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softersinned · 2 years ago

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@xfindingtrouble said: ♫ for percy

"time in a bottle" by rob lane, julia church, and jim croce

If I had a box just for wishes and dreams that had never come true The box would be empty, except for the memory Of how they were answered by you So if only I could save time in a bottle the first thing that I'd like to do Is to save every day till eternity passes away Just to spend them with you

i love this cover - it's so dreamy, and i think it's perfect for them. (the original is beautiful, too; i just like the echoing dreaminess of this one.) it's actually used for a wedding night in the discovery of witches show, and i think it's pretty perfectly selected as a wedding song, especially when one person in the equation is immortal and the other is not. astoria is perpetually aware of the passage of time, and torn between appreciating every moment she has with him and living deliciously with him, and trying to find a way to guarantee that she won't have too many days without him.

even though she has no regrets (how could she? they make her deliriously happy!) she finds that a lot of the love she feels for them is tinged with some premature sorrow: she knows that no matter how much she loves them now, and no matter how happy they are during the days they have together, those days are limited, and she will live with his memory longer than she lived with him. how is she supposed to be her, still, when the day comes that she's forgotten the exact shade of green of his eyes? or when she can't remember the exact tone of their voice?

"vampire smile" by kyla la grange

Baby, I need to leave, 'cause I'm getting drunk on your noble deeds It doesn't matter that they don't get done When I feel this cold, they're like the fucking sun Baby, I need a friend, but I'm a vampire smile, you'll meet a sticky end I'm here trying not to bite your neck, But it's beautiful and I'm gonna get so drunk on you and kill your friends

the physical hunger & craving she feels for him really can't be understated. she wants so badly to hunt him in those early days, because she can't really conceive of anything more intimate, more permanent, than that. the actual, physical need she feels to bite and drain him is a constant one, and when she smells anyone else on him, it makes her ill. he is the sun around which she orbits, warming her despite the reality of her undeath, and she's fighting her nature every step of the way because she wants him alive more than she wants him hers.

but she'd be a liar if she pretended that the urge wasn't there. she fantasizes sometimes about how their blood would taste. and when she does finally bite them, it takes every bit of self control she's ever had not to drain them dry, because she simply cannot get enough of them. how could she? and she feels guilt for that - for wanting to hunt him, for feeling shame in her own very natural desires as a vampire. some part of her thinks that he deserves better, and so she tries to become better in her own halting, stilted way. it never really takes. the effort is always uneven and, at its core, selfish. she still tries, for them. and after drinking his blood, she thinks about it all the fucking time. edward cullen's got nothing on her.

"foreigner's god" by hozier

Her eyes look sharp and steady into the empty parts of me Still my heart is heavy with the hate of some other man's beliefs... I've no language left to say it but all I do is quake to her Breaking if I try to convey it: the broken love I make to her All that I've been taught and every word I've got is foreign to me... Screaming the name of a foreigner's god The purest expression of grief

astoria's complicated relationship with god, divinity, religion in general is pretty well-documented on here; she's wounded, she's angry, she's grieving. she's sworn off faith as a whole, and she believes in the gods, she simply has no respect for them. holy ground rejects her; holy magic harms her; she has been built, changed, to be so deeply unholy that any god's touch is pain. and yet when percy dies she carries him past the threshold of a temple, and she walks across holy ground despite the pain she feels with every step to be the one to lay him at the altar, and when she gets outside, she prays. she prays to the dawnfather, because it's his guidance that built whitestone, and by extension, made percy. she prays to the everlight, because it's sarenrae who will bring him back.

and those last lines i quoted are really the ultimate expression, in this case, of love: her willingness to turn to any god for help, but to the two gods who, specifically, pose the greatest threat to her, compounding holiness with the sun. it's just that as far as she's concerned, there's no step too far that she could take for them. if prayer will do it, then she'll pray until their body's fully decayed. she'll pray to anyone. shit, if there were even the slightest chance that her own absent matron would help her, she'd beg her. astoria thinks herself inherently broken, too broken to ever touch holiness again, but for percy, she tries.

"when creation was young" by joy williams

When creation was young, before rivers learned to run Before Hell caught fire and God made the sun When creation was young... Before you, you took a breath, before sin ever confessed Before hate was a word and life found death Before you, you took a breath, oh, I was loving you

do you ever get emotional thinking abt the passage of time as it relates to these two bc i do constantly??? astoria spent a hundred and twelve years without percy. he didn't exist. he wasn't a thought to her. and still, after she meets him, it feels an awful lot like this was inevitable: like everything else in her life was just building to this. everyone before them was practice, so she'd know how to love, really love, when the time came. shitty way to think about past lovers? for sure. but she's also not changing a damn thing.

long before percy even existed, before they could have ever known her or known of her, she knew something was missing - and despite how many days she had without them, despite the days to come when they're gone and she's grieving, she wouldn't change a thing. she wouldn't wish a moment spent differently. in her mind, feeling how she felt so much more right after meeting them, and recognizing how she felt about them, she's loved him from the start, from long before he existed, and she'll love him long after.

"labyrinth" by taylor swift

'It only hurts this much right now' was what I was thinking the whole time Breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out I'll be getting over you my whole life... Uh oh, I'm falling in love Oh no, I'm falling in love again Oh, I'm falling in love

i'm not sure what exactly it is that has her fairly certain that there's no wonder left to be found in the world - she's going through a vampire adolescence & young adulthood and she's bored, and angry, and exhausted. she's realizing now that she's going to be doing this for the rest of her life, and her life will be very, very long. it's one thing to achieve immortality when you have someone or something to dedicate it to, and another thing entirely to realize that there's no other choice but to survive, even if you're running out of reasons.

and she's lost people she loved, watched everyone she knew die, and here's percy. short-lived, comparatively speaking, probably shorter-lived given their line of work and some of the decisions they make. the smart thing to do is walk away from this before she gets more tangled up in it. the smart thing to do is accept a long life that's fine, over a long life that shines very brightly for a short period and then fades into grief when that light fades. but the thing is that she does not make smart decisions. so, as scary as it is, she gives herself permission to see this through.

#(i do not have honorable mentions for them yet but i will soon)#ii. sweet music playing in the dark. ( playlist )#i. here's the truth from my red lips. ( answers )#xfindingtrouble #iii. when i feel this cold you're like the fucking sun. ( percy x astoria )

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luna-writes-stuff · 3 years ago

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Heyyyy!!! Congrats on the milestone!!! Could I possibly request a matchup with Lotr and The Hobbit? No gender preference, but we all know there's a vast overrepresentation of men lol

I'm kind of average height with long blonde hair. I like reading and watching movies, I work in a bakery and I love to travel! I'm really into art and music as well as doing karate and scouting. I'm also into the general outdoor activities like hiking, outdoor cooking, snowboarding, climbing, skiing, canoing, biking etc. I'm also really into all kinds of mythology and folklore!

I'm stubborn and loyal, I tend to do things regardless of gender stereotypes and I try to be kind to everyone. My style slides from very feminine to gnc, and I love practical but nice looking clothing.

Sorry if this became a lot, feel free to pick and choose from these! Thank you in advance and take all the time you need Luna! 💕💕💕💕💕

Thank you for being the first one to tell me that there is a vast over representation of men in LOTR because I canNOT UNDERSTATE THIS. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Tolkien content we have but I would have loved to see more women kick ass, because yum.

The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn:

- After you said ‘travel’, who else did you expected me to choose? This man knows many woods and paths, and he has memorized many wonderful places he has been. Upon discovering your love for wandering, he wishes to do nothing more but show you those breathtaking waterfalls he found years ago. He knows all safe paths, so without any doubt, he will do anything in his power to keep you safe.

- For outdoor activities over all, he is the perfect person to go to. He has many experiences with things such as climbing and canoeing. And he absolutely loves the fact that he gets to share it with someone who is just as excited about it as him. He is very careful with you, sometimes a bit too much, though he knows you can handle yourself. It doesn’t go under appreciated, but you’d have to remind him that you can do those things yourself as well. He admires your daring spirit. Hell, at times it even leaves him stunned.

- He himself doesn’t even believe in gender stereotypes. He himself can be feminine at times and he doesn’t even care. As a king, he becomes clear to those ‘rules’, but he is quick to consider them broken. But crowds are difficult and push their opinions. Aragorn remains unfazed by the words though, and simply encourages you to do whatever you want to do. If he feels particularly bold, he’ll take a few days of and let you take over. You rule beside Aragorn often, but he remains the king, so it’s usually his words and decisions, but he makes it clear to you that he finds your actions as important as his own. Even as other fail to recognize the profit it brings.

——

The Hobbit, Fili:

- He loves good stories. Dwarves of their own already love tales, but he seems particularly fond of them. He has many stories to tell himself from his childhood and fairytales, but he enjoys listening to them even more. Introduce him to other mythologies and he won’t ever shut up about it. He gets so caught up in them, it’s adorable.

- If you can kick his ass, he is done for. The second you show him what you’ve learned through karate, he’s smitten. Completely head over heels. Dwarves are a proud folk, so don’t feel surprised when he lets his tongue run every so often. He’s so proud and in love with you, he simply has to share it with everyone. All in good nature of course, but he will never shut up about it.

- Fili enjoys lazy nights in, and though he loves going outdoors with you, he cannot wait for the night, where you cuddle up to him with a book while he reads over your shoulder. He doesn’t even have to know the stories. He just enjoys the time spent with you in his arms. It makes him feel all happy and warm inside, as cheesy as it might sound. He really prides himself on you.

——

#1000 followers celebration!#matchup requests closed!#lotr #lord of The Rings #the hobbit #tolkien #Aragorn #elessar #aragorn x reader #Fili #Fili durin #fili x reader

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blamemma · 2 years ago

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please i would love to hear some of your book recs!!

a very random ask but a very sweet one i love talking about books!! i'll put a couple under the cut for you and hopefully one will suit what you might be looking for!!

bewilderment by richard powers - my standout read of 2022 the one i do not stop thinking about. we follow a single father who has a neuro-divergent son who is incredibly passionate about the climate crisis and what that will mean for animals and their eco-systems. medical ethics are blurred through out and you essentially just follow a father who is trying to do the best for his son but sometimes it just doesn't work out. 4 books in my life have made me sob, this being one of them!

stoner by john williams - a modern classic. understated and quiet. simply, it's a story of life. there's nothing remarkable in it. the protagonist comes from a small farm and dreams of being an english professor and succeeds at it and it just follows the trials and tribulations of his life. sounds boring, but its one of the novels that excels in the mundane

drive your plow over the bones of the dead by olga tokarczuk - female rage!!!! female revenge!!!!! fucking with men!!!!! set in a spooky snowy cabin!!! god it has it all but in this weird creepy way. an old woman's dogs die along with some hunters and there's a murder investigation that opens up but the woman doesn't think the police are doing enough and takes matters into her own hands and from there suspense grows and grows and weirder things start happening

the death of vivek oji by akwaeke emezi - deals with gender dysphoria, friendships, love and heartbreak, family and what that truly means, has vivd descriptions of nigeria and delicious food, another book that made me sob...from the title, you know it's not going to be a happy one, but throughout there are so many happy moments that it makes the ending even more of a gut punch

for some great scottish literature, i can't recommend mayflies by andrew o'hagan enough (and if u don't fancy reading it, it was just made into a 2-part tv show which was done astonishingly well) and Shuggie Bain by douglas stuart (won the man booker for a reason!!)

non-fiction wise, you genuinely cannot go wrong with anything by patrick radden-keefe. say nothing explores ireland's troubles through the lens of a mother going missing and empire of pain is a deep dive into the sackler family and the opioid crisis!! i would read his shopping lists he's that good. if you want something more nature based entangled life by merlin sheldrake is phenomenal or something health based, unwell women by elinor cleghorn explores how women are disadvantaged in today's modern health system and how that came to be

honorable mentions go to piranesi, my year of rest and relaxation, 1q84, a prayer for owen meany & a little life (but please do ur research before reading this its phenomenally good but goddd its also traumatic!)

send me some of ur book recs i looooove comparing book notes and seeing what other people enjoy xx

#i like how reading is cool again now #one good thing about the pandemic #book recs

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mira--mira · 4 years ago

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Another OOT question!

I know some people believe that Madara (adult) is misogynistic because of what he told Tsunade in the fourth war (about her being a weak woman) and that's a totally valid opinion! Taking into account that OOT's Madara clearly is not like that, I want to know what is your opinion regarding this. Personally, I think he didn't mean that because she is a woman she is weak, but that she is simply a woman and she is weak (like saying that she is a weak shinobi)

This got long lol

Honestly I've seen a few different theories, the "he's just a misogynist", the "Kishimoto knew he was getting backlash for how he portrays women so Madara said that and then Tsunade proved him wrong" (despite ultimately being beat), the "it was a mistranslation/comma theory and should have been read as 'you're weak, woman'" (I think is spiritually the same point you mention), the extremely creepy "well he hates women/doesn't like them this is obviously another hint he's gay" (which while this one is usually presented jokingly I dislike it so much. Male homosexuality has no intrinsic tie to misogyny and it just makes me so uncomfortable even as a joke.) However, my ultimate opinion is every character is some flavor of misogynist because Kishimoto is one and writes them like that in a mix of on purpose and by accident. This is kind of tricky because I don't know the man, I haven't consumed any content of his outside Naruto, and I don't make a habit of reading interviews or anything promotional about his writing process, so I'm reluctant to speak with any kind of definite authority but reading the manga or just watching the anime, in general, is just...terrible if you're focusing on how he portrays women and treats them like characters. This is a great essay that I like, but here are some main points that stick out to me about Kishimoto writing women.

First there are all the "missing women." By all accounts, ninja society should be split decently 50/50 on the sex ratio just like irl but...there's always one girl on a team of two boys. Besides Kurenai (and Tsume who's a special jonin but I'll count her) what prominent reoccurring female jonin do we see? Besides Anko what chunin? Count all the male characters you can and then the women and girls. Why are so many mothers housewives in magic ninja world with superpowers? Mikoto, Kushina, Yoshino, etc. How many of them don't even get named despite their husbands getting that basic acknowledgment? Ino's mom, Shino's mom, Choji's mom, Hinata's mom, Neji's mom, Gai's mom, Madara's mom, Hashirama's mom, etc.? Why out of every possible count of the Akatsuki is Konan the only woman (unless Taka is counted and then Karin is a member)?

Then there are types of women themselves. They're not allowed depth and most women's personalities can be divided by angry/shy dynamic as their main personality trait. They're always medics, always love interests, they never get to use their power to the extreme be taken seriously they're always handicapped by the narrative (see Konan and her powers as the biggest damn example of this). Sakura and Ino are the closest thing to actual friends two women are because there are so few of them in-universe but a big chunk of their relationship revolves around Sasuke. Even in that, women's relationships are ultimately dependent on men. Not even Tsunade is exempt from this. She never references Mito as an influence or major part of her character. Her biggest influences are Dan and Nawaki, her lover and her brother respectively. Her other influences were Hashirama, Hiruzen, Orochimaru, and Jiraiya. Shizune is the only woman she interacts with on a regular basis before Sakura but her story doesn't revolve around her relationship with Shizune, it's not even a major part narratively. Mei, the other extremely powerful woman with two kekkei genkai, who took over from Yagura and tried to restore Kiri's reputation from the bloody mist...is obsessed with marriage. Somehow I doubt if she'd been a man, that detail would have been kept.

I will not even begin to address the fucking mess Jiraiya is and how it's disgusting that he objectives Tsunade down to her body measurements and peeps on her in the bath all while claiming to be her friend.

And the saddest thing is this isn't just a Kishimoto problem. These are common things that are still present in media today. I hate the excuse "I don't know how to write women" it's just that, a lazy excuse. Ultimately I have no idea how canon Madara was supposed to come across with that line. I'm just not surprised or horrified by it at this point because there are so many other problems in the narrative.

OoT is my self-indulgent little fic where 95% of OCs of any kind will be women to try and drag that damn sex ratio back to even something decent and where all the looked over women will, at the very least, be given a fucking name. And I think I've mentioned in a comment or two on the fic, maybe even in one of the notes, but just in case I haven't it brings me sweet, sweet joy to headcanon the two most powerful men of their time, Hashirama and Madara, as momma's boys whose relationships with their mothers (especially Madara because of that line) cannot be overlooked or understated to understanding their characters in that AU. It's my fuck you to Kishimoto's way of handling women. And, I guess I'll announce it here lol, I'm reworking Kaguya's role in the narrative too and she's no longer getting scrapped in OoT because I'm going to make her make sense and work without alien bullshit and a flat female antagonist who appeared too late and didn't get proper build up.

#naruto #asks #al-stuffy #this turned into a rant lol #kishimoto handling women #that should be its own cw #out of time

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amethystpath-writes · 4 years ago

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Hi ! Love what you wrote BUT ABSOLUTELY ADORE "Dance with the Devil" with Hades (#teamhotgreekvillainforever) and Persephone !! So ... Perhaps a continuation please *O* ??

Continued from this.

Looking down at her legs as she sat on a throne of thorns, Persephone bit her tongue. Hades stained her once brilliantly glowing legs with the marks of the souls which tried to drag her down into the Underworld’s fiery and endless depths.

‘A reminder,’ the lord told his queen, ‘that I could have let you fall. I did not have to pull you out.’

But he did have to pull her out, didn’t he? Because Perse was the only one Hades would have ever considered being his queen. Her brilliance was nothing to understate. She glowed brighter than even the sun- brighter than Apollo, too. Persephone was beautiful, and she was even more so shrouded in Hades’ world of night sky.

‘I would have preferred you let me fall,’ she returned. The defiance had not lasted. Hades gripped her mind with his own, crushing it beneath a strong grip until she was knelt on the ground, touching the tips of his feet with outstretched arms. Compliant. Yielding.

This was when Hades knelt to her, whispering to her a sweet nothing. ‘I should do this to you someday, my queen. Lay myself down for you. Submit beneath your will.’ He hummed, standing, and telling her to do the same. She did.

They had remained in the ballroom after their dance, after Persephone’s near-plummet to everlasting torment and despair. Demeter was correct in telling her daughter of the lord’s eyes- of how looking into to them meant losing every piece of yourself if it were as Hades wished. The man was wretched, despicable, terrible. And he loved the Goddess of Spring.

Now Persephone sat alone in the room, considering an escape, but knowing she could never achieve one. This world Hades possessed worked against her in any way that might have revealed Perse was trying to get away, trying her hand at rebelliousness. Even simply shifting in the throne she sat on led to branches of thorns stretching out into her vision- a threat to her to stay seated. Hades didn’t even trust her to wander the ballroom, which as she viewed it, had no escape anyhow- no doors or windows. And even if there were an opening, she would only fall into an endless amount of matter made of fire.

Perse touched the arm of the- not her- throne, looking at the thorns. She could make flowers bloom in their place, or perhaps beside them. In an instant, she conjured every visual of flowers belonging to thorn bushes: roses, blackberries, black raspberries, flowering quince, chickasaw plum, elderberry, black chokeberry.

There were many flowering plants with thorns, but the one she considered most was this; pokeweed- or nightshade as many knew it. So what if it were not much of a flower? Every part of the plant was likely to cause death if one consumed enough. What was the likelihood of Hades knowing that? Would he even be naïve enough to pick berries from Persephone’s throne if she decided to grow them? It was worth a shot, wasn’t it?

The throne blossomed with pink-red stems which developed green berries. Over the course of minutes, some of the berries ripened, but not all. It was part of Perse’s strategy to do this. Hades would pick two or three of the ripened fruits, then Persephone could tell him the green ones were just as good to eat- hence why she left so many.

Her plan was well thought out and the throne did not object to her enchantment. The Goddess of Spring took this as a sign that Hades didn’t understand at all how dangerous this was.

As she waited, Persephone took the time to look at the rest of the room, particularly the checkered floor which nearly swallowed her perhaps an hour ago. She hated that floor almost more than the dark lord who pulled her out of it. What would happen if she stepped onto it now? If she managed to escape the throne, she imagined the floor would fall through as soon as her lightweight touched it. What would Hades do then? Would he save his queen for a second time? Probably. He would likely never let her go.

It was as she thought this that Perse jumped at the King of the Underworld’s sudden image in the centre of the room. Swallowing, she tilted her chin up, as if she were superior to the dark lord- and she was. As terrified as Persephone was, she would hold her own weight.

“Very gorgeous, my queen.” Hades admired her throne from afar before stepping further. “Nightshade, yes? I think you have proven your place even further in my court. Does Demeter understand just how dark her daughter, the goddess of Spring, is?”

He knew.

Persephone crunched a fist and let the berries dwindle and fall to the ground in her defeat. Of course Hades would know of nightshade. How could she assume that the lord of the Underworld wouldn’t know about poisoned berries? So many mortals had fallen prey to them or used them as killing agents themselves. Hades was likely experienced in every method of death, which meant Persephone had no hope.

“No need to kill them. Their colour is unique to my realm. Keep them.”

Her chin became even more angled. “No.”

Hades chuckled, coming closer and closer to her. The floor remained intact beneath his feet unlike it would if Perse stepped on it. “Your defiance will fade someday, my dear. And when it does, you will find yourself happy you stayed.”

She gritted her teeth. “You say it as if I had a choice. I chose to die.” Instinctively, now, she glanced at her charcoaled legs. The horror of the moment remained, from being grasped by the ankles by light-eating souls, and Persephone could hear her own screams. It was dreadful, but she still preferred physical torment over- over whatever this was in the ballroom. Being bound to a throne of thorns and talked to like a pet by Hades…it was worse than any fate.

“But you chose me over being turned to stone. That sounds like choosing life- a life with me.”

“You are God of the Underworld. You are Death itself.”

“So, you chose death over stone. What point are you attempting to make anymore, I wonder.”

Persephone fell silent. Her point was that she did not choose Hades, but…well, he was right. In the moment the lord mentioned Medusa, she had been more terrified of her than him. She looked into his eyes, even if by accident in terror.

Hades walked up the dais and held a hand out to Persephone. “I could grow berries in your stomach,” she said. Persephone looked at his offered hand then almost to his eyes. It wouldn’t matter if she looked into his eyes now; Perse was already under his control. Still, Persephone liked to pretend she never looked to begin with. Especially in moments like these where Hades allowed her own free will.

“And you may.”

Now, she did look. It seemed shocking statements were a sure-fire way to gain Perse’s full attention. “What do you- why? Why would you allow me to?”

The lord smiled at her, poison shining on his teeth. “What did you call me just moments ago, my love?”

God of the Underworld. Death itself. The realization tugged at her throat and she whispered, “You cannot die, can you?”

His smile widened. Persephone’s stomach knotted.

“Take my hand, my queen. Our dinner is ready.”

******

Part 3 here

(Tag list: @nuttynutcycle @igotthesmellofbooks @revrevrew-personal) I will probably make this a series if it becomes requested again.

#request fill #continuation #persephone and hades #greek #greek mythology #greek story

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dramaticviolincrescendo · 4 years ago

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Okay, what are your thoughts on Ian's relationships? With his family, his boyfriends, and Mandy (since I think that's the only friend he's had)

Oh, no. Ohhhhhhhh, no. Now you’ve done it. You’ve asked about my dear, darling favorite character on the show. My love for one Ian Gallagher runs deep, which means this answer is going to run super long. The good, the bad, and everything in between—Ian Gallagher lives rent free in my brain and always will. I derive so much satisfaction from seeing Ian interact with other people, in whatever capacity that might be. I admire and aspire to the compassion he has shown for others over the years, even and perhaps most especially those who arguably haven’t earned it. He tries so hard to be good to people, and seeing their love for him manifest when he’s reached such lows where he can’t even fathom why the love of his life would want to be with him forever? That’s powerful.

So, yeah. I said I could write essays on these characters, and that’s exactly what you’re about to get: five hours and 6k words’ worth of my thoughts. (I am so sorry. There will be text walls.)

Let’s dive into Ian’s many and multifaceted relationships—his family, his friends, and his romantic pursuits.

Ian and Family

Ian told us where he stood on this in the very first season, and it set the standard for his character for eleven years to come. Faced with a prospect that others in his position could only dream of—not being Frank’s son and having a wealthy father with a functional, prosperous lifestyle mere miles away—Ian refused to buy into it. He refused to do what might have been objectively better for his future by seeking a relationship with Clayton. In that household, he would have had access to a better public school, more financial resources, a tutor to help him where he was struggling, and less urgency for him to work so that he could enjoy being a kid. When he got sick, he would have had access to better healthcare, too. Perhaps he would have had a better shot at West Point from that background than he did at home. But that’s just it: home was with his family, and he was very clear that they didn’t live in that nice house. All he wanted—all he wanted—was to be with his brothers and sisters. He has never referred to them as only half-siblings or half-cousins; he has never even used the words, “you’re not my dad,” on Frank. That’s his family, the people he loves most in the world, and he’s always been at his best when he’s with them and at his worst when he’s not. Let’s look at each of them:

1. Frank: It is so striking to me that Ian doesn’t appear to hold the outright contempt for Frank that Fiona, Lip, and Debbie have exhibited at different points over the years. Aside from the handful of instances where they’ve gotten into physical altercations (which Frank always initiated) and kicking him out of the house on occasion, Ian is simply indifferent to him. But there are these moments, these brief glimmers of mutual attachment and loyalty, if those are the right words. In the scene where Ian famously doesn’t count to three before using the pepper spray on him, Frank starts saying how his New Gallaghers weren’t his real kids—that Ian is his real son, and Frank is his real father. It’s a passing thought uttered while trying to manipulate his way into the house that neither of them think much of, nor does the audience…until you remember that biologically, Frank isn’t his father, and he certainly hasn’t behaved like one either. Ian has more right than anyone to comment on that, but he doesn’t because Frank is his father. He’s the father that Ian idly hoped wouldn’t come to his wedding yet sat joking about with Debbie rather than getting pissed off that he was making out with some lady in front of everyone. He’s the father who sat at the table with them eating breakfast in 11x03 and claimed Mickey was the man in their relationship without Ian saying a word to him about it, and who Ian saw no issue with taking Franny to school when no one else could. In s4, as far removed from his family as he’d been for a while, Ian still went straight to the hospital when he heard that Frank was at death’s door. We focus so much on his attitude towards Monica because of how obvious it was that we frequently miss these tiny moments and their implications. It would take an awful lot of patience, compassion, and love not to write Frank off completely after all he’s done. Not necessarily our standard definition of love between a son and his father, perhaps, but a loving soul.

2. Monica: I have actually written a pretty lengthy post about his relationship with her because while their shared mental illness definitely plays a role in his feelings toward her, that grew complicated far earlier than his diagnosis. The first time we meet her, we see that he has a visceral reaction to news of her presence. He runs. When Ian can’t process strong emotions, that’s what he’s done in the past. I happened upon an interview Cameron did just after the end of s1 where he mentioned something I had already been thinking: Ian’s age when Monica left is extremely important. He was a kid in s1, but one who could roll with the punches, sometimes literally. She left them two years before that. Ian would have been in middle school, roughly as old as Debbie was when she still called Frank “daddy” and forgave him for everything he did. It’s an awkward age that once again set Ian in something of a danger zone—too old to accept an excuse or no explanation at all, but not old enough to process the situation in a healthy way. And then she’s back all of a sudden with no warning. Ian doesn’t cry like Debbie, and he doesn’t typically get explosively angry like Fiona. He can’t deal, so he runs. He hangs back. He only speaks when he has to and compartmentalizes: Monica wants to take Liam, and they need to stop her. It doesn’t have to be about her leaving. They have a goal—he can focus on that. And then she’s back a year later, saying she’s here to stay while Fiona seems to take her at her word and Lip isn’t there to ground everyone. Ian tries so hard to behave like Lip would with his biting sarcasm and attempts to stay emotionally distant in a way that seemed pretty exaggerated for Ian, but he’s also dealing with a fresh wave of guilt over Mickey going to juvie—and Monica gets it. She’s the only person to acknowledge that he’s in pain and actively try to make it better. She’s the only one who really knows at the time, but that hardly matters. This poor kid, whose mother left him when he still needed her, has her standing in front of him and saying she’s sorry and listening when he speaks and taking him dancing—just the two of them. Embarrassing as it was and harmful as it could have been, she tried to facilitate his dreams when no one else wanted him to go into the military. She was there for him when he went AWOL. She came for him when he was arrested and even wanted to make a place for him in her new life, unrealistic as it was. This goes so much deeper than them both being bipolar. Ian’s comment about her parachuting into their lives in s7 wasn’t about Mickey or her role in them breaking up. He trusted her. He wanted her. He needed her. And she’d convinced him that she would be there—until she left. Over and over again. She was there for him and unintentionally took advantage of how desperately he still needed his mother. She made him keep loving her, and that’s both a blessing that has him crying into a voluminous man’s arms when she passes and a curse that wrecked him more than once.

3. Fiona: The trust these two have for each other cannot be understated. Fiona has discussed things with Ian that she never brought up around any of the other kids throughout the entire series. In the pilot episode, she tells him about feeling needed and takes his opinion on the matter to heart. At the end of the season, he’s the one she talks to about the car because she can trust him to give her an answer even without speaking. In s2, she tells Lip that the two of them are her rocks, and we see that time and time again. That’s part of what makes their falling out over the church hit that much harder: it’s Ian and Fiona. The only time they’d been on the outs in any serious manner up to that point was when Ian was adjusting to his new reality and they were trying to find a balance between sister and caretaker. Otherwise, that bond of trust had never been severed—not until Ian literally sold himself only for it to amount to nothing in the end because she had no idea the lengths to which he’d gone to get that building. That damage gets mended, thankfully, but what a powerful period of time when those two were the only ones who’d never really been at each other’s throats. There is a downside to that trust, though. As I mentioned before, Ian was so responsible and put together when he was younger that Fiona didn’t think twice about his situation with Ned or that he ran away. Not even seventeen yet, and she was telling Debbie that she didn’t like his decision to leave but trusted him. That is one of the things I love about this show—even something like trust that we always prop up as an important factor in our relationships can betray us in the most unexpected ways.

4. Lip: I won’t go into it here, but the relationship they share is something that means a lot to me on a personal level. It’s part of how I knew that Ian would become my favorite character pretty early on. The way he simultaneously admires and envies Lip, loves and is annoyed by him, relies on him and is desperate to pave his own path in the world—what a beautiful and accurate depiction of what it means to be a younger sibling. Lip is the first person to discover that he’s gay and openly accept him for it. (I think what he tried with Karen came from a well-meaning place even if it was horribly, horribly misguided.) Lip is the one who tries to get him into West Point, hate it as he does. He helps Ian when Terry is after him, takes care of him in the aftermath of the wedding when he realizes just how deeply Ian feels for Mickey, searches the whole damn city for him when he finds out that Ian is in trouble, gets him a job, leans on him in his own time of need… He’s not perfect. He slips up, just like Ian does. Some things break my heart, like Lip insisting that he’s earned his own space when his little brother is asking him for safe harbor or Ian thanking him for being his brother outside the prison. But they love each other so much, and I just… I can’t possibly put into words how much I love their dynamic.

5. Debbie, Carl, and Liam: I’m grouping these three together because they’re further separated from Ian in age, so we see a lot of the same trends with them as a whole. Ian loves taking care of people. We know this. We also know that Fiona and Lip don’t typically want him taking care of them—they’re the ones who take care of him when he needs it, specifically Lip. With the younger three, however, Ian can be the Big Brother. He can shake his head in utter bafflement at Debbie’s obsession with holding her breath for two minutes, walk Carl through what he needs to go camping, and promise his baby brother postcards when he leaves. The difference here is that his relationship with them is so much less fraught with conflict. We don’t see him fight with Debbie, Carl, or Liam the way he has with Fiona or Lip. While Ian tends to be the voice of reason during conflicts overall, I think it’s also because he relies on his older siblings in a way that he doesn’t with his younger siblings, and the latter don’t tend to rely on him as much as Fiona or Lip as well. There’s a lack of tension in most of their interactions growing up because that pressure isn’t there. Perhaps this is where Ian’s age and standing in the family is a bit more beneficial: young enough to have people he can rely on while too young for anyone to really rely on him for more than his share of the squirrel fund.

Ian and Friends

I’ve seen it mentioned that Ian (and Mickey) not having more friends is bad or lazy writing. I tend to believe that that fails to take something into account that, admittedly, most of us don’t really have to think about: having friends is a luxury. It requires time and effort to cultivate friendships, especially lasting ones. As a kid, Ian spent a lot of his free time working or helping to manage one family crisis after another. Going AWOL, losing his health, struggling to acclimate to his illness, trying to find a new career path, spiraling into the Gay Jesus movement, going to prison, adjusting once again to normal life, getting married, a pandemic… I’m sure he’s had plenty of acquaintances over the years, but having a family to support and constant upheavals would have made it extremely difficult to really forge strong relationships with them. I think that’s part of what makes his relationship with Mandy so special and valuable to him: she’s sort of the same way.

When we met Mandy in s1, she had other friends. We saw her meet up with them and go shopping; she told Ian a story about how one was mad at her for not sharing her make-up. As the trauma in the Milkovich household reached its zenith for her in s2 and she started thinking seriously about getting out of there, we saw those friends fall by the wayside—all except Ian. He saw her and let her see him early on. That’s a level of trust and respect that nobody else in their neighborhood would have displayed, certainly not to her. But then there’s this guy who defended her against their creepy, perverted teacher and treated her like a human being, not an object. It’s no wonder she developed an obvious, unrequited crush and sought physical comfort from him occasionally. It’s no wonder she tried to repay the favor by giving Mickey a hard time in s3 and s4, misguided and rather uninformed as we know it was at the time. (It’s also no wonder that she went for the closest Gallagher to Ian, either, but that’s for another meta.)

And Ian… Ian is loyal to a fault. We have watched Ian cut out his own heart and let the blood drip down his arm to pool on the floor at his feet if it would make a damn bit of difference for the people he loves. Like Fiona and Lip, Mandy immediately accepted him for who he is and suggested an arrangement that would protect him as well as benefit her. That is enormous where they came from. To him, that had to feel like the ultimate sign of friendship: he could trust her with a part of him that he hadn’t even entrusted to most of his family yet. From that point on, she was on the List of People Ian Gallagher Would Do Anything For. Finding out about Terry and what had happened? He held a bake sale, of all things, to fundraise for her. Seeing that his brother—his best friend—was treating her like garbage? He put him in his place. Her boyfriend was beating her? He brought her home and made it his goal to find a safe place for her to stay, even if it ultimately didn’t work. She was going to move away from all of her meager support with that boyfriend? He didn’t just rally his own arguments—he brought in outside help with Lip, who he thought might tip the scales. It’s usually just a saying that true friends will help each other hide a body, but Ian literally tried to do that. Lucky for him, he has a good head on his shoulders and used it.

No, Ian doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends. We’ve seen that he has spheres of influence, if you will, and acquaintances that he can call upon when he needs them. (For example, the guys that helped with the preacher.) However, Ian has always struck me as a “quality over quantity” type of person. Being a soldier or an EMT isn’t lucrative, but they’re meaningful for someone who sees them as vehicles for helping people. Seeing more parts of the world than just Chicago has appealed to him in the past, but he seems perfectly content to carve out a spot for himself right here at home. Having only three best friends—Lip, Mandy, and Mickey—doesn’t seem like much of a hardship for him.

Ian and Romantic Pursuits

I hate to say that there were five, but from Ian’s perspective, there were. So, let’s talk about all five. Even though…there weren’t five. There was only one. We’ll save the best for last.

1. Kash: The first of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. I hope it goes without saying that I hate this man with the passion of a thousand burning suns. I hate him so much. However, their interactions taught me a whole lot about how kind and compassionate Ian really is—and how naïve. Of course, he would believe that Kash loved him. The man was buying him all sorts of expensive gifts, and that’s what we see on all the commercials and in so many movies, isn’t it? Grand gestures of affection through expensive gifts. Poor as they were, Ian still scraped together the money to buy him baseball tickets and CDs, convinced as he was that that was all part of what you did in a relationship. That desire to do things like a “normal” married couple in s11? Yeah, that starts here. Ian has always been a planner, and he’s always bought into certain stereotypes. We can see that here. What we can also see is Ian’s compassionate, kind, loving soul. He cares so deeply for other people, even ones that he doesn’t know very well, especially if they are living in circumstances that mean something to him. (For example, the mentally ill woman they tried to help at work and the shelter kids whose situations were so similar to Mickey’s.) Kash being a closeted gay man living in misery with a wife he didn’t love and two children he never meant to have clearly tugged at Ian’s heartstrings. Even after everything that happens, even though Ian behaves as though they’re awkward exes who just happen to work together, he still covers for Kash. He gives him that head start and takes it upon himself to break the news to Linda that he’s gone. He defends Kash to Lip when the latter finally says exactly what we all know: he was a pedophile who deserved to rot in prison for what he did. As with Fiona’s trust, Ian’s loving soul, compassionate heart, and desire for love outside his siblings are virtues that have done him harm in the past. This is one such instance.

2. Ned: The second of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. To be honest, I don’t believe that Ian would even characterize it that way. He seemed very aware that Ned was a distraction from his problems—from Mickey being in juvie, Monica falling into a depressive episode, the money in the squirrel fund being gone, Lip moving out, losing his shot at West Point, and getting denied for service due to his age. Again, though, Ian has always wanted to feel valued, and this rich dude was letting him stay in a fancy hotel room with anything he wanted readily available. This (disgusting predator) guy was giving him attention and a distraction with no strings attached. Then the complications roll in, and he’s once again faced with being the mistress to a closeted, married man. The difference here is that he’s not comfortable with it. He tries to tell Fiona twice, which is enormous for Ian when he has never been very good at communicating if it means burdening others with or even merely facing his own problems. But he tries to tell her. He rejects the GPS unit and tells Ned that he has a boyfriend, boxing him into a strictly sexual arrangement. (This, unfortunately, makes sense. It aligns with how Fiona viewed things: where Jimmy was concerned about it, she told him that it was “just sex.”) He is also visibly embarrassed to admit to Lip and Fiona what has been going on with Ned. By that point, Ian is a year and a half older and, while still scarred and warped in his views because of Kash, perhaps a bit wiser. Emotionally, he kept Ned at arm’s length most of the time. He used Ned not just as a distraction, but as a way to galvanize Mickey into taking their relationship a step forward. But Ian is still Ian, and Ian is compassionate to a fault. Ned played that card by asking if he could have a little understanding for a man whose life was falling apart. Sure, he can. He’s Ian, the Gallagher too empathetic for his own good at times. We know how that spirals out of control. It just goes to show that even when Ian was trying to maintain some emotional distance, his heart is simply too big and his perceptions too heavily impacted by the grooming he’d experienced with two different people by then, and so he [SPOILER ALERT] still feels enough of a connection to Ned after all these years to be mildly bothered that he passed away.

3. Caleb: The third of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. Ian’s relationship with Caleb strikes me as being similar to what he had with Ned. While more age-appropriate, Ian was very much using Caleb, just as Caleb was using him. That’s why it was so easy for both of them to walk away. Ian was in a difficult spot when they met. He was grateful to the firefighters who saved his life, but he had also just saved someone else at a moment when he was perhaps at his absolute lowest. That’s what he’s always wanted, isn’t it—to be a bit of a hero and help people? So, he’s understandably drawn there, first out of gratitude and then to be surrounded by very attractive gay firemen who helped people, saved his life, and invited him to be part of a function they were holding. But he made himself pretty clear from the start: he was interested in sex with Caleb. That was the draw. He still hasn’t come to terms with being bipolar and losing Mickey, but Ian has never not been with anyone for any extended length of time. That’s just who he is: he’s always sought some level of outward validation—from the army, Kash, Monica, Mickey, and so many others. We’re seeing him struggle with that now as he deals with the opportunities available to him as a mentally ill ex-con felon. So, he pursues Caleb as a distraction just like he did with Ned, only Caleb is a predator in his own right and can smell that his interest is coming from a place of weakness. He immediately (and initially unintentionally) preys on Ian’s desperate need for structure and order by insisting on a traditional date where Ian is very much out of his element and even goes so far as to instruct Ian on how to be intimate. It’s no wonder he mentions Mickey in these moments, as Mickey never wanted him to change, and Ian leans heavily (even slightly hyperbolically) into the fact that Mickey wasn’t a paragon of order and stability like Caleb outwardly appears.

And I think why Ian puts up with it so long—being taught like a child, being used to upset Caleb’s parents, being paraded in front of his friends to make them jealous—is because he was getting something out of it too, just like with Ned. A stable place to live when their home ownership was in flux, a place away from his family when they weren’t providing the support he needed as he adjusted to his disorder, someone who validated his desires to help people regardless of their ulterior motives, and a physical distraction from his own problems. All of these parallel his relationship with Ned very closely. It was never going to last, of course. Ian is a strong person who temporarily forgot how strong he was because he forgot who he was, and Caleb didn’t want to be cared for—he wanted a project, like all of his sculptures. Being a project, being something that others see as needing to be fixed? That’s a hard no for Ian. It always has been. There’s a moment I love later in their relationship where Caleb tells him to turn off the lights when he goes out and lightly reprimands him for leaving one on the day prior. Ian is in a better place at that point, having regained a lot of his sense of self, and stares after him with indignation at being treated like a kid. He’s then lied to and cheated on, but I think that to mention those things to Caleb when they break up is to admit weakness on his own part—that he stuck with Caleb knowing that he was being mistreated, and Ian is not one to be called a victim. So, while we know from his discussions with Lip and Sue that the cheating and distrust bothered him most, he merely focused on Caleb lying about his sexuality, which removed a lot of the emotion from the situation—just like he did with Ned. It ultimately turned out to be a bad move since Caleb, being a skilled predator, made him question even his own sexuality in return, but we’re starting to see that Ian isn’t here to be someone’s toy anymore. Not an older, married man like Ned, but definitely not anyone his age either. I’m glad this pseudo-relationship happened because it showed Ian how strong he really was and that he could be in control of his own life. Sure, it destabilized him a little in the aftermath, but he worked through it. He leaned on his family, specifically Lip, who has always been his rock without the blurred lines that Fiona represented between sister/mother-figure/caretaker. Caleb is a garbage person, but Ian was the one who pulled the treasure from the trash, not him.

4. Trevor: The fourth of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. Trevor is perhaps the first relationship where we don’t see Ian dive in. Whether that’s because of his confusion over Trevor’s gender identity or the fact that he was really beginning to fully mature as an adult by that point (ostensibly finishing his education, getting a career, being fully self-sufficient, etc.), he tried to take his time and not jump right in. They hung out, talked around the neighborhood, and yes, engaged in some casual intimacy at the club. Again, Ian might not be in a full relationship, but he’s never without someone for long. At that point in the series, all he was missing was a relationship when it comes to traditional, “normal” goals for people to have. But Trevor posed a situation he’s never been in before since, while gay himself, Ian has never been very interested in activism or engaging in the LGBT community. It’s just not in his culture or environment, so to be faced with someone he’s interested in that challenges a lot of his views of gender and sexuality is something he takes his time with. Unfortunately, Trevor is younger than him and not quite as mature, not quite as experienced. He tells Ian he has plenty of friends and doesn’t need another, which is an ultimatum that has never really sat very well with me personally because I’m generally of the mind that if a person needs time and you really care for them, you’ll let them have that time. I’m not unsympathetic to Trevor: he’s been burned before and has his own trauma stemming from responses to his identity, so it makes complete sense for him not to be patient in this regard. He shouldn’t have to be—but then, Ian shouldn’t have to rush into anything he’s not 100% certain he wants either. That’s exactly what he does, though, because Ian does for others without thinking of the implications for himself a lot of the time. They make great friends, but they don’t make great partners. Trevor treats Ian similarly to Caleb in that he’s a bit of a project. Trevor educates him on the LGBT community and incorporates him into his ventures for the shelter without ever really showing much interest in Ian’s life or family, which suits Ian just fine because for as interested as he is in helping with the shelter and as attracted to Trevor as he is, he seems to know they’re not compatible. Ian, who has been having sex since he was far too young, takes a step back from it when they run into compatibility issues. (And pushes back on the pressure to bottom with some of his own—neither of them were in the right on that.) He doesn’t ask much about Trevor’s family or try to be part of his personal life. They sort of embody the “friends with benefits” stereotype: they hang out, they have sex, and that’s really all there is to their relationship.

The reason Ian doubles down on trying to make it work isn’t because there was a future for them before Mickey broke out. It’s because he thinks he’s lost Mickey forever, he knows he’s lost Monica forever, and he’s not going to get the support he needs from his family when they couldn’t stand Monica and Fiona told him what he already knew to be true, namely that Mickey being an escaped convict would destroy everything Ian worked so hard for if he got involved. So, he does what Ian does. He needs that distraction—he needs to run from these strong emotions he can’t process, so he bottles them up and unfairly hopes that Trevor will provide some of that comfort after cheating on him with Mickey. (Had Mickey been released, I think they would have broken up. Instead, that was the first match Ian lit, but certainly not the last.) Now, the thing is, Trevor said at the start that he didn’t want to be Ian’s friend. He’s also younger and less mature in a relationship, which means he threw the concept of love out there prematurely, just like Ian thought what he had with Kash was love. The death throes of their relationship were a back and forth where Ian was spiraling and seeking comfort, and Trevor was providing some while keeping their relationship pretty amorphous. (Were they exes? Were they friends? Were they people who shared interests and danced around each other? Were they going to get back together? They never officially broke up—it fizzled and resurged, then fizzled for good.) Ultimately, whatever it was that they had couldn’t survive Mickey, Monica, or Gay Jesus. Trevor wasn’t prepared to deal with a full-blown manic episode, and based on his hands-off approach with involving himself in Ian’s life even before the Mickey-shaped bomb got dropped on them, it doesn’t seem like he really wanted to anyway. He did what he’s always done: prioritized his shelter, which I’m not deriding in the slightest. By that point, Ian was too far gone to care that he disappeared anyway. Had the situation been different and he was getting the support from his family that he needed, it doesn’t seem like he would have cared much there either.

5. Mickey: Finally. Only took over five thousand words to get here. I’ll preface this with something that anyone who knows me from other fandoms is already well aware of, namely that I don’t do romance. Ever. Never been interested. The relationships I’ve always been most passionately interested in are platonic ones, especially “found families” and siblings, which is probably obvious from the other five thousand words here. Ian and Mickey are the first relationship I’ve actively shipped or written for in a fandom. They’re the first I’ve been invested in to this extent. As such, one of the biggest pet peeves I had when I first joined this fandom was the saying, “Ian fell first, Mickey fell harder.” These two wonderful dumbasses face planted on the concrete in front of the Kash and Grab in s1 and never recovered. I could go on forever about these two, but that particular wall of text would probably be too daunting for even the most avid Gallavich stan to traverse, so I’ll keep it fairly brief. As we can see above, Ian has a very strict sense of what he “should” want in a partner. Someone who is moderately successful in their chosen field, makes enough money to at least live comfortably, and typically does something that helps other people (a doctor, a fireman, a youth counselor). These aren’t passionate people. They’re not men who operate on instinct the way most of the people in his life have always had to by virtue of their social standing. They have life goals and opportunities that he envies, and Ian has a great deal of compassion for them when they hit a roadblock or things don’t work out. The amazing dichotomy of Ian Gallagher is that he straddles a line most people can’t between the rough neighborhood that has instilled in him all of his values/behaviors and the middle-class mentality of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and aspiring to more. Ian has always aimed for what Lip said wasn’t possible for poor people: being successful without having to scam or steal. But as I said way back at the beginning of this manifesto, the South Side is his home. His family is his family. And none of the people he’s been with personify the South Side quite like Mickey—they don’t personify home like Mickey.

And I think that’s where the initial draw for Ian is. (I’m going to focus on Ian’s side since he’s who your question focused on.) The other guys look great on paper, and Ian’s brain says that that’s what he should aim for. We know better, though. We know that Ian has an enormous heart that belongs first and foremost to his family and their home. His heart says that this person—this dirty, rude, mean, violent person—is home. His heart says this person is everything about himself that he denies having, just like Ian was everything about Mickey that the latter declined to openly acknowledge for so long. I don’t like relationships built on “making each other better.” I really don’t. The wonderful thing about this is that it’s never been that way. Ian didn’t change Mickey. He’s exactly who he’s always been, but he’s grown past the fear of his own emotions and Terry’s response to them. He’s still a thief, a con artist, violent, and rude. Mickey didn’t change Ian either. He’s still rigidly conforming to certain stereotypes of what he thinks he should want, seeking structure (to his own detriment at times), and not a great communicator. The point for them is that they complement each other, not that they make the other a better person—not even that they bring something out of each other that wasn’t already there. That’s what Ian’s other relationships did. They made him shave off his edges so that he could fit a square peg into a round hole, and that’s not happiness. It’s simply what he thought he was supposed to do—what “normal” people did.

With Mickey, he doesn’t have to worry so much about what is normal or acceptable. He doesn’t have to worry about whether or not his life is objectively “on track,” not until fairly recently. Mickey is the only person he’s ever been with who has accepted him for who he is, faults and strengths alike, without the underlying insinuation that he should be aiming for something else or pretending to be whatever the other person needs him to be in order to care for them. Kash needed an escape—Ian provided it. Ned needed a very specific brand of toy—Ian played that role. Caleb needed a project to feel fulfilled—Ian went along with it for a bit. Trevor needed someone who accepted him as he was but did things his way—Ian did that. To care for Mickey has only ever meant being himself because all Mickey ever really needed was him. Mickey didn’t need an escape from his home—his relationship with his family is more complicated than that. Mickey didn’t need to be saved from his upbringing—it’s what made him the person Ian fell in love with and who he is happy to be. Mickey didn’t need someone to change who he is on a fundamental level because unless it is going to get him into trouble and separate them, Ian never wanted him to. (Even then, it’s about what he does, not who he is.) And yes, I’m sure that there’s a level of excitement that Ian finds exhilarating where Mickey is concerned, but I tend to believe it goes a lot deeper than that. What he finds exciting about Mickey is what Mickey embodies about the South Side—about home. About his own upbringing, but also Ian’s. About Frank and Monica, his siblings, school, work, ROTC—existing and surviving in an environment where it’s not guaranteed that you’ll have money to keep the heat on this winter or feed your family. They spent the early seasons living in a constant state of fight or flight. They couldn’t afford not to. And there’s excitement in that. Look at how many people say that the first seasons are their favorite! There hasn’t been a huge shift in the quality or direction of the writing, just the trajectory of the characters. They’ve gotten older, and their problems have been different. It’s not about survival so much of the time anymore, but those are the storylines that excite us. For Ian, that exhilaration in the constant battle of survival in their neighborhood is sewn into the fiber of his being just like it is Mickey’s. He saw his home in Mickey before they truly fell in love, and when that followed, Mickey became home.

In Conclusion

Ian has spent his entire life looking for the “right” path only to realize that it was laid before him: his family, his small circle of friends, and Mickey. I love that that is coming full circle this season, where [SPOILER ALERT] marriage has almost made him regress a bit to that place where there must be a right way of doing things going forward, and slowly but surely, we’re seeing him loosen up.

Good morning. It’s Ian Gallagher loving hours.

#shameless #ian gallagher #it's ian gallagher loving hours #shameless meta #well that took six hours #and I didn't get more writing done #but I feel accomplished

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batmanisagatewaydrug · 4 years ago

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books books books books

[prev]

absolutely no preamble; I've been putting this off because I was trying to finish reading Ahmed faster than was physically possible before I posted this but now it's time to face reality

what have I been reading?

Book of Hours (Kevin Young) - I've been all high and mighty about not reading any books authored solely by men this year and then I completely forgot myself by reading this poetry collection. and I regret nothing; Young's reflections on loss of his father and birth of his son make for a mournful and meditative narrative that's a quick but compelling read. strongly recommend for folks who aren't super at ease reading poetry but want to change that, like myself.

Red at the Bone (Jacqueline Woodson) - sometimes I'm reminded that despite my obvious preference for speculative fiction, I'm not at all opposed to contemporary stories so long as the writing is simply exquisite. Woodson's work is sharp as ever, her prose poignant and poetic as she untangles the hurt and hope across three generations of a family shaken by an unexpected pregnancy.

The Kingdom of Copper (S.A. Chakraborty) - oh man oh my god you guys, this series does not stop and it CERTAINLY does not disappoint. I read 300 (!!!) pages of this book during one day of travel and did not once get sick of it, and A Certain Scene near the end made my cry uncontrollably. I'm going to be a little delayed getting to Empire of Gold because of my decision to dedicate June and July to new releases, and honestly that's okay with me - it would be a shame to run through a great thing too soon.

Children of Vengeance and Virtue (Tomi Adeyemi) - meanwhile, on the polar opposite end of the sequel scale... I'm gonna be real guys, I think I might have waited too long to read this. I remember Blood and Bone being a delightful, Avatar-inspired romp across Yoruba mythology - epic and massive, filled with intricate magic, a little messy in places but understandably so, given that it centered on teens tasked with fixing a very broken world. it was fun. this one was not fun. most of the book involves the narrative bending over backwards to keep Zélie and Amari constantly fighting, until Amari (spoiler alert) eventually decides to become a war criminal about it. Inan is still Inan, which is to say he's The Worst, and Zélie's new love interest is a shithead teenage mercenary whose hits all the worst "sexy dangerous bad boy" cliches. Tzain is the only one who's never done anything wrong, and that's because he was barely in this one. that's a big oof from me.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Becky Chambers) - god, speaking of good things being over. this is possibly the coziest of Chambers' Wayfarers books yet, following five strangers of four different alien species stuck at one outer space truck stop thanks to an unexpected infrastructure failure. while stuck together they grapple with the usual bevy of themes Chambers explores in her books - culture, colonialism, community, connection, and what it means to be a person in a world with countless forms of personhood. it's a soft, understated end to a soft and understated series, and - surprise surprise - made me cry like a baby. also it's introduced my second favorite alien, an artsy, amiable, hedonistic lobster named Roveg who's simply a delight on all fronts.

what am I reading now?

Living A Feminist Life (Sara Ahmed) - oh man okay getting back into reading theory for fun is a slow and painful process and I cannot read this as quickly as I want but oh man. oh my god. Sara Ahmed your brain.

Sorrowland (Rivers Solomon) - the first new books of Hot Book Summer! I'm not very far in at all, but Sorrowland already has a vibe that feels very much in conversation with Octavia Butler's Parable books. and you know I love some Butler!

#bookblr #reading updates

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nealiios · 4 years ago

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The Supernatural 70s: Part I - Corruption of An Innocent

"We're mutants. There's something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us. Something seriously wrong with us - we're soldiers writers."

-- with apologies to the screenwriter of "Stripes"

Dear reader, I have the darkest of revelations to make to you, a truth when fully and wholly disclosed shall most assuredly chill you to the bone, a tale that shall make you question all that you hold to be true and good and holy about my personal history. While you may have come in search of that narrative designer best known for his works of interactive high fantasy, you should know that he is also a crafter of a darker art, a scribbler of twisted tales filled with ghosts, and ghouls, and gargoyles. I am, dear innocent, a devotee of horrors! Mwahahahaha!

[cue thunderclap, lightning, pipe organ music]

Given the genre of writing for which most of you know me, I forgive you if you think of me principally as a fantasy writer. I don't object to that classification because I do enjoy mucking about with magic and dark woods and mysterious ancient civilizations. But if you are to truly know who I am as a writer, you must realize that the image I hold of myself is principally as a creator of weird tales.

To understand how and why I came to be drawn to this sub-genre of fantastic fiction, you first must understand that I come from peculiar folks. Maybe I don't have the Ipswich look, or I didn't grow up in a castle, but my pedigree for oddity has been there from the start. My mother was declared dead at birth by her doctor, and often heard voices calling to her in the dead of night that no one else could hear. Her mother would periodically ring us up to discuss events in our lives about which she couldn't possibly have known. My father's people still share ghost stories about a family homestead that burned down mysteriously in the 1960s. Even my older brother has outré memories about events he says cannot possibly be true, and as a kid was kicked off the Tulsa city bookmobile for attempting to check out books about UFOs, bigfoot, and ESP. It's fair to say I was doomed - or destined - for weirdness from the start.

If the above listed circumstances had not been enough, I grew up in an area where neighbors whispered stories about a horrifically deformed Bulldog Man who stalked kids who "parked" on the Old North Road near my house. The state in which I was raised was rife with legends of bigfoots, deer women, and devil men. Even in my childhood household there existed a pantheon of mythological entities invented explicitly to keep me in line. If I was a good boy, The Repairman would leave me little gifts of Hot Wheels cars or candy. If I was being terrible, however, my father would dress in a skeleton costume, rise from the basement and threaten to drag me down into everlasting hellfire (evidently there was a secret portal in our basement.) There were monsters, monsters EVERYWHERE I looked in my childhood world. Given that I was told as a fledgling writer to write what I knew, how could anyone have been surprised that the first stories I wrote were filled with the supernatural?

"The Nightmare" by John Henry Fuseli (1781)

My formative years during the late sixties and early seventies took place at a strange juncture in our American cultural history. At the same time that we were loudly proclaiming the supremacy of scientific thought because we'd landed men on the moon, we were also in the midst of a counter cultural explosion of interest in astrology, witchcraft, ghosts, extra sensory perception, and flying saucers. Occult-related books were flying off the shelves as sales surged by more than 100% between 1966 and 1969. Cultural historians would come to refer to this is as the "occult boom," and its aftershocks would impact popular cultural for decades to come.

My first contact with tales of the supernatural were innocuous, largely sanitized for consumption by children. I vividly remember watching Casper the Friendly Ghost and the Disney version of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I read to shreds numerous copies of both Where the Wild Things Are and Gus the Ghost. Likely the most important exposure for me was to the original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? cartoon which attempted to inoculate us from our fears of ghosts and aliens by convincing us that ultimately the monster was always just a bad man in a mask. (It's fascinating to me that modern incarnations of Scooby Doo seem to have completely lost this point and instead make all the monsters real.)

ABOVE: Although the original cartoon Scooby Doo, Where Are You? ran only for one season from 1969 to 1970, it remained in heavy reruns and syndication for decades. It is notable for having been a program that perfectly embodied the conflict between reason and superstition in popular culture, and was originally intended to provide children with critical thinking skills so they would reject the idea of monsters, ghosts, and the like. Ironically, modern takes on Scooby Doo have almost entirely subverted this idea and usually present the culprits of their mysteries as real monsters.

During that same time, television also introduced me to my first onscreen crush in the form of the beautiful and charming Samantha Stevens, a witch who struggles to not to use her powers while married to a frequently intolerant mortal advertising executive in Bewitched. The Munsters and The Addams Family gave me my first taste for "goth" living even before it would become all the rage in the dance clubs of the 1980s. Late night movies on TV would bring all the important horror classics of the past in my living room as Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, the Phantom of the Opera, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Godzilla all became childhood friends. Over time the darkened castles, creaking doors, foggy graveyards, howling wolves, and ever present witches and vampires became so engrained in my psyche that today they remain the "comfort viewing" to which I retreat when I'm sick or in need of other distractions from modern life.

ABOVE: Elizabeth Montgomery starred in Bewitched (1964 - 1972) as Samantha Stephens, a witch who married "mortal" advertising executive Darren Stephens (played for the first five seasons by actor Dick York). Inspired by movies like I Married a Witch (1942) and Bell, Book and Candle (1958), it was a long running series that explored the complex relationship dynamics between those who possess magic and those who don't. Social commentators have referred to it as an allegory both for mixed marriages and also about the challenges faced by minorities, homosexuals, cultural deviants, or generally creative folks in a non heterogeneous community. It was also one of the first American television programs to portray witches not as worshippers of Satan, but simply as a group of people ostracized for their culture and their supernatural skills.

Even before I began elementary school, there was one piece of must-see gothic horror programming that I went out of my way to catch every day. Dark Shadows aired at 3:30 p.m. on our local ABC affiliate in Tulsa, Oklahoma which usually allowed me to catch most of it if I ran home from school (or even more if my mom or brother picked me up.) In theory it was a soap opera, but the show featured a regular parade of supernatural characters and themes. The lead was a 175 year old vampire named Barnabas Collins (played by Johnathan Frid), and the show revolved around his timeless pursuit of his lost love, Josette. It was also a program that regularly dealt with reincarnation, precognition, werewolves, time travel, witchcraft, and other occult themes. Though it regularly provoked criticism from religious groups about its content, it ran from June of 1966 until it's final cancellation in April of 1971. (I would discover it in the early 1970s as it ran in syndication.) Dark Shadows would spin off two feature-length movies based on the original, a series of tie-in novels, an excellent reboot series in 1991 (starring Ben Cross as Barnabas), and a positively embarrassingly awful movie directed by Tim Burton in 1991.

ABOVE: Johnathan Frid starred as Barnabas Collins, one of the leading characters of the original Dark Shadows television series. The influence of the series cannot be understated. In many ways Dark Shadows paved the way for the inclusion of supernatural elements in other soap operas of the 1970s and the 1980s, and was largely responsible for the explosion of romance novels featuring supernatural themes over the same time period.

While Dark Shadows was a favorite early television program for me, another show would prove not only to be a borderline obsession, but also a major influence on my career as a storyteller. Night Gallery (1969-1973) was a weekly anthology television show from Rod Serling, better known as the creator and host of the original Twilight Zone. Like Twilight Zone before it, Night Gallery was a deep and complex commentary on the human condition, but unlike its predecessor the outcomes for the characters almost always skewed towards the horrific and the truly outré. In "The Painted Mirror," an antiques dealer uses a magic painting to trap an enemy in the prehistoric past. Jack Cassidy plots to use astral projection to kill his romantic rival in "The Last Laurel" but accidentally ends up killing himself. In "Eyes" a young Stephen Spielberg directs Joan Crawford in a story about an entitled rich woman who plots to take the sight of a poor man. Week after week it delivered some of the best-written horror television of the early 1970s.

In retrospect I find it surprising that I was allowed to watch Night Gallery at all. I was very young while it was airing, and some of the content was dark and often quite shocking for its time. Nevertheless, I was so attached to the show that I'd throw a literal temper tantrum if I missed a single, solitary episode. If our family needed to go somewhere on an evening that Night Gallery was scheduled, either my parents would either have to wait until after it had aired before we left, or they'd make arrangements in advance with whomever we were visiting to make sure it was okay that I could watch Night Gallery there. I was, in a word, a fanatic.

ABOVE: Every segment of Night Gallery was introduced by series creator Rod Serling standing before a painting created explicitly for the series. Director Guillermo del Toro credits Serling's series as being the most important and influential show on his own work, even more so than the more famous Twilight Zone.

#horror #70s #occult #supernatural #television #writing

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scatterbrainedbutterfly · 4 years ago

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how you doing? i'd appreciate some ideas on where to start researching (besides wikipedia or etc. obvious places) for my human au 2p germany as i'm trying to get back into the fandom after a long time not really participating.

I am the wrong person to ask on research, since most of my 2ps are more set in personal characterization that historical context. If you're making it in a human au, then I'd work on setting them in the time period you're in and look into where they live, and go from there is a way to start. Something I do when I make characters in any fandom in general but specifically in Hetalia in this case, is striking a triforce balance. The Tri-Force Balance is the balance of personal characterization, the canon material, and the historical setting. If you have too much of one corner things can come off as unbalanced and out of character.

When it comes to making 2p's though (since there is no canon) it just depends on what exactly you're wanting your 2p's to be. Everyone usually has a through-line in their 1ps, i.e. being nations. So usually they have a through-line in their 2ps. Are the 2ps direct copies, are they some sort of alternate version from another world? Are they just second personifications for the same nation no strings attached? This idea isn't my thing, but are they some sort of evil organization planning world domination, were they made in a lab?

Once you find that through-line it can make things easier. My 2ps are simply other personifications. The same world, not human made not evil. Just if one nation was able to come from the soil, why not two? And their personalities usually start with a question with the 1ps. A what if I changed this one detail, what would be different.

Example, my 2p Germany and 1p Germany are about as different as can be. But they started with the statement and question of, if you think about it, Germany probably has a lot of trauma from being the youngest nation, never having a childhood and coming to be right before two of the worst wars in human history with no friends to support him. He probably has a lot of unaddressed trauma, though on the surface he seems to have gotten through it fine, but what if he didn't? What if he didn't get through it okay? What happened if Ludwig was more unstable, and didn't have the support of Gilbert and Feliciano? What if he knew he was HRE in a past life? What would happen? How would he change as a person?

And Thus, my Lutz came to be. Lutz is a multi-faced German man who doesn’t seem very complicated at first glance. First meeting him he’s an energetic, suave romantic who seems to spend more time in his head than anywhere else. However he does have some odd habits and more unhealthy tendencies that have made people weary of him in the past. It’s really hard to gauge what he’s thinking about, though he seems to like it that way, only close friends being able to guess accurately. He’s recovering from a lot of childhood trauma at the hands of his Veneziano and Prussia, and unlike the other Germany, he’s much more imbalanced because of this. The first strong bonds he had went terribly wrong, leaving lasting emotional and physical scars. He’s very much a people-pleaser with a desperate want to be loved, and this want can often override his common sense.

When it comes to research, I can't encourage people enough to actually read the Hetalia comics. The comics show so much of the character outside of just the anime dub. The dub gives you >5% of their characters theres so much more in the strips so actually looking into the strips cannot be understated. There is free reading of all of them on Hetarchive. They also post these translations on Tumblr and Twitter to read.

https://hetarchive.net/

#mun tema #normally I take these over on my art blog #but this works

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mewrising · 4 years ago

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Lair Review! Rutile #256644

@rutile-fr

Okay, so let me preface this by saying that my browser was positively crammed with tabs from all of the wonderful dragons whose pages I opened whilst browsing your lair. It was SO HARD to pick only six because your entire lair? Phenomenal. I am awed by how many of your dragons have complete bios, and your lore is so fun and interesting! A haven for monsters and dragons alike? Delightful! If you ever make a concentrated lore thread for your clan’s story, please, please ping me because I’d love to read it!

After a lot of deliberation, I finally settled on six favorites (listed under the readmore in no particular order):

#1: Valentine. This man is delightfully soft, and he totally embodies the whole “caring messenger” vibe I got from the Obelisk release. His colors are amazing, with special bonus points for not only utilizing my favorite prim/sec gene combo (skink + blend) but also finding a use for an under-appreciated gene like scales! I also love the fact that one of his main descriptors is “himbo” XD In all seriousness though, his lore is fun and I’m sure his lack of common sense will get him into plenty of shenanigans while he waits to discover more about his purpose!

#2: Opal. I know they don’t have lore, but I just could not resist their beautiful colors and accent! Teal/green is a color combo I ADORE and they wear it so well--not to mention the fact that the whole “cybertronic eldritch horror” vibe is one of my soft spots XD I would love to know if/when they get lore because I don’t think there is any way that this dragon’s story wouldn’t hit even more soft spots of mine!

#3: Ieuan. Opal’s inclusion probably foreshadowed this pick, but oh my WORD. This dragon is peak everything!! Their accent + outfit combo is delightful, their colors are (once again) teal and as such my favorite, and their whole monstrous vibe is something I cannot understate my appreciation for!! Once again, I’d love to know when and if you get their lore set up because they seem like they’d have a fascinating story.

#4: Nyota. This gal once again checks a lot of boxes for me--particularly because she has excellent lore, savannah, and ice primal! I love the idea of her growing up in a family of monstrous dragons who were totally ordinary in every other regard and just tried to live their own life away from a world that would condemn them simply because of their innate appearance. I’m so glad that she was able to find a way to explore beyond the bounds of her home and eventually wind up selling sweets at the Isles of Memoria! I’m sure her confectionary creations are well worth the pride she takes in them :D

#5: PazToril. PazToril here initially caught my eye because I love the ghastcrowns and can’t resist appreciating any dragon who wears them, but I absolutely had to include her once I read her lore! Once again, you’ve created a monstrous character who is pretty much entirely ordinary and who just wants to live their best life. I especially love how Paz and Toril do have conflicts over controlling the same body but that those conflicts have mostly to do with mundane things--like how Paz likes sweets while Toril hates them. It’s just such a fun concept!

#6: Aphyria. Finally, how could I forget the Isles’ leader, Aphyria? Faes can be so hard to work with but she is just stunning! I love her outfit and her striking Dark Sclera eyes, not to mention her lore! I got such vivid pictures of her using dark, terrible magic to slay away Jackal’s killer and then resurrect Jackal, and I really like how you’ve tied the consequences for her magical oversteps into her story. She seems like a dutiful ruler who puts a lot of needless strain on herself over the past. The final paragraphs of her lore seemed to show that she’s starting to break down the walls between herself and others, and I hope that she is able to move on and also move forward!

Overall, your lair was a delight to scroll through and I’ll definitely be back to take a deeper dive into the bios I missed out on!

#lair reviews #untagged dragons

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paragonrobits · 4 years ago

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a friend asked me to give a shot at doing an entry in this tier list they linked me to, of the video games inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame since 2015, and I opted to give it a shot!

My rankings are generally biased towards games I personally enjoy playing, though I will give some commentary on their historic relevance:

S-Rank

Super Mario Bros: The game that repopularized video games in the US, that arguably began the entire platforming video game genre and all its imitators and spin-offs, that spawned a new generation of video games after the Atari Crash in the US, and still a DAMN FUN game in its own right! I simply had to put this at the top ranking. After the disillusionment caused by Atari’s failures, this game brought home consoles back in a big way to the US.

World of Warcraft: Now, I’m not much for MMORPGs. Nevertheless, I’ve followed the lore and general information in the Warcraft setting for years now, and a couple years back, my brother asked me to play it with him. I had a ton of fun, honestly! Playing a goblin mage, I believe. WoW is notable for being THE MMORPG, and still going strong. Admittedly, nowadays many games do what it does better, and the time when it was dominant as THE single game to play is past, but it was still an enjoyable experience and I really have to like how sincere the game is about its aesthetics and campy vibe. Given that the entire setting is reputedly a reskin of a Warhammer Fantasy Battle video game that went south, it’s cheery and colorful, morally gray tone is... an interesting complication in its history. (Also, HORDE. I STAN THE HORDE VERY HARD.)

The Sims: A bit of history; I did not play this game as enthusiastically as a kid as my sister and mom did. We ALL spammed the hell out of the Rosebud cheat, though; not until recent times did I actually wind up playing the game properly, when the most recent iteration of the series was free for a while. My mom didn’t care to play the game, she just liked building houses. In any case, while my attention drifted from the game now and then, I always am fascinated by the actual gameplay of caring for your simulated humans, and the way you don’t actually control them directly. This sort of hands off experience is actually a bit similar to the ‘dungeon simulator’ genre, and while the game is notorious for enabling cruelty (something I never saw the appeal of!), it’s a surprisingly wholesome experience, and it can’t be understated how unique this gameplay was at the time.

Legend of Zelda: It’s actually rather interesting how different OG Zelda is from modern games. Not just the top down perspective (which DOES pop up, now and then); the game is non-linear and allows you to go to any dungeon at any point, completing the game at your leisure, and the story is extremely barebones compared to what we may be used to. It’s quite a far cry from the linear gameplay of gradually collecting tools and working through plots that the games are known for. Breath of the Wild is, in fact, a return to form rather than an upheaval of the formula. I’ll also admit that I have a lot of affection for the gameplay of this one, as well as Link To The Past.

Donkey Kong: When you’re talking old school, as far as what you might call the modern generation of games goes (which is to say, the games that resurged after the Atari Crash), it’s hard to go wrong with Donkey Kong. It’s certainly notable for being a weird stage in Mario’s character and something that is generally ignored; it’s just strange thinking that at one point he was supposed to be abusive towards a pet ape that went in an innocent, well-meaning rampage! Personally this one kind of breaks a mold for my S-class rankings because while I like this one fine, I don’t like it THAT much; i mostly played it in the DK 64 game, and found it very difficult and that’s stuck with me. Still, I place it here for its momentous position in placing Nintendo on the map, with the influence and revolutionary technologies and gaming mechanics they would introduce, to this very day.

Pokemon Red/Blue: Hoo boy. HOO BOY it is honestly something of an oversight that I didn't immediately shove this beauty straight to the front of the S-line because good god I love this game. It's been years and years, long since I was but a whee Johnny playing a strange new game for the first time just because there was a cool turtle creature on the cover (because I was super into turtles back then), and I still love this game. Even with the improvements made to the formula since then (getting rid of HMs, the fixes and new types introduced since) there's still something lovable about this game, even as something as basic as the official artwork that just tugs my heartstrings. This game is highly notable for being an RPG that popularized the monster collecting/befriending gameplay (so far as I know), and as an autistic person, i really appreciate knowing the whole thing grew out of an autistic man's bug collection hobby from when he was a child. Pokemon is an absolute juggernaut of a media influence, and THIS is where it all began. It's first stage evolution, you might say. And not like a Magikarp or anything. This one's more like one of the starters... appropriately enough. Final Fantasy 7: This is probably a bit of a controversial take, but FF7 was not actually one of my favorite Final Fantasy entries back in the day. I never played much more of it than the beginning missions, as my cousin owned the machine in question, and I moved out before i could play it much. Final Fantasy 3 (in the US; it's more generally referred to as 6 now) was my favorite for a long, long time, and that game pioneered many of the traits that would be associated with 7: the epic story, the complex ensemble cast, though 7 really expanded on that basic idea, and previous games were hardly shabby in that regard. 9 is my favorite of the pre-10 era, with its extreme shake ups to the mechanics of the game. No; what makes 7 stand out is that it was a shift towards making Final Fantasy a constantly shifting, unique franchise where every entry was its own thing; it introduced 3D graphics with a fun and cartoony style mixed with a story that wouldn't be out of place in a cyberpunk story, and heralds Squaresoft (as it was called at the time) splitting off from Nintendo, with its censorship policies, and doing its own thing with Sony, with a great deal more freedom to write as they pleased. The party design also stands out, which each character having their own unique function in the party while the Materia concept allows a degree of modular skills to be installed, customizing them in ways that, in my opinion, the best entries in the franchise (on a gameplay level) would revisit. Colossal Cave Adventure: I'll be honest; I never played this game, and I don't believe it's particularly familiar to me at all. However, I chose it for this vaunted spot in S-rank because games of this nature, of text-based prompt and responses, are some of the most interesting things imaginable! Games like AI Dungeon are similar in some respects, and its impressive to think just how dang old this game is, and yet it managed to pull off basically being it's own DM. It has an interesting history; created by a man who worked on the precursor to the Internet, the game was made to connect with his daughter and was inspired by recent entries into Dungeons And Dragons, and later expanded upon by other programmers. It's notable that while Zork is the sort of game that would probably involve more immediate recognition (I actually mistook it for Zork at first, from the screenshot), this game was the first of its kind, and that always deserve some recognition. Minecraft: I absolutely LOVE Minecraft, and it's rightfully one of the most popular games, if not THE most popular game, of the last couple of decades, and it's interesting to think just how unconventional it is; the game is, effectively, a LEGO simulator, and as someone who honestly always wanted tons of LEGO sets as a kid but could never afford them consistently, there's something genuinely very appealing about Minecraft's basic set up. It's open approach and lack of a goal, just gameplay mechanics that encourage you to build and do as you please, makes for a very relaxing and unusual mentality not often seen in games until this point; it doesn't even have a storyline, it simply gives you a world to play around in. Of note, Minecraft's entry seems to have relevance towards video games becoming a cultural touchstone; Minecraft's visual aesthetic leans towards both blocky LEGOs and retro graphics, and certainly proves that games don't need to strive for hyper realistic graphics to be appealing. ----- A RANK Doom: I genuinely like Doom, a lot! I still have memories of replaying this game frequently, long before Doom 2016 and Eternal were glimmers; it's just genuinely very fun to play. That said, I feel that there's other games that are a bit more historically notable and while i like this game, not quite as much as other entries. But it cant be understated that this was THE first person shooter, and more to the point, was fundamental towards game design as we know it. Of note, it pioneered the idea of a game engine, which has had tremendous impact down the road in terms of making a flexible baseline system that latergames were programmed around. Additionally, the first three episodes being free, with the additional ones being purchased as part of the full game, this was, I think, the first demonstration of a demo. Back then, we called this shareware; a game which was free but had full features locked off, but otherwise you could play it however much you wanted. There's a REASON Doom winds up on more systems than Skyrim! Ultimately, while it's not one of my favorite games, it's impact on the business of gaming and the functions of game design cannot be overstated. Pac-Man: This game, is THE game that made video games a phenomenon and its worth thinking about that and how video games as a modern institituion can be drawn, however broadly, from Pac-Man's commercial success. I should note that while I've played this game extensively, it's not something I'm particularly good at; there's a LOT going on here and its a bit much for me to handle. That's probably a strength; there's a reason people had to fake their accomplishments and falsified high scores. It's worth noting that Pac-Man is a unique thing in that it has been rereleased many times over, and every generation has found it enjoyable and fun, unlike other games that set trends only to be lost out in the end. (Goldeneye, for instance!) The Oregon Trail: Like many other people I assume, I first played this game as something available on school computers. Purportedly made as an educational game to teach students about history, this game may be notable for, among other things, being an entry point towards the idea of resource management in video games (as well as being hellishly difficult, by the standards then, but that DOES illustrate a point, does it not?). It's also the oldest, most continuously available game ever made, even now being ported to smartphones, or so I hear! It seems to be a very early example of edutainment games, and a genuinely great one at that. It probably helps that a selling point is that it doesn't really mince around with its subject matter; anyone who's played this game knows that total party kill is the default assumption, as it was in life. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat: I place these two together as I feel that they form a duo of sorts, and defined fighting games of my childhood and modern gaming experience; name a fighting game, from Injustice to something as deliberately different as Smash Bros, and it has SOME relation to these games, even if its in terms of doing something completely different. These games set a mold for fighting games! Among other things, both games feature iconic characters as a selling point, and to this day fighting games make their mark based on how signature their characters are. Mortal Kombat is of course an incredibly violent game (though very tame, by modern standards), and its fatalities and depicitons of violence sparked thought and arguments on what video games ought to be allowed to depict, for better or for worse. It's not implausible to suggest that the overly strict restrictions on what video games could depict go back to Mortal Kombat's fatalities, specifically (since there's far worse games predating it, though too graphically primitive to be obvious). Street Fighter, conversely, strikes me as having more characterization and depth, especially as far as fighting systems go; I find it hard to be interested in many fighting games now, if they don't offer as much depth as the likes of Street Fighter 2. Street Fighter stands out for innovating multiplayer play, initially in the arcade, and its not implausible to say that the likes of Smash Bros is a descendant of sorts of the specific mentality Street Fighter brought to the table. Consider also that it is STILL a mainstay in the remaining arcades and cabinets in service today! Tomb Raider: This is a game i legit liked back in the day, and there's some part of me that's sad that the platforming, puzzle solving and focus on exploration has not really made it back into the modern Tomb Raider series, last I checked. There's probably something interesting in that Lara Croft represents a bit of an intermediate period between platforming mascots and modern Edgy Protagonists; you know the ones. Balding white dudes with vague dad vibes, but this is not a slight on Lara; she definitely has a ton of personality, even just at a cover glance. This game had a strong focus on exploration, and that's honestly something I really like. Super Mario Kart: I'm going to be controversial here; complaints about the Blue Shell are kinda overrated. It's not that different from, say, a red shell hitting you from behind when you're close to the finish line. But, jokes and old 90s memes aside, this game has some interesting status in that it started the idea of making spin-off games in dramatically different contexts; Crash Team Racing and Sonic Drift, for example, are listened as similar games. On a franchise level, this began the trend of Mario becoming a truly flexible character who could do pretty much whatever was required of him, not just the original platforming games, and its possible his imitators never quite learned the same lesson. Though one wonders what Miyamoto might have thought if he'd known how many thinkpieces he would spawn with 'why does mario go-karting with Bowser when they're enemies?'. For my part, I favor the idea that the other games are in-universe fictions they're actors on and this is their actual dynamic, or that Mario is a relaxed dude who doesn't mind playing kart games with his foe. (I mean, he's not Ridley. Bowser's easy enough to get along with.) Animal Crossing: Again, I have to emphasize that I've never actually played this game, at least on a consistent basis (and by that, I mean I MIGHT have played it on the Gamecube, once, in the early 2000s), and have to speak from what I've seen of what it sparked. And I really do like the way it really codified the sub-genre of relaxed, open-ended games where the player is free to do as they like, without much stress or fear, which is something I think more games could stand to do. On my personal list of features that my ideal video game would have, Animal Crossing would definitely offer a few ideas. I am reminded of farming simulators, such as Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley; while they are different beasts entirely, there's a familiar sense of non-combat relaxation that's pleasant to see. Spacewar!: This machine is GODDAMN old, and like an old fogey predating modern humans, it deserves our respect. It's so old, it predates Pong. Supposedly created as part of predictative Cold War models, with an emphasis on emulating sci fi dogfights, producing a game that soon proved popular, for over a decade remainign the most popular game on computer systems, and a clumsy foray into arcade gaming (that didn't pan out, unfortunately) led to the creation of Pong by its creator, which is another story all its own! And Pong is directly responsible for the idea of the video game itself; this game launched the entire video game industry as we understand it! No small feat, indeed. ----

B RANKED Sonic The Hedgehog: I must state that I DO like this game, though not as much as later entires like Sonic 3 and Knuckles, or the Sonic Adventure series; the fast paced action seems a bit hobbled by the traps and need to be careful of surroundings, which would seem to run counter towards the whole idea of GOTTA GO FAST, y'know? But the game presents an interesting viewpoint on the nature of mascot gaming; created specifically, so it is said, as a rival to Mario, Sonic was designed as a mascot with attitude, and inspired a host of imitators; he's probably the only one to escape the 90s more or less intact, and this may have something to say about his flexibility, star power, and also the fact that he's a pretty mild character, all things considered. This game certainly has its place in gaming history, giving an important place in the console wars of yesteryear. Believe me, I was a kid in the 90s, Sonic was a HUGE deal. Space Invaders: This game is noted to have catapulted games into prominence by making them household, something outside of arcades, and it shows! An interesting detail of note is that supposedly, the Space Invaders were meant to all move at high speed, but this was either too hard to play against, or too costly on the processor; it was found that by making them speed up as they were defeated, it created an interesting set of challenge. You have to appreciate game history like that. In general, its success prompted Japanese companies to join the market, which would eventually produce what I imagine was a thriving, competitive market that would eventually get us Nintendo and it's own gamechangers down the road. Grant Theft Auto 3: I'm going to be honest with you. I don't much care for this sort of game. The Saints Row series, with its fundamental wackiness, is the kind of game I really DO like if I'm going for something like this, and GTA sort of leaning towards the 'cruel for fun and profit' gameplay is really unappealing for me. However, I'd be remiss if I didn't address this game, and what seems to come up is two things: the game's sheer freedom in its open world (which certainly pushed the bar for games of that nature, and has made it a byword for gamers screwing around in a game just to see what ridiculous things they could or couldn't do) and the infamous reputation from the mature aspects of the game. Personally, I'm not much for this game's take on maturity (if I wanted to discuss a game of that nature, I'd suggest, say, Spec Ops: The Line) but I really do appreciate what this game and its series did for the open world genre, and the sheer possibilities presented for letting you do what you wanted. King's Quest: I've never played this game, but I am a HUGE fan of the point and click genre (also known generally as the adventure game genre) that it spawned; without this game, there's no Monkey Island, no Sam and Max, no The Dig or Full Throttle, or Gabriel Knight. This game was similar to previous text-based games, with a text parser to input commands, but with the distinction of a graphical interface to move their character around, which would be the seed of later games such as the SCUMM engine of Monkey Island and other Lucasarts games (which, to me, ARE Adventure Gaming). The puzzles, comedic sensibilities, and interface innovations originated with this game, and codified those later adventure games i love so much. Starcraft: This is another one those list of 'games I should have already played by now'. I'm not much of an RTS person, barring forays with games such as Impossible Creatures, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, and more strange entries such as Brutal Legend, and I contend that the combat aspects of 4X games like Civilization DO count on some level; the specifics of troop movement and unit strengths/weaknesses are a bit beyond me, when you get to more complex stuff. Starcraft, reading between the lines, really introduced the idea of multiplayer culture especially for RTS, pioneered the Battle(dot)net system (which I mostly recall from Diablo, if I'm being honest!) as well as the idea of relative strengths and powers for individual factions so that they became characters in their own right. It's still a very popular online game, and that says SOMETHING. Also, I tend to use zerg rushes, so I would probably play Zerg. Probably. (There is much speculation on whether or not, like Warcraft being a failed Warhammer Fantasy game, if the same holds true for Starcraft and Warhammer 40k. I lean on the side of 'probably not'; the differences are too notable. The Zerg and Tyranids have some similarties, but that's probably because they're based on the same broad hive mind evil insect aggressor trope, and they have enough differences from there to be very distinct from one another. It's not like how OG Warcraft's orcs were very obviously warhammer orcs with less football hooliganism.) Bejeweled: This is a firm case of a game that I don't play, but I really have to respect its influence on gaming as a whole. Apparently it started as a match three-type game with a simplistic formula that proved wildly popular (perhaps making a point that simpler can be more effective, in game mechanics), with a truly explosive record of downloads; over 500 million, it seems. Thus its fair to say that this game set the precedent for casual games, which have become THE market. Regardless of your feelings on that genre, this one was a real game changer. (Pun intended, absolutely.) ----

C RANK Pong: "By most measures of popular impact, Pong launched the video game industry." This line alone saws it all, I think. It wasn't the first video game, but it was one of the more early ones, and its the one that really made video games and consoles successful, gaining widespread attention from the mainstream audience, as well as getting Atari recognition (for better or for worse, but perhaps that was just a development of being on top, so to speak; maye the console wars at least kept the big three honest). It also started the arcade revolution of games, and this humble game is essentially responsible for the entire state of video games as a concept, as we know it today. Halo: No disrespect to Halo, but it's just a game series I've never quite been able to get into. Those games are very hit and miss for me; games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Gears of War and everything like that are just... hard for me to get into. It takes something specific like Borderlands or the Besthesda Fallout series, or something else, for me to get hooked, and Halo just doesn't do it for me! Nevertheless, I would be QUITE remiss if I simply dismissed it, and there's reasons for it to be inducted into the hall of fame barely three years into the hall of fame making inductees. Firstly, it was Microsoft's big entry into the console wars, and it must be said this was a MASSIVE upset and a completely unprecedented shift in the assumptions of the console wars back then; NO ONE expected microsoft to actually do this, let alone redefine gaming out of Sony and Nintendo's favor like that. At the time, PCs dominated FPS games, and Halo showed that consoles could do it just fine. It must also be said that it has a very intricate and complex system of lore, backstory and material that was quite distinctive for a new setting back in the day, and while I've seen people object to it's gameplay, I suspect that its with the benefit of hindsight; Halo offered an extremely unusual degree of freedom in achieving the goals set out for you. (Cortana also didn't deserve getting her name slapped onto that search assistant that eats up all your RAM.) Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego: Surprisignly enough, based on the article, this game was NOT an adaptation, but the source material of this character. This is where the fancy, mystery lady in the red coat started! Evidently this game was originally an edutainment game with a cops and robbers theme, and inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure from higher up on the list, and one must appreciate the effort that went into it. This one is ranked low, mostly because it didn't seem TOO notable to me. Honestly I'm surprised this is where Carmen Sandiego started. (And that she doesn't get enough credit as an iconic theatrical villain who won't go a step too far, but that's another rant.) -

D LIST

Here we are. The D LIST. The bottom of the sorting pile; the lowest of them all, the... well, the ones that I honestly don't necessarily dislike, but couldn't place higher for reasons of notability, personal interest, or perceived impact on the history of gaming. John Madden Football: Sports games, as a whole, really do NOT do it for me. I don't like real like sports at ALL (with, as a kid, a brief interest in boxing and that was just because they had gloves like Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog) so its hard for me to say that I find the history of this one all that compelling. Even so, there's some interesting elements in how this game was a sequel to a previous failed attempt, with a bold new attempt at a more arcade-style action game with a more dramatic take on the players, who would in turn be rated in different skill sets. The Madden series is STILL going so... it worked out pretty well, I'd say. (FUCKIN EA WAS BEHIND THIS ONE??? wow, EA is older than I thought.) Microsoft Flight Simulator: It's honestly a bit painful sorting this one so low, since I had many happy times as a wee Johnny playing this game back in the old days. I mean the OLD, old days. This was like, the days when Usenet was the preferred way for people to talk online. (Not me, though. I didn't talk to people, then. I was even less social than I am now, which is saying something!) All the same, I suppose that it was important to not crowd too many entries in a specific folder, and statistically, something had to keep getting knocked down, and in the end, I couldn't honestly say I still enjoyed this one enough to place it higher. Still, credit must be given where it is due; this game stands out for being an early foray into simulator gaming, showing a realistic depiction of actual flight. It has apparently been updated and rereleased many times since, which is impressive! Tetris: I like puzzles. So it might be surprising to hear this seminal game ranked so low; firstly, I like different KINDS of puzzles (like weird ones where you have to fling your sense of logic to the moon and back, or make use of gaming mechanics) and honestly this game is kind of stressful for me. You gotta keep an eye on a lot of different things flying around all at once, and constantly move things around, and that kind of attention and quick thinking does NOT come easily to me. All the same, I really have to admire how it was born from it's creator's pleasure in solving mathematical puzzles about sorting shapes into boxes, in a manner strangely remniscient of Satoshi's bug collecting that became Pokemon. Certainly the game's simplicity has proven a universally appealing thing, and may say something about the value of keeping it simple. Microsoft Solitaire: This game apparently became pay-to-get some time ago in recent computer generations, and let me tell, you, it was genuinely depressing to find that out. I remember younger decades, from the 90s and on, when this game was a regular and free feature in Windows computers fir MANY years. You got a computer, this game was on here. I was a kid, and i remember watching my mom play this game and makign the cards go WHOOP WHOPP all over the place and marveling, because I couldn't ever do the same thing. (A related note: I am terrible at this game. Go figure!) Of note, this game was massively widespread, and just EVERYWHERE, and I think everyone who ever played a computer back in those days instantly remembers it in some way. It was just... ubiquitous. Centipede: Oh, ol' Centipede. I don't mean to be mean to you. But between the likes of Pokemon and Super Mario Bros, even the arcade Donkey Kong, someone had to keep dropping down the leaderboard that is this tierlist, and unfortunately, there were other games that felt higher up than you. All the same, you're a very good game, and honestly, I like you more than some other games ranked higher for reasons of relevance to gaming history. Certainly more than anything else in D-listing. The colorful and appealing palette is noteworthy. That trackball controller! Amazing! (More games should use trackballs. They're fun and easy to use.) At the very least, Order of the Stick did a joke with you once, and that's better than anything I can do for you. All the same, you're a cool game.

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