#nate ramblings

[ambrosiadreamer]

.....what

[chronicowboy]

started my leverage rewatch and never has a pilot episode piloted so hard. it genuinely feels like walking into a room of old friends you haven't seen in about a year. they work alone, they always work alone. parker? she's insane. what're you gonna do when she finds out you live with your mom? age of the geek, baby! twenty pounds of crazy in a five pound bag. boys are on their way. what is it that you do? that's what i do. are we gonna talk about how hard we rocked last night? one show only, no encores. it was kinda cool being on the same side for once. i don't like guns. my money is not in my account that makes me cry inside in my special angry place. eleventy million dollars. that's a computer thing i told her to say that. so this time you really are inside my head. i'm just very good at what i do. somebody kiss this man so i don't have to (🤨). bad guys have money. we work on an alternative revenue stream. we provide... leverage

[blueskiesandstarrynights]

They don't talk about it.

But there's no way Nate should know those things. No way the client could have told him, no way he could've figured it out on his own. Not when these things were nothing more than fleeting thoughts from the mark. But Sophie notices him quietly go for the scotch behind the counter and rub at his head in pain with extra vehemence some days despite the latest con having no personal connection to him.

They don't talk about it.

But someone should've recognized Sophie on that con. There's no way she could have that many characters per con. No way none of those diplomats didn't recognize her from any of her previous cons. Not when she didn't change any more than her clothes and accent. But Nate notices her features seem to flicker at the peace and safety of home when she thinks he isn't watching.

They don't talk about it.

But no one could've survived that. And certainly not looking the way he does. There's no way he didn't come out of that fight broken and bloodied to all hell. Not when instead he walks out with a purposeful stride and only a clenched jaw, rolling his shoulders. But when he's cooking and accidentally burns himself, Parker notices the unmarked skin left behind.

They don't talk about it.

But not all vents are human sized. They all saw the size of the vent cover as she exists with a grin. There's no way she could've fit in there. Not when the human body can't bend that way, a way that even the greatest contortionist can't bend. But some days Hardison notices as she seems to stretch and bend before his eyes when she's feeling relaxed and safe enough.

They don't talk about it.

But that's not how computers work. There's no way Hardison could access that kind of thing. Not when he describes how he did it like that. Not when he does it so quickly like that. Not when he says he's taken berries and the next thing they know he's recreated a colonial era journal to perfection. But Eliot swore he shoved a glass of water at him, not more goddamn orange soda.

They don't talk about it, the thing lingering over their heads as they conduct each con, the unacknowledged thing between the five of them that's a little deeper than just a desire to take down the rich and powerful.

They aren't perfect, they all know that- sometimes they're too good with their covers, sometimes they have to shift gears as the con unfolds before them, but somehow things always seem to work out.

But no one asks about it, so-

They don't talk about it.

[heart-freak]

we do Hermitcraft here

I tried to tag everyone, it will not let me..

[empressofthewind]

i really don't think Mello gets enough credit for how good he is at staying calm in a crisis. like when he finds out Takimura is dead:

the rest of the mafia is in shambles, but Mello? smirking. unbothered. already moved onto his next plan.

and when the police force kills all his allies and raids his hideout:

he exhibits mild annoyance at best. he's certainly not happy about it, but he looks kind of pissed for about 2 panels, and then he immediately launches into action, focusing on self-preservation and taking measures to prevent the Death Note from falling into their hands. he's still moving, still calculating, still thinking on his feet. he didn't expect this but he's prepared for it, and when we next see his face in the monitor room:

smirking. totally unbothered yet again.

compare this to how Near reacts when the SPK raids his base:

angry. immediately breaks something. he does have a plan, and he jumps into action fairly soon after this, but he stays angry even while he's making preparations, and starts insulting the people who are attacking him.

to contrast this specifically against the scene of Mello's base being raided; both are about to lose access to their main hideout, both are at a genuine risk of being killed, and both have backup plans for their respective predicaments, yet the notoriously cool, calm and collected guy reacts more emotionally than the emotional guy.

[purplepenguintime]

Adding one more to the list of animated movies I thought were never going to see the light of day that said fuck you disney:

[kaiwuzherenz]

okay wait. pause

WHAT!

kkkkkkkkkkk... i know everything that catra has done during S1-4 but to still blame her after S5

okay people...im so not going to ramble about this

i am

anyway! if you cant give catra just the benfit of the doubt i mean like. She tried to change.. Glimmer help her see that she wanted to change for the better. and what did catra do? she saved glimmer from horde prime

then we see that because catra did this, horde prime was very angry....

and then catra got chipped.......... adora offers to take her home. S1-4 Catra would have said no at any cost, but S5 catra is changing for the better

because of this again, horde prime gets angry again and then snap..just killed catra on the spot

adora then jumps down to save catra (ngl watching this, i throught adora basiclly just killed herself but u know she lived)

now we have catra back, the one how wants to change (FOR THE BETTER i must add) Entrapta helps to get the chip out of catras neck, while the ship is going through a belt in space.... Catra trys to say no for this help, knowing that she had hurt entrapta and sent her to beast island.. Entrapta doesnt even care and helps catra, very sorry when she hits one of catras nerves in her neck..

s1-4 catra would have prob attacked entrapta, but s5 catra qucikly calms downs so entrapta could contune

the chip gets removed, and catra sees that entrapta doesnt hate her...and before entrapta could leave, catra stops her

heres the thing i must point out too. S1-4 catra could say sorry or smth like that, but s5 catra says sorry and means it... PART 2 LATER CUZ I NEED A BREAK NGL!!!!!!!!!

[falling-star-cygnus]

you gotta love Nate Adams

man gets ragged on relentlessly by both his friends and yokai for being 'average' and yet still treats all of them with unending amounts of gentle kindness -> unless you're Whisper or Jibanyan but you could also argue that those two are closer to him than the others

he even takes the time to make sure the yokai he 'fights' are okay afterwards, this boy was raised RIGHT

[gh0stbeeee]

Random Death Note headcanons

L has a bit of an overbite, he had braces as a teenager but he never wore his retainers so it came back a little.

Misa was a little ragamuffin as a kid, she loved going outside and being messy with her hair unbrushed, but she realized she couldn't put her hair in twin tails if it was knotty so she improved her hygiene as she grew up.

Light has always wanted to grow his hair to his shoulders and part it in the middle because he thought it looked really elegant, but he never did because he was worried people would think he wasn't respectable.

Also, Light was a bit chubby when he was young. He developed an eating disorder as he grew up because of how family and other adults would comment on his body. Keep in mind this was healthy baby fat, and he is now perpetually a little underweight.

L has a ridiculous metabolism, so despite his diet he is naturally skinny and light weight. In contrast to Light, he wishes he could gain a little weight.

Misa knows Light doesn't love her. She stays with him because he became a rock in her life despite his coldness and manipulative nature, and he keeps her grounded. She is scared of independence, due to ptsd. Light isn't aware of this exact reason, but neither does he seek to know her. His optimism and confidence eases her anxiety, just as Misa's blind worship encourages him. Toxic af for eachother.

Light is on the aroace spectrum, but he never sought to experiment to find out what exactly he is. He is completely neutral to both genders, with a preference for intelligence. (Sapio.) He never learned the proper terminology for sexuality beyond hetero and homo.

L is completely ambiguous in terms of sexuality. He has attractions, but they disappear quickly and he never acts on them. He suspects he is aroace spec, but he never confirms it.

Lawlight was violently timid. Their passion for eachother was insane, but neither knew what to do with it. One minute they were kissing chastely, the next they were beating the shit out of eachother. They had sex a couple times, but they were more focused on the intimacy and mind games than the pleasure.

Misa was comphet and her obsession with Light stopped her from exploring herself (and Rem her monster girlfriend that loved her more than her life.)

Near found the HQ security footage years after the Kira case ended and to say it made his opinions of L and Light more complicated is an understatement. (I want to write this fic.) He saw L's true morality, and the endeared relationship between L and Kira. He saw innocent Light, and thought that he wasn't so bad.

[applestorms]

i love near so goddamn much. i finally read the c-kira and a-kira post-canon one shots all the way through last night and AAAAAAAAA my heart. nate river 🫵🫵🫵

c-kira in particular hits me hard bc you can really see that he's still reeling from the events of the main story. it’s a very specific era of near that’s so horribly awkward and insecure about his place in the world, about his role as L, and has so very few people left behind to support him-- really just lidner, rester, and gevanni. so much of that story is about near struggling to figure out who he is and who he wants to be in the wake of Everything, scrambling around in the shadows of all these false gods and blown up egos, trying to grow up and be a Person in the smoking remains of all these people who killed themselves with their own hubris. i mean, just look at this page:

LOOK AT THIS. near is almost shockingly expressive in this story, his grief and regret is fucking Palpable in a way that you very rarely see with a guy like him. it really gets to me that this is the story where near actually opens up about his mixed feelings surrounding the original L, about the interview he held where he picked near & mello out to be his two successors, and all while hiding himself within these massive card towers that you only see to be these giant L's at the end-- a kid barely out of his teens already getting dwarfed by the enormity of the history he is expected to continue and represent. the winner of the game who's only prize is the legacy he now holds on his shoulders, the grief he is cursed with as the only one left behind. this kid barely has anyone now, never even got the chance to truly, fully know what he lost in the first place, these all-powerful figures that have dictated every inch of his life from the moment he stepped foot in that damn house.

and i mean, goodness. what did we expect? i can talk all i want about the cinematic parallels of light & L as opposites, but look at near & mello in literally every piece of official art-- near truly loses his other half when mello dies, and you can just Feel the discomfort, the deep-seated, underlying imbalance in his soul through this shit.

a-kira near, on the other hand, has had the time to grow a bit more at ease with himself, but he still gets to me in a slightly different way. i cannot emphasize enough how utterly fucking perfect the decision to make his hair longer is-- for so simple of a detail, it really sums up so much about his character. this version of an older near feels like a guy who's been stuck outside of time for ages, barely even noticing the constant shifts of the outer world as he holes himself up in his room, hardly aware of the way that his own body stretches and grows and changes with each passing day. doing his job, all just for a bit of entertainment. there is still that distinctly privileged, childish part of him that hides in his forts of toys and makes whatever demands he pleases, but it's more smoothed over, more exhausted, more Done.

he's packed away the grief by this point. dealt with it properly? not necessarily. but the wound isn't as raw now so he can set it aside to be ignored or looked over more easily, focus on the things that he wants to. blow up his toys when they don't meet his standards.

i strikes me as important that near's view on the new kira's shifts so much over the course of even just these two little stories. in the c-kira story, near is so Quick to shit on the new guy as fast as possible, literally snarking him into submission with the fear of his presence alone until he writes his own name down. we never see this "cheap" kira, this pathetic fake that couldn't possibly stand up to the original. (projecting a little there, nate?) he's barely more than a panel or two of hands, and then he disappears from the story forever.

in a-kira though, you get something a little more desperate, a little more hungry-- near really fucking wants to meet this new guy, purely for the sake of talking to him, and is a lot quicker to respect him & the depth of how well he's thought through this plan. at first it seems like he's intrigued by the idea of finally finding yet another equal, someone to match his freak after years of standing on his own, and knowing DN you're inclined to trust that the mind games will eventually happen. but, in the end...

he loses. and doesn't he seem so happy about it?

minoru really is the perfect match for near in a way-- a new, passive kira, uninterested in the bullshittery of killing and shinigami and evil murder diaries, to reflect and match the tired, new L who was done with his job before he even started doing it. RIP minoru dying due to shinigami bullshit, but i'm genuinely happy that this is the ending near gets, the chance to finally lose at something without having to pay the price of human lives for it. winning has almost never been a truly positive thing for near-- his winning wammy's house only gave him the many pressures & stresses of a job as L, his winning against light only gave him a dead mello and a notebook to quietly burn, hell, all of this shit happening at all is what made mello resent him so much in the first place.

but now he can lose. and i think he's all the better for it.

near is immature, yes, he bossy and snarky and blows up his toys without giving a fuck what anyone else has to say-- but he doesn't get ahead of himself in the way that light and L and the others did, a trait which ultimately lets him win but also leaves him behind to shoulder the grief of a generation. but now he can lose, he can let the fate of the world fall of his shoulders for just a moment, and everything is still going to be okay. it's good to see him getting older. it's good to see that you can still move on and grow, even when it seems like the legacies of the past are locking you away in a cage. i'm glad these manga exist, and i'm glad near can still make it out alive.

[undergoing-mitosis]

i am going to ramble about my death note accent and language headcanons (wammy's boys + light) okay thanks

L is very British. This fits surprisingly easily with Alessandro Juliani's incredible dub performance, but just lose the Canadian(?)ness. He still has that slight drawl and softly pronounces every consonant, so it's less bo'o'wa'a bri'ish and more autistic every consonant is pronounced British. Every language he speaks is practically perfect accent wise, he tends to be a bit of a chameleon. You can only tell that he's not native Japanese when he speaks it by a few lilts on certain sounds which aren't quite right, but even then it's only noticeable if you're looking for it. Knows an ungodly amount of languages fluently: he had a period of hyperfixating on learning a bunch between cases, before he got bored and moved onto advanced Go strategy.

Light is Japanese. Mamoru Miyano's voice is canon. That is all I have to say on the matter. He also knows a few other languages from his studies, including English, but knows very little about using these languages in practice, making his speech sound very formal and textbook-y.

Mello is from somewhere in east Europe, but given he's lived at Wammy's since he was around 5-ish he had completely lost his accent. So his base accent is British like the rest of them. Whatever his native language may be, he can understand it but not speak it. Mello tended to err on the side of more rough British, dropping consonants no matter how much Roger tried to make him speak properly. He never devolved into full roadman though. When he ran away to the US, he taught himself how to speak with an American accent. (this idea is directly from Crush on ao3 haha) Over the years of the time skip he perfected his accent, now it is indistinguishable from a native LA resident. However, he is still having to actively put this accent on. Post-Mafia, Mello doesn't have to put up a front of being purely American any more: he still does it out of habit, especially in public, but in private his voice will become an odd mix of American, British and a few muscle memory sounds that come from his mother tongue, creating a unique sound. When Mello loses his composure (mainly, when he gets pissed at Matt) he devolves into full British expletives. He is known he mutter "bloody hell" under his breath frequently. He can also speak Japanese fluently, along with French and bits and pieces of a few other European languages.

Matt is Canadian. I don't know, I just think a Canadian accent suits him. Picked up a few British turn of phrases at Wammy's, but given that he moved there later than Mello he kept his accent. The only Japanese he knows is osmosised from anime. He also picked up wingdings from that period of time when every email he sent would be in it for funsies.

Near is also British. Very much has that autism British accent, without the added drawl in L's, making him sometimes sound quite posh even though he isn't. Nate River is the most British name I have ever seen I'm sorry I don't make the rules. He learnt Japanese for the Kira case, and can speak it pretty fluently and without a strong accent, but as a rule of thumb he has no interest in learning languages: he'd rather spend his time making paper cities or studying quantum physics. An exception to this is code languages: he knows morse code fluently.

[ambrosiadreamer]

i am going to be real here . i would've fallen hook, line and sinker for the other mother's tricks. the food alone would've done me in

[chronicowboy]

underrated leverage moment is in the studio job when hardison's explaining his auto tuning device to parker and eliot and nate butts in to ask who he just called baby

[blueskiesandstarrynights]

Most people have an angel and a devil on their shoulder. Nathan Ford has a little icarus glaring at him from the corner

[heart-freak]

I WANNA DRAW SPOOKY STRESS!! SHES SO CUTE!!

[empressofthewind]

I find it honestly a little ironic how Near is always considered the "winner" in the Death Note fandom, because on paper it's true, but I feel like Near himself would resent that idea. Between L, Light, Mello and Near, Near is the only one who never once regards his prospective victory as a victory for himself alone. His entire speech in the warehouse is about how his original plan would have killed him, but it was the contributions of the people around him who saved his life and resolved the case. He recognises that he's only one piece in a bigger puzzle, yet he's always the one who gets credited, because he's the only one who lived.