#not that I think they’re necessarily connected (pretty sure they only met once before dead apple) but in the way

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

Obsessed with Fyodor’s as yet unknown backstory today. And not just in the ‘I need to know’ way but… idk there’s something about the way he seems to wholeheartedly believe that what he is doing will result in the removal of sin. Thinking about how he doesn’t have a god complex but is instead a follower of what he believes to be god’s will. Thinking about how he places himself as above others anyways by taking their free will from them. I think about how his ability didn’t attack him and instead seems to be working with him. The gem is in his hand, the hands he kills with, the righteous hand? I think about that gakuen profile that I can’t find anymore but I know I saw where his likes are generally good and selfless things like peace, and about how, if this is true, he’s been an extreme idealist all along. I think about how senseless violence, the people who can’t stop killing each other, seem to disgust him. That he wants to cleanse it. That he repeatedly uses the very thing he wants to cleanse as a weapon regardless. I think about him and Dazai being foils and wonder if his plan to remove the sin of ability users includes his own self-destruction. I wonder where his self-assurance in the necessity of his cruelty and the perfection of God’s intentions comes from. I wonder how old he actually is.

As funny as the idea is to me that he’s just like that… is it kind of weird that I hope whatever his deal is ends up being a gut-punch?

[lasquadrasfuckhouse]

since i've been talking a lot about my hcs for la squadra's backgrounds i figured i would drop what i've thought of so far for risotto 👀

as a heads up there will be talk of ❗catholic trauma, familial death, and grief❗

prefacing this: so i saw an idea somewhere once that risotto and mariah are related b/c their stands both deal w/ magnetism and they both have white hair and then i made a mental exercise to play around with the idea of how that would actually Work but then the idea stuck lol

so they're half siblings and mariah is like, 5 or 6 years older? they have the same dad. he and mariah's mom separated on good terms and he eventually moved to sicily for work but went back n forth a lot to still be active in mariah's life

which is where he met risotto's mama. risotto was born and raised in siracusa but the family went to cairo a lot and likewise mariah and her mama would come visit too

so risotto's family life may have been unconventional (especially considering it was the 70s in a catholic country and his parents weren't married, nero is his mama's last name) but was very happy. he had good and loving parents, he and his sister loved each other a lot, their moms got along really well and mariah's mama was very nice to risotto too and vice versa, it was all pretty chill!!!!

maybe a few months (or a few years) later some wreckage washed ashore that could be identified as part of their vessel, but that's the most closure risotto had. he knows in his heart that they're dead because they were good parents, they would never have abandoned him and mariah. he doesn't blame the sea though and he's not afraid of it, it's just nature, and nature happens sometimes.

but when risotto was about 8 or 9, his parents were lost at sea. not sure if they were on a ferry and there was a freak storm and there were others that were lost too or they just liked to sail or what, but their boat pretty much vanished and they were never found.

so as presumably, probably, an orphan, he was taken in by his maternal grandparents in the sicilian countryside and lost contact with mariah and her mama. his grandparents had also taken in his older cousin prior to that too so it was the two of them being raised in the middle of bumfuck nowhere by their grandparents.

and their grandparents were, hm. Not Great. they were pretty hardcore catholics who ran a strict house, made ris and his cousin go to church whether they liked it or not, tried to instill them both with Catholic Guilt™️, were very conservative, kinda broadly fucked up and controlling etc. it was just, not an emotionally healthy environment.

risotto's mama probably moved away for a reason 😬 they were definitely aghast that their daughter had a child out of wedlock and it wouldn't surprise me if they had this notion of having to '''save''' risotto from '''sin'''. which probably made him feel like something was wrong with him, which he thankfully knew wasn't true because his early childhood was happy and healthy enough to give him that perspective, but it hurt nonetheless.

he and his cousin were each other's confidants and partners in crime, they loved each other so damn much and were always looking out for each other. often it was big cousin looking out for baby ris cause he was like ~5 years older but risotto wanted to be there for him too.

they got up to a lot of trouble as kids in small towns in the middle of nowhere do and it was stupid as hell but fun and freeing. authoritarian houses make good sneaks and good liars and the two of them definitely lived up to that. risotto also couldn't help but feel a sense of pride and love when he did what he pleased and tried his best to live freely because he felt like it brought him closer to his parents in spirit.

as soon as big cousin graduated the two of them hit the road and moved to palermo, against their grandparents' wishes. they shared a shitty cheap apartment that felt like a damn mansion to them cause they could do whatever they wanted and just live their lives.

they lived there for about a year before risotto's cousin was killed and he felt like the fucking world crumbled from beneath him. he viewed it very differently from his parents' deaths: one was nature, one was some asshole who couldn't be considerate to the people around him and now risotto's best friend is dead.

so he was back with his grandparents but without his cousin and he was pretty fucking miserable, but he refused to just be sad for himself, he was sad for his cousin first and foremost and couldn't stop thinking about him. and he was angry. big cousin had his whole life ahead of him that was cut short, he was a whole person with dreams who loved and was loved, and this guy only gets four years in prison and then could just go back to his life like nothing had happened when his cousin wasn't alive anymore? no. it wasn't right. risotto refused to let that go unresolved.

and that thought is what kept him going but he still ran away a lot, didn't bother with school unless he thought it could help him, etc. he became sort of numb to his grandparents and the irony of plotting revenge in his head while he was made to sit in church wasn't lost on him.

he probably dropped out and left his grandparents' place by the time he was 17 and he hasn't spoken with them since, went back to palermo, and went from there with his plotting. that's how he got involved with passione.

he got vengeance for his cousin at 18, and it was at least something, but yeah, he realized it would never be enough and the pain stayed. not that he regretted it in the slightest tho, he can still sleep a little easier and feels like he can do.... something aside from just being consumed by it.

but then he was indebted to passione for their help with getting risotto to the guy, risotto took it in stride cause again, he didn't regret it, and the rest is history.

not to say he's necessarily happy or satisfied being in passione tho, but he accepts it and works with it. he doesn't really think about what he'd like to do cause this is what he just.... does.

he tries to visit his cousin's grave in palermo every year for his birthday (and maybe throws some flowers into the ocean for his parents too, they left from the opposite coast but he figures the water will carry his intentions where they need to go). he would be perfectly happy to never see or hear from his grandparents again. once as an adult (and with gang connections) he realized he could try to track down his sister again, but decided against it. not only because he's not sure if she would accept him for who he became (he can't stand the thought of her rejecting or being afraid of him), but if he put her in harm's way, he would never forgive himself.

he doesn't know mariah is also a stand user, nor her involvement with dio or who the fuck dio even is or basically the whole mess of stardust crusaders. but she IS alive, she got very injured but is alive. maybe once giorno becomes boss, gets in touch w/ his joestar family and the speedwagon foundation etc all the little strings start coming together and risotto and mariah can find each other again. and she very much does love her big baby brother and wouldn't even dream of rejecting him. so they can be brother and sister again and it's really lovely and healing :')

[giveemhales]

Moodboards for Sterek AUs: 10/?

For @averystereksummer Day 6

AU where Stiles has a fear of storms

For the prompt: “How’s the weather?”

With a ficlet! Content warning for anxiety and panic attacks.

Stiles was afraid of storms.

Maybe that’s putting it wrong, because there’s a lot of things Stiles was afraid of that he could deal with. Really, he had a fear of storms, “astraphobia.” He hated it.

He wished he could say there was a reason. That his mother died on a stormy night or that the thunder reminds him of gun shots.

But there was no rhyme or reason. It was nothing more than a phobia, an anxiety disorder, an evolutionary flaw.

He’s always been good at hiding it, though. When he was younger, he hid it because he was made fun enough as is, he didn’t want to give any other material for his bullies to work with. Not even Scott ever figured it out. He could usually handle rain, but when there was thunder, he’d always make an excuses to go home, whether he was at school or on a sleepover. He’d usually say he was sick, and his mother was understanding enough that she’d be willing to take him home. She would build them a blanket fort and put on way too loud cartoons to help drown out the noise. Sometimes she would hold him closely, and remind him the thunder couldn’t hurt him, and that she would always protect him.

Then his mother died, and his fear got worse. It wasn’t just that storms were harder to handle without his mother, it was also the way his mental health had deteriorated after her death. His anxiety was significantly worse, and things that once scared him would now trigger full blown panic attacks.

His father got him a therapist to help him, but the therapist was mostly focused on his grief and how to handle his panic attacks. He had coping mechanisms now, but he still tried to avoid being out when there was a storm at all cost. Avoidance wasn’t necessarily healthy, but it was what worked for him. He continued to claim illness, and would curl up under the covers, blasting music through his earbuds.

He had even managed to hide this fear from the pack, which he’d say was pretty impressive considering most of the members could quite literally smell fear.

He religiously checked the weather every day, using multiple sources for the daily and weekly forecasts. If there was a forecast for a thunderstorm at any point, he’d make up plans (which was difficult when dealing with people who can hear when you’re lying, but he had perfected the art of half truths, always using something like “having homework” or “wanting to see his dad,” which were all technically true). So far, he’d only been outside in a thunder storm with the pack once, and they were fighting wendigos so they didn’t really question his scent of fear or him running off to his Jeep as soon as the creatures were declared dead. That was one of the few times in his life he had been unable to avoid being outside during a thunderstorm, and the resulting panic attack had been so bad he hadn’t been able to go to the school the next day (which was easy enough to get away with, since the rain had also resulted in a cold).

He’s not really sure why he spends so much time and energy hiding this fear like it’s a dirty secret. Maybe part of it was that he knew he couldn’t avoid thunderstorms, but he could try to avoid being around people during thunderstorms. It gave him something to focus on, a feeling of control.

Honestly though, he knew it was mostly his own insecurities. He was at a good place with the pack, and he doesn’t really think any of them would be malicious if they were to find out. But he knew that he was just human, that he was weaker than the rest of them, and he strived everyday to prove he could keep up. He couldn’t show any weaknesses because he couldn’t let them know he was weak.

So he had basically perfected the art of keeping his phobia hidden away from the rest of the world.

But one of the worst things about storms was that you don’t always know when they’re coming. And that’s what led to his current predicament.

He was in the car with Derek after they had met with a pack outside of town. The pack was new to the area and hoping to make an alliance. With Derek the alpha and Stiles the emissary, it was customary for the two of them to make negotiations.

The meeting had been fine. A simple agreement had been made and then Derek and Stiles made the hour long drive back to Beacon Hills, specifically to Derek’s loft where Stiles’ Jeep was waiting.

Derek had insisted that they drive together, and had refused to go in Stiles’ “death trap” (more like because he was a dick), so Stiles was now seated in the passenger side of the camaro. And that was fine, Stiles honestly enjoyed spending time with Derek. But it was about half an hour outside of Beacon Hills that he noticed the grey clouds.

Stiles had checked multiple weather sources that morning like he always did, and none of them had mentioned a chance of storms. A couple had mentioned a chance of rain that night, but it was still afternoon. There was no reason to expect a risk of storms.

But Stiles had obsessively studied storms enough to know what storm clouds looked like. And right now there were definitely storm clouds in the direction of Beacon Hills.

Fuck.

“How’s the weather? I mean, do you know? I feel like with your special werewolf senses you should be able to tell. You know, smell when a storm is coming. That would actually be pretty cool, it would make you a great meteorologist. Although meteorologists aren’t as bad as people make them seem. They actually have a 90% accuracy five days in advance. And on the actual day are usually within 2.5 degrees in their predictions. That’s pretty impressive. But obviously they don’t always get it right. Clearly, since they hadn’t said there would be rain today and-“

“Stiles!” Derek barked, cutting him off. “No, I can’t “sense” the weather. But from those clouds over there I’d say it’s probably going to rain.”

Stiles nodded. “Yeah. Looks like it. That’s cool. Cool cool cool cool cool.”

Derek side-eyed him, but at this point he was used to Derek’s seemingly constant annoyance with him.

His leg began bouncing, as it usually did when he was nervous. Derek was clearly annoyed, but fortunately didn’t say anything.

A couple minutes later, the drizzle began, and Derek turned on the windshield wiper. Stiles looked down at his phone which had the directions. Still 20 minutes to go. He desperately hoped that they would get back before any thunder started, but it seemed unlikely.

Stiles leaned over and began fiddling with the radio. He eventually found a station playing heavy metal, and turned it up as loud as it would go, hoping it would be enough should there be any thunder.

Derek cursed and immediately shut off the radio. “What the fuck is your problem, did you forget about the werewolf hearing?” He grumbled, pawing at his ears with one hand still on the wheel.

“Just wanted some music, you’re so quiet, you know. Thought we could liven things up.”

Derek just growled in reply, which was pretty par for the course for him, so Stiles didn’t bother saying anything else.

Pretty soon, the rain started getting heavier, pouring down loudly on the windshield. Derek increased the speed of the windshield wiper, but seemed unbothered.

Stiles opened his mouth before closing it again. He honestly wanted to just explain to Derek why he was being so weird. Derek wasn’t the type to judge, and would probably even do what he could to be accommodating.

But at the same time, he couldn’t think of worse person to find out about his fear. Besides the fact that Derek was one of the strongest, bravest people he had ever met, Stiles had also been pining after him for years. He knew Derek had seen him as the hyperactive, token human, and even if Stiles now had a spark and Derek had accepted him as the pack’s emissary, Stiles didn’t want to risk revealing anything that might ruin their progress. He knew Derek would never feel the same about him as he did, and he was okay with that, but he was absolutely not okay with Derek ever viewing him as lesser. He wouldn’t, couldn’t be seen as weak.

So Stiles kept his mouth shut, and tried to just focus on anything other than the impending storm.

That worked out until the thunder came.

The first roll of thunder hit when they were about 10 minutes from the loft, and Stiles’ composure began to crumble.

He felt his heart beat quicken, his palms sweat, his breath become raggedy and stomach begin to cramp. These were standard symptoms for his anxiety, but not something he ever truly got used to.

He tried to focus on his breathing, but was interrupted by Derek.

“What’s wrong? Your heart is pounding and your breathing sounds weird,” Derek said, the concern clear in his voice. Stiles supposed that after all the terrifying shit he had been through, it would make sense that Derek wouldn’t make the connection between his fear and the thunder.

Stiles clenched his fists and closed his eyes, trying to block everything out. “Nothing. I’m fine, dude,” he ground out.

He could practically hear Derek rolling his eyes, but for once he ignored the “dude” comment. “You’re clearly not fine, I can smell the anxiety rolling off you. If you’re in danger or if something’s wrong, I need to know.”

“I said I’m fine. Just drop it,” Stiles knew Derek would be able to hear the lie, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He was focusing too much energy on trying to calm down to come up with a plausible lie for why he was acting the way he was.

“Please, Stiles, I just want to help you,” Derek’s voice was softer than Stiles had ever heard, and he hated the way it made his eyes tear up. He turned and rested his forehead on the window, trying to focus on the cool feeling.

Stiles was surprised Derek didn’t pry further, but instead grabbed his hand.

Stiles thought about the fact that his palms were sweaty and probably pretty gross, but he couldn’t bring himself to pull away. It wasn’t even because he had been dreaming of holding Derek’s hand for years. It was because it helped ground him.

He tried to focus on touch so he could block out the flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder. He tried to think about the warmth of Derek’s hand, and his mother’s voice when she reminded him the storms couldn’t hurt him. He counted his breaths, and reminded himself they were only a few minutes away. And as soon as they were back, he could get in his Jeep, blast his music, and try to ignore the outside world.

They arrived to the loft, and Stiles vaulted out of the Camaro before it was even in park (although a small part of him was reluctant to let go of Derek’s hand).

He ran as fast as he could to the Jeep to try to avoid the worst of the storm. Unfortunately, he didn’t get the chance to make it to the Jeep before he was being grabbed by Derek (honestly, fuck werewolf speed, that’s just not fair).

“Stiles, I need you to tell me what’s wrong. I can’t just let you leave if you’re in danger!”

One of the symptoms of anxiety that is less talked about is that heightened anxiety makes a person prone to emotional outbreaks. Maybe that’s why he lost it at that moment. Or maybe it had been building up for years, the anger and shame and fear finally boiling over. Or maybe he just wanted somebody to know, because he was so tired of being alone.

Whatever the reason was, Stiles finally let it all out.

“Oh my god, I’m not in danger. Nothing is going to happen to me and I logically know that but I can’t help it. I’m terrified of storms. Is that what you wanted me to say?” Stiles was yelling, even though he was sure Derek could hear him perfectly well, but he couldn’t stop. “I’m terrified of how loud the thunder is, how I can barely hear myself think over the noise. I’m terrified of lightning even though the likelihood of being struck is one in a million. I’m terrified that I can’t always prepare for storms and that I have no way to control the weather. And I know it’s a fucking stupid fear. And that’s why I’ve tried so hard to hide it. But I feel like I can’t breathe. And you probably don’t know what that’s like, you probably don’t have stupid fears and constant anxiety because you’re the bravest person I know. But you know now so please just drop it.”

Stiles was panting by the end of his rant. He wanted to turn around, to go to his car, just like he said he wanted, but the masochist in him needed to see how Derek was going to react.

“Do you really think I’ll judge you for that? You think I don’t feel afraid? I’m scared every day. I’m afraid I’m going to fail as an alpha. I’m afraid I’m going to lose everything again. Hell, I’m afraid every second I’m around you.”

“What? Why would you be afraid around me?” Stiles asked incredulously, fairly certain Derek was just making it up to make him feel better.

“Because I’m afraid I’m finally going to break and kiss you.”

Stiles isn’t sure what Derek saw in Stiles’ slack-jawed expression, but evidently it was an invitation, because the next thing Stiles knew, there were lips on his own.

Derek’s were wet from the rain, but still warm. The kiss was soft and tender, and everything Stiles had ever wanted.

Unfortunately, it was still storming, and Stiles jumped back just a moment later when there was a roar of thunder and crack of lightning.

Derek looked stricken, clearly drawing the wrong conclusion.

Stiles was quick to correct him. “As amazing as that kiss was, I can’t- I need to be alone right now.”

Derek looked relieved, and reached out to Stiles. “Do you- You’re welcome in the loft if you’d prefer.”

Stiles usually preferred to be alone during storms so no one could see his vulnerability, but the Jeep was also usually his last resort. The loft would be much quieter, so he nodded and took Derek’s hand.

Up in the loft, Derek grabbed Stiles a towel to dry himself since he was dripping everywhere. After he dried off, he went ahead and wrapped himself in a blanket and curled up on the couch. “Do you mind if I turn on the TV? Noise helps.” He was still shaking, but felt himself calming down. Hopefully if he put on the TV, he could try to forget about the storm.

Derek nodded and then paused. “I can leave if you’d like but if it would help... Would you mind if I just held you?”

After years of keeping his fears private, Stiles’ instinct was to ask him to leave. But he remembered how he would feel when his mom would hold him during storms. He remembered how his fears had quietened when Derek had kissed him. He remembered all the reasons he fell in love with Derek, and how safe he made him feel.

He nodded.

[incorrectspnforfun]

^^ nah, dw, it didn't ruin the show for me. thanks for your opinion. i just wanted to build on what you said, sorry it's long XD you're right that they did mention other characters, and there was the montage, and who knows, maybe the lack of other characters in 15x20 is just because of covid. the thing for me is that sam living this "normal life" and never mentioning hunting, and dean dying young on a hunt, those are the endings they would have gotten had they stayed on their respective paths 1/

at the beginning of 1x1, so it feels like doing all those things since then and changing their destiny (at least i think they did that? feel free to correct me if i'm wrong) didn't really matter. plus i always thought that dean’s line of "going down swinging, guns blazing" was just something to hide his fear of doing exactly that. dean was planning to retire as a hunter, he had managed to completely distance himself from being "daddy's little soldier", but in the end he still died his dad's case? he got out and then was pulled back in just to die, it's... sad. also, you're absolutely right that the core of the story is about the brothers' relationship. but i think this relationship evolved with time. in the beginning it was just the two of them, and it was "toxic codependency" (i think that's how other characters said it?), but as they grew up and met other people they... didn't exactly grow apart, but they took some distance, at least emotionally speaking, and their relationship became way healthier because of that. maybe i'm just imagining things, but this final episode, with a road trip case a la season 1 and barely mentioning other characters, felt like going back to the beginning (...which was probably the whole point ^^") and almost erasing the fact that they became different people since then. idk if that makes sense? also, the actors were always very vocal about mental health issues, but this final episode showed us traumatized characters ending up either dead or living unhappy, and only being happy once they’re dead. i *do not* like this subtext. i know it's definitely not their fault, they said they didn't like the ending way before we knew what the ending was, but *someone* decided this was a good way to end a story that was, at its core, all about hope. sorry, it was even longer than i planned ^^"

Alright. I just cut all of them together so it was more or less consecutive lol. Let’s try to break all this down! (And no worries about the long response! I’m happy to talk about it, and I’m so glad you’re sharing your thoughts! I really appreciate you taking the time to type all of that out! <3) 

For starters, I’m really glad it didn’t ruin the show for you. I’ve heard a lot of fans saying that it’s their ex-favorite show now and they can never watch it again because they didn’t like the finale, and that makes me really sad, so I’m glad to see someone who still appreciates the show even if the finale wasn’t their fave. :)  

In terms of lack of characters because of COVID, I think that’s definitely true. I know the cast and crew had been saying that they wanted more guest stars in the last two episodes, but they had to take some of them out because of COVID concerns. Overall though, they did say that it didn’t change the core story they wanted to tell too much, so I think the Sam and Dean-centric ending would’ve still been like that, but maybe with a few more character appearances (like Shoshannah Stern, for example. I really believe that the reason Sam’s wife was blurred out was because they couldn’t get Shoshannah Stern back for some reason, but they wanted us to believe it was Eileen). 

When it comes to the boys’ destiny, to me--and, in my opinion, this is exactly what the show was trying to show us--their destiny was always supposed to be one brother kills the other. It was the destiny meant for them at the end of Season 5, and it was the destiny and final ending that Chuck had written for them at the end of Season 15. But, time and time again, the brothers’ love for each other and love for the world kept pushing against that destiny. In the end, by defeating Chuck, and by helping each other up and not backing down, they did write their own destiny and fight against it and, ultimately, give themselves free will. 

Now, in thinking about Dean’s death and the brothers’ codependency (yes, you were right, that’s what the angels and such called it), I see your point about Dean’s words being a mask for his fear, and while I agree that he often did use them in that way, in the end, I think his fear was less about dying on a hunt and more about dying alone, but also about making sure that he isn’t taking Sam down with him. His death scene in 15x20 says that loud and clear. Sam tries to leave to get him help, but all Dean wants is for Sam to stay with him, and then his last request is for Sam to come closer so that he can make sure his little brother is okay. That said, though, I do agree with you that they’ve taken some emotional distance from each other and had a healthier relationship because of it--which is why, despite Dean dying and Sam surviving, Sam let him go and didn’t try to bring him back, because they had achieved that emotional distance. 

All of that in mind, I, personally, feel like the only way this story could end was with Dean dying and Sam living to old age, eventually joining his brother in heaven--so basically, exactly what we got. 

I hear a lot of people saying that Dean deserved to live a normal life and live to old age--he had that job application on his desk, he had a dog, etc.--but while I agree that he deserved that happy life, I feel like it wouldn’t have been happy for him. Dean’s tried the normal life thing before, several times, and it’s never worked for him. He can’t stay away from hunting for too long, because he’ll always be looking over his shoulder, and/or he’ll always be worried about his brother. If Sam would have died, he also never would’ve forgiven himself or gotten over it and wouldn’t have been able to live a normal life. In general, as much as I would love for Dean to live a normal life and have a chance at happiness, it’s never fit his character. Even with the growth he’s experienced in the last several years, the way he’s grown up and the things he’s been through just won’t let him experience an apple pie life. 

Sam, on the other hand, has always had a connection to a normal lifestyle and has always had more of an ability to have that. If you ask me, a lot of that is because of Dean--since Dean grew up so fast, Sam never had to, so he had a chance to go through normal childhood experiences and learn how to live a life outside of hunting. As such, his attempts at a normal life usually were pretty successful, and it follows that any attempts he makes in the future could be successful too. The big thing that stops all of that, though, is Dean. While Sam, in the last several years, has said that he’s okay with his hunting lifestyle and happy doing what he’s doing, it’s less about the actual hunting and more about being with his brother. Sam, in general, is miserable in the hunting lifestyle. It’s not what ultimately makes him happy, but being with his brother does. Because of that, he accepts the lifestyle for everything that comes with it because it means bonding with Dean and seeing him happy. As such, he can’t live a normal life if Dean’s around, because he knows it’s not what Dean wants, deep down, and it would mess with the dynamic they’ve built through all these years of hunting. So, the only way Sam can live a normal life is if Dean dies (kind of like in Season 8. When he thought his brother was dead, he actually did live a normal life for a while, and he probably would’ve continued to do that for the rest of his life if Amelia’s husband hadn’t come back and if Dean hadn’t come back). 

Now, with all of that said, you’re right in that this does connect directly to how the brothers likely would’ve ended up in Season 1. However, what’s different is the strong bond that Sam and Dean have now developed over the years. Yes, if Dean hadn’t gotten Sam at Stanford way back in Season 1, Sam (probably) would’ve lived a white picket fence life, and Dean would’ve died on a hunt. The difference, though, is that both of those things would’ve happened without either brother being aware of what the other was up to and, frankly, probably not necessarily caring as much (in Sam’s case anyways). 

With the Season 15 ending, though, Sam lived his white picket fence life, but his entire life was built in tribute to his brother. He named his son Dean, he kept the Impala, he had pictures of the two of them all around his house, and his son even had an anti-possession tattoo. While Sam was able to live a normal life, he never forgot about his brother, and Dean was--just like he said in his death scene--always in his heart and always remembered, because of all that they had shared for the last fifteen years. 

The same goes for Dean. While Dean did die on a hunt like he normally would’ve, if Dean had died in Season 1, he would’ve gone up to heaven, relived his best memories (which all probably would’ve been with kid!Sam), and that would’ve been it. Instead, in Season 15, we see Dean go to a heaven that’s been re-created into something that he deserves by people who love him and who he loves very much (Jack and Cas) that he (and Sam) were able to influence heavily. And yet, with the entirety of heaven open to him to see anyone he wants (including Cas), what does he do? He goes for a drive and waits for his brother--the brother that he’s bonded with for the last fifteen years. He could see anyone, and in Season 1, if heaven had been like that, he probably would’ve. But instead, he just sits and waits for his brother, because ultimately, that’s who makes him happy. We never would’ve gotten that if it weren’t for the bond that Sam and Dean created with each other in the last fifteen years. 

As for the “traumatized characters ending up either dead or living unhappy, and only being happy once they’re dead” subtext, that’s completely valid, and I can see how that would be upsetting. Personally, I didn’t see it that way at all, mostly because I feel like the characters weren’t necessarily happy after they were dead. Dean was only happy in heaven once Sam was with him, and Sam actually was happy throughout his life with his family, even if he was still mourning his brother, and ultimately, he was able to live a life and continue that happiness in heaven when he reunited with Dean. Cas was happy before he died (hence, why he died) because he finally admitted his love for Dean. While I fully acknowledge that not a lot of them necessarily got the chance to deal with their trauma in a prolonged way, I feel like their individual deaths helped them cope in some way. That’s just my opinion though, and I can definitely understand where you’re coming from. 

Sorry it took me so long to answer this, but I hope that all makes sense! (Also sorry mine was so long too! Lol.) <3 

[mottephobia-imagines]

BNHA as Hetalia Characters (Axis + Allies only)

Hahahahaaaa.. I’m still Hetalia trash 😇

—

Mirio Togata as America

I first put Denki as America but then I saw a post and now I can’t stop thinking about BTT SeroKiriKami so yeah-

Mirio and America have more things in common other than being blond, blue-eyed precious beans that need to be protected

First of- s t r o n g. They’re both canonically some of the strongest characters in their respective series despite their relatively young ages (Mirio being above some pro-hero levels despite still being in high school and America being well America lmao)

Additionally, they both have drive; they have a determination to become as strong as they possibly could, and stop at nothing to get there

Also, they love helping people! Mirio wants to save a million smiles, and America is a self-proclaimed hero (who admittedly isn’t the best but he’s trying okay)

Both of them kinda also have a hidden intelligence? Like, as in one would never think of them to be highly intelligent people because they’re so goofy and energetic

Since it’s implied that both Tamaki and Mirio game in their free time, him and America are also avid gamers (imagine them playing smash together lmao I feel like they’d break all the controllers)

Both v v competitive too (not as much as the next duo tho)- they’ll never back down from a challenge and face it head on with all their might!

Also, they’re basically the blond boy of the month but it’s every month lmao

(In my eyes they’re both cute little golden retrievers shshsjdjskal)

In conclusion, they’re sunshines who deserve the world and more

Katsuki Bakugo as England

Okay fr hear me the fuck out-

I know it’s an unlikely pair

But they have their similarities just bear with me here

Yes, I was initially going to put in Romano for Bakugo (anger issues gang)

But then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that unlike Romano, he wouldn’t back away from a challenge or run at the slightest scare- Bakugo would take that shit and smother it into the ground

And while England may sometimes be portrayed as a prude gentleman type, we can’t forget his history- this man is probably one of, if not the most, ballsy countries to exist (at least back in his prime)

England is smart, calculated and cunning- how could you not be when you’ve conquered nearly the whole damn world?

He’s proud and maybe a bit too egotistical, and while lacking the anger issues and probably dead vocal cords of Bakugo, he sure as hell matches him in the pride and power aspect

Bakugo, on the other hand, is literally top of his class; boy is a nerd and has a perfect record

So he’s by no means any less smart than England, maybe a little more reckless, but he’s 16- you can’t exactly compare his mindset to a country’s

Even so he does act quickly on the battlefield, much like England assessed situations very precariously (most of the time)

Both of them would probably look an opponent dead in the eye and tell them to do it, bet you won’t pussy ass

On a lighter note tho, they’re two blond, spiky-haired tsunderes who are way to proud and smart for their own good

They also both listen to rock/punk so there’s that too

foreverfurrowedbrowclubTM

Aoyama Yuuga as France

I know I just said SeroKamiKiri is the BTT but once again hear me out

I couldn’t not put Aoyama in as France

It’s literally a match made in Heaven guys cmon

They’re both sparkling, flamboyant and fabulous blondies

Although sometimes their attitude can be interpreted as holier-than-thou, really they just know that they’re amazing and don’t care what people think (we stan confident kings 😤)

They also know that they deserve the best luxuries in life, and definitely won’t settle for anything else

In terms of courage, they’re pretty much on the same level; they get scared easily and will more than likely either back out of the challenge or give up the moment they feel tired

The difference is, France will never regain whatever bravery he had before the French Revolution, but Aoyama is slowly building his courage up in his journey to become a hero

They also take things in stride, willingly or unwillingly (whether it be an ugly outfit or a defeat, they won’t be a sore loser lmao)

While not necessarily flirty like France, Aoyama can still charm people with his whims. Also, their relationship towards people that they can’t charm kind of mirrors one another? (Might be reaching here lmao)

I do think though sometimes that Aoyama shows some similarities with Poland/2P!Romano, but he has the most similarities with France so 🤷🏻‍♀️

Toga Himiko as Russia

You may say she’s more like Belarus but nay nay I say

Belarus is the more kind of ‘stoic’ cruel in my mind; she doesn’t show much emotion besides annoyance and getting angry

Russia however

He’s ‘childishly’ cruel- looks innocent but is capable of some horrible, monstrous things.

Even though his face says otherwise, he does take some glee in torturing harming others (like, a lot)

Toga also does this, but in a much more obvious way lmao. She’s a villain, who drinks blood, there’s no doubt she hasn’t killed anyone. She also takes a lot more pleasure from hurting people than Russia does

They not that close with people, but the ones they are close to they are immensely protective of (Toga and the LOV, Russia and his sisters)

They also are capable of being highly intelligent, knowing more than what people think they know (Toga helping Twice our, and I high key headcanon Russia as a manipulative and cunning bastard who’s done many horrible things to people to get his way)

(I still love you Ivan)

I think this goes without saying but they’re really really violent

Russia just likes using his magic metal pipe of pain, and Toga likes her knives

They also have some really shitty pasts that have lead them to be who they are today

They may look cute on the outside, but they are oh so very cruel on the inside

Shota Aizawa as China

Haha, old man syndrome-

These two have more in common than you’d think

First off, they have that wisdom that comes with age, and are trying to get the younger ones to learn it (Aizawa does this better lmao)

I can totally see them complaining about ‘kids these days’ even tho they’ve done the same shit back then-

Along with wisdom comes cunning and craft. I headcanon China as a low key genius, so he’s probably on par with Aizawa, if not better (in terms of battle strategy and such)

Even though they come off as strict, all they really want is the best for their students/siblings

They’re both physically strong (China was probably once hella jacked, and Aizawa speaks for himself)

They do tire out quite easily tho so there’s that

Both have a penchant for cute animals like cats (Hello Kitty’s a cat don’t @ me)

On a darker note, they’ve both suffered losses of close friends. While China has definitely lost a lot more, Shirakumo’s ‘death’ still took a huge toll on him. Likewise, China has lost all his ancient friends over the years, making him the last one left (except turkey and Mongolia they don’t matter rn)

Tenya Iida as Germany

You cannot tell me this isn’t also a match made in heaven

They’re literally, at their very core, almost the exact same person

Iida is a stickler for rules- he follows every single one of them. Any and every. Pretty organized too, if I do say so myself

Likewise, Germany is also very strict with rules and regimens. He’s also canonically OCD so mans cannot stand messes (people or things)

It may make them seem like pains in the neck but really it’s the only way they know how to interact

Also have some angsty connections with their brothers

Although not as easily provoked as Germany, Iida can still be just as terrifying (mans tried to kill Stain I mean come on-)

As with nearly all of these characters, they’re both strong as hecc

Also, I feel like both of them are somewhat pressured by what their other family members have accomplished and want to achieve the same thing (Iida coming from a family of superheroes, and Germany really looking up to his father and brother and wanting to be like them but less yknow)

They don’t really know how to communicate well?? Like, of course they can talk and hold conversation but they have difficulty with most social interactions (it’s adorable)

More often than not the louder voice of reason within their friend group (Everyone in the Dekusquad besides Deku himself is the voice of reason lmao, and Germany is a no-nonsense kind of guy)

Smart bois (In Gakuen Hetalia, Germany is said to be one of the smartest students and tutors Italy, and Iida tries his best)

All in all very awkward and loud losers beans that need to learn how to not be so stiff lmao

Shoto Todoroki as Japan

Y’all already know I had to pair the introverts together

Calm, collected and reserved- these two mind their own business like it’s a sports championship lmao

Even though they may come off as intimidating sometimes, in reality they’re just shy and don’t really know the basics of social interaction (more than Germany and Iida lmao)

They’re both fairly strong, too (Todoroki with his icy hot quirk makes him one of the most OP characters in MHA imo, and Japan definitely doesn’t carry around a katana just for show)

Very very convoluted and not so great childhood (Think the sengoku period was Japan’s childhood so he was basically torn up as a kid while Todoroki had to deal with Endebitch)

Also both pretty smart??? Like, high key they’re both very intelligent and skilled

Both their friends are slowly helping them get out of that super duper introverted mindset, but the poor bbs are still trying to learn how to be a lot less stiffe

They’re also really into architecture esp traditional Japanese architecture (canon in both)

I honestly think they’d get along pretty well if they met, tbh

(Japan would get him into anime and manga and the bookworm in Todoroki can’t resist)

The strange circumstance of Italy

Honestly, I could not find anyone in MHA that was remotely similar to Italy

I was very close to putting in Mina or Nejire, since those two come to mind whenever I think of bright and bubbly (Maybe Kirishima too, but it just doesn’t fit)

So while those two are pretty much the most fitting I feel, they don’t completely encompass his character enough yonow?

Like, I genuinely cannot find anyone who is similar enough to compare him to

So for now, until I can find a suitable pick, Italy won’t have a MHA character to be paired up with 😔 sorry guys

—

What do you guys think? Do you agree or do you think different characters should be put in place?

If this gets enough notes, I might make a part 2 including female nations and the others (or whatever characters you guys request)

Requests are still open! You can ask for edits or character imagines/headcanons!

[potatocrab]

20 OTP Questions

Thank you @adventuresofmeghatron for tagging me :D

I’m going to tag @falloutglow , @its-sixxers​ , @rhetoricalrogue​ , @lechatrouge673​ , @courier-sux​ and anyone who feels fancy //// going against the grain and talking about the babes that have been on my mind a lot thanks to Noir AU

Madelyn & Deacon 

(this screenshot still amuses me to no end)

1. Who can out-drink the other?

Mads, on account of that healthy, pre-war Irish liver. She can drink anybody under the table. Except for maybe Hancock. (Or Nick, since he’s a synth)  

2. Who says “i love you” more?

Madelyn. Once she gets around to saying it, that is. She’s not one to be shy about her love, and thinks it is important to let it be known (physically and verbally) as much as possibly. She doesn’t always need it to be said back, because she knows, and it does well enough for her to see the little changes in Deacon’s expression when she says it. 

3. Who has trouble sleeping alone?

Madelyn has trouble sleeping in general, so if she’s alone, it’s tenfold. That started well before she met Deacon, or even woke up from being a popsicle. It gets a little easier after she settles down (away from the haunted hell she considers Sanctuary), and fills her home with things that bring her comfort, including trinkets that remind her of that sneaky spy.

4. Who swears more?

Mads, in privacy, because she’s still got her sweet housewife mentality that says “don’t curse like a sailor in public”. But good lord, that woman has quite the mouth. Otherwise, it’s Deacon

5. Who does more of the housework?

Codsworth? 🤣 

Okay, Madelyn. Like mentioned above, she’s still got that housewife mentality. Sometimes it drives her to keep up appearances and “play house”, collecting as much pre-war memorabilia she can so her house feels as close to home as possible. 

She does make Deacon cook though. Please don’t make Madelyn cook. D: 

6. Who forgets their anniversary?

Both, on purpose. They figure it’s mostly important to focus on the fact that they are together and not on a specific date that it came to be. Plus, when they had this discussion, it almost spiraled into a disagreement over when it would’ve been. When Mads joined the Railroad? When they first kissed? When they first slept together? When Deacon first started stalking her around the Commonwealth? Yeah it’s a little complicated. 

7. Who steals the duvet in their sleep?

Madelyn, and Deacon is happy to let her, because if she’s fallen asleep, that’s a good sign. She deserves to be comfortable, even if that means he has to suffer without a blanket. 

8. Who keeps the other awake at night with their snoring?

See above: Madelyn is usually already awake. If she is asleep, she has these tiny little sigh-snores that are good for keeping Deacon awake if he’s on watch...otherwise, sometimes it’s a little tricky for him to fall asleep unless he tricks himself to focus on something else or rolls her head a different way so the noise stops. 

9. Who finds stray animals and begs the other to let them keep them?

Considering Madelyn already had Dogmeat when she met Deacon, this should be a dead giveaway. Though, this eventually leads to her wanting to adopt every stray kitten they stumble across. Deacon eventually comes up with the compromise to transport said kittens to nearby settlements--one even ends up with Tinker Tom, though she makes him promise that he won’t run any experiments on it, or there would be hell to pay. 

10. Who usually makes dinner?

Deacon, because Madelyn will not. She’s pretty stubborn about that. She was never a good cook before the bombs, and now that most ingredients are questionably irradiated, she doesn’t even want to try and figure it out (lest she accidentally kill one of them). She’ll bake, though, and use her well-earned caps to purchase ingredients. 

11. Who plays their music out loud?

Madelyn. She really likes music and dancing, so she takes advantage of the times when she can play her music freely without the danger of raiders/animals finding them. Not very covert of her, but Deacon has always found it endearing. 

12. Who hogs the bathroom?

Mads. If there is running water, at least, so she can take a long shower or bath. Otherwise, she’s stopped being as high-maintenance as she used to be pre-war, and doesn’t need the bathroom for hours on end to preen in the mirror to prefect her curls/makeup. 

13. Who gives the most compliments?

Madelyn; see above comment about saying “I love you”. She isn’t afraid to express herself, or sprinkle (or shower) somebody in praise, especially if they are deserving of them. (Read: Deacon really deserves some compliments).

14. Who usually starts/causes arguments between them?

Even before they were romantically connected, Deacon has had a stick up his ass about Mads’ work with the Minutemen, which he’s eventually come around to as the climate in the Commonwealth has only gotten worse (considering they end up being one of the only people left that can help her after she burns her only way into the Institute). 

15. Who isn’t afraid to embarrass the other in public?

Obvious answer is obvious. I sometimes feel like if Deacon and Mads weren’t constantly working Railroad ops (or other jobs for the Minutemen), he’d be walking around like this. 

16. Who gives the other cringe-worthy pet names?

Madelyn’s codename may be Charmer, but that doesn’t stop Deacon from coming up with a litany of in-joke names to call her, including references to pre-war media. (But never anything close to her name, that’s reserved for special occasions only). She is more traditional with her pet-names, only because she knows she can’t compete with his creativity. 

17. Who fusses over the other when they get sick?

Madelyn is more fussy (call it motherly instinct), but Deacon doesn’t let her fuss too much, unless he’s really out of sorts (like injured, and not necessarily sick). Deacon’s fretting is a silent one, all furrowed brows and pouting as he rushes around to make sure Madelyn has everything she needs: pillows, tea, blankets, warm soup and some sweets. 

18. Who finds it impossible to stay angry at the other for long?

Deacon, which he finds frustrating. Madelyn is stubborn, she’ll pout forever, if she had the chance. When they have arguments or spats, they’ll run off to their perspective corners (or rush off to different settlements if it’s that bad), but after stewing about, he’s always the first one to go looking for her. Madelyn will apologize if she knows she’s done something she knows is her fault, but he’s always the first to stop being upset about a situation first to ease the tension. 

19. Who clings to the other for comfort when they’re sad or scared?

Madelyn; see below. Touch is her love language, so she typically needs this kind of comfort even when she’s feeling the complete opposite. She doesn’t need a lecture (she’ll ask for advice if she does), she just needs silence and warm compassion. 

20. Who is more ‘physically passionate’? (hugs, kisses, or maybe more…)

Deacon, once he realizes that Madelyn is super receptive to touch (and prefers it more than anything else). As well as he communicates through words (see crafts, and lies), he’s much better at communicating and being honest through touch, and can get his point across in these acts of passion. 

[thanksjro]

Eugenesis, Part Six Scene Four: Xenon Info-Dumps For Five-And-A-Half Pages

Alright, back to bullshit.

Galvatron is being a rude little turd to Xenon, calling his robot collection old and dusty, but Xenon’s too wrapped up in the Quintesson/Cybertronian lore to be bothered. Ultra Magnus just wants to know what the fuck he’s done with the Matrix.

You heard the man, out with it.

So, back when the Quintessons first started out, they were known as the Progenitors- yeah, I know- a quasi-organic race who went from caveman-level intelligence to full-blown hard sci-fi sons of guns at an incredibly rapid rate.  

Problem is, they didn’t get any further than that. They tried, sure. They tried real hard, for millions of years. Then, once their inspiration had run out, they started looking to other races to try and figure something out.

This just in, god is dead and James Roberts killed him by turning him into a glorified OS.

So, P.R.I.M.U.S. is encoded onto these geodes, and they become sentient. Sometimes they think they’re god.

Just like everyone else in this story.

Now that the Quintessons knew about these little god-doodads, they wanted one for themselves, to try and reverse-engineer the secret to immortality. They hired some guys called the Weavers to nab one for them.

This is some serious nerd shit, y’all. Galvatron agrees with me- he’s never even heard of any of the things Xenon’s droning on about. Neither have I- this is all Roberts at this point.

The Weavers brought back two geodes to the Quintessons, who promptly hid them away until the Masters cooled off a bit, since they were a little miffed about the thievery and whatnot. Then they noticed a couple problems: A) the geodes were encrypted to the moon and back, and B) if you so much as looked at the thing wrong it would purge the Lifecode completely.

Didn’t Optimus throw this thing at Unicron a couple times? Maybe the geode just doesn’t like you, Xenon, ever thought of that?

In order to decode the geodes, the Quintessons needed massive computers. Y’know, like God. But before they could really get a head start on that, the Masters’ nanobot enforcers showed up, blocking out the sky like a giant swarm of angry wasps. They wrecked shopped on Quintyxia- the old one, not the new one- and the Quintessons ran for it. They headed for the planet where they’d buried the other geode, but something went wrong with their hyperspace drive, and they didn’t arrive until two million years after they’d set off.

They dug for the geode, hit something metal, and that’s when the quakes started. The Quintessons left, thinking the planet was unstable.

At this point, Magnus is begging Xenon to just get on with it.

The Quintessons headed back to Quintyxia, to find that their lush, green world had been turned into one made of metal. Cybertron. Quintyxia is Cybertron. New Quintyxia is Quintyxia. It’s like that time Prince named himself the Artist Formerly Known As Prince.

Of course that leaves the question of why the nanobots didn’t just destroy the planet instead of… doing whatever they did to make Cybertron Cybertron.

So, Cybertron is a planet-sized computer, tasked with the sole purpose of decoding the meaning of life.

You know, I remember reading somewhere- and don’t quote me on this, because I can’t for the life of me remember where exactly- that Roberts has never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Now, either he’s lying- which I don’t know why he would, the guy loves references- or this is just a weird thing the collective brain of the English population does, where they all jump to the same ideas in absurdist sci-fi.

When the Quintessons showed up on Cybertron, they were met with the results of the cracked Lifecode- the first Transformers (but they couldn’t transform, that was a thing that developed alongside the war.) They couldn’t do much of anything, really.

Well, now we know where the protoform babies in IDW come from.

The Quintessons, not ones to squander an opportunity, decide to use these fragile, helpless proto-beings as slaves.

Yeah, the Quintessons have kind of been the worst since day one.

They build brain modules, stick them in the ground- Seedlings, Xenon calls them- and watch as the planet wrapped living metal around them and built bodies.  

The Quintessons get pretty good at making the Auto-Bots, and get to a point where they’re drafting up blueprints for each solitary one. Blueprints that Xenon apparently kept, since he’s got all these copies in the pods right now.

If you couldn’t tell already, we’re going with the “the Quintessons made the Transformers” creation myth.

Of course, you make a big enough species, they’re going to need some corralling- that is, if you want to be an awful, controlling, overbearing parent. And the Quintessons definitely wanted that. So, what’s one to do?

…Look, it’s not that I necessarily disagree on a base level, but-

Xenon, you fucking neckbeard.

Because the Quintessons forgot that religion is not a one-set-outcome game, they were surprised to find that it had given their creations hope and will, things you really don’t want your enslaved masses to have.

The Covenant drove off the Quintessons, then fucked off into deep space to spread the message of Primus, with Maximo at the head of things. Maximo was the leader of the Cybertronian Empire and Megatron’s progenitor in the Marvel UK comics. They did leave someone behind to keep the masses within the faith- Primon. He’s important in the comics, just trust me on that.

Oh man, we’re finally getting some answers.

Xenon admits that the Quintessons didn’t come up with everything; there were parts that they just straight-up ripped out of the geode’s owner’s manual.

Oh. Well. That’s… underwhelming. Xenon’s really just dumping the entirety of the Cybertronian religion into the trash at this point, isn’t he? This info-dump has been going on for five pages, and we still aren’t done.

Turns out that kill switch code was pulled from the geode too- 4/11.002983712 is its serial number. That’s like if you called your dad by his first name and then immediately died afterwords.

But whatever happened to that second geode the Quintessons buried on the other planet?

Yeah, that turned into Unicron.

Turns out the virus that wipes the Lifecode from the geode messed up, and made the geode want to kill literally everything in the universe just for being alive.  

Well, isn’t that all just fine and dandy~!

Because the Quintessons didn’t realize what Unicron’s whole deal was at first- the vore-planet had learned how to lie at some point before they met up- they worked together for a time.

At this point the Quintessons had gone from being quasi-organic to something more cybernetically-dependent, so that might have also made things a little difficult in the baby-making department. Or not. I don’t fucking know, things are just happening at this point.

MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU KNOW WHAT BOOK YOU’RE IN

THERE WILL BE NO HAPPY ANYTHING

Storytime’s over, back to the present day. Xenon’s going to take these podded robots and populate New Quintyxia with them. They won’t fight, they’ll be actual, normal people who don’t wage war.

Xenon must have gotten some new glasses, because that’s one hell of a rose-tinted worldview he’s got there.

Ultra Magnus at this point just asks for the Matrix back so they can go home. Xenon says “nah, but check this out tho” and powers on the pod-bots.

Xenon, that’s gross. Don’t make Galvatron and Magnus watch you be weird with the power of granting life, man.

All the robots wake up, stand, and stare up at Xenon, who’s floated up to the ceiling on his power trip. They… aren’t supposed to do that.

Turns out the Matrix is a friggin’ liar, and only promised power because it’s actually Unicron in there. Well, damn.

Galvatron shoots Xenon. Good.

Shoulda sprung for the waterproofing on your Uggs, Mags.

Galvatron’s on a roll, now. He aims at one of the zombies and fires, and they all go down, thanks to their interlinked minds. Crisis averted, I guess.

Magnus, though not happy with Galvatron’s wanton destruction of innocents, has bigger fish to fry at present; he’s convinced that the Matrix is still inside God. Boy oh boy, is he wrong, but the narrative demands he at least tries. He sticks his hand into the computer, up to the shoulder. That’s not good heavy-duty machinery safety.

Well, shit. He’s been possessed by a higher power.

You know, now that I think about it, there’s a good chance that Xenon putting the Matrix into God messed up the killswitch code, and that’s why Prowl had to use a wasting disease to try and end it all. Not really relevant at this exact moment in the story, just a thought I had.

Galvatron, having had enough mystical bullshit for one day, shoots his arm clean off, severing the connection. Magnus drops like a stone, and Galvatron bolts as everything starts coming down around them.

Oh no, Magnus is gonna be our first victim, isn’t he?

Magnus follows after Galvatron, leaving his arm. Hope he doesn’t run into any aqua fortis on the way back to the Trident, because his Pretender shell is beat all to hell.

Then Xenon pulls himself together and stops being dead.

Sigh.

This was ONE section.

[ellaoftarth]

Ch. 1; the anatomy of an introduction

here’s the first chapter of the science-centric Modern AU Braime. I’m not sure what to call it and whether or not to post it on either fanfiction.net or ao3. Let me know if it’s worth continuing?

Brienne walked into the lab, her earbuds already in, wanting to get some work done before her new coworker arrived. When Dr. Baratheon, the head of the Microbiology Department, had first mentioned the new project to Brienne, she was weary. Not because of the person she would be working with, she hadn’t known of him at that point, but because someone else would be intruding in her lab space, her space.

Earlier in the week, she had emailed her new coworker, Jaime Lannister. He was an animal behaviorist and pathologist who worked in another department. She read back over the email exchange at the computer once more, confirming the time he was supposed to be arriving this morning:

Dr. Lannister,

My name is Dr. Brienne Tarth, and I wanted to connect with you before we began our project together this coming Thursday. Dr. Baratheon said that you have been having issues with the death rates of brown bears on the wildlife reserve and wanted to consult the microbiology department to determine if there is a molecular cause. If you can, please bring a sample with you from one of the bear’s digestive tracts; I’d like to see if this is perhaps diet related. Dr. Baratheon mentioned that you have been doing autopsies for the last few months. I’d be very interested in reading those over as well, if you wouldn’t mind bringing them along. I look forward to meeting you on Thursday, the 7th at 9 am.

Best,

Dr. Brienne Tarth

Microbiologist at the Westeros Institute.

To her dismay, the reply she received was outrageously informal and unhelpful;

Sounds good, will do.  

-Jaime

Brienne rolled her eyes, uneasy with anticipation at meeting Dr. Lannister. To keep busy, she set to cleaning her workspace. Her lab was neat, as she always kept it, though there were always things that needed done; dishes to be washed and autoclaved, samples to be checked. Putting on a new playlist, she set about to cleaning the empty erlenmeyer flasks in the sink.

Once they were on the drying rack, she decided to make a basic media, in the case that Dr. Lannister brought the samples she asked him to and they were able to culture them. While she prepared it, she hummed along to the music. Between that and making the media, she was so  focused that she hadn’t realized someone else was in the room until she felt the tap on her shoulder.

Brienne instantly removed her earbuds and turned around to see a man laughing lightly at her. She couldn’t help but note how attractive his smile was, though she disdained him for catching her off guard.

“May I help you?” She asked. It was only 8:30 and she hoped that this didn’t turn out to be Dr. Lannister.

“Can you find your supervisor? I’m supposed to be meeting Brienne Tarth here.” He looked at the pile of petri dishes in front of her and smirked, “she keeps her lab assistants pretty busy, huh?”

Before Brienne could even answer, Dr. Baratheon walked into the lab.

“Ah, Jaime! I thought I saw you walk by. I see you two are getting to know each other.” He said, smiling warmly.

Jaime’s eyes widened and it was Brienne’s turn to smirk at him. “My apologies, Brienne,” Jaime started, having the decency to look slightly embarrassed, though laughter still remained in his eyes, “I didn’t realize that that was you. Usually my lab assistants are the ones cleaning the lab and getting it prepped for experiments.”

“How kind of them,” Brienne said flatly. She turned away from Lannister, “Dr. Baratheon, will you be joining us this morning?”

“No,” he said, looking between the two as if sensing the hostility between them, “I just wanted to make sure you were introduced.” He cleared his throat in the awkward silence that answered, “I guess I’ll leave you to it.”

As he walked out, Jaime asked curiously, “You call him Dr. Baratheon?”

“Yes, why does that matter?” Brienne was already growing irritated.

“Just, if you are in fact a doctor, then you are colleagues, are you not? Why don’t you call him Renly?”

“If I am a doctor? Just what are you implying?” Brienne asked harshly.

Jaime could tell he was getting under her skin and Brienne could tell he was enjoying it. He leaned on the desk between them. She could see the missing button on the collar of his shirt that peaked out from under his sweater.

Jaime shrugged, “You just seem a bit young. That’s why I thought you were a lab assistant.”

Brienne didn’t care to explain herself to him, but she was insulted. “This may be my first year here as a doctor of microbiology but I assure you I am fully qualified. As qualified as you are in your specialty, Dr. Lannister.” She continued, “And I’ll have you know that I address Dr. Baratheon as such because he was my mentor here before I earned my degree and I prefer to continue to address him with the respect he deserves.”

Jaime was quiet for a moment, nodding. But the smirk broke out on his face again, “And you address me as Dr. Lannister. Should I be grateful that you think I deserve such a respect?”

Brienne’s eyes narrowed, “It’s more that I’d rather keep things professional between us, Dr. Lannister. I don’t see us becoming acquaintances in the near future.” Brienne walked around the lab table to discard the gloves she was still wearing, but Jaime stepped in front of her, stopping her mere inches in front of him.

“What a shame, because I thought we were getting along so well,” Jaime’s voice was thick with sarcasm. But it wasn’t malicious. In fact, it seemed to break the tension that had been building between them. Jaime laughed, lightly this time, and stepped aside so that Brienne could get through.

She sighed in relief. As she threw away her gloves and replaced them with new ones, she took a moment to compose herself. Then, she turned around and met Jaime’s eyes. “Alright, would you like to tell me what we’re working with?”

Jaime pulled the backpack off of his back and took out the small, tightly sealed box from an ice bag. “Here are the samples you requested. It seems that whatever disease or pathogen the bear came into contact with spread quite quickly; it was healthy one day and dead the next. There doesn’t seem to be anything suspicious from the autopsy. I can’t find any preliminary cause, but it has to be something external; bears don’t just drop dead. I don’t think you’ll find anything, though, since no one else has been able to. I didn’t really want to waste your time or mine, but, you know, protocol.”

“I do appreciate the insinuation that I’ll be a complete waste of time,” Brienne countered bitterly, inspecting the samples, “But, perhaps let me do my job before making such judgements?”

Jaime put his hands up, as if to show his concession to let her work.

“Thank you,” she said tersely, and began to spread the samples out onto the plates she had prepared. She explained to him, “I’m just going to grow these overnight. Hopefully we’ll see some growth of the microflora from the bear’s gut and we’ll be able to sequence the microbiome from there to determine if there is anything suspicious.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Jaime said, unenthused.

“You sound so concerned. Don’t animal behaviorists usually care about the animals they’re studying?”

“Usually,” Jaime agreed. “I didn’t really want this project, to be honest. My specialty is mountain lions, but because this issue is becoming more pronounced, they reassigned me for the time being.”

“I see,” Brienne said. “Well, at least we both don’t want to be here.” At his laugh, her lips twitched upwards in a smile.

While she plated the samples, Jaime watched her hands. While they were rather large and strong, they moved with such fluidity, streaking the plates, spreading the sample. When he noticed himself staring, he shook his head, and forced himself to make small talk. “So, how long has Renly been your mentor?”

“About 4 years, though I’ve known him since I got my Bachelor’s degree. I began working here, as a lab assistant, mind you,” he could almost hear her roll her eyes, “and he went out of his way to teach me as much as he could. No one saw potential in me the way he did. When I started working towards my PhD, he continued formally as my mentor.”

“You sound quite fond of him,” Jaime remarked, “Perhaps respect isn’t the only reason you call him Dr. Baratheon; perhaps you need the reminder, to bury any… improper feelings?”

Brienne’s voice was cutting, “Oh, yes, you’ve figured me out, haven’t you! I can’t bear to see Dr. Baratheon happy with his husband instead of me and I just-“ Brienne turned around to see Jaime quietly laughing. He was only joking, just riling her up again.

“You really are quite easy to read and provoke, you know? Almost easier to pick apart than that bear was.”

“Lovely of you to compare me to the bear you just dissected,” Brienne snapped back. She couldn’t decide if he was intending to be irritating or playful with his banter. She didn’t necessarily want to find out.

She plated the last sample and looked at Jaime, “Well, that’s that. I don’t suppose you have any interest in me looking over anything else?” She looked at hime, expecting him to be eager to leave her and her department.

“Here,” he said, handing over a binder. “It’s my report so far, as well as other similar cases in the past month. Look it over and let me know if you have any input. While I don’t exactly understand why you would choose to look at this from a perspective you can’t even see with the naked eye, I suppose there’s a reason a microbiological analysis is part of the protocol. Let me know if you have any input?”

Brienne nodded, surprised. “If you’d like to come back tomorrow and look over the cultures with me, we can maybe determine if there’s anything worth sequencing.”

“Sure,” Jaime grinned, “I’ll be back tomorrow, then, Brienne,” he emphasized her first name, as he turned to leave.

She smirked, “See you around, lion boy,” she laughed as he did a double take, looking shocked. “Informal enough for you?” While she was loathe to admit it, she could imagine that working with Jaime Lannister could be quite fun. Well, irritating, but fun.

[murasaki-murasame]

I guess it’s time for me to put on my clown wig and make a complete fool of myself by dumping out all my last-minute thoughts about what I want and expect from the Sarazanmai finale, now that we’re just a few hours away from it.

Mostly this is just gonna be me trying to rationalize a way this could end happily for everyone involved even though I know full well the finale’s gonna murder me. [And tbh this is mostly gonna be me talking about Reo and Mabu lol]

lmao I have so many scattered and messy thoughts about all this, where do I even begin.

Most of all I’m still clinging onto the hope that Reo and Mabu will some way or another get revived in the finale. I’m bracing myself for the worst, though. I just feel like their deaths don’t even fit into the typical pattern of Ikuhara characters ‘dying’ as a way to transcend reality. Reo’s death in particular was so down to earth and casual that I don’t really think it’s satisfying or even bittersweet in the way that a lot of other Ikuhara endings are.

I also just think it seems really noteworthy that instead of getting sucked into the hell of never ending, beginning, or connecting, the ring representing Mabu’s place in the big circle of society bounced back and manifested in the real world to land in Reo’s pocket. And then Reo himself turned into the same sorta ring after he died even though he didn’t even become a kappa zombie or anything, and he just died a regular death. I get the feeling that Keppi might have somehow stepped in to stop them from completely being destroyed, considering what he said after Mabu’s death about how he was going to make sure to connect their desires to the future.

It just comes across like they’re in some sort of stasis where there’s still a chance to bring them back somehow. At the very least, I don’t really see what the entire point of them turning into rings would be other than that.

I’ve also been thinking for a while now that it might be Sara and Keppi who get the trademark ‘self-sacrifice/transcending reality’ Ikuhara ending, rather than any of the main trio or Reo and Mabu. I could even see it being a thing where they don’t even die, but they basically give up their place in the human realm and go back to the kappa kingdom permanently, which wouldn’t even be that sad of an ending for them in my opinion. There’s a lot of different ways it could play out, but I’ve got two ideas.

For one thing, I think Sara might be able to create her own dish of hope like Keppi can. He said he was the only one who can do that [I think he did, at least], but he’s also clearly been lying about being the ‘sole survivor of the kappa kingdom’ so I don’t really trust that, and the fact that the main dish of hope that we’ve spent most of the series working toward has already been used makes me think that another one might be introduced in the finale so that another wish can be made. It also seems really fishy to me that the scene with her and Haruka in ep10 revealed that Sara’s head ornament thing is apparently a type of plate. It makes me wonder if maybe there’s gonna be a reveal where we find out that she’s been hiding a dish of hope in plain sight, literally right on top of her head.

I could also maybe see a situation where Sara and Keppi transplant their own shirikodama into Reo and Mabu to bring them back, like what Kazuki wanted to do with Haruka in ep6. I’ve been wondering ever since that episode if that whole idea was going to come up again, at least. I think this could lead to the sorta situation I mentioned before where they have to give up their place in the human world, since as we also learned in ep6, giving up your shirikodama ejects you from the circle. But they might still be able to just go back to the kappa kingdom even after that so it might not be a big deal for them.

And along those same lines, maybe instead of Sara and Keppi both giving up their shirikodama, maybe Keppi will transplant the two halves of his broken shirikodama into Reo and Mabu. I guess it’s not really that different than the other option, but still. I think it’d at least be a nice bit of symbolism if they end up with two halves of the same shirikodama.

I’ve also been toying with the idea that maybe as part of the whole thing with how they deleted all the tweets from the ReoMabu twitter account, maybe if the finale involves them getting revived, the twitter account will basically be ‘rebooted’ and start posting all new tweets about their post-anime lives together. That’d be a really nice way to turn things around from how depressing the end of ep10 was. And it might be a good way to help balance out the fact that they probably wouldn’t get that much screen time in the finale even if they get revived, so giving them an epilogue story of sorts in twitter form could help make it feel more fleshed out.

In general I’m just gonna be disappointed if they stay dead in the finale, lol. I’m not going to make any harsh judgments or final opinions until the last episode airs, but I just think it’d be lame if their ending is just ‘they died, the end’. It’s obvious what sorta social commentary Ikuhara’s trying to make with them, but I feel like there’d be nothing subversive or interesting about commenting on how gay characters are ‘punished’ for being open about their feelings by just, y’know, effectively doing exactly that. Especially since it feels like Enta’s probably not gonna end up being able to properly tell Kazuki about his feelings either.

But the bottom line is that we just have to wait and see how it pans out. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions. And even if I end up disappointed by it, it wouldn’t make me hate Ikuhara as a content creator or as a person or anything. It’d just make me wish that more people would go about this kind of social commentary by giving gay characters happy endings where they get to be open about themselves.

Anyway, aside from the whole question of if this two will stay dead or not, I think the thing I most want out of the finale is some sort of a concrete explanation of how the ReoMabu manga fits into the whole timeline. We know for a fact that it’s canon to the anime timeline and isn’t some sort of an alternate universe story, but the more I think about it, the harder it is to figure out where it fits in.

It boils down to whether it happened before or after the anime, I guess, but both options don’t make complete sense. It seems more logical to assume that it happened before the anime, but it’s worth noting that the twitter account seems to end right before Reo and Mabu head off to the war, but they never acknowledge Sara at all in the whole twitter account, and I think there was even a tweet they made about Children’s Day ‘not being relevant to them’. Which seems like a hint that they haven’t even met Sara by that point.

But it happening after the anime comes with some more obvious inconsistencies. Though honestly I prefer this option, and I think a lot of questions about it could be solved if we assume it takes place post-anime with Reo and Mabu being revived but with some of their memories erased, and if we assume that the otters are completely defeated by this point.

I think the only thing that seems to concretely ‘date’ the manga is the absence of the Skytree, but I still think that it’s very likely the Skytree might just get destroyed in the finale as part of the big final clash between Keppi and Otter, so I think that’s not necessarily a contradiction. There’s also the fact that in the manga, the name and design of the police station is plate-themed instead of otter-themed, which on paper seems to indicate that it’s taking place before the otters took over, but it might instead indicate that it takes place after they’ve been defeated.

The whole thing with them not recognizing Sara at all in the final chapter of the manga also sticks out to me a lot now that we know Reo and Mabu used to be quite close with Keppi. It just seems like no matter where in the timeline the manga takes place, if they know about Keppi, they should probably be aware of who Sara is. But who knows. I just think it might be a hint that they get their memories of everything related to the kappas and otters erased after the anime.

I also think the whole premise of Sara being abandoned in the human world and conveniently adopted by Reo and Mabu seems more and more baffling the more we learn about them all as characters, and I think it might make more sense if it happens after the anime. Maybe Sara uses up so much of her power that her human form reverts back into being a baby. Who even knows! It’s weird in it’s own way to assume that the princess of the kappa kingdom just got abandoned in the human realm before any of this even happened.

The bit with her reuniting with her manager and Keppi also comes across as being pretty final to me. I get the feeling that she’s leaving the human world forever and isn’t going to be able to come back. Which makes me think that even if most of the manga takes place pre-anime, maybe the final chapter or two alone happens much later. Somehow. 

Then there’s the possibility of time looping being involved and there’s just too many ways it could all play out, lol. I just really want there to be a clearly understandable timeline of events once this is all done, otherwise it’s gonna nag at me forever.

If we find out that the manga happened pre-anime, I think they should have basically adapted it into an episode of the anime somewhere in the second half, to flesh Reo and Mabu out more. But we’ll see.

Also, before I forget, the Sarazanmai twitter account reposting the old PVs is making me wonder if we ever heard Reo’s line from his PV about assumptions being dangerous in the show itself. All of the other lines everyone said in that series of PVs ended up being used in the show itself, but I don’t remember that line of Reo’s ever coming up. I’m definitely just grasping at straws but it makes me hope that maybe it means it’ll be part of the finale. It at least gives me the mental image of him and Mabu appearing at the last minute to help fight against Dark Keppi and the Otters or whatever, and them being like ‘BITCH U THOUGHT!!! >:^)’

I don’t really have as many concrete predictions for what’ll happen with the main trio, even though they’re gonna be the focus of the finale. Mostly I just hope this doesn’t end with Kazuki making a wish to turn back time. I feel like that wouldn’t really fit the whole narrative and message of this show. And honestly there’s only so much that could even be ‘fixed’ by turning back time. Like, sure Kazuki might be able to improve his personal relationships and maybe prevent Haruka’s accident, but would turning back time do anything about Toi’s family history and Chikai’s criminal ties? Would it do anything about the destruction of the kappa kingdom, or Mabu’s death and rebirth with a mechanical heart? Would it do anything about Enta’s presumably one-sided crush? It just feels like there’s only so much that could even be achieved with that sort of an ending, unless they completely undo everything. But going by how ep6 played out, I don’t think Ikuhara’s planning on that sort of ending. I just want this to end with the main trio having to move on with their lives and live with the consequences of how everything turned out.

But if we exclude the possibility of time looping and whatnot, I don’t really have any strong ideas about how things might turn out with them. But I guess all they really need to do is just save Toi from venturing outside the circle, and after that they can just deal with the rest of their lives together.

The big wildcard seems to be the fact that we’re finally gonna figure out the true meaning of the very first scene in ep1, which is still one big question mark. It does come across like it’s hinting at some kind of a time loop, but who knows. One way or another I feel like I might end up rewatching ep1 right after the finale. It’ll be interesting to see if it carries any additional meaning after all that.

And on the topic of ep1, even aside from that very first scene, I’ve always kept thinking back to how part of ep1 involved some narrative misdirection where we found out that in the scene at the car garage, ‘Sara’ was just Kazuki cross-dressing. It just seems interesting to me that that level of outright misdirection and lying to the viewer hasn’t really come up again, outside of Enta’s delusions. So I’ve just been wondering if it might ever come up again somehow. Though I also can’t help but hope that his cross-dressing will come up again one way or another since it kinda got unceremoniously dropped after ep6, so maybe I’m just grabbing at straws, lol. I do feel like it’d be a bit of a shame if there’s no actual deeper link between Kazuki and Sara, one way or another.

Though on that note, I do think it’s still pretty likely that if the ending involves her leaving the human realm, we might get an epilogue scene that shows that Kazuki’s basically taken her place as the local idol/TV presenter. Which I think would be a cute way to tie everything together.

In terms of happy epilogue type stuff with the main trio, I think it’d also make sense if we see them all playing soccer together.

I don’t really have much investment in shipping any of them, but part of me’s still holding out hope for a polyamory ending. But the more it goes on the more it does feel like Ikuhara doesn’t plan to really go anywhere super substantial with any of them in terms of their romantic relationships. Which is fine. I think it’d probably just be kinda sad if this ends with two of them getting together and one of them being ‘left out’. I’d rather it be an all or nothing type of thing.

Even the ep11 synopsis hints at the idea of them wishing for something at the end of all this, but I don’t know if that means they’ll literally make a wish with a dish of hope in the finale, after Kazuki just used his to save Enta. It might just be more about them finally bonding properly as a trio and resolving to keep living together.

But I do still think that Sara’s gonna make a wish on her own secret dish of hope, though. And if that happens I think the only things she’d really want to wish for would be related to saving Reo and Mabu, or turning back time completely.

All in all, as much as I want to go into this finale with restrained hopes and measured expectations, I still feel like this is the most stressed I’ve felt about an anime finale ever since Yuri on Ice, lmao. It’s gonna be really sad to see this all end. Even if we still have Migi’s manga adaptation and the second LN volume to look forward to afterwards.

[twdmusicboxmystery]

Walker Herd Names and What They Foreshadow

Okay, so I promised to talk about the names they’re using for walker hordes on the show.

Someone in my group pointed out that storms are often given names like this. I thought that was interesting for two reasons. 1) last season on FTWD, they had a hurricane. Often hurricanes have names. So it could be linked to that, and the storm that the characters in TWD keep talking about that’s recently passed through. Remember in my 9x01 Analysis, I connected that to the storm in Them, which symbolically foreshadowed this storm. 2) These walker hordes symbolically represent storms that will come through and cause devastation. So I think this is an interesting idea.

So, we know that there are three walker hordes so far with three different names: Horatio, Sylvia, and Margaret.

When I heard these names, the first thing that came to mind was Shakespeare. I wasn't sure if Margaret was a Shakespearean character, but I knew that Horatio and Sylvia both were, so it was a good bet Margaret would be too. 

Hamlet is one of my favorite plays, so I'm very familiar with Horatio. But even though I know Sylvia is a Shakespearean character, I'm not familiar with her story. So, to Google I went to research my shit.

I’ve come to the conclusion that these three names/hordes represent three major character dynamics that we’ll see this season. It’s not ALL about Beth (yes, I heard your gasp ;D) but a lot of it is.

Let me just give you a few lines about each character and the Shakespearean plays they appear in. Yes, there will be spoilers for Shakespeare plays in this post. In my defense, they were written in…what? 1200? If you’ve had 700 years to read them and haven't done so yet, I gotta say, that's kinda on you. 😋

Horatio

So, Horatio is Hamlet's best friend and right-hand man. In fact, I do believe some reference is made in the play to them being as close as brothers. (Who does that sound like in TWD?) When all the crap goes down in Hamlet, Horatio is the one that survives and walks away at the end.

Being a tragedy, most of the main characters die at the end of the play, including Hamlet. At one point, Horatio even suggests that he might take poison himself, simply because Hamlet, his best friend, is dying. They’re so close that Horatio would rather die and be where Hamlet is, than be left behind.

That doesn't happen, though. Hamlet begs him not to take his own life. (Hamlet has been poisoned and so knows he will die in a minute but hasn't actually succumbed yet.) So, you might call Horatio the last man standing.

So I’m thinking that Daryl is Horatio to Rick’s Hamlet. I won’t go into spoilers here, but I will say that my group is analyzing the CRAP out of the synopsis for episode 7. You might call Horatio a very lonely character after Hamlet dies, and let’s just say it’s looking like Daryl is getting there fast. Saying that Rick will die isn’t really a spoiler since AMC is advertising S9 as “Rick Grimes’ final episodes.” Once Rick goes, Daryl will feel very alone and this really may be his rock bottom moment.

And the thing is, guys, this makes me SO excited. Okay, it’s going to be completely heart wrenching to watch. But I keep going back to Still. Remember that when Beth said, “you’re gonna be the last man standing,” Daryl REALLY didn’t like that. (”You’re not a happy drunk at all.”) She meant it as a compliment, but he specifically stopped smiling. We all know that it’s because Daryl hates the idea of being alone, and more specifically of losing everyone around him. So when she says that, it’s not just sadness on his face. It’s pure terror. She follows it up with the “you’re gonna miss me so bad when I’m gone” line.

But it’s BETH that says that to him. Not some other character. So if Rick’s death leads to his last-man-standing moment…then they pretty much have to bring Beth back right after that. That’s all I’ll say about that, mkay?

Sylvia

Sylvia is one of two heroines in the romantic comedy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. You can look up the full plot synopsis on Wikipedia. I won't say that Sylvia’s story arc is EXACTLY like Beth's. Because it's a comedy there's all kinds of goofy things that happen, people falling in and out of love, some slapstick comedy. There's a fool and even a little dog. (looking at you, @frangipanilove) who plays a small but memorable role. But, there's a big part of Sylvia’s arc that I think could be applied to Beth.

Sylvia falls in love with a man named Valentine, but her father wants her to marry some other rich dude instead. So, to keep her away from Valentine, her father locks her in a tower an won't let her out.

(We’ve always thought Beth's situation at Grady was sort of a princess-in-a-tower scenario because she was up high and the hospital was a tall building.And Daryl and Rick attempt to rescue her.)

Again, the comedy has some ties that I don't see in TWD. Valentine's best friend Proteus also falls for Sylvia, but Valentine doesn't know his friend likes her. So, Valentine confides his plan to rescue Sylvia from the tower and elope with her. Because he wants her for himself, Proteus tells Sylvia’s father and Valentine is banished.

This is where things get interesting. After that separation, Valentine runs into a band of outlaws. (I'm kind of thinking Claimers? Or perhaps the Saviors under Negan? It depends on how you interpret it. I first thought of the Claimers because when Beth was first taken from him, he met them. But after he lost her at Grady, which is more in line with the tower scenario, he meets the Saviors, who often act like a band of outlaws).

Valentine lies about why he was banished, saying he killed a man in self-defense, and the outlaws make him their leader. (Daryl is now the leader the Saviors, who were once a band of outlaws, at the Sanctuary.).

Meanwhile, Sylvia, in the tower, is told that Valentine is dead, but doesn't believe it. With the help of knight, she manages to escape. And eventually, and to make a long story short, is reunited with Valentine. Her father and her husband-to-be show up, and her husband-to-be tries to claim her. (Yes, in most summaries I’ve read they actually use the word “claim.”) But Valentine (Daryl) says that if the fiance comes anywhere near Sylvia (Beth), Valentine (Daryl) will kill him. The fiance releases his claim to her and she and Valentine live happily ever after.

So you might call it a little bit of a remix. Things don't happen quite the right order, and obviously we haven’t seen anyone other than Daryl try to claim Beth, but I think we will. (Remember Crazy Wolf Dude in S6, who Nicotero said fell in love with Denise and took her hostage? She was a major Beth proxy and I think we’ll see a mirror story play out in Beth’s arc.) Either way, there are parallels here.

So overall, I think Sylvia represents Beth and Daryl’s reunion before the season ends. (Yea!)

Margaret

At first, I thought Margaret could also be compared to Beth’s arc, with only one small part that didn’t really fit.

Margaret in Shakespeare’s historical plays is a real historical figure, Queen Margaret. She appears in several plays. In the earliest, she starts out as a young, naïve girl. That could be in keeping with Beth. 

Then, over the next few plays, we see her become a very strong woman and powerful queen (think 4 Queens Theory) who rules beside her husband. Also in keeping with Beth’s arc. 

But then, she appears in a final play as an older woman. After her husband is killed, she becomes angry and bitter about his death, and returns to her homeland to preside over the planned In other words, she becomes vengeful.

It was then that I realized the Margaret herd is not about Beth. It’s about Maggie. Remember that Gregory often referred to Maggie as Margaret with a great deal of douchebaggery in his tone. Maggie was also a naïve farm girl at one point. Remember in S2 she, like Hershel, thought the walkers could be cured. But like Margaret, she genuinely fell in love with her husband and has now grown to be strong leader and woman. Now that her husband is dead, we have this whole revenge arc going on.  

Unfortunately, this doesn’t bode particularly well for Maggie. I’m not saying she’ll die, but just that she might remain bitter and vengeful for the rest of her days. Or at least, that’s what happened with Margaret in the play. But then again, this is a forecast for season 9. Not necessarily what comes after, which could change.

So, I believe the names of these three herds represent three major character arcs that we’ll see the season. Could I be wrong? Sure. But I’m not the only one to have noticed the Shakespearean character names for the hordes. And when I Googled, I couldn’t find any other ties between these three names, so I don’t think I’m wrong. And this DOES support that this will FINALLY be our season where Beth returns.

OHPLEASEOHPLEASEOHPLEASEOHPLEASE!

Thoughts?

[thelawyerthatwaspromised]

Just How In Love With Daenerys is Jon Snow?

If you’ve read any of my posts you probably already understand that I believe Jon’s interactions with Daenerys are motivated by his duties to the North and his behavior in Season 7 can be easily explained with the fact that he’s trying multiple approaches to try and change her priorities.

So many times, the contra opinion has been “No, Jon is definitely in love with Daenerys. The cast and crew says so. The marketing says so. The show runners say so.” 

Ok, among the myriad of reasons why I think this is a terrible argument is that;

1) The same people swore up and down that Jon was dead forever;

2) The same people blatantly discussed some deadly rivalry in S7 between Sansa and Jon

3) The script page cited as “he realizes he’s fallen in love” did not initially leak with all of the other script pages that proved to, more or less, true...so someone needs to show me otherwise in the first place;

BUT the most important thing I’d use to examine this is;

“Ok, well what does Jon Snow say throughout Season 7?”

Post continued under the cut...

I noticed such a different pattern of behavior with Jon when it came to how he privately spoke with Daenerys and how he spoke about Daenerys with other characters.

I operate under the assumption that the creators put scenes into their own shows on purpose (revolutionary, right?) and I just can’t escape the conclusion that Jon Snow is two different people in Season 7: the laser-focused, big-picture, intelligent hero of the story AND on the other side the love struck, flattery-extolling, miss-the-forest-for-the-trees, dopey lovable hero.

I’ve already written previously about the way Jon dresses up his language around Daenerys, particularly after he observes Jorah interact with Daenerys in e5. 

I’ve now concluded that’s only half the story...because maybe you could argue that he just started seeing what Jorah and Tyrion and Missandei see in Daenerys.

If he really sees this greatness, strength, and worthiness in her, surely he would indicate to SOMEBODY else how strongly he feels about Daenerys.

I can’t even find ANY room in Jon’s interactions with other characters where they discussed Daenerys to support that he loves her or even finds her particularly “good” in any way.

I’ll go clip by clip.

Jon’s Motivation for Leaving

Now it would be unfair for me to say that this clip shows anything about how Jon feels about Daenerys because he doesn’t know her yet.

What it does tell us is that Jon’s mission is to get a powerful ally to come North to fight the Night King.

It also tells us Jon already knows he’s going to need to “persuade” her.

Alone, does this tell us anything necessarily? No...but it tells me that Jon has a clear objective in going to Dragonstone, he has a very specific goal in mind, and he knows he will have to work to persuade her.

First Meeting / Talk With Tyrion

Jon learns pretty quickly he needs to change tactics. I’ve gone over this before...but I really want to focus on what Jon says ABOUT Daenerys in these interactions...because it’s projected to us, as the audience, that Jon is falling in love with Daenerys and it’s so heavy-handed about telling us this fact that I would imagine his feelings would leak through when speaking with others...

I can’t even cite anything about what Jon says to Tyrion about Daenerys except for one thing (later) because that conversation seems to only set up Jon trying to do some research on the Dragon Queen to figure out how to convince her more effectively.

Davos

Jon’s asked multiple times during the season what he thinks of Dany and each time Jon gives a rather bland answer or chooses not to talk about her in any meaningful way on a personal level.

This is the first occasion. Jon initially doesn’t realize Davos is asking about Daenerys. Maybe you can argue he’s playing coy, but then when Davos really asks him, he says something that basically amounts to “well, she doesn’t seem to be a bad person.” Ok...not much revealed here...

But there clearly ARE things about Daenerys that have already rubbed Jon the wrong way...how do I know this?

Missandei

Jon and Davos happen upon Missandei. Jon prods her a bit about who Daenerys is and what Daenerys believes. Missandei predictably tells Jon how wonderful the Breaker of Chains is and how much she believes in her.

Davos notes how Missandei was “freed” by Daenerys only to serve her in a way that doesn’t differ terribly from her previous state. Missandei grows irritated and says she serves Daenerys because she chooses to serve Daenerys.

Right away alarm bells are going off in Jon’s head. He poses a pretty damning question:

Pretty simple...oh...can you really leave?

“Yes, of course!” claims Missandei.

Jon gives her this incredulous look. “You really believe that?” He asks. Missandei responds “I know it!”

Now as viewers, are we not able to see through exactly why Jon is asking this question. He’s not asking Missandei because he wants to know more about Daenerys...he’s asking to test Missandei and her followers.

How do I know this?

BECAUSE JON JUST POSED HER THE EXACT SITUATION HE FINDS HIMSELF IN AND KNOWS WHAT THE REAL ANSWER WOULD BE IF SHE WAS HONEST ABOUT DAENERYS.

How can anyone take this scene to seriously mean that Jon learns more about Daenerys. My contention is this is Jon’s attempt at learning about the Cult of Personality surrounding Daenerys. This is why I think Jon is learning much more about the people around Daenerys than he is learning about Daenerys.

So Jon doesn’t tell anyone anything particularly meaningful about Daenerys while on Dragonstone. Ok, maybe you could think “well hey he’s guarded while on Dragonstone but by the time he leaves he’s really falling for her” so let’s look at the dialogues AFTER Jon leaves. (Hint: Jon gets more frank and demonstrates a pretty good understanding of what it is Daenerys wants)

Wight Hunt

Jon has a few conversations about Daenerys while on the infamous wight hunt. A few preliminary observations: he doesn’t distinguish Daenerys from Cersei in any meaningful way, he doesn’t initiate Daenerys as a topic any of the times he talks about her, and each time his comments only reflect that he knows her political ambitions and he knows what she wants him to do in order for him to gain her help with the Night King.

This is sort of a funny quote so I’m actually leaving that out because I think it distracts from the real content of the conversation.

1) Jon apparently hadn’t told Tormund that the wight hunt was for CERSEI...just for the two queens. So he didn’t distinguish Daenerys already before the dialogue starts. He still sees Daenerys and Cersei as squabbling children who are complaining that the game isn’t fair. His attitude about their conflict hasn’t changed since 7x03 in his first meeting with Daenerys. Only his approach has changed.

2) This would have been a great time to show Jon saying “well they’re nothing alike!” or “I hate Cersei but it must be done” or “Daenerys will help but we still need Cersei on board”. Instead we get none of that. Jon still knows he’s going on this stupid mission because, primarily, Daenerys isn’t committed to the cause. Why do I conclude that it’s about Daenerys? Because Jon never mentioned ONCE a desire to get Cersei’s support and he never agreed with Daenerys that a ceasefire was particularly important. He only knows that he can’t get Daenerys unless Cersei sees a wight and agrees to a ceasefire.

Again, Tormund starts this exchange by asking a pretty simple question.

“So you met this Dragon Queen....and?”

This continues the pattern of people asking open ended questions to Jon fishing for how he feels about her personally...and again Jon demonstrates a laser-like focus on his overall mission that he needs her to fight with the North and what he needs to do in order to get her to commit to doing that.

I think it’s important that Jon is asks about Daenerys this way: open ended, leaving him ample opportunity to say SOMETHING about personally. Time after time, Jon...just...doesn’t...care.

He is still only viewing Daenerys through the scope of what she can do for him with regard to the war with the Night King.

THIS IS THE SECOND TO LAST EPISODE OF THE SEASON. WE SHOULD BE SEEING SOMETHING FROM JON APPROACHING AFFECTION.

Beric

Later on, we have Jon asserting once again that he serves the North. His entire S7 arc is about serving the North, even if it leads to his scorn, it’s not about Jon falling in love and giving that kingdom away. 

I also enjoy the subtlety of Jon looking over his shoulder before he says he serves the North. Probably doesn’t mean anything narratively, but this isn’t the behavior of guy falling in love.

Maybe this is cheating...but I’m including what Beric says because it’s the first time in a very long time that the viewers got to see Jon connect with another person about his “purpose” since he left for Dragonstone.

How long has Jon been waiting for someone to say something that makes sense to him? Tyrion tells him he’s not a prisoner; he’s just not free to go. Daenerys tells him not to hold her accountable for her father’s crimes but demands he be held to the vows of his great x900 grandfather and also tells him she believes him about the NK so that must mean he should be more than willing to bend the knee. Missandei tells him that she knows Daenerys would let her leave for Naath if she asked for a ship WHILE JON IS BEING HELD PRISONER AND PREVENTED FROM GOING TO HIS SHIP. 

But what Beric says triggers Jon in a positive way. It confirms what we all should know: Jon doesn’t care who sits on the Throne. He just doesn’t. He’s trying to navigate this entire situation so that he can defend his home and his people.

Theon

So Daenerys saves Jon. Now people argue that this is the point that Jon fell in love with Daenerys. I’m going to again argue otherwise because of what I see...

Beric talks about someone sitting the Throne whom he barely knows and not caring about that; Jon tells Daenerys before leaving for the wight hunt that he’s asking her to trust him, a stranger. I think it’s reasonable to say that, given the total lack of any personal exposition given by Jon to Daenerys, given the total lack of positive reaction to being asked questions ABOUT Daenerys by other characters, and given the striking similarity between Jon’s stranger speech and Beric’s quote to Jon, Jon still sees Daenerys as a stranger when she comes to his rescue North of the Wall.

And this is supposed to be the moment Jon falls in love with Daenerys? Wow, if that’s the standard, I guess it’d be really hard for anyone to argue that Jon isn’t already in love with Sansa then, right? Of course that’s not the case. At the point of the wight hunt, Jon still shares no particular warm feelings regarding Daenerys. If the foundation of their love is that she saved him after he didn’t express any fondness to anyone despite weeks (months?) together on Dragonstone, I’m wholly unconvinced.

Which brings us to the scene with Theon. How anyone can see this in any way other than foreshadowing (or even a semi-reveal) of political!Jon is still beyond me. What other narrative purpose for Jon saying “it might LOOK LIKE I’m doing the right thing but I’m REALLY NOT” other than to show that there’s more to this Northern Fool than meets the eye. The same one who suddenly was placed on a pedestal for his apparent incapability to lie.

Folks, Jon is saying there’s more to him under the surface than he’s showing outright.

If this is how Jon Snow acts when he’s in love, then Kit Harrington did the worst job conveying love of any character on a TV show that I can recall seeing. Because I will agree he shows a measure of seduction with Daenerys in his conversations with her through the season. But that simply doesn’t explain his behaviors with other characters.

He acts dopey, honest, and impulsive with Daenerys. He acts laser-focused, driven, and pragmatic with the other characters.

Jon Snow is two different characters in Season 7.

The proof is right there in the show screaming at you.

Shouldn’t this be enough to convince you that political!Jon is possible if not probable???

Aye, maybe that’s enough.

[saintanism-archive]

daaaamn aj, back at it again with the long as fuc headcanons !! anyway hi everyone it’s me this is saint he’s a pretentious fuck & my ( really long, sorry, feel free 2 skip them, there’s a tl;dr summary in my bulletpoints so u can just scroll past it ) headcanons and intro stuff is under the cut !

first headcanon. while most houghton parents are doctors, lawyers, and business executives, saint’s always been something of a horse of a different color. his family certainly isn’t unwealthy—he does, after all, live in one of those multi-million-dollar brownstones in beacon hill auctioned by freaking sotheby’s—but they’re certainly neo riche, which can be sort of hit or miss, depending on who you’re asking. saint is not unlike his parents in that they surround themselves with a kind of off-kilter opulence ( sure, that kind of cash value would have bought them a newly constructed sleek mansion in the suburbs, but why go for something new and modern when you could live in a brownstone with over three hundred years of history that, supposedly, one of the founding fathers lived in? besides, you just can’t beat that location—never mind that the brownstone’s been totally gutted and replaced with sleek, modern interior anyway, and definitely not anything that ben franklin or whoever would have touched ) while pretending to eschew materialism and vanity. why else would they live in boston instead of new york or la, right? anyway. saint is the only son of the one and only cordelia st. mercy ( pronounced, unlike saint’s name, the french way—san merci, which sounds hilariously close to ‘sans merci,’ meaning ‘without mercy,’ a joke that is not lost on saint ), a renowned fashion photographer and portrait artist ( think in the vein of annie liebovitz  and arthur elgort ) with a marked celebrity and high art clientele, and also the one and only son of the less elegantly named garrett wallace ( a pen name; his real name is garrett wallerstedt, but his editor and agent agreed that last names that are difficult to pronounce are harder to sell ), whose grisly but artful novels earned him a national book award in 1997, a film deal in 2001 ( the film was a critical and box office success but, in garrett’s opinion, too reductive of his book; ‘pure snuff’ ), and a professorship in the creative writing program at MIT. yes, that MIT, which yes, does have a creative writing program, and yes, it’s a very good one. SO—that’s the pedigree saint mercy-wallace was born into, and it probably explains a whole lot about him. his parents are not and were never married, so he can’t quite say he’s a child of divorce. instead, he spends the school year with his father while his mother travels all over the world, doing her work, though she comes home for holidays and saint’s birthday, and the summers he spends with his mother, dipping his feet into the world of the new york art scene. it was an unusual arrangement, but not a bad one; it was a long time before saint even understood that his family situation was out of the ordinary, but, like, at least he knew both his parents loved him or whatever. they are both pretty emotionally distant and prone to getting caught up in their own work—his father is always focused on teaching or poring over his latest book or invited to give a talk somewhere, for example—but it’s not a bad situation. they’re just more like friends than parents. as a result, saint grew up with a lot of freedom ( more than most of his houghton peers, whose helicopter parents put the weight of the world on their shoulders ) and little discipline, often left to his own devices and trusted with the ability to take care of himself.

second headcanon: ah, yes. the houghton food chain. it’s easy to say saint sits at the dead bottom. like, he’s not even the bugs that get eaten by the birds or whatever. he’s the plant that gets eaten by the bugs. or the soil nutrients that get consumed by the plants—something like that. but the easy answer isn’t necessarily the correct one, and you see, once upon a time, saint sat somewhere near the top. he was never number one, of course, but he was up there, in that little crew of self-proclaimed high school princes and princesses ( quite literally, what with calling themselves windsors and all ). and he fit quite well, all things considered. what, with his pseudo-celebrity family background and his instagram roll full of selfies with models and musicians and actors and that specifically youthful brand of devil-may-care attitude that bordered at times on cruelty—he was a perfect fit for the windsors, his five-story, oft-empty brownstone the perfect venue for their parties and his unconscious need to belong to some kind of family the perfect host for going along with anything that dante and his ilk said. that’s not to make it sound like he was manipulated into it or anything of the sort—he wasn’t. he and dante were good friends—they were all good friends—and like anyone would, saint relished in the perks that came with sitting at the king’s left hand instead of dancing for his entertainment. he was ( and still is ) always the kind of person who gave off an air of not really caring about anything at all, but that’s especially easy when you want for nothing. his life was impossibly easy. too easy, perhaps—exactly what went down that infamous day when saint fell from his high school pedestal remains a mystery. all anyone really knows is this: it was your typical rager at chateau mercy-wallace. the party was going as saint’s parties typically did, so, pretty well, until saint cut the music and ( red-rimmed and wild-eyed, or stinking of about a hundred cigarettes, or with a bloody nose from too many lines of coke, depending on who’s telling the story—it’s morphed a bit over time ) threw everyone out of his house with no explanation. just a party’s over, fuckwads, get outta my house, and some monologue about the bullshit superficiality of high school, of all of them, about how they were all talking in circles and repeating the same lines over and over, but not even their own lines, lines they’d inherited from generations and generations past. it’s equally up for debate whether saint left the windsors or was kicked out, but there’s something of a general consensus that it was in the muddy lines of both. that went down somewhere towards the middle of the end of his junior year. since then? total social pariah. he left behind the lacrosse and soccer teams, opting instead for chain-smoking under the bleachers and cutting class. he’s a mystery, that saint mercy-wallace.

third headcanon: they were friends until they weren’t. they met in middle school and hit it off pretty easily, these two sons of daedalus who feared not the dangers of flying too close to the sun. they were handsome and charming and confident and gifted and the world opened for them—it made it easy to get along. eleven-year-olds didn’t need much by way of substance to start friendships. if you were to ask saint, looking back on it, after that they remained friends out of habit—because they were in the same place at the same time, because they had similar privilege, because they both felt they could do anything and get away with it, because they had similar luxurious sensibilities. it was ( if you ask saint ) what really bonded all of the windsors together more than any other kind of commonality. but, you know. when you wake up—as saint describes it, a waking up—and you look around and you see all this shit you’ve been brainwashed into thinking matters about anything, and you call out the only flimsy common ground you’ve got. well. you’re not going to be friends anymore, are you? after that, saint didn’t harbor any particular resentment towards dante, but he made no attempts to be friendly, often making snide remarks about the absurdity that was the whole premise of the “windsors” and how maybe they all needed to get outside and look at something other than their phones once in a while. he was still fairly shocked and upset by his death—nobody wants anyone to die, old friend slash new enemy or otherwise—but not enough to make a big thing out of it. saint’s had a pretty hard time feeling much of anything these days.

OK THE TL;DR VERSION:

son of a big hotshot fashion/art/celeb photographer ( cordelia aka cordy st. mercy ) and an acclaimed writer, essayist, novelist, thinker, etc ( garrett wallace, who teaches creative writing at MIT )

lives in a big ol brownstone in boston proper, often left to his own devices

his parents are not married to each other so he usually spends the school year w dad and the summer w mom - pls advise if u want some kind of step sibling or “our parents are dating this is terrible!” connection

used to be a windsor ! he was once (in)famously a member of the elite Inner Circle(TM) until he even more infamously had a giant burnout , threw everyone out of his house during a Classic Saint Rager ( he used to be known for throwing parties ), stopped hanging out w the windsors and has been kinda.....weird ever since

i mean don’t get me wrong he was always a pretentious fuck but he used to be better at keeping it inside and like having fun and talking about silly things now he hates talking about basic high school bullshit

his instagram is full of selfies w models and artists and musicians and actors and he only listens to bands you’ve probably never heard of who are “on the up and up”

and also house music and gregorian chants and weird af shit he’s into, like, industrial noise. anyway..........

prides himself on being very fashion forward and forward thinking in general

BIG MESS

literally never says things that aren’t . ridiculous

examples:

“can’t today my existential dread is acting up”

“i only eat squid ink pasta it’s the most melancholy of pasta”

“i can barely navigate the hellish vortex between breakfast and dinner, let alone the labyrinth of the soccer field” ( said when he quit the soccer & lacrosse teams, which he used to play )

does not give a single fuck about anything ever

chainsmokes like u wouldn’t believe catch him on the bleachers during football practice wearing all black and smoking three cigarettes at once it’s disgusting ( lowkey he thinks it looks cool lol what a loser )

reads pretentious af shit like jd salinger and allen ginsburg and the other beats and thinks he’s so edgy. kill him

skips class.....all the time . . . . but has really good grades ? wild

hates everyone and everything that isn’t Elegant

acts like he’s so above all this high school hierarchy nonsense & too cool for it & blah blah but uh

he’s probably just depressed

maybe still gets invited to parties if people forget for a second that he’s a giant fucking weirdo now? but maybe not

i would Love a ferris bueller to his cameron frye but we’ll see

anyway he’s super hard to plot with but you should plot with me anyway

this has been an intro by aj thanks for coming to my ted talk

[ernmark]

Hi I love all your penumbra metas. In the latest episode I'm still confused by what actually went wrong with the dome, was it the society or the dome that didn't work?

Is this gonna be a thing I do?

I am totally cool with this.

Again, major detailed spoilers for Promised Land under the cut.

And an anon asked:

Thanks for explaining the end of the episode! I’m a little confused about what happened with the dome in the first place. I mean, I know the free dome wasn’t real. And Erin tried to get her son(?) to get it to work and he was a giant dick trying to torture people looking for it. Did Erin set up the dome stuff prematurely? Did it ever exist? Marshall’s son felt really bad and wanted to warn everyone. Where did the hallucination gas fit in? Did Erin and company think they had it but didn’t?

One thing to keep in mind is that we’re deliberately not given the full story, so all we’re left with is bits and pieces that we can glue together to kind of get a vague impression of what happened, but the way I put them together won’t necessarily be the way you put them together. 

So let’s get to it, shall we?

Why was the Free Dome important?

Real estate on Mars is expensive, outside of super low-income neighborhoods like Oldtown, The Boiler, etc. 

This is because 90% of Mars’s surface is uninhabitable. If you want to live somewhere, you better be willing to fork over a ton of cash for a tiny place, or else you’re going to be buddying up with your immediate family/seven of your closest friends/etc. 

JUNO: Mars only has a couple cities and a few desertoutposts cuz the radiation will bake you like a potato if you stay out theremore than a few hours, and Domes can’t be built just anywhere. So if you want anew city, you’ve got to figure out how to build a place to build it. You haveto invent a better Dome.

Life cannot exist underground, because the ambient radiation is just too strong:

PILOT: A lot of space in this subway. I wonder why I neverbuilt anything down here. Some housing or something.

PIRANHA: People lose their marbles if they live under Martianground too long. Radiation burns, Brainswell…

STRONG: You know whatbeing under all this radioactive sand too long does to you? Drives you crazy.Makes you see things.

This is likely why the subway has been closed off everywhere except Oldtown– most likely it wasn’t safe for the people working there, or for the people using it for transit.

Oldtown was the only part of Hyperion City that still had a connection to the Old Subway, behind a boarded-up door in a nondescript office building. (Stolen City)

This is probably also why the only thing that lives in the sewer are giant mutant rabbits. 

Notably, though, both the subway and the sewer system are in fairly good repair because they’re both under Hyperion City and its protective dome. The same doesn’t hold true for structures built outside of that protection:

People hadbuilt things down here, signs and lights and tracks, but the radiation hadclearly done damage even this deep below the surface. Fixtures corroded. Trackslike time had taken a blowtorch to them.

Even the existing domes are fragile. We know that Hyperion City’s has some places that are protected better than others.

RITA: Well… sounds like a pretty bad sandstorm is gonna hit this afternoon. You’ll probably want to be out of Oldtown by then; the shield over there’s about as strong as used tissues. They went into lockdown three times just last month. (Day That Wouldn’t Die)

Our Man-Who-Wasn’t picked a good neighborhood to set up shop in: the Old Industrial District, a place blasted by sandstorms and cosmic rays so hard that not even the roaches would live there anymore. The shields protecting the rest of Hyperion didn’t reach this far, and so neither would most of its citizens. It was the perfect place to do bad business – so long as you didn’t mind a tumor or two. (Prince of Mars)

That’s important: You can’t build domes just anywhere, and the domes that do exist have to be heavily shielded from sandstorms and cosmic rays. 

If you can solve those two problems, then you can build a dome wherever you want, you can build as many of them as you want, and all the unclaimed land on Mars is effectively yours for the taking– and that means that you now have the power to decide who gets to live there and who doesn’t. Do you give affordable housing to anyone who wants it, like Erin Marshall D’Arc? Or do you do like Pilot wanted, and make the hyper-wealthy pay top dollar so they can have their own personal golf course? Either way, that’s an incredible amount of power.

The Family D’Arc

So we have three main characters in this story: Erin, the scientist; Marshall, her son; and his kid, Domer 3 (they’re never given a name, but that’s what the script calls them).

We started in a reception hall that didn’t lookprepared to receive anybody. There were portrait frames on the walls, but mostof them were empty, and the ones that weren’t just showed family photos. A momand her son –- the D’Arcs, probably. The kid all grown up, moody, wild-eyed.The only full portrait in the room had the face scratched out – and theydidn’t look like Erin or Marshall. 

Erin was a military scientist who thought she had a solid technology on her hands, and believed in it enough to run away with a group of other believers. Erin was an optimist who seemed to genuinely believe in her Utopian dream.

After her death, her son Marshall took over leadership of the dome.

MARSHALL: Cuz Ma might’ve had allthat crap about everyone being her neighbor or whatever, but guess what? She’sdead.

The character descriptions in the script talk about how Marshall was a believer who wanted desperately to be good enough, but neither he nor the Free Dome ever lived up to expectations, and that broke him.

But all of that is background information. From what we see in the episode itself, Marshall was… not a nice person. His tests were murderous, sadistic, and full of gaslighting and victim-blaming, and the way he addressed his prospective “neighbors” was nothing short of abusive. 

So you’reprobably wondering why I stopped you out in these irradiated badlands, with allthe oogidies and the boogidies waiting to getcha. I’ve got three answers forthat. Answer one: it’s none of your business. Two: my testing materials havegot to last a long time, forever probably, and it’ll help wear-and-tear if lessof you make it to them. Three: it’s still none of your goddamn business.

“Anyone whowishes to enter the Free Dome must be generous, and give more of themselvesthan they can afford. So sit upon this Chair of Charity and give to us… fromyour blood.”

Congratulations.You’re a very generous idiot. Here’s the Dome… and here’s your blood back,weirdo. Just do me afavor: if you feel like you’re gonna bite the big one, show yourself out,alright? We’re already behind schedule without cleaning up your carcass.Marshall out.

That’s it!Easy, right? Just hold the Dome and walk straight. No matter what. You hear me?No matter what. (AN UNDERCURRENTOF DARK, DARK ANGER) And if youknow what’s good for you, you’ll listen.

That’s way beyond unreasonable. But it wasn’t just toward the test-takers. His kid flat out tells us that this was regular behavior for him.

Dad was a good guy, too. I mean… well, no hewasn’t. 

I never met her, but Dad… Dad wasn’t good beforethe radiation either.

(Notably, this is the same kind of language that Juno uses to describe his own mother.)

We don’t know Domer 3′s name, but we know that they lived outside of the dome with Marshall long enough to know him (and his abuse) before the radiation made him worse; we also know that Erin didn’t live to meet her grandchild. 

After Marshall presumably died, Domer 3 seems to be the last person here. They recorded warning messages to keep everybody away, and encoded a kill switch into the final recording so that once it was activated, nobody could enter the Free Dome again.

There is a fourth character here, but we only know them incidentally. I don’t know whether they were Marshall’s ex-partner or his co-leader, but Marshall really did not like this person:

MARSHALL: … a test tosee how generous you are. You want in you gotta have a sense of charity. Notlike that weasel Malvin, I swear ifyou’re listening to this, Mal, I’m gonna tear your—

Alright, fine.Test of Faith. You’ve got to do whatever I say exactly, right? That’s how youprove you can be faithful. That you’re going to listen when I tell you to dosomething. That you’re not just going to run out. Malvin.

I suspect Malvin is not Domer 3, because otherwise Domer 3 would have been given a name in the script. Also because Malvin clearly left on their own terms, whereas Domer 3 was clearly the last one there.

So what went wrong?

As near as I can put it together, there were two main problems, one structural and one societal.

Structurally, the dome tech just didn’t work.

I’m sure it did in the short term– after all, the dome sample that Pilot received was powerful enough to protect them from most of the dangers of the third trial, and it was stated to be a much less powerful version of the real thing. 

I genuinely believe that Erin set up her city on the other side of those doors in the end. But what worked in a lab setting just couldn’t hold up to the brute force of sandstorms and constant cosmic radiation. As soon as the dome failed, everybody had to rush back into the relative safety of the underground areas on the other side of the door. The ruins of the city were likely warped by radiation and ground up by sandstorms until they were reduced to nothing at all.

Underground, Erin kept trying to fix the dome tech, and then brought in her son to give it a go. Both of them failed.

I wish they made it. I wish it was possible. Erin, I think she really thought, even if she couldn’t do it… maybe Dad could. She believed in him so much. And when he realized he couldn’t make it work, he just… (BIG SIGH) It was bad. He was… bad.

They were underground in the facility long enough that they started to hallucinate death millipedes, undercrows, and from the sound of it, the functioning dome itself:

I don’t know how it happened. The undergroundradiation, maybe, making them see things, or… maybe they just wanted to see it. 

What exactly happened to them isn’t elaborated upon, but the implication is that they assumed that the tech worked and walked into the desert unprotected, which killed them within a few hours.

(Just to clarify: there was never any hallucinatory gas; the hallucinations were a result of the brainswell, which was in turn a result of the underground radiation.)

But there were some societal issues at play, too.

I’m gonna step back for a second into the real world: historically, there have been a handful of experimental Utopian colonies over the years, with varying degrees of success. A common thread, though, is that a lot of them tend to fall apart when people stop dividing things evenly and start hoarding and hiding an unfair share of the goods for themselves (among other things). The test of charity suggests that this is one of the things that went down here. Once again:

MARSHALL: … a test to see how generous you are. You want in you gotta have a sense of charity. Not like that weasel Malvin, I swear if you’re listening to this, Mal, I’m gonna tear your—

But it’s not the only thing that went wrong. 

Erin’s answer to a galaxy-ending conflict wasn’t to address any of the existing problems that broke the world, but to just pack up and move somewhere else.  Which is not that great of a strategy.

Your wholething is that the world’s a train wreck, so you open up a new city and just letanybody who wants walk in? That’s not anew world. That’s not a utopia. That’s the old one all over again. Justsmaller.

Erin’s strategy was apparently to please everybody, which is also not a great leadership strategy, especially in a small place with limited resources. Marshall had a lot of things to say about that, but he wasn’t much better. Apart from being seriously abusive, Marshall wasn’t the kind of leader that could command respect, which he clearly resented. 

… what isthis, second? Uh, Test of Faith, how about that? Listen to whatever I say.Somebody’s got to. Somebody should.

Hey, you listened. Nice work. If you’re alive. Which you probably aren’t. Because you probably didn’t listen. Nobody does. Why would you? Why would anybody? 

On a societal level, the Free Dome was doomed to fail even before the brainswell started making people hallucinate and taking away their ability to think rationally.

From the sound of it, people stopped listening to the D’Arcs, they started hoarding things, and then they started leaving or dying, until the only ones left were Marshall and his kid. And then it was just Domer 3, who shut down the whole thing and walked away.

[rxbxlcaptain]

RxbxlCaptain’s Official Rebel Rising Review:

Since this novel was released in May, I had heard plenty of opinions -- mainly negative -- about it, so I decided to check it out for myself. I’ll be completely honest: I came into the book bracing myself against a novel that would completely ruin Jyn’s characterization and the urge to throw the book against the wall. Maybe because I came in which such horrible expectations -- Well, I didn’t hate it. 

Of course, of the three Rogue One-related novels I’ve read now (Rogue One Novelization by Alexander Freed, Catalyst by James Luceno, and Rebel Rising by Beth Revis), I would say that it’s my least favorite. There were some redeeming factors, some Imperials that were actually kind of intriguing, some moments that made me go “I’m sorry, are we talking about the same Jyn Erso?” and some moments that made me go “That’s my girl!” So if you’re interested in hearing some very spoiler-y opinions of the novel, click below the cut:

My first issue with the book: It’s genre

The decided to write a book about Jyn Erso -- a woman I’d understood to have been raised as a child soldier -- as a young adult novel. Now, I have nothing against the YA genre, there’s plenty of amazing things within that genre, but... I’m questioning if it was right for this. 

This leads to a significantly less violent childhood than I thought Rogue One (either the movie or the novelization) implied. Jyn doesn’t go on missions with Saw Gerrera until she’s well into her teenage years, and most of those involve coding and not actual fighting. Most of Jyn’s time with Saw is spent on Wrea, the planet where Saw’s base for the Partisans is located, learning coding and splicing. She doesn’t even stay in barracks with the other Partisans but instead has a private room to herself. No one’s gunna all favoritism on that one, Saw. But, really, the first time in the novel when Jyn shares a room with someone is when she’s in prison, which just feels... weird to me?

Another thing I have against a YA novels: There always seems to be a forced romance and this one is no exception. I’ll go into more details below, but I do, at least in part, attribute this aspect of the plot back to the fact that it’s a YA novel. 

But that’s a little bit broad, so let’s narrow it down into a few more things that I did/didn’t like:

Saw Gerrera:

Read all this with the disclaimer that I have not watched Clone Wars and so my knowledge of Saw outside of Rogue One is limited to Wookieepedia and what I was told in this novel!

We all know where this book picks up: Lyra Erso has just been murdered and Galen captured up the Imperials, leaving Jyn all alone waiting for -- someone. That someone turns out to be Saw Gerrera, who Jyn has met once before: when Gerrera offered to smuggle the Ersos off Coruscant and find a homestead for them on Lah’mu. Because of this, she trusts him already.

Saw refers to Jyn as “Kid” and “Darling” a lot of the time which is such a minor detail but it feels so... weird to me. (I can really only read “Kid” in Han Solo’s voice). And it’s just a small part of Saw’s dialogue that just feels way too out of character for him, things that I can never picture Forest Whitaker saying in general. 

Adorable detail: Saw takes to referring to Jyn as his daughter throughout her time there. In fact, most of the Partisans take to calling Jyn “Jyn Gerrera” since the word “Erso” is never to be mentioned in context of Jyn, per Saw’s orders. (And, for good reason, which the characters learn the hard way later on)

Saw’s number one misstep, in my mind at least, was when he finds Galen Erso, realizes he’s cooperating with the Imperials now and promptly tells Jyn that Galen has, essentially abandoned her and she should think nothing of him again while I continue to spend most of my time attempting to discover what he’s doing

Which could lead to some reeeeally fun meta about how Jyn’s feeling about Galen during Rogue One

My anger of this is, of course, rooted in the fact that I really love Galen Erso and I cry every time I picture him working on the Death Star when he really just misses his girls and wishes they were safe and happy so it probably doesn’t make other people as angry. 

So Saw’s running his little side of the rebellion, which has a strange focus on what Galen Erso is going for the Empire (Saw refers to his as their “normal mission”), but don’t worry -- he’s not opposed to blowing the occasional Imperial gathering or stealing their supply shipments or causing general chaos within their ranks. 

Once, against orders, Jyn followed Saw into an Imperial celebration on a planet they’d recently conquered, only to find Saw blowing up the entire thing -- both the reps from the Empire and the natives of the planet -- which Jyn knows she is not okay with. 

He also has some super sketchy mottoes about fighting -- “If we used the same tactics the Empire does and brought about the same kind of fear, we’d control the people and give them the peace you are so anxious to have” and “What we fail to protect, we leave in ruins” for example-- that aren’t out of character with what we see of his tactics in Rogue One but more an explanation of why his methods were wrong.

As implied in Rogue One, the Alliance doesn’t appreciate that. However, different than I pictured in Rogue One, Saw is never a formal part of the Alliance. Idryssa Barruck seems to be the only connection back to the Alliance since, after years of working with Gerrera, she decided to join the more organized forces.

Jyn will meet another member of the Alliance later on, once she’s on Tamsye Prime and the Alliance is trying to recruit her boyfriend as a pilot (more on that later)

After Saw abandons Jyn (which I’ll talk about in the next section), he still send a spy to follow her around the planet she’s settled on to make sure she’s doing okay. Which -- I don’t know, not necessarily out of character, but definitely a dick move. Saw, either you care enough about the girl to keep her with you, or you let her live her life. One or the other, bro, not some weird grey zone in between. 

Saw’s abandonment of Jyn:

If you’re talking about Saw, you’ve got to mention the “big event.”

Saw’s abandonment was... Literally nothing like a pictured. Nothing. Not at all. 

Saw appears to make a snap decision to leave Jyn in the middle of a very active war zone with literally no way to get off the planet. And what seemed even more out of character to me was that Jyn guessed Saw was leaving her behind -- and she still trotted off to the bunker and let him leave her there. (See, Draven, the reason why she doesn’t follow orders is because following them normally gets her bad things)

A quick summary of the operation that leads to this: Jyn and Saw were in charge of recon of a planet, had sneaked in under the guise of being a propaganda work crew, filming the laborers of the planet to make the Empire look good. What they didn’t know was Reece Tallent, a man salty at Saw Gerrera for a whole host of reasons and who suspected who Jyn really was (and really wanted the financial benefits of turning these two in), had set this whole thing up with the Imperials. This leads to an Imperial air attack, hoping to kill Saw and Jyn. 

In the midst of the battle, Saw (who was dangerously close to bleeding out at the time) tells Jyn “Hey, go hide in the bunker over there and I’ll totally come back to this planet that will be totally destroyed in two hours to get you!” to which Jyn is like “That sounds really sketchy and you’re totally going to leave me here, but okay!”

Legitimate dialogue from this novel

Jyn manages to get off planet by stealing a ship with one of the workers on the planet. They sell the ship, split the money 50/50 and never see each other again. She then finds a woman looking for someone to repair her astromech (”I can do that!” Jyn lied, seeing how she’d never repaired a droid before in her life) and hops a ride off planet with her. Halfway through, however, Jyn forges some documents for the woman -- whose name is Akshaya Ponta -- and, in thanks for helping her avoid fines, she invites Jyn to stay with her. 

Turns out Jyn reminds this woman of her dead daughter and she develops a super maternal protectiveness over Jyn (which Jyn finds both really nice and really smothering, considering, you know, her mother died when she was seven.)

So Jyn moves in with this woman, doing some occasional splicing/forgery for her, but mainly she has a lot of free time which gives her time to explore my next topic... 

The Romance:

I believe it’s no secret that I personally believe that Jyn Erso belongs with Cassian Andor for the rest of forever. (Guys, look around at the blog. Forget that -- look at its name)

That being said, I tried to keep an open mind with this romance. 

Hadder Ponta, the boy in question (his mom is the one who took Jyn in, so they’re kinda living together?), was... fine. There was nothing wrong with him. And I don’t really have a problem with the idea of him and Jyn -- she was sixteen and had just been abandoned by Saw and he and his mother has been incredibly kind to her and he was nice (guys, he took her on real dates and bought her food and everything) and safe so I can’t really blame her for diving headfirst into a little romance -- but, as I mentioned before, it felt a little too much like a stereotypical YA romance 

Fun fact about this kid: he ends up speaking to an Alliance recruiter about joining up at one point. He claims it’s because he wants to fly, but he’s also pretty certain that it’ll impress Jyn. (What doesn’t impress Jyn is the fact that the recruiter ends up being someone she knew from the Partisans and accidentally reveals more of her past to the kid than she was intending)

Their romance was a lot of “Hey, we’re about the same age! And you’re a girl and I’m a guy so therefore we’re in love, right?”

Basically, not my favorite kind of romance. (They got along but they didn’t really have chemistry)

But no worries about Hadder coming back -- he and his mother were both killed while attempting to escape the planet and they got trapped in a dogfight between Imperial and Rebellion forces. 

However that leads to a whole new host of problems: Jyn keeps thinking about him for an awfully long time. Really, it’s implied she still thinks of Hadder and Akshaya Ponta when she gets her first glimpse of Cassian as the events of Rebel Rising clashes into the beginning of Rogue One. 

I contribute it less to her feelings being strong enough to last the years and more to guilt. It was, in Jyn’s mind, her fault that Hadder and Akshaya ever died: if she hadn’t come to live with them, the Empire never would have come knocking on their door in the middle of the night and they wouldn’t have died in a fiery explosion. It does feed into Jyn’s resistance to becoming close to anyone ever again, that fear of hurting everyone she befriends, which could actually make great meta about Jyn’s behavior during the canon events of Rogue One. 

Now, speaking of the Pontas, does that name sound familiar to you? It should!

Jyn Erso’s alias’s:

We end up seeing all of Jyn’s canon aliases throughout Rebel Rising which is, in a way, both really cool and kinda disappointing. Here’s what we learn about them...

Kestrel Dawn: Jyn dawns this one (haha, see what I did there? Shut up, I’m funny) while she’s still with Saw. In fact, she’s using this alias on the day that Saw abandons her. She ends up keeping “Dawn” for a last name (obviously “Erso” has proved to be a dangerous last name to have) but returns to “Jyn” by the time she meets the Pontas. 

Tanith Ponta: See, I told you their last name would be important. Remember Akshaya’s daughter that I mentioned? Turns out her name was Tanith. When Jyn escaped off Skuhl (the Ponta’s home planet), she saw the ship Akshaya and Hadder were in crash, but out of some irrational bit of hope (see, Cassian, she does know what hope is) she tells the intergalactic customs agents that her name was Tanith Ponta in the hopes that if Akshaya and Hadder arrived, they would be able to find her.

Liana Hallik: The last alias we’re given in Rogue One (turns out the Alliance missed a few others like Lyra Rallik and Nari McVee, both references to earlier parts of Jyn’s life, being her mother and a droid the Ersos owned on Coruscant) doesn’t appear until late in the novel, when Jyn is bouncing from planet to planet simply surviving. It’s not even the alias she’s using when the Imperial arrest her, but rather the new scandocs she had just completed that the Imperials believed to be her real identity. 

My favorite Jyn Erso details:

She’s smart. Saw, in the very beginning when he had no idea what to do with a child, handed her a code machine one day to allow her to play with it. Well, she did really well -- so well, in fact, that she became the main supply of forgery throughout the Partisans. If you needed a flight manifest or Imperial orders to get you through a blockade or a fake identity for Saw’s next mission: you went to Jyn and she’d fix you up. (She continues to use this skill to her advantage for the rest of the novel)

We get to see her first use of truncheons! That detail is so tiny I should not be excited by it but she was using them for the first time and I just went “Those will be very important in the future!” because I am a nerd and the scene where she uses them in Jedha City was the first moment I admitted I was completely in love with this woman. 

She’s a good person. Like we’ve seen in Forces of Destiny and saving the tooka cat and in the movie itself when she’d run into the line of fire to save a child, Jyn risks her own freedom, and likely her own life, to set a group of female slaves and their children free from a smuggler. She literally overthrows an entire crew by drugging them (note: if you’ve made sexist remarks to get a woman to cook you dinner for an entire journey, she just may respond by poisoning you) and tells the slaves they’re free and gives them control of the ship, only wanting enough to make sure she can get off the next planet. 

She’s knows how to survive, no matter if it’s off credits a day or from people attempting to blackmail her. She survives the a crippling doubt in the faith her mother raised her on in prison and the endless crushing blows of being orphaned again and again. In a way, you can see her grow to become the Jyn Erso we met in Rogue One... It’s just that her background is a little different than I expected. 

IN CONCLUSION:

It was... fine. 

Not what I pictured inside my head of what Jyn’s upbringing was like (I hesitate to say it portrays her as too sheltered, because she is still being raised in the midst of a war, but it’s a hell of a lot more sheltered than what I originally pictured when I thought of Jyn’s childhood)

The romance feels kinda forced and I think some parts are a little OOC but I didn’t hate it as much as I was expecting

If the book happens to land in your lap, it’s a quick and easy read but I wouldn’t suggest going out of your way to find it. 

Now that I’ve gone on a long and rambling rant about Rebel Rising (leaving out a lot of details I’m certain I should talk about, like Jyn’s perception of her parents throughout the novel which I super fangirled over) I’d love to hear what anyone else who’s read the novel has thought about it! Feel free to drop by my inbox and discuss!

[senseandaccountability]

FIC: The light that shrivels a mountain, chapter 1

Pairing: eventually a slow burn Sara Ryder/Harry Carlyle story Summary:  They will need new terms for everything now, a whole new vocabulary for their existence. Sara Ryder and Harry Carlyle try to get their bearings in a new galaxy as they find themselves closer to each other than they ever expected. Read at AO3 or under the cut

Prologue: One for the ages The neon outline of the Silversun Strip almost rivals the lights inside the vast flat where the Milky Way’s best and brightest are hobnobbing tonight. It’s an impressive display put on by - among others - a handful of renowned scientists, eccentric billionaires and a few figureheads like N7 legend Alec Ryder. Big and pompous but somehow still somber enough, just the way these things are supposed to be. And Harry Carlyle isn’t a detective but even so he can spot the trail of Something Else going on behind these carefully constructed facades. Harry once knew Ryder’s wife Ellen but that seems like ages ago now, in another world entirely. She had been a Harlow then and sat beside him during lectures; her mind had been a maze of cleverness and creativity and he had felt inferior to her on several occasions - inferior and impressed because he likes to pride himself in always being able to appreciate brilliance. Now it all feels like a closed chapter. A remnant from when the galaxy had felt fresh and untraveled and people weren’t in all seriousness plotting their escape from it. “Surely there are ethical ramifications-” an elderly man - chief engineer Adams, stationed at SSV Sparta - points out but are cut off by a younger man, one of Harry’s former students. Brenner, he recalls. Morgan Brenner, with ambitions twice as high as his IQ. “That’s always been said for new discoveries!” he blurts now. “The relays, FTL, even spaceships!” “You make careful consideration sound outdated,” Jien Garson says from a few feet away. Her voice is cool, deep; when she motions herself towards them everyone watches. “But last time I checked we still live in a society that favour evidence based theories over speculation.” Harry stifles a sigh. It’s not that the concept itself - an evening of debate and speculation about everyone’s personal obsessions -  is boring, because it’s not. It’s actually mostly the individuals present that are dull. Everyone here is so imbued with greatness, wrapped in an air of arrogant successes and with such an abundance of means that it leaves them with nothing interesting to speak of. It’s an existence without friction, without resistance and it washes away everything besides these smooth, polished surfaces that rivals the facades of the buildings outside. These are men and women of the future; most of them are already halfway there, living through future glory in their own minds. The Andromeda Initiative promises to stroke the egos of the already grandiose personas of their galaxy - he has yet to learn anything about it that is aimed at the less fortunate. There are things that could tempt him when it comes to leaving the Milky Way behind, he’s not going to lie to himself about that. Things, reasons, motivations. One of the major ones is the dead-end of science as they know it. The human mind - the human sight - is ultimately a failed one, clouded by history or regret or faith. Not necessarily a spiritual faith either, which he can at least understand the outlines of, but a conservative faith in old science and outdated doctrines, as though hundreds of years of intergalactic collaborations haven’t altered their arts entirely. That kind of backwards thinking is the one extreme in medicine. The other is represented by individuals such as Alec Ryder himself and that perspective sees no limits to anyone’s reach or claim. If you can, you must. Harry can’t fall in line behind that way of reasoning either, can’t abandon that lingering sense of what’s right and wrong or what ought to be right by all sensible standards. Or wrong. Goodness knows it’s mostly when it goes badly one needs those guidelines in the first place.   He swallows a mouthful of wine. Networking has never been his favorite pastime but even if it had, this is an extreme case of it and only irritation and frustration with current events at Huerta Memorial has brought him here. Looking around this room he can spot at least four or five doctors and scientists with - he suspects, but he was always an excellent guesser - the same set of motivations. With recent discoveries and breakthroughs after the Geth invasion, Harry and his colleagues had somehow assumed their work would follow in line, open up to new schools of thought, but instead they had met heavy resistance among medical bureaucrats and human diplomats alike. Never before has it been made so abundantly clear to him that he has reached a dead end in his research. Ten years ago when he had been climbing up the apex of his career and hosted several seminars at the Citadel, he would never have imagined signing up for something that will, in every way, strip him of all his connections and reputation and spit him out on a remote colony somewhere. A lifetime of hard, dedicated medical work ending on a brave new world. “There will likely be another war here,” Adams says. “Our resources-” “Our resources?” No, Harry thinks. The centuries-old ideal of humanity as a collective certainly seems to have lost impact. “The Initiative is not unmoved by the plight of the Milky Way.” “That’s what you’d like me to believe, isn’t it?” Garson gives a little laugh that sounds sharp against the people in the crowd. “We would hardly invest our time and credits into this project if we wished for anything but prosperity for generations to come.” Adams shakes his head. “Prosperity as a measurement of success, now that is outdated.” Touché, old man. The conversation fades out and becomes soaked up in the noise of the large room and Harry turns away slightly, marking his disinterest as subtly as he possibly can. Which isn’t subtle at all. There’s something about these gatherings that strips him to the bare bones, as if the formal wear only ever serves as a reminder that he still isn’t assimilated enough for the bored exhaustion not to get to him. A simple upbringing is such a cliche but still true for many of them even up here, in the fancy apartments at the Citadel. Not that they’re on top of the hierarchy, far from it, but high enough for it to be a place where people want to spend several hours. At least the drinks are nice and strong and the food is well-suited to its purpose. Removing himself even further from the discussion, he spots a woman standing by the large panorama window; she’s alone and holds a beer bottle in on hand as she tampers a bit with her omni-tool. Oblivious to everyone else or acutely aware, he can’t say from a distance and somehow he’s intrigued enough to want to know. Around him he can hear low voices talk about black-ops, about the N7 program, about Commander Shepard and the Council; there are a large group of medical professionals too and they mainly discuss recent discoveries in xenomedicine and restrains infringed on them. Once, he met his wife at a party not too unlike this one. Wedged in between rambling old scholars and over-eager military strategists fresh out of some SpecForces program, he had spotted her: short, pink-haired, overdressed and striking in all her awkwardness. Judith Krinth, about to become one of the most prominent sociologist of the century and embark on a splendid career in the intergalactic paralegal community. Back then she hadn’t been famous for those things, of course. Back then she had just been a very clever, obscenely funny girl and Harry had fallen in love with her after one drink together. One drink and then twenty years of them. Their marriage - like so many of the marriages in their circle of friends, a quiet little epidemic - ended in a divorce but while it lasted it had continually amazed him.

He had really wanted kids, to start a family; she had really not. It’s far from the only reason but it had been the start of a waning in their marriage that they never properly managed to recover from. So many ups and downs in fifteen years and somehow they usually ended up in bed, or at a restaurant, laughing at something together. Elasticity, someone had called it once. The measurement for healthy relationships: how far you can leap in either direction and still be returned to the heart of it all. But this had been something from which they hadn’t bounced back. Some days he mourns her like he mourns the dead. Tonight, there’s no pink-haired sociologist in the crowd but there’s a woman inspecting him from a few meters away. Pretty, he thinks to himself as he crosses the floor and approaches. But likely too young. For what, Harry? “Sara.” She extends her hand; he takes it. A trace of something crosses her face as their eyes meet. “Hello, Sara. My name is Harry Carlyle.” There’s a certain look at the bottom of her gaze, he finds, a certain edge to her entire being that tells him she’s the kind of person it will turn out to be nearly impossible to establish a personal history for. A wild sort of trait, a lack of confinements that runs deep. It’s appealing and - when he encounters this among his patients - slightly infuriating. “What kind of famous and important fool are you, then?” He feels the corners of his mouth twitch at her bluntness. She really is young, no doubt about it; it’s a young person’s bravado hammering behind every word and there are days when he misses this in himself, other days when he wonders if he ever had it or if he was always intent on success and accomplishment. “I’m a medic,” he offers. “Trained surgeon. Specialized in neurosurgery.” Once, among different people, that used to be impressive. Did it now? Really? These days he doesn’t expect it to awake any kind of reaction besides the one this Sara is giving him now: a brief nod. “And you?” he asks instead, trying to come up with a qualified guess in his head. Not old enough to be anything that demands the kind of extensive education that gets you invited to these gatherings - he sees no other students here, at least - and too sharp to be nothing but a security guard in civilian clothing. “Family.” Her gaze travels over the room until it rests at a young man standing beside Alec Ryder. A young man with a striking resemblance to her own features. Of course, he reminds himself. The Ryder twins. There’s an extensive medical file on her somewhere, even. The biotic twin from Ellen Ryder’s much-chronicled pregnancy. “Ah,” he says. “You know my dad?” “That would be an exaggeration.” Harry tries to summon his most recent memory involving the man in question but fails. Their paths very rarely cross and he can’t say he’s mourning the fact. Lately, word on the street is that Ryder is on the verge of making himself a pariah in more organisations than one, keeping up his stubborn and illegal research like a man possessed. In addition to his already arrogant personality, it's definitely not a winning concept. “We’re acquaintances, at best.” A little smile tugging at her mouth. “That’s pretty much how I feel about him, too.” He wonders if that’s the truth or a comment made in order to sound like something she isn’t, something she’d rather be. Once he might have claimed the same things about his family, the strangely distant mother and the father he barely saw more than occasionally at birthday dinners and holidays. We are shaped by our early years, someone he used to work with echoes in his head and Harry wonders if that is still true, in this age of space and beyond. Maybe it never was, maybe it is now more than ever. “I suppose he’s a man who works hard,” Harry says, steering carefully along the neutral road of this conversation. “You could say that.” She smiles properly now and whatever hard traces he had spotted in her face before have completely vanished. It’s just youth, he thinks. Youth and some disappointment, most likely. Maybe sadness. There are rumors about Ellen Ryder floating about, rumors regarding her health and Harry finds himself wishing they are false, for this girl’s sake if nothing else.   There’s something about her. Something genuine, something misplaced among these people here tonight, maybe in this entire context. Harry himself can’t even begin to fathom all the hidden agendas behind the fancy words of Garson and her ilk, doesn’t even want to start deciphering it because there’s a pull in there, too, an allure in falling for their golden worlds and new frontiers. And there’s something about her that tells him she feels the same way. Or maybe she’s just young enough to still be a full-blood cynic, gods know he was at her age. Either way, she’s got a presence, a slow, steady kind of gravitas. Her dark eyes follows him, he has a sense of her even when he can tell she's watching something else. As though she leaves an imprint in the room. Decades ago Harry knows some people would have suggested it's a result of the biotic energy but common sense and science have dispersed that kind of nonsense – at least most of it, most of the time.

The reality is just that Sara Ryder is Ellen and Alec's daughter and has inherited a streak of intelligent charisma – hers – and a dominant sort of personality – his – and Harry is getting pretty damn drunk to be standing here, waxing lyrical about this kid in the first place.

Now she looks at him again, eyebrows slightly arched. “What?” “Nothing,” he says, offering a half-apologetic smile before looking out over the room again. “Quite a crowd tonight.” “Dad’s been even more obsessed with his research lately. And with this.” She makes a sweeping gesture. “What do you know about the Initiative?” Harry thinks while he sips his wine; there’s a dull headache forming around his temples, like a persistent little reminder to get more sleep. “Not much.” “Yeah.” She checks something on her wrist, possibly the time, but this entire setup reminds him of cheesy old vids and her behavior would belong to a spy in one of those, hired by someone high up in the ranks and programmed to report any Doubter to the powers that be. He nearly smiles. “I don’t, either. Scott, my brother, keeps trying to find out all sorts of things but there’s not much there.”   “Or what’s there is very protected, perhaps.” She nods. “Will you join them?” Them, he thinks, but doesn’t say. He’d have assumed Alec Ryder would make sure his family was on board with the plans before taking them further, but maybe he assumes they are. Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe this is part of his elaborate exile from every unpleasant current situation he’s ensnared in. Maybe this entire thing is so damn full of complications and complexities that Harry will never be able to wrap his head around them all.   “I’m open to the idea,” he concludes after some consideration. It nearly surprises him to hear his own words, at least until he recalls his latest research project and the quest for funding. “Maybe we’ll be sharing an ark in the near future.” Sara flashes him a quick grin. In the corner of his eye he observes a trio of men his age deeply engaged in a conversation. One of them he identifies as Oleg Petrovsky, a man most people have considered long lost to dark ops and fringe groups. There’s a fleeting unrest at the idea of that kind of mark being left on this expedition, but then again why wouldn’t it be? Wherever they go they’ll carry the Milky Way with them.   “No battleplan ever survives contact with the enemy,” he overhears Petrovsky say and then one of the other men makes a disdainful noise. “We’re not planning for war, Petrovsky.” Petrovsky laughs, a quick, hard laugh laced with a lifetime of battle experience. “You should.” Harry lets a mouthful of wine be his focus for a second, pretending to enjoy the taste the way he did back when Judith would drag him with her to assorted wine tastings at the Citadel. He had never achieved the manners of someone as refined as this ideal husband his ex-wife sometimes seemed to search for, but he had at least tried. That counts for something. “You’re going then?” he asks, turning his attention back to Alec Ryder’s daughter. She nods. “Probably. Yeah. Need to make sure Scott doesn’t get himself into trouble.” At every party there are moments where the setting changes, the tone alters and the crowds morph slightly - sometimes not at all - into something barely different. A quiet gathering turns into drunk people looking to dance, a dinner party with sober intellectuals end up as a riveting chamber play and a discussion that originated as a feud transforms into actual, fair debate. Tonight, he feels, he can either remain a cautious bystander or he can finish his wine, get the two of them another set of drinks and they can continue their conversation. He’d actually very much enjoy that and the varied reasons why aren’t something he needs to delve into - not right here and not right now. He’s just about to make this suggestion to Sara when he sees they have company - her brother, by the look of things, seemingly eager to drag her away. She shoots Harry a glance - lingering, but only for a fraction of a second - before smiling. A polite smile this time. What did you expect? “See you later, Harry Carlyle,” she says. And he’s left standing by the staggering view of the Citadel by night, hoping he’ll feel certain of whatever decision for his future he’s about to make.

[neverfcrgottenarchived]

  RUFFNUT ON ASTRID ( and sort of tuff ) AND HERSELF

note: admittedly, i may have derailed myself a few times writing this so if it seems jumpy, the answer is because it is.

i’m putting these topics together because a lot of how ruff views astrid ( and sort of tuff ) ends up playing into how she views herself.  and i just have this complete and utter fascination with ruff and astrid’s relationship, and i h a t e that it’s never really explored.  as the only two girls in the group, and as the only two teenaged girls on berk, there’s kind of a lot currently riding on their shoulders with the change in how dragons are treated and the island runs and everything.

but don’t even get me started on ruff just becoming fishlegs and snotlout’s object of affections and her and eret, that whole thing irks me and i have very low expectations for what they’ll do with her in h.ttyd 3.

the easiest place to start is with the obvious.  astrid is the popular one.  astrid is the one everyone expects things from.  astrid is the strongest, most talented, prettiest, smartest, etc. etc. ( and the implications of the stress this might place upon astrid is an entirely other post for an astrid roleplayer haha )  so, right from the get go, ruffnut is probably already down the drain.  lets be real, she’s already getting compared to tuffnut and now she’s got the one other girl her age to live under.  not that ruff is necessarily under tuffnut, but in a society that favors the mighty, i’m sure boys are initially considered the stronger gender due to sheer physical differences with biology.  and even despite that issue, they’re twins and always going to be compared in similarities and differences.  thus with tuffnut the generally louder and more talkative of the two, ruffnut more than likely comes off as his shadow to most people, even if she’s stronger and smarter.

ruff is probably in this really odd space of being herself and trying to live up to being a thorston while also trying to not get completely disregarded as a female viking in comparison to astrid.  but, in the end, she’s aware that it’s “astrid this, astrid that.”  she won’t compete in that regard so all she has left is to be herself and try to be the best her she can be.  that doesn’t mean she’s completely happy with the situation, and i think there are a few instances we can see that she’s not perfect with how things have turned out, but she’s made the best of her situation.

she doesn’t hate astrid.  she may, at times, envy or grow frustrated with the other, but there is very little disrespect or hate towards her.  if anything, i think ruffnut uses her feelings towards astrid to hate herself in some regards.  because, honestly, i think ruffnut views astrid in much the same way as the rest of the village, she just tends not to show it through constant praise or attention as even hiccup will give.  ruff finds the other blonde to be cool and tough and amazing.  but astrid’s just all those things in a way that ruffnut isn’t interested in being like.  she doesn’t care to look cool taking down five vikings at once -- she’d rather look cool burning down five buildings at once.  her interests differ and so she never met the same scale as her fellow female, leaving her forgotten in the dust and just merely “the girl twin.”

and, in some instances, people don’t even see her as a girl.

this hurts ruffnut.  she does have female-aligned qualities and likes being seen as female.  she cares about her looks to some extent and has shown this when tuffnut generally puts her down.  with astrid already being the “pretty” one, she doesn’t need her own brother making her feel as if she’s not cute in any regard.  she does have a sense of insecurity because she’s so closely regarded with tuff that her being female is either looked over because no one cares to differentiate between the siblings or it’s the only aspect that separates them so she simply becomes the girl version of tuff.  but it’s a trait she doesn’t want to be forgotten or simply skimmed over.  she’s female.  she wants to be pretty and tough and unladylike all at the same time.  but she also doesn’t want to just be tuff with boobs.  and just because she doesn’t have table manners nor rounded features doesn’t mean she should be seen as any less than astrid in the terms of looks.

but she knows she is.

“Astrid, Astrid, Astrid.  Everyone’s always talking about her.  How pretty she is, how smart she is, how muscular and shapely her upper arms are...”

ruff is insecure!  at this point when she says this line in the show, she even holds up her arms to look at them, flexing before growing disappointed and sighing.  she had just come from talking astrid down in terms of astrid’s inability to hold respect for some of the riders, revealing one of the girl’s flaws, and yet ruff still feels that it doesn’t matter because everyone will always favor astrid despite this.  and it is a sense of jealousy to some extent, but it’s also a sort of sadness and understanding that she’s not meeting the standards.  it’s not that astrid is the most amazing, but that ruffnut isn’t doing amazing at all.  hence why she looks at her arms.  she’s not trying to disprove that astrid doesn’t have strong arms in that moment, but instead seeing that she’s the one who doesn’t.  and then goes to wonder why her and tuffnut’s idea isn’t being recognized.

she’s not blaming astrid, she’s blaming them.  herself.  how come she isn’t good enough?

this isn’t something that ruff questions every day, i don’t feel.  she isn’t to the point that she looks in the mirror and is disappointed in that she doesn’t look as strong or pretty as astrid.  in fact, i think ruff believes she and tuff are just as talented and just as smart and just as strong.  it’s just in different ways.  and it’s the fact that no one seems to believe or accept their strengths that bothers her.  that makes her feel downhearted.  she has no desire to be more like astrid, but she wants people to see them on the same level as her.  ruffnut doesn’t like her and her brother to be treated as infants in comparison to the others.  it’s demeaning and annoying, even to someone so carefree at times.  just because their behavior is different, doesn’t make them any less viking.

and the only reason she probably doesn’t feel so strong about situations where hiccup is praised is because he’s a whole different story in regards to his strengths and talents.  and he’s male.  it’s easier by default to compare oneself to a person of the same gender than it is the opposite ( for the sake of this headcanon, please don’t think too overly l.iberal of gender right now, i’m not trying to get into politics just share my views on the thoughts of a teenaged, fictional, girl viking ).  i’m sure, at times, she does think about how even he is getting recognition for his accomplishments and not them, but he’s still just a widely different circumstance while she grew up and trained more alongside astrid until things began to change so much.  astrid had the same goals and aspirations as them all for a while, so it’s always been astrid’s accomplishments up for the comparison.

regardless, another thing i think shows ruff’s insecurity is when bark and belch have left to pay hiccup back for saving his life.  ruffnut is, understandably, sad by what is basically the loss of their dragon.  as far as they’re all aware, the zippleback won’t be coming back to them any time soon unless they can trick him in believing he saved hiccup’s life or he actually saves hiccup’s life.  or they’re all dead ( which isn’t quite what anyone wants ).  at one point, tuffnut says that he left because ruffnut is too clingy.  and she gets angry for a heartbeat, shoving him, and trying to retort with “no, you’re too clingy.”

really, all it does is show a sadness and she sounds bitter when she responds, revealing that ruffnut may actually be rather clingy and she knows it.  where this sort of clinginess stems from exactly is unknown, but i’ve always sort of felt that ruffnut is used to being ignored in a way.  the others mock her and tuffnut so much and tuffnut mocks her, as well.  granted, she does it completely to them back, but maybe there’s something inside ruff that seeks more of a connection than just bickering.  granted, this was probably just done for comedic effect within the show, but i personal love the idea that ruffnut is more of an emotional being and does desire closer friendships aside from her brother.  it also fits in with her desire to be recognized in comparison to astrid and to be her own person beyond just her brother’s twin.  a great way to achieve these notions is through stronger attachments with other people and animals.  and we have seen her form these sorts of bonds with scauldy, barf, and belch.  she has a more inclined love for animals more so than people, i feel, because the animals can’t really call her and her brother names, and are also much more likely to be impressed or amazed by things she does than humans.  since, well, animals are generally more instinctual creatures and will display their gratitude.

tl;dr - ruffnut really admires astrid but, because of this, it gets her down when she ( and tuffnut ) are not recognized for their strengths and efforts the same way astrid is.  she indirectly compares herself to the other, and does hold some jealousy though it’s not abundant.  all-in-all, ruffnut is more insecure than she lets on, wanting to be praised in for the good things that she and her brother still accomplish, even if it doesn’t meet the standards of most vikings.

she wants to be an individual and not just a female version of her brother or the ignored teen girl viking.

she’s a bit clingy, especially with those she cares about, because she she does seek a more emotional level bond with others.  she’s just not exactly good at it in any way.  it’s easier with dragons and perhaps other animals for her.