#or good at writing or even media literate

[cuverale]

can we have us as Lee Byung Hun wife?? pretty please🙏😭 (idk if I'm write it's right, srry, I'm not good in english)

ᯓ bliss — lee byung-hun.

note: loved the idea!! enjoy <3

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tmz_tv

liked by ynmybaby, byunghunspookie and others

tmz_tv Actor Lee Byung-hun and his wife, Y/N L/N, recently celebrated their wedding anniversary in style, and fans can’t stop gushing over their heartwarming photos. The couple marked the special occasion with a romantic photoshoot, capturing their timeless love and undeniable chemistry. Known for keeping their private life low-key, the duo gave a rare glimpse into their relationship, sparking admiration from fans and media alike. Their elegant yet intimate celebration was a testament to their enduring bond, proving that their love story is truly one for the ages.

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kissmeyn they’re the definition of couple goals !!

iloveoldermen the way he looks at her 😭

ynmybaby how do they manage to look even more stunning with each passing year? absolute perfection!

randomuser he’s too old for her tho

byungswife nobody asked for your opinion, hope this helps!

ynsluvr proof that true love only gets stronger with time. happy anniversary to the most iconic couple!!!!

number001 alexa play that should be me by justin bieber ✋🏻😭

simpforfictionalmen Lee Byung-hun and Y/N L/N are the real-life ‘happily ever after.’ Disney, take notes!

mrandmrslee GOD I LOVE THEM SM !!! 💗

leebyunghunswife can we just talk about how these photos are better than half the wedding shoots i’ve seen? iconic.

yourusername

liked by byunghun0712, from_jjlee and others

yourusername wifey wifey wifey wifeyyy

view comments

byunghun0712 my love ❤️

liked by author

yourfriendsuser i’m the sniper btw

yourusername stop😭

ynmybaby MY PARENTS

delulugirl happy wife happy life

from_jjlee happy anniversary to my favorite couple!

yourusername love youuu!!

kissmeyn you’re glowing mrs.lee 🗣️

byunghunspookie the chemistry is unmatched

dilflover look at my man with his wife

ynswifey look at my girl with her husband 😞

mrandmrslee their love story is like something straight out of a movie. wishing them many more anniversaries to come!!

inhosimp these photos made my day 😭💗

byunghun0712

liked by yourusername, hoooooyeony and others

byunghun0712 Every moment with you feels like a new beginning, and every year, our love grows stronger. Thank you for being my rock, my joy, and my greatest blessing. Here’s to many more years of laughter, love, and unforgettable memories. Happy anniversary, my love.

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yourusername i love you i love you i love you

liked by author

yourusername literally crying rn

byunghun0712 let me cuddle you then

ilovebyunghun SIR ME TOO PLS

hoooooyeony 💘💘

ynspookie may this type of love find me

wifeofinho relationship goals? more like LIFE goals. can I just be their third wheel forever??

leebyunghunfan their love story is so wholesome, i might have to start writing fanfic. don’t judge me anyone!

ynmybaby LMAO SAME

inholuvr girl you better hurry up i wanna read that now

byunghunswifey Lee Byung-hun out here setting the bar way too high for all husbands. noted, sir, very noted.

iloveyn someone check the dictionary—pretty sure their photo is next to ‘soulmates.’

byunghun0712’s story

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

I’m starting to think people being too obsessed with Meghan even to hate her is not a good look on the royal family. It just elevates Meghan to the level of a rival. You all keep saying she will fade into irrelevance, which isn’t unlikely, but rooting for her to fail is just giving her ammunition to play victim and gain sympathy from the public. We should all wish Meghan success for her ventures. I think she’s naturally going into Fergie territory with her ventures. It’s her trajectory. I was just reading about Fergie being a producer on The Young Victoria. I didn’t even know Martin Scorsese was a co-producer on the film. It even won an Academy award for Best Costume Design. Fergie achieving these things was never seen as a threat to the royal family, so Meghan going into media production and lifestyle business shouldn’t be also. I know there’s a difference in that Fergie never declared war on the royal family, or Fergie never exaggerated her fame and popularity by making claims the way Meghan did. But what I’m saying is, if you all are determined that Meghan will be put in her place and fade into irrelevance, you all should not act too afraid of her.

Most of us aren’t rooting for her to fail. Yes, there are some people here who do want her to fail but what can I do about them? I’m not blocking them because I disagree with the things they say and the names they call her and it does frustrate me that those people are lending me a reputation by association I don’t want. The rest of us - myself included - genuinely want Meghan to succeed because then, we hope, she’ll be happy enough with her own success to leave the BRF alone and stop trying to compete with them.

But Meghan isn’t the kind of person to find happiness in her own work. She likes being the best and she’s driven by competition to be the best. For someone like Meghan, the grass is never greener on the other side because they’re always comparing to someone else or what should have been.

No one is afraid of her. Not anymore. Really and truly. Meghan has the bark and energy of a mad chihuahua but it’s all a house of cards one angry foot-stomp away from collapsing. If she spent more time being her authentic self instead of pretending to be someone she isn’t, no one would actually care about her. But she doesn’t; she focuses too much on maintaining her illusion that we can all see it really is just an illusion with a crumbling facade.

And no one thinks Meghan being in the lifestyle entertainment business is a threat to the BRF. It’s different strokes for different folks - Meghan’s audience is people who like the breezy cutesy California celebrity activism chic stuff. The BRF’s audience is everyone who likes pomp, circumstance, and history. Two very different user audiences. What we *do* think about Meghan going into the lifestyle and entertainment biz is that she’s doing it by copying aesthetics and traditions from her time in England - time she has repeatedly said she’s hated, traditions and aesthetics she’s said she hated - and emulating people she’s called racist, ignorant, and unfriendly. All we’re doing is calling out the two-sided hypocrisy. Fergie isn’t a hypocrite so Fergie gets left alone to make her movies, write her books, and no one cares.

She will fade into irrelevance with time. You seem to think that means she will disappear from the public space and become a recluse. That’s not what irrelevance means. Irrelevance means she does something, no one notices, or they notice and it’s barely a blip on the radar. We’re not there yet. And we’re not there yet because Meghan still has the kind of money, access, and Sussex Squad supporters that literally spam social media and the internet with ‘pay attention to me’ content any time she breathes. But Meghan does lose relevance by the day. More and more people lose interest in her with every PR scheme she concocts. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and we’ve barely reached the halfway point and there are still the hills to go.

Since you keep bringing up Fergie, this is the difference between her and Meghan: Fergie doesn’t care that people don’t care about her. She’s happy doing her own thing with her family beside her. Meghan does care. Meghan, possibly, cares too much about getting attention because everything she does she does with the intent of getting attention and of making sure that we know she’s involved. If she didn’t care about the attention, she’d just be doing these things already, no Netflix programming or lifestyle merch necessary. By contrast, Fergie doesn’t - just look at the fact that you didn’t know about her involvement in Young Victoria or how Hollywood the production is.

As I’ve been saying all weekend, what you see on social media is not what reflective of real life away from the internet. Meaning the only place Meghan is relevant and has this kind of power is social media. IRL, not many people are actually paying attention to, or care about her and that’s her kiss of death. It’s happening as we speak as more people see her wildfire “visit” for the PR it was.

A quick interjection here. I have no problem with the Sussexes aiding the relief effort or viewing the destruction in their own backyard. My problem is that they show up with the intent of publicity, talking only to the authorities on the ground and not actually helping or volunteering with anything. Serve meals, sort donations, make phone calls, talk to people who lost their homes instead of the staff that came with you, and don’t fucking pose for group photographs to mark the occasion when the fires are still raging and they’re still finding bodies!

Lastly, if the BRF can withstand Republican or colonialist attacks on their existence in person, they can withstand a bunch of nobodies in the cult of personality around an ex-member because they’ve done this before…and those ex-members were their abdicated king and Diana. Meghan is not on the same scale as either of those individuals (despite what she believes of herself) so the BRF will be just fine.

Well, this ended up being much longer than I thought. I think this will be it on the current topics because it’s still way too Sussex for my liking. I really did mean it when I said I wanted to pull back from the Meghan focus.

[nonsensechemicals]

crying whenever i talk about Cookie9 because all my friends have these interesting and unique theories on them while i take everything too literally and they all just stare at me like “dude… uuugh we r TIRED” <-they dont actually say this they are very kind to me but i can Feel It

[celtrist]

Why does Vassago already have merch, we haven't even met him yet

[icewindandboringhorror]

boy in silly sitting positions compilation

[bsotted]

ok well. unfortunate news: sometimes ur niche is so niche u've already niched the niche. this is exactly the same as the feeling of hitting the end of ur ship tag in ao3 🥲

*edit: sorry i accidentally named like every character ever in the tags so ppl are Seeing this post who dont have the benefit of so much as a single crumb of context. if i accidentally namedropped ur blorbo its bc of this post:

anyway. i was excited for recs bc i also enjoy this genre of fictional character. unfortunately as above the niche is niched, it turns out. at least for me, content enjoyer georg, who has apparently already seen or read everything anyone else has already seen or read except for a small handful of specific media properties that i do not wish to see or read for various personal reasons and also not literally everything ever... just the same things as everyone else has already seen and read... u get the idea. ok thnks 👍🏻

[onbearfeet]

Queerwolf By Night: Queercoding, Media Literacy, and Werewolf By Night (part 2)

Welcome back to Media Studies And Writing Hacks With Kat! Part 1 is here if you missed it. We discussed queercoding: what it is, how it works, why it exists, and how it plays into the 1930s and 40s horror movies Werewolf By Night likes to reference.

Once again, the thesis I'm arguing here is that there is queercoding in WBN, and that it should be part of the discussion of the special (which I'm calling a movie or film because I think "special presentation" is dumb and this is my essay.) I am NOT arguing that WBN is explicitly queer, or that inferring heterosexuality where queercoding exists is morally wrong or even textually inaccurate.

TL;DR: you can totally still ship Jack and Elsa, I just wanna point at some metaphorical rainbows and say, "Look! Rainbows! Aren't they neat?" I personally think the queercoding adds a layer of richness to the story. I hope you get something out of it, too.

And now, allow me to introduce our starting point, the wolfman of the hour, everyone's beloved blorbo and queercoded icon: Jack Russell.

Look at this adorable protagonist, this absolute chewtoy of a human being.

He's queercoded as fuck. Not as much as Ted, but we will GET to Ted.

Let's begin with Jack's introduction, where he is literally revealed as the narrator speaks the phrase "the monster who finds himself among them". We join Jack as he enters an unknowingly hostile space, a building full of people who would literally mount his head on the wall if they knew who and what he really was. Jack's introduction to this world is a series of Bayeux-style tapestries showing, among other things, the gory slaughter of his kind. We see him react with a mixture of shock, queasiness, and tamped-down anxiety, which marks him as an outsider. It seems unlikely that the other hunters would be grossed out by the sight of a depiction of their literal jobs.

Now, outsider status alone isn't necessarily queercoding, but it often is, especially in monster movies. Jack's reaction is not dissimilar to that of a closeted person entering a homophobic church for some kind of socially expected ritual--and, indeed, Jack has come for a funeral.

Look at that nervous glance as he walks into the room. He's not comfortable here. He knows he doesn't fit in.

This is a good time to mention Jack's outfit and the way it intersects with what we see of hunter culture. From the leather to the weapons to the heads on the wall, the aesthetic of hunter culture in WBN is hypermasculine, almost to the point of parody. The obsession with imagery of violence and death (the paintings on the walls, the corpse animatronic, the skull bowl) and the hostility to anything perceived as feminine is marked.

Wait. Hostility to anything feminine? Yes, I said that.

There are three characters who are played by female actors: Elsa, Verussa, and ... look, the hunters HAVE names, but I'm just gonna call them Scottish Guy, Asian Guy, Black Guy, and David Bowie. So David Bowie is an adrogynous character played by a female actor who acts as our third not-exactly-a-male character, and it's interesting to me that they're taken more seriously by the other hunters than Elsa is. Elsa, by contrast, is treated with contempt by the other hunters--and the contempt is very specifically gendered. Scottish Guy calls her "lassie" when he threatens her, and Asian Guy says, "Where's the lovely lady's medallion?" with a noticeable leer. They don't take her seriously, not even after Verussa announces she's welcome to participate--and they only brighten up when Verussa reminds them that they're allowed to kill Elsa if they can. That's the response to the only unambiguously female hunter.

Now, you may point out that Verussa doesn't get nearly as much shit from the hunters, but Verussa is explicitly presenting herself as the servant (and sexual partner) of a man. She's also not competing with them for the Bloodstone, nor trying to inherit, even though presumably she has at least as good a claim as Elsa does. She's not trying to enter the hypermasculine realm of hunting, but Elsa is in it, and so Elsa is despised and Verussa is tolerated.

And then there's Jack.

Okay, time for Baby's First Queercoding Element: gender nonconformity. In general, feminine male characters and masculine female characters (something explicitly forbidden by the Hays Code, by the way) are coded as queer. A lot of gay male stereotypes are men doing "womanly" things, like cooking and wearing dresses and having sex with men. The same goes for lesbian stereotypes like short haircuts, manual labor, and having sex with women. Now, obviously ACTUAL queer expression is infinitely more complex, but stereotypes don't do infinite complexity.

So. Is Jack feminine?

Well, he's wearing a gentleman's suit, but by the standards of hunter hypermasculinity, yeah, he's pretty girly. For one thing, he's wearing that suit in a room full of people in combat gear. For another, the suit itself is full of fussy details that mark him as a man who cares a great deal about his appearance, another stereotypically feminine trait. The suit is green, a barely acceptable color in menswear, and it has glittery details like the trim on his lapels. The spinal-column tie is metal as fuck, but it's also a silk tie. He's doing the death-and-gore theme, but making it high fashion. He's even wearing makeup. Granted, it's Día de los Muertos makeup, but it's still pigment on his face for aesthetic purposes. He's also the only hunter who acknowledges, in dialogue, that he has non-white, non-USAmerican heritage--"It's to honor my ancestors." He marks himself (literally) as visibly foreign, even though denigrating foreign masculinity is a big part of American hypermasculinity. He also tries to smile at and befriend every hunter who glares at him--another stereotypically feminine trait that leads to his conversation with Scottish Guy.

Speaking of, that conversation is gay as hell. It's practically flirting, especially the part where Scottish Guy compliments Jack's makeup and then tearfully admits that hunting and living all by himself "gets lonely". And Jack makes this amazing face:

Now, this is me inferring again, but I read this face as a combination of "Aww, that's sweet of you" and "Loneliness caused by hypermasculine self-isolation? I literally have no idea what that's like, but it sounds bad, bro." Perhaps with a soupçon of "Get me out of this conversation aaaaaaa."

So the scene rolls on, and Jack continues to be Bad At Toxic Hypermasculinity. When his top kill count is mentioned, he shrugs it off rather than taking a little bow like the others do. He actually chuckles at Ulysses' joke. He seems mildly interested in Elsa rather than hostile, and amused by her snark rather than threatened by it. He shows fear and worry when he learns Ted is in peril and in pain. The guy really wears his heart on his impeccably tailored sleeve. Notably, none of these traits are bad, per se--they're just more likely to be assigned to feminine characters, and they're given to Jack.

It's important to note the impact of perspective here. Jack is our POV character. If there were to be a hunters' version of this story, Jack would be a sneaky, cowardly, vaguely effeminate villain and Elsa a traitor (or possibly a dimwitted victim seduced by Jack's charms). All of Jack's queercoding would make him a GREAT queercoded villain; it's just that here, he's the protagonist, and a deeply sympathetic one at that, so we miss some of his "unmanly" traits.

All right, let's fast-forward to the maze. We see Jack being clueless and awkward about the drawing of lots, we see some sneaking around, and then we see his first hostile encounter with Elsa, and we get this great exchange:

Jack: I suggest we just pass each other by.

Elsa: ... What?!

Jack, visibly pained by the awkwardness: I suggest we just ... pass each other by.

Jack is uncomfortable with violence. He actively avoids it, talking his way out of trouble when he can and running when he can't. Even Elsa points out how strange he is compared to other hunters, specifically because he avoids violence. He doesn't kill or even hurt anyone in his human form. He doesn't even know how his explosive works--to the point where he asks a woman if SHE knows how to work it.

I'm not saying violence is an inherently masculine trait, but the association of masculinity with a capacity for (and comfort with) violence runs deep in Western culture in general and American culture in particular. It's a huge thing in Mexican culture as well, and yet Jack is actively choosing not to participate in it. He's denying a core part of what would otherwise be his traditional gender role. He later tells Elsa that any "hunting" he does is done by "a part of me that is not me"--a part of himself that he doesn't see as himself. In his eyes, violence is not merely scary or distasteful; it's not part of him at all.

(Compare this to all the ass-kicking Elsa does.)

And then we get to Ted. Buckle up, guys.

Technically, our first introduction to Ted is a distant roar and some screaming, but the moment where we meet him is this:

A jumpscare, followed by a cuddle.

Once again, Jack wears his heart on his sleeve, but more importantly, let me draw your attention to the juxtaposition of Ted's scary grab and Jack's excited snuggling. This relationship is introduced as something scary before being revealed as something sweet--and "scary" is a good description of the portrayal of queercoded couples (who are, remember, usually villains) in classic cinema. All the cinematic language around Ted right up until the grab is telling us to be afraid of him--and then our cinnamon roll of a protagonist starts petting him and greeting him and asking if he's okay. Ted is monstrous and inhuman ... right up until we see him receive affection from another man.

We don't get clear details of Jack's relationship with Ted, but we know that it's a big deal to them--after all, Jack is risking his own life to save the big guy. Jack also describes Ted as "family" and, with a fond eyeroll, a "pain in the ass". Jack implies that he no longer has contact with his family of origin, a common experience for many queer people who are shunned for leaving the closet, but Ted slots neatly into the category of found family. Ted is also, notably, the only close relationship Jack is seen to have, just as Jack is the only close connection Ted is seen to have. The two are physically affectionate (again, cuddling) and emotionally vulnerable in their conversations.

And Elsa, the outsider to their relationship, finds the whole thing bizarre, right down to Ted's name.

Speaking of Elsa, let's talk about Jack's behavior in the crypt and the cage.

In the crypt, Jack displays compassion for someone who has largely been hostile to him (he REALLY wants to fix Elsa's leg), absolute delight when he receives the tiniest signal that she might be sympathetic to him ("It's not in your DNA, then?") and remarkable emotional intelligence (see his speech about families). He also, notably, doesn't hit on Elsa or indicate any sexual interest in her.

He also makes this terrific face when he's handed a skull:

Oh, yeah, that's a big, scary hunter there.

Now, the cage. Jack's response to being put in the cage (and stripped of his jacket, interestingly--little bit of dehumanization there, perhaps) is recognition, followed by attempts at reassuring Elsa, followed by panic. He's arguably more upset than Elsa is, and Elsa thinks she's about to be torn to shreds.

At two points in this story, Jack Russell finds himself trapped in a small space with a beautiful woman and more or less immediately freaks out. It's not the most heterosexual pattern. In fact, it's got strong thematic overtones of queer men being forced into straight relationships by their families, their work, or their society. In a culture that entwines sex and violence, the fact that he's delighted to be grabbed by a male swamp monster but begs for death rather than symbolically do a sex with a woman is noteworthy.

"Symbolically do a sex"? Yeah, the only times the film frames Elsa as anything like a sexual object are the transformation sequence, which is a visual callback to classic sexualized scream queens of yore with her literally in Jack's shadow, and the face-touching scene, where Jack straddles her, their faces almost touch, and then he flees and she sits up with her hair mussed in a dreamy, almost post-orgasmic way.

Michael Giacchino doesn't eroticize violence MUCH, but he's fairly classy about it when he does.

"But wait!" I hear you saying. "What about the sniffing scene? Isn't that eroticized? And it's between Jack and Elsa! Checkmate, liberals!"

First of all, how dare you call me a liberal when my preferred political descriptor is "chaotic good". And second of all ... well, you're HALF right. It IS eroticized...but not because of anything Laura Donnelly or Gael Garcia Bernal is directly doing.

Go watch Elsa's body language during the scene. It's awkward as fuck. She's curled in a ball, knees and elbows out, letting Jack pull on her arm and sniff her hair but not really participating. There's no indication that she wants to be doing this, or even knows what "this" is.

Gael is making a little more of an erotic show about it; in fact, the intensity of his sniffing would probably be an indicator of sexual desire--if he weren't CRYING WHILE HE DOES IT. That's why his voice breaks on "Once."

These are both excellent actors, making very intentional choices with their voices and bodies. They're playing the scene as something that COULD be sexy IF THEY WEREN'T BEING FORCED TO DO IT.

Seriously. There's enough fanfic now that we've all read Jack giving Elsa a leisurely, consensual sniff. You can't tell me Gael and Laura couldn't have made that happen. This is not sexy sniffing. This is angst sniffing. It's just angst sniffing between two beautiful, sympathetic characters who genuinely don't want to hurt each other. It could have been acted and shot in a much sexier way, but it wasn't.

It's also worth noting one last category of queercoding that WBN plays with a lot: dehumanization. A lot of those classic movies played their queercoded characters as specifically less than human, visually aligning them with disliked animals like rats or wolves and often making them literally less human as the story progressed. Even after the Hays Code, monstrous and inhuman queers became a staple of horror movies, especially in the 1980s and 90s as the AIDS crisis convinced a lot of conservative America that LGBTQ people were literal plague rats. There were proposals to tattoo HIV-positive people to identify them, to round them up into camps, to shut HIV-positive kids out of schools because those kids were implicitly queer and therefore not deserving of human rights like an education.

WBN, with its werewolf POV, pushes back on this trope in some specific ways. Jack's line about being "still a human" is an obvious one, as well as his explanation of "systems" to keep other people safe. (It was common during the AIDS crisis for queer people to be fired from their jobs if they were outed because they were considered an AIDS risk to their coworkers--even if they were, say, an office worker who didn't have any contact with other people's bodily fluids. There were conspiracy theories about AIDS spreading through shared soda cans. Those paper seat protectors in public bathrooms came about because of fears that AIDS could spread via toilet seats. So imagine a gay man trying to explain that he's not a threat to his officemates, and you'll see the parallels to Jack trying to reassure Elsa.)

Most notable, however, is how Elsa survives the wolf. She's safe because she maintains eye contact (implicitly acknowledging her and Jack's shared humanity--she literally refuses to stop seeing him) and because he remembers her scent (she becomes a part of his world as he becomes part of hers). Elsa is rewarded, both with her life and with her inheritance, for treating Jack and Ted like human beings when the world around her regards them as abominations.

Elsa is an ally. She's ally-coded. She can also be read as a love interest for Jack, but she consistently acts in support of his relationship with Ted as well.

In Part 3, we're going to talk about the crowning moment of queercoding in WBN. That's right--it's time to learn about coffee in the woods, the gay jukebox, and the Friends of Dorothy.

[steeltwigz]

Saw a post abt the Sonic movies that was like "plz filter negativity posts better" which is GOOD AND TRUE you should be doing that. Ok. But then they kept going to imply that the criticisms of the Sonic movies are all entirely Personal and Ignorable and not like. Usually abt the horrific copaganda, misogynistic writing, and Paramount's disgusting zionism.... Guys a lot of ppls problem w the Knuckles show wasn't JUST a bastardization of Knuckles' character or thinking Wade was annoying or whatever, but like was focused on the grotesque Zionist message from that one episode 😭😭😭 you can enjoy something and still recognize that it has intrinsic and huge glaring flaws and talk abt them. I think actually you Should be speaking up abt the misogyny, zionism and propaganda the SCU supports and discusses, ESPECIALLY if you like the movies! Its important to be able to recognize these things in media and admit that even media you personally enjoy can be deeply problematic, instead of hiding it away and pretending those HUGE FLAWS aren't issues actually....

[quirkle2]

who wants zombie au writing. don't answer that ur getting it anyway (1.6k words)

His shoes knock against the old flooring of the house, wood creaking under rubber soles that slide over the woodgrain. He drags them a bit, lifts his limbs up no more than he strictly has to, and they lead him to the nearest sittable surface.

The couch is old and dusty and has likely gone untouched for months, much like everything else nowadays, so he watches the thin cloud of dust billow off the cushions largely with disinterest. He collapses into the fabric heavily, feels the whole thing scoot back an inch and hit the wall behind him. The sound echoes, carried by lifeless rooms, while he unceremoniously drops his backpack to the floor by his feet.

The breath he lets out is slow and methodical and born of pent up muscles, aimed at the ceiling where he rests his neck against the back of the couch and relaxes every limb one by one. It’s a process he forces himself through, if only to rid the constant ache beneath his skin.

Slow, sweeping footsteps meander around the room in front of him, and Ritsu angles his gaze down from his craned back position to look at his brother. He wanders, like he so often does—seemingly aimless, but there’s something procedural about it that he’s convinced he just hasn’t figured out yet.

Shigeo’s empty eyes crawl along the hearth of the fireplace, explosions of ash sprayed out across the red brick. His head tilts up to trace his attention around the angular lines of the television, hung on the wall and screen grey with dust. He flits back and forth between the roundness of the bricked mantle and the sharp edges of the screen, like he’s taking notes.

Shigeo paws the television. Four lines of muck are cleared. The zombie blinks, paws at it again with dusty, curious fingers. Ritsu watches him make a mess of the television screen in silence, blinking tiredly.

He almost closes his eyes, but he fights against the urge and moves his fingers down his lap to reach for his bag. His middle hooks around the loop at the top and he lugs it up and into his lap, where he unzips it and peers into the shadowy contents.

Ritsu fishes out the water bottles. He finds the one with the messy R scribbled along the cap in sharpie and takes a big swig of it. It’s warm going down, constantly insulated in a bag of old, sweaty clothes. He feels like he can taste the odor in it, but it clears the grain in his throat from stomping all over dirt roads today, so he’s still grateful.

He holds out the one labeled S to Shigeo. “Thirsty?”

Shigeo looks at him from where he’s crouched down to the floor now, inspecting the soot along the hearth. Unfortunately, he sees handprints in the black already, and when his brother reaches a hand out to take it, his palm is covered in soot.

He lets him have his fun and settles his own bottle back in the mess of tangled clothes and rolls of bandages. Ritsu rakes his fingers through their stock with no real purpose—he knows exactly what’s in here, and none of it is useful.

They’d been searching all day; Ritsu doesn’t really know how far they’d walked, but it had to be a lot of miles. In and out of stores, up and down empty houses, weaving between warehouses—they didn’t really stop for a break. Not when Ritsu can hear Shigeo’s stomach from here and he himself has shaking hands. They can’t afford a break.

Nothing, though. Not a single goddamn thing worth taking. A settlement must have come through here long ago and swept the highway. They’re in the countryside, where houses are spaced out acres from each other and there’s entire cow pastures between properties. And yet every house they’d seen and entered provided nothing.

Ritsu stares into the negative space in his bag where there should be supplies. His stomach cramps and if he smells another whiff of that godawful sweaty, bloody sweatshirt he still carries, he’s going to throw up bile.

He leans away from the open pouch, eyes wandering to his brother who draws… something into the soot of the hearth. His water bottle sits on the floor, abandoned and still unscrewed. Ritsu leans forward with great effort and a grunt, leaning over his bag to grab at the top of it.

It takes him two tries to get Shigeo’s attention, and one more for an answer on where the cap is. It’s then placed in his palm, covered in soot and also saliva. Ritsu swallows down the nausea that rolls up his throat and wipes it off with his frankly already disgusting sleeve, and screws it back on.

He leans back again, succumbing to the urge to let his eyes rest, and he listens to the very subtle swipe of his brother’s hands across brick. There’s birds outside, chirping, and even though it’s still very much a common occurrence, Ritsu cannot help but feel nostalgic about it.

If he ignores the awful hum of silence, and the distinct lack of an electric thrum throughout the walls, and the fact that this is a stranger’s couch and not his, he can almost imagine normalcy. He can almost say this feels like those quiet moments after school, when he settles on the couch and scrolls through his phone in a house that only holds him and his brother because their parents simply aren’t home yet.

He can almost hear the creak of wood from Shigeo walking around his room upstairs. He can almost tap his fingers on the couch cushions to the pattern of his brother making his way down the steps. He can almost hear the fridge opening, and the sound of milk being poured into glass.

Almost. But Ritsu listens to sharp silence instead, and he tries not to think too hard.

He drifts for a while, feels himself truly sink into the couch and let the cushions claim him, and he thinks about nothings because if he doesn’t, then he’ll lose it. He carefully sifts through the nothingness of his mind, through the passing thoughts that have no bearing, and he focuses on that, on the lack of substance. His head is too full of things that have too much substance.

He misses boredom. He tells himself he misses boredom—the complete insubstantiality of it—because if he lets himself think of what he really misses, it’ll drive him insane.

The cushions move, and Ritsu peels his eyes open and lets himself get pulled from liminal mindspace. The cotton in his head recedes, and he blinks, and then he’s swiveling his head to look at his brother who sits in the cushion right next to him.

His hands and the cuffs of his hoodie are smothered in black. Shigeo sits hunched, gaze still wandering even when there’s not much decoration in this house to look at. He studies the off-white walls, the chips in the paint, the holes drilled in where there maybe used to be photos hung.

Ritsu gazes at him quietly, chest instinctively rising and falling to match his brother’s rhythm. He watches the expansion there, under his hoodie, in the subtlety of the folds and the way they warp over the movement. It’s slightly quicker than what he’s used to, but Ritsu knows his brother’s heart rate is much slower. He’s felt it before. He’s listened to it before, with his ear against a chest.

Ritsu’s attention moves to his eyes, and the heavy bags underneath them, and the paleness of his pupils and the ghostlight of him underneath that. He stares into them, looks for stray, familiar thoughts that might enter his head. Looks for old memories that might shine through in the form of recognition when he sees furniture layouts, and candy wrappers, and ads for soda.

Ritsu looks for it all the time, that glint of familiarity. And he finds it, sometimes. And really, he thinks that’s keeping him going more than food ever will.

Shigeo turns his head, and looks at him. Sometimes, when his brother looks at him, there’s not much there. No substance, no anything. And Ritsu finds it a bit evil that he craves silence in his own head, and yet noise in Shigeo’s, and often times it is the other way around.

His brother looks at him now, though, with that comforting recognition. That growth of the pupils, that softening of the hard edges of his face where unknown stressors have gotten to him. Ritsu wonders what zombies get stressed out. He figures it’s the same deal with humans, considering they’re largely alike.

Ritsu wonders if Shigeo knows he’s sick. He wishes he could ask him. He wishes for a lot of things. Silence in his own head is one of them.

Ritsu swivels his head away and stares at the ceiling, if only to force the thoughts to pause. He studies the popcorn ridges above them, traces the peaks with his gaze. It calms him, gives him something to focus on. He looks for patterns in the shadows they make.

Shigeo shifts next to him. And then he shimmies down, settles into the cushions, and plops his head right down on Ritsu’s shoulder.

Static roars in his mind and his heart stammers. Ritsu swallows the lump in his throat but that just makes it bigger, so he clamps his mouth shut and breathes carefully through his nose.

The tears cut through the grime on his face. He plops his own head down against his brother’s, and lives in the noise.

[ianthesmells]

the people genuinely complaining abt jayvik "not becoming canon" or "they didn't kiss" are insane to me. u got a shakespearian tragedy on screen and u don't feel that was enough? they need to walk out on stage and kiss so you know it's canon? is that all love is to you? a kiss? characters need to kiss so they can be canon? caitvi literally had sex on screen and it was so nothing whereas jayvik took up like half the season and got development that even made non-jayvik shippers believe in it. they literally blipped out of existence together in a fruit salad-level space scene after being in a gay ass timeloop and ur mad they didn't kiss?

[zukkaoru]

the disparity in kudos between a skk fic and a fic for literally any other bsd characters/ship :/

[cloudysfluffs]

Don’t listen to haters, everything ever spread about Vivzie was disproven. Your art is cute.

LMAOOOOOOOO NO IT WASNT????????!!??!?!?

[victorfrankensteinsuggestions]

I wasn't going to make a post about it because I am a firm believer in simply not engaging with people who have rancid shit takes on the internet and just moving past it but it's been like the fourth tweet I've seen today clearly taking the Nosferatu (2024) film at face value and then blaming people who interpret it differently (see: not taking the themes and motifs depicted in the film as per our modern, non-fictional, dare I say even bordering on puritan standard of what constitutes "good" media and "good" representation) and I'm just sooo tired of it all.

The amount of people agreeing that it's a movie that depicts certain themes "wrongly" is sooo exhausting. It's gothic (technically romantic, actually). It's horror. It's not meant to be therapy speech healthy tropes and sunshine.

It has MANY different readings that you can take away from it. Not just the one "this is what This Movie means," because the themes and topics and motifs or whatever the fuck you want to call them are many, and some of them can coexist. And some may even be opposites! And that's ok because for one, it's fiction. And for another, the Vampire as a monster, as a concept, is a thing that has existed for CENTURIES and has come to mean many a thing. And at this point I'm just rambling with no point or purpose but. It just pisses me off how close-minded the general public is to any piece of media that is no longer clear cut and adamant about what it depicts and what that depiction entails.

When the gothic and the horror are PRECISELY the genres that are most detached from clear cut and easy to comprehend. And they are NOT supposed to be happy and healthy and rainbows! Because the romantic and the gothic are supposed to be about exploration! What it means to be human! What is a monster! There's so much to talk about I'm just... So I've come to the website with the mentally ill homosexuals and transgenders in search of community.

(And I did like the movie a lot, actually)

[psalmsofpsychosis]

so anyway, DC's Doom Patrol (2019) is a level of storytelling that simply feels so impossible, and coming from DC too, and YET

[vonnegussy]

not to swing at a hornets nest but tommy 911 fans are giving parse fans from the check please fandom 10 years ago lmaoooo

[musical-chick-13]

"This show is SO good, you should watch it!!"

I gotta be honest. If I look at a character list on Wikipedia and get five characters down without seeing a single woman, it's probably not for me.