#pre rescas technically

[grotesque-marvel]

1: in sickness (and in health)

something something freehoun sketches to try and get me out of artblock. theyve taken over like worms in my brain

[angels-heap]

can i have hl headcannons… freemance headcannons but they can be anything related to hl also

Okay so, it took me an embarrassingly long time to compile a list of interesting-ish headcanons that I haven't already written into a fic, but here you go!

I know nothing about quantum physics, so I try to think about the actual mechanics of Gordon and Alyx's vortal soul bond as little as possible, but I tend to conceptualize it as, like... a fuzzy radio connection. Post-Ep2, they start to realize that they're more attuned to each other and that they can occasionally sense each other's locations or pick up on each other's thoughts/emotions/physical states, but it takes them a long time to learn how to intentionally "tune in" to those signals on demand.

They've decided to take a "wait and see what happens" approach to having kids, but it's a bit more complicated than that. After spending 27 years expecting to be his friends' kids' weird uncle and nothing more, Gordon's started to warm up to the idea of having kids of his own, but he's also pretty sure his window to father children closed somewhere between the rescas and his visit to the Citadel reactor core. He waves at little kids when he sees them, and it makes his day when they wave back. Alyx is a lot more ambivalent about the whole parenting thing, especially in light of the fact that she grew up without her mother (and her relationship with Judith Mossman was... complicated). She tends to avoid the places where parents and children congregate, and babies kind of freak her out, but she still feels a little twinge of disappointment once a month when she's reminded that parenthood probably isn't in the cards for her.

Alyx enjoys kissing and otherwise benevolently sexually harassing Gordon while he's wearing the HEV suit, with the goal of increasing his heart rate and triggering a "seek medical attention" alert. She thinks this is very funny; he lives in fear that she's going to secretly modify the thing to say "huge boner detected" or something similarly mortifying. (She has definitely considered this.)

Gordon still has some weird hangups about gender roles and relationships as a result of having grown up in the 80s and 90s (and having not lived through 20 years of brutal oppression that beat most of those hangups out of everyone else). The resulting conflicts tend to be more amusing than anything else, and are easily solved, but Alyx often finds herself distressed by the thought that generations of men lived and died without ever asking to be the little spoon.

Alyx and Gordon both get a kick out of invoking their stasis-induced age gap when it's convenient or funny. Alyx calls Gordon an old man when he complains about waking up with back pain, he mumbles "well... I was studying quantum mechanics before you could read" to try to soothe his ego when she easily solves a problem he's been struggling with for hours, etc. (Listen. I firmly believe, based on canon info and common sense, that they either didn't meet or barely met pre-canon and I'm not going to pretend the technical age gap doesn't have tons of comedic potential. Also, Barney 100% cracks these kinds of jokes, too.)

Gordon gets pegged. :)

[newtafterdark]

A few silly name information on my versions of the Freemen & Calhouns! (This was inspired by something I wrote earlier today)

Freeman: Gordon Freeman Feetman: Gordos Martinis Freeman (RIP for having a typo on his name change papers. But he takes it like a champ! 👍 ) Freemind: Gordon Quentin Freeman Gorgeous: George Freeman Metal: Gwen Martini Freeman

Barney: Barney Calhoun Benrey: Benrey Lover Eddie: Barney Edwin Calhoun (technically Barney Edwin Freeman, even pre-ResCas... for reasons. ;)c) Beauty: Barnabas Clementine Calhoun

[cheshiba]

is your oc easily bothered by things? // what is something really dumb that irritates your oc a lot? // which one of the 7 deadly sins fit your oc more? do they see it as a flaw?

1) Answered in another ask!

2) When someone changes the height on his swivel chair, it’s technically not his since other people work in that lab but he claimed it and anytime someone changes the height on it he knows. Magnusson is the most common offender, they have a bit of a back and forth of annoying eachother and shit like that is why Gordon exploded his casserole.

3) Oof good question, pre infection maybe pride? He was very sure of his academical achievements and part of why he didn’t get on well with other scientists is them looking down on him. He didn’t view it as a flaw since he had every right to be proud of his work, even if it led him to drastically overwork himself.

Post infection I think wrath, he’s got a lot of anger and resentment towards the science team and black mesa for what happened to him. He knows this is a flaw and tries not to let his resentments get the better of him. Most of the people he works with couldn’t do anything about what happened anyway.

Post rescas/xen it’s sloth, not in the traditional sense of being lazy but in the sense that he just, doesn’t care. He’s numb to the suffering of those around him, disjointed, like he’s playing a video game and the people suffering around him are at best just NPCs and at worst food/fodder for himself and the hive. Gordon knows that’s kinda fucked up but he spent long enough on Xen to go kinda feral, and his human family either encourage or ignore it so there’s nothing stopping him.

[angels-heap]

lbr even if Valve shipped Gordon with a random woman he couldnt have met pre rescas, m/m shippers would still say its wrong

... yeah.

I've thought a lot about this, actually. If HL2 was exactly the same except Alyx was replaced with some random woman in her mid-20s who met up with the cast post-rescas, people would still criticize the technical stasis-related age gap (and/or invoke the whole "I see them as found family so any shipping of these unrelated characters is literally incest" argument). If, I dunno, mid-40s Judith Mossman was canonically into Gordon, people still "wouldn't see it" or would write her off as "evil" or would say the age gap is creepy because she's the older "predator" inappropriately pursuing "a traumatized younger man who has no idea what's going on."

Hm, it's almost as if age gap discourse doesn't matter or make sense when sci fi time travel shenanigans are involved! And people who don't engage with media they claim to like beyond shipping the two hottest, youngest available white guys will always find a way to pretend a canon M/F ship is problematic! 🙃

Blargh. I don't think this counts as "making up a guy to get mad at" when there are so many documented cases of this happening in other fandoms, but... you get the idea. I long for the days when people didn't weaponize progressive language to win ship wars. That is all.