#space battles podcast

[rickybaby]

Genuine question as I am curious — I know it’s pretty obvious with his expressions/ body language that Daniel seemed shy/insecure(?) about having his braces, but has he ever outright said anything about feeling that way with them? Just out of curiosity as I am new around here!

“I feel very different in terms of looks. Fortunately, experience also bought me better looks. I’m not really too fond of showing people photos of me when I was younger”

[sshbpodcast]

Character Spotlight: Jake Sisko

By Ames

We’ve talked a bunch of times on A Star to Steer Her By about how Jake Sisko is the best. He’s one of the best child characters in the whole Star Trek franchise, in both writing and acting (second to maybe Mezoti and/or Rok-Tahk). His relationship with his father is depicted so beautifully in so many episodes, as we’ll surely discuss below. And that kid’s personal style bypasses Wesley Crusher’s in every single way.

So this week, we’re picking up a Jake Sisko holonovel to read as your SSHB hosts declare our favorite Jake-O moments and scrape up some bad moments to consider. Our definition of what a Worst Moment is – which was shaky at best to begin with – gets really stretched this week. So enjoy them all below, listen to our chatter this week on the podcast (jump over to 1:01:52), and prepare for Jake Sisko to make a deal for you to have great damn day.

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best moments

“A” is for Apple, “B” is for Best friend ever Jake is just a straight-up good kid. So good that we happily forgive everything on our bad list, and this early moment really established what a pure heart he has. When Rom pulls Nog out of Keiko’s school in “The Nagus” and Sisko is about to get all racist at the Ferengi for corrupting his son, we learn that Jake has been sneaking off to teach Nog to read, squashing all the jumped-to conclusions and being the example that everyone on the station needs right now.

Who wears the lobes in this relationship? Speaking of teaching things to Nog, when the two form the Noh-Jay Consortium in “Progress,” which is adorable enough on its own, Jake somehow schools Nog on the value of owning land when they start trading assets around. How a Ferengi doesn’t understand real estate is beyond me, but Jake knows a good deal when he sees one. Turns out Jake’s got the lobes!

My friend’s real sorry for what he did In our Nog coverage on the podcast, I mistakenly sullied Jake’s name, claiming he started a fight with the Skrrean kids in “Sanctuary.” Well I was dead wrong! Jake, the ever goody-two-shoes, actually tries to prevent the fight and then does one better by patching things up with Tumak in line for the replimat later. How I could think Jake would have a vicious bone in his body was my error.

I need to find what’s me While we gave Nog lots of props for pursuing his dream of being the first Ferengi to join Starfleet, Jake goes the opposite path, and we love him even more for it! You’d think with a father commanding a whole station, Jake would go the Starfleet route too, but in “Shadowplay,” he reveals he’d rather pursue something he’s more passionate about.

First let me get the hang of flying at impulse When the away team gets captured during “The Jem’Hadar,” Jake and Nog sneak aboard the runabout to escape. Despite not knowing how to pilot the thing, Jake is able to elude disaster and invaders long enough to be rescued. Add to that the fact that they were there to ensure Nog got a passing grade, and Jake comes out as the hero of this episode! (Sorry, Quark.)

If I go, you’ll be all alone Even though he wants to spend time with Leanne, Jake decides to accompany his father on the lightship in “Explorers.” This episode gives us some more of those patented lovely father-son moments of the two being honest and supportive of each other, as Jake expresses his interest in writing and also that he’s concerned about Ben coping without him if he went away to school.

Something called “Sliding into Second” An episode later in “Family Business,” Sisko relents to Jake’s insistence that he get a girlfriend by going on a date with Kasidy Yates based on his son’s matchmaking skills. And it turns out Kasidy is perfect for Ben! Now whether Ben is perfect for Kasidy is another matter altogether that we hinted at a little in our Ben Sisko post, but let’s just say Jake has solid taste.

To my father, who’s coming home I cannot overstate how beautiful “The Visitor” is, and at the center of it is Jake’s relationship with Ben, undoubtedly the strongest asset of all of Deep Space Nine. Jake’s love for his missing father is so strong and pure that he dedicates his life to getting him back from the white void. Is it what Ben would have wanted? Absolutely not. But is it perfect for Jake Sisko? Tremendously.

You may be a little rusty, but you’re still the Chief When O’Brien has gone through literal decades of torture after his brain adventure in “Hard Time,” who better than Jake Sisko to help reacclimate him to all his tools? Jake, who apprenticed briefly under the Chief earlier in the series, shows characteristic patience and empathy for the man who is clearly in need of much rehabilitation and therapy.

The line between courage and cowardice Cirroc Lofton gets his time to shine in “...Nor the Battle to the Strong,” providing an understandably terrified face to the front lines. Not only does he scrub up to help Julian and the other combat medics as injured soldiers start pouring in, AND thwart a Klingon siege by blasting out the ceiling, but he also reminds us that war is absolutely horrifying, in case we’ve forgotten.

You can always find something that’ll make you smile Yet another feel-good moment comes from Jake in the entire lovetrip that is “In the Cards.” While trying to cheer up his dad by getting him a baseball card, Jake and Nog find themselves running a series of fetch quests that add up to one thing: finding ways to make everyone have a nice day, even in the middle of the Dominion War. It was a breath of fresh air in a very serious season.

Let people read it and decide for themselves While Nog and the rest of Red Squad were entirely taken in by the opportunity to play war, Jake saw through Watters’s bullshit immediately in “Valiant.” He’s able to scrape Nog and Dorian Collins together and save them from destruction. And I’ve got to give him credit for endeavoring to write both sides of the story, without bias or condemnation, even if Watters deserves it.

—

Worst moments

Watch the wheel, not the girl Boy, that Jake Sisko has a type, and that type is older Bajorans. We first meet Mardah in the flesh in “The Abandoned,” and not only is she a Dabo Girl (whom we know have sex acts with Quark written into their contracts), but she’s also too old for him. I don’t know what age of consent laws are in the future, but when she’s 20 and he’s 16, it just feels on the wrong side of legal.

Stop calling her Nerys When things with Mardah don’t work out, Jake sets his sights on another Bajoran who’s definitely too old for him in “Fascination”: Major Kira. And sure, you could justify this one by saying that everyone on the station is affected by Lwaxana Troi’s Zanthi Fever, but out of all the uncomfortable pairings, it was this one that just felt kinda gross about it.

I guess I just forgot you’re a Ferengi While we blame Nog for his terrible behavior during their double date in “Life Support,” Jake isn’t innocent either. First, how he let Nog weasel in is just a goofy plot device to make the episode happen. But also, Jake shows naivete on his part for not understanding that this is perfectly normal for a Ferengi, and blaming his friend for his upbringing isn’t a good look.

So you’re Jennifer Sisko, but you’re just not my mom Okay, this one’s a little on Ben too for trusting mirror Jennifer to be alone with Jake, like a fool, but Jake’s whole attitude toward his mirror mom in “Shattered Mirror” plays right into her trap. He is so blindsided by her presence that he doesn’t think rationally, even if he’s heard the stories about how nefarious everyone is in the alternate universe. Jake, don’t trust this imposter!

I can spot a creative soul a galaxy away Jake’s weird thing for older women shows up again in “The Muse” when Onaya easily manipulates the poor boy. This is just an episode after “Shattered Mirror,” when his mirror mom took advantage of his trusting nature and eagerness to believe people have good intentions. And this soul-sucker preys on him so easily because he lets himself get taken in.

How much laundry is too much laundry? One last one that’s on both Nog’s and Jake’s list somewhere, since the two are so intertwined: While Nog has become a complete square in “The Ascent,” Jake has turned into a slob so comically disorganized that it stretches credulity. Nog is literally gone for several hours and when he’s returned, Jake’s laundry coats their quarters. How is that even possible?

These visions, they’re not worth dying for This is one of those instances that’s more bad for Jake than bad for us at home. When Ben is catatonic from prophet visions in “Rapture,” it’s Jake’s responsibility as next of kin to decide his fate. He chooses for his father to live, partly selfishly, even though it’s not what Ben would have wanted. But really, I say they should have put this decision on Joe and not a teenage boy.

Just remember, Bashir is spelled with an I Consistently, it’s a running joke on the show that Jake’s spelling is poor. It comes up a couple of times! Nog has to correct all his spelling in “The Ascent.” Sisko points it out when he reads Anslem in “The Muse.” And clearly he spelled Dr. Bashir’s name wrong in his article from “...Nor the Battle to the Strong” because Julian reminds him of the spelling in “Call to Arms.”

This is where I belong After all the Starfleet personnel have abandoned the station in “Call to Arms,” Jake opts to stay behind to do some journalism work, hoping that his status as the Emissary’s son will keep him safe because the Bajorans will revolt if some harm comes to him. So he effectively makes himself a hostage of the Dominion just for a writing gig. Weird flex, Jake-O.

What about freedom of the press? And then the stories Jake writes about the Dominion occupation don’t even go anywhere because Weyoun keeps intercepting them in “A Time to Stand”! Jake, my dude, you can’t go writing clearly biased stories and thinking they’ll make it to your audience. You think Weyoun’s going to let you interview him when he knows your angle? Oh you sweet summer child.

Anything for a story I’ll admit that Jake’s actions and uncharacteristic ability to see through bullshit in “Valiant” were commendable, but his reasons for being there in the first place were thin at best. He weasels into Nog’s trip to Ferenginar to try to get an exclusive interview with the Nagus. Presumptuous much, kid? This after promising to Nog that he wouldn’t be acting as a reporter on his mission.

Please, no more Vic Fontaine! When Nog returns to the station in “It’s Only a Paper Moon” after his leg replacement and clearly suffering from PTSD, the support he gets from friends, family, and professional therapists alike is laughable. Even Jake. It strikes me as out of character that Jake fails at being tolerant of Nog’s wishes during a painful time. Maybe get the guy some comically large headphones instead of kicking him out next time.

—

Send this one off to the presses because we’re done! We’ve still got some more Deep Space Nine characters to spotlight coming up, so keep following along for those. We also hope you’re watching Enterprise along with us over on SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcasts. You can play some dot-jot with us over on Facebook and Twitter, and check your spelling before submitting because evidently there’s no Clippy on DS9!

[the-summ0ning]

Sleep Token HC: being in a relationship with vessel

Hello, I hope you like my final HC for Ves. Fluff elements with highly NSFW ideas. 🤠 I’m always open to HC requests as well 🤭

Vessel, vessel, vessel—where do we begin?

Vessel the bf that is so deeply profoundly in love with you

If he could he’d rip his heart out of his chest for you and just hand it to you, he would.

His love languages would be words of affirmation and physical touch

He often battles with icky thoughts of himself, and you’re his ever radiant light in his bleakest days, so he would go out of his way to make sure it was known

Notes everywhere around your house, even a month and half into tour, you keep finding them

Praises in your medicine cabinet, crumbled pieces of paper at the bottom of your bags bc he know you won’t find them right away. Little Sonnets on your desk or on the fridge just so you know how much you are loved by him

Once you stopped finding them around the house or in your things, he’d start sending flowers or treats with love notes attached. Just because gestures especially if the night before you told him what a long week it was and knew you were struggling

You have so many of these notes, post its, scraps of paper you’ve compiled them in a scrapbook/binder and it’s on your bookshelf now

Texts for when you wake up reminding you to take your meds/vitamins, and to keep up with your water intake—voice memos too

Honestly he’d send you voice memos all the time like it was your own little podcast

Having black paint smeared on you because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself

Or would want you to apply his body paint before a show. Squirming underneath your fingers as you apply it because of your featherlight touches, listening to his quiet hisses when you’d go too low and gentle

“We’re not going to make it out of this dressing room if you keep doing that, love.”

Vessel would love to be big spoon, having you tucked underneath him or your back against his chest. Tracing patterns on your arms, hips, and thighs

He always loomed around you, everyone knowing if you were there, he was somewhere lurking around 95% of the time. He was a quietly protective man.

Coming up when you were talking with friends at an event, a comforting squeeze to the nape of your neck and a drink to quietly check on you

Wearing one of his extra robes backstage. It was so big and light, perfect for the hot and humid venues, a great blanket tbh where you could use the hood to cover your face

There’s a folder in his phone dedicated with pictures of you in many spaces of the venues they played just sleeping with his robe over you

Also the amount of videos of you two just frolicking around backstage, helping him with dance moves whilst in his robe that dragged on the floor, nearly tripping on it, when you wore it because it was so long on you

You liked to go into the crowd during the shows, enjoying the atmosphere of fans. Vessel would get a kick out of that, and you two would make it like a game almost

Instantly being able to spot you in the crowd through the lights and smoke. Always looking in your direction to lowkey serenade you and do little inconspicuous moves directed for you. In return, you’d run your hands through up and down your body swaying your hips to his voice. His own little siren in the sea of people

He loved watching you jam tf out with the fans so careless in your own world dancing with everyone or receiving bracelets from the fellow concertgoers (he would panic slightly watching you try to go into the mosh pit every time tho, one time he actually had to send a member of the crew to discreetly retrieve you.)

I imagine vessel being codependent af, and the simplest of tasks you were always requested to tag along

groceries, pharmacy trips, picking up takeout—he needed his emotional support person. Bribing and rewarding you with little treats to lure you with him thinking you’d say no how could you he’d hit you with the puppy dog eyes I just know he’s master at that

Staying up or waking up to listen to his late night rambles/dreams/conspiracies tucked under his arm while sharing a joint or bottle of spirits

Or sitting beside him as he wrote song lyrics, quietly running them by you for your opinion. You just blinking slowly in awe with what his mind created unable to provide the input he wanted

I thinks it’s a mutual consensus among us: Vessel loves to bite. He can’t help his carnal primal urge to. He does it with his friends, you… Everyone had a mark from him at this point

I don’t imagine him being into quickies (unless he was absolutely throbbing and thirsting for you) this man would take his time. Setting the pace all during the day teasing you

He loved nuzzling his face in the crook of your neck, pressing kisses below your ear and whispering the filthiest things to get you flustered

“You look so good right now, I could take you right here.”

“I can’t wait to get you home and be deep inside you later, doll.” He would murmur, his hand squeezing your hip pulling you back into him feeling his already hardening length pressing in the soft flesh of your ass

Then when it finally happened, he goes at a nearly agonizing pace—he wanted to worship you. He didn’t like to fuck, he liked to make love.

intense and passionate, hips slowly rolling into you up til you were full of him. And he kept hitting that spot that made your eyes see stars and lulled to the back of your head.

He was not shy about how he felt, always moaning and praising you, but wasn’t too loud. Vocal fry as he quietly moaned about how good you made him feel

“You’re squeezing me so well,” rasping out, trying to look at where your bodies connected, resisting the urge to close his eyes

“Fuck, you look so pretty under me.”

He’s 100% a morning sex person

Not even letting either of you have a chance to get out of bed, one hand slipping down your front rubbing you softly while the other gripped your throat to turn your face so he could slowly kiss you—devouring your mouth with his—all in a blissed out half sleep stupor

Hehe, I woke up from my nap and chose violence horniness, sorry. Anyways thanks for the support and all the love on these 🫶🏻✨

[ekebolou]

I get that people have complicated relationships with higher education, and that's 100% reasonable, but there's something I want to point out.

when you hear a popular podcast or youtuber or history show or see a popular history book or article say it's 'revealing' or 'uncovering' or 'bringing to light' or 'reevaluating' some story of the past, it's usually doing so off of academic history work done by people in academia.

Journalists and your average YouTuber are generally the worst about not crediting this work,* but it's there in the background, nonetheless.

That work - academic research, particularly of this kind, and the articles, books, and other information it produces - doesn't get done without institutional support. That is, like with everything, sure some enthusiasts will keep at their particular interests hell or high water, and rich folks can peruse to their hearts' content - that's what fueled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' ever-increasing investigative output.

And that should be concerning, not comforting.

Not because all of that output was wrong or terrible or misguided - a lot was, but much of it is still essential, foundational, exceedingly rigorous and useful - but because much of modern history work, twentieth century on, has been a century-long battle to correct some of deeply culturally embedded beliefs an almost wholly dilettante pursuit of the past generated. It's kind of a joke in English-language scholarship that the Victorians ruined everything, but like, for real, y'all, the Victorians left us some BURDENS, from fake relics created for ~the aesthetic~ to defaced and destroyed historical documents.

Academic research in itself is not some kind of panacea. we're not shitting on dilettantes (I am very much a dilettante, in my way) and so-called 'amateurs', who are vital and excellent contributors to knowledge. We're also not saying institutions are always perfect and good and don't need to change. I'm saying that robust, diverse, in-depth, careful, broadly reaching, and most of all interesting and new scholarship requires something on the scale of institutional support.

This is not just because that's where your historians live, but because in a very practical sense, that's where your archives live. You do actually need a big building stuffed with Things Of The Past well-maintained and with a core of well-trained and extremely cool (like librarians, all archivists are extremely cool in my books, even if they're kind of assholes, as long as they are good archivists).

Archivists are currently doing a lot with very little support - like a lot of academics and librarians, really - because that's what people do. When they care about doing something, they get along, they scrape by, they suck it up. But they need buildings, they need climate control, they need continuing training and new people coming into the field - if the idea is that we have so many documents from the past extant today because archives DON'T need institutional-level support, then you are severely misinformed about how much of the past has survived to the present day. And if the idea is that we'll preserve the IMPORTANT bits of the past regardless then you're also sadly misinformed about how good we are at determining what's important, and how frequently (and with growing frequency) disasters of various kinds wipe places out (Lisbon 1755, for example), and how robust any of our documentation (often ESPECIALLY the 'important' stuff) is in terms of long-term survival.

There's a theory going around that THIS period - like the 2000s through today and into the future - will produce a 'dark age' for future historians because the digital infrastructure which not only underpins almost all of our day-to-day lives but is how we've decided to 'save space' - by preserving things digitally rather than in hard copy - is so unspeakably vulnerable and weak. Everyday folks have already, for the most part, lost access to things like CDs, which have a lifespan of something like 100 years at the most. Proprietary softwares, black box devices with irreplaceable parts, flimsy modern materials with difficult to preserve features mean a whole of information that drives our lives today will simply become inaccessible in, actually, a very short time.

Archives - vast storehouses under careful supervision full of well-organized stuff that might potentially be important one day - need institutional support, but also, on their own, are kind of... well, let's just say, Historians will also say shit like they 'uncovered' a 'hidden history' in a previously 'lost, unknown' document that some archivist put in a special box on a special shelf and carefully catalogued for prime findability. It's a symbiotic relationship that doesn't always get its due. An archive on its own can be very useful to a local community, an individual business, a specific family, all kinds of things - but to get History out of it, you need some Historians or suitably rabid individuals of other castes. You need both, or you end up with the pseudo-histories of nineteenth-century rich folk that then get to determine what we believe is possible for the future by what we are told of the past. It's a bad scene.

Again, there are further steps to take - not over here defending institutions as they stand. We were, at one point, on our way to accessible higher education, meaning everyone had a chance to go to pursue their interests, before we started seeing Universities not as a social good and social resource but as job training and profit centers and cut social funding as demanded by business ghouls. Higher education and academia as it functions now has done a lot of damage to people's lives.

But institutions are much harder to build than to change, and change is hard enough. Once an archive is defunded, its collections distributed or destroyed, you typically don't get it back. Like certain species of sea creatures with long gestational periods, once you destroy the mid-range of the population - the bit that raises up the next generation - your population collapses and its very hard to get things back on track (historians and other academics who require lots of investment and training and time and experience are like the sea creatures, you see).

You can, of course, start new. We've done that a lot, as a species. It's always possible. But it's a bit like running out of a fire empty-handed instead of grabbing your wallet as you go. Sometimes you just gotta go, and that's always safest - sometimes you just can't think or there's no time to think and you couldn't get to anything useful if you wanted to - but if it's matter of looking at the wallet in your pants pocket and dipping down to grab it (and maybe pants!) while you bolt then yeah, ought to try. Maybe the pants catch fire and you've got to abandon them anyway to save your life. That's reasonable. (This is just an analogy - fire safety generally says to get ye gone with your life and health intact ASAP, just for the record - don't stop for shit and don't go back in).

The point of this is that next time you're enjoying some popular history content (please save me from this word) or learn some cool fact about the past, think about the fact that none of that get down to you without a big chain of people all joined together doing different things. And that big chain needs nice big social supports to exist. The social supports are hard to change, but the chain is easy to lose without them. It's a group effort all the way, even that little fucker who didn't credit the work they used to make fun videos is important.

That content doesn't happen without the structure to support it - or even worse, that content lies to you. Makes stuff up. The stuff it makes up isn't going to be fantasies of freedom and equality, at least going by what's been made up before.

Hate the academy, want it to change, act to reform it - all very good, go for it, no desire to stop you (except maybe the hating part, try to hate more specifically, like individual actions or aspects of the academy, if you're going to hate on stuff, but, like, hate can be unhealthy, get some peace in your life if you can). Things are bad enough without also feeling like you have to take on a crusade to save archives or other institutions - though honestly just participating in your local history scene, giving them time and attention, is really valuable help - so that's not really the call to action here. The call is just asking you to notice the big structures that enable these small joys.

Don't let yourself be convinced that they somehow happen in a vacuum, that they'll just persist somehow like getting Deliveroo at your off-grid mountain cabin. A lot people helped make that stupid podcast about Marie Antoinette's toenail fungus happen - and there's way more than that waiting! If we can just keep letting people make archives, study stuff, fuck off on fruitless searches for things that were never there and instead find stuff we never KNEW was there. There's so much of that to be done! The more the merrier on who should be doing it! But if we want that, we got to figure out how to support it, to keep what we've got, build more of it, or it'll be the same shit about Marie Antoinette over and over and over and over and over because that'll all we'll have to build from.

Anyway, if you've never done it, take a ghost tour. Visit a museum nearby. Pop into an archive and just ask them some stuff. Get on these web pages that do things like recreate Angkor Wat as a virtual tour, go watch a Youtuber do a frothing-at-the-mouth defense of Charles Lightoller, or even better, read this reddit thread about whether Dua Lipa would have survived the Titanic sinking based on her music video. And just think - holy shit, isn't it cool that we have a society, a whole social structure, that could produce such a thing? And it's right here, at my fingertips, ready to disappear.

*there are reasons for this, some related to format and legibility/accessibility that still shouldn't eliminate the need to credit others' work and others cowardly excuses for parasitism

[kingofthewilderwest]

While I'm willing to give the live-action HTTYD a chance, I wish executives didn't play it safe and instead did spinoffs that do something new and exciting with it's world that helps expand it in the same vein as say Andor, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Better Call Saul, etc. How come they can't do that when it's a franchise with such potential for its world-building?

A non-comprehensive list of better ways to expand the HTTYD franchise without redoing a movie that's not old:

HTTYD faithful book series retelling in a 2D television show with one (on occasion two) episodes per book

HTTYD prequel with Valka and Stoick

HTTYD midquel with Valka's dragon lady adventures

HTTYD midquel with Drago's backstory

HTTYD movie short about Gobber's missing socks

HTTYD movie long about Gobber's missing socks

HTTYD movie spinoff about the Dragon Viking games

HTTYD spinoff in Ancient Rome

HTTYD spinoff in Ancient Persia

HTTYD spinoff in East Asia

HTTYD spinoff in Southeast Asia

HTTYD spinoff in South America

HTTYD spinoff in North Africa

HTTYD spinoff but in space (space dragons)

HTTYD musical stage play

HTTYD performative art exhibit

HTTYD M-rated Action RPG with story-altering choices and multiple endings

HTTYD puppet show with sock puppets made, written, and performed by 9-year-olds. Plot deviations encouraged

HTTYD as interpreted by a game of American football

HTTYD but it's a cooking show and no one knows how to make soufflé

HTTYD pornhub special

HTTYD worldwide scavenger hunt for Hiccup's prosthetic leg

HTTYD but presented as a true crime podcast

HTTYD but it's just Monty Python

HTTYD retold but it's steampunk, Toothless is an automaton that gains sentience, and Stoick wears a top hat and both Stoick and Gobber have long, elegant, up-curled mustaches

HTTYD retold but it's rated R and different characters live or die and the screen is so dark in the battle scenes that you're not sure what happened

HTTYD retold and it's live action but every actor is an actual kitten and they just mew and chase each other

HTTYD retold with actual lizards. The lizards barely move. They're sitting on their rock. Now they're sitting on each other. Now the gecko is licking its eyeball. Oh look there's a toad.

HTTYD crossover with Rise of the Guardians (never heard this idea before)

HTTYD crossover with Rise of the Guardians and Frozen and Brave (definitely never heard this idea before)

HTTYD crossover with Rise of the Guardians and Frozen and Brave and Big Hero 6 (never ever seen or heard of this)

HTTYD crossover with Shark Tale

HTTYD crossover with The Bee Movie

HTTYD crossover with Shark Tale and The Bee Movie

HTTYD but it's just an edit of every time a character says "the" "and" or "no" and the soundtrack has been replaced by the skibidi toilet song

HTTYD but it's the trilogy's script carved into the skin of a pear and written backwards

HTTYD but it's a workplace movie mockumentary as acted out by Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and the other composers. Toothless is played by Stravinsky.

HTTYD but it's a bimonthly curated box of snacks

Now. On a somewhat more serious note. It's not to say that a live action retelling in and of itself is good or bad. There are good live action retellings and they can be inspired and there are some worth receiving a chance.

But personally, I'm all about the carved pear option.

[smoshyourheadin]

yay!!!!!! mother is back!!!!!!

could i request a spencer agnew x reader where they meet at a bar and spencer ends up taking the reader home and it ends however you want

Butterflies That Flutter By

pairing: spencer agnew x f!reader

a/n: I. LOVE. THIS. anon u cooked w this. i went CRAZAAAAY!! two posts in one night who am i!! also sorry if u wanted smut i don’t feel comfortable writing it for real ppl!! charachters i can consider it tho ;)

warnings: if u don’t like mentions of alcohol or just a bar setting then this probably isn’t for u!! i’m sure ill catch you at another time tho <3

requests r open <33

saturdays are when you thrive. going out with all your college friends was just tradition at this point.

sitting at the bar in between anna and courtney, you complain about another failed date you had recently.

“ugh, he was just the worst! he was talking about his podcast the whole time, and then asked me to go back to his place? what do men expect me to say after that. ‘oh yes you talking about your alpha male, gym, i hate women podcast really made me so attracted to you’ like come on!” you turn to anna who’s laughing at you, with a sad stare, and she then is quick to put a hand on your shoulder.

“it’s okay! im sure you’ll find your man soon. isn’t court trying to set you up with that guy from her work?” she says to you, cocking her head to the side slightly.

courtney then chimes in, “yes! oh my gosh, her and spencer are literally perfect for each other! you need to meet him soon, you’ll love him!” she says with a wide smile.

“i mean, he is pretty cute…” you trail off.

courtney had been trying to set you and her friend spencer up for weeks now, and as she continued to gush about how spencer would appreciate your nerdiness and how you would adore his, you feel a tug of curiosity. ignoring the conversation for a moment, you make your way to the old street fighter arcade machine at the end of the bar. the familiar sounds of the game fill your ears as you slip a coin into the slot, your fingers itching to take control of your favorite character - ryu.

as you focus on the game, your mind drifts to the idea of meeting spencer. would he really be as perfect for you as courtney says? The thought lingers in your mind a bit as you unleash a flurry of moves on the joystick, losing yourself in the focus.

as you're deeply engrossed in the game, spencer enters the bar, scanning the room for courtney. spotting her animatedly chatting with anna, he makes his way over, a small smile playing on his lips. courtney notices him approaching and waves him over eagerly.

"hey, spencer! glad you could make it," she greets him with enthusiasm, nudging anna to make space for him between them.

"hey, court, thanks for inviting me!" spencer replies, returning her smile. his eyes then wander around the bar, landing on you as you fiercely battle your way through the arcade game.

courtney follows his gaze and grins mischievously. "oh, hey, look who's here! it's the girl i've been telling you about," she says, motioning towards you.

spencer's interest piques, and he watches you play for a moment, impressed by your technique. he can't help but notice how focused you are, your determination evident in every move you make. with a newfound curiosity, he watches in awe as you skillfully defeat everyone you fight with ease.

“hey…” you whip your head around and stand up straight from your practically bent over pose, as you hear courtney’s voice from behind you.

there, stood next to her, is possibly the most attractive man you’d ever seen.

he’s got beautiful brown eyes, and dark curly hair. with glasses. oh my. he’s dressed in slacks, tattered old vans, a flannel, and an old work jacket.

“um, hi court.” is all you can muster up to say to her.

“this is spencer, spencer this is the woman of your dreams!” she giggles.

spencer glares at her, but then smiles sincerely at you.

“so, street fighter, huh? you've got some serious skills," spencer remarked, impressed by your gameplay.

you glanced over at him, offering a small smile in return. "thanks! it's one of my favorite games. i've been playing since i was a kid. i think it’s one of the main reasons i decided to be a game developer."

courtney takes this opportunity to slip away from you both, leaving you to geek out together, and she rushes over to anna

“i told you! twenty bucks says they leave together!” she grins.

“you are so on!” anna replies.

across the bar, you and spencer are chatting it up, both leant against the wall near the machine.

spencer takes a sip of his drink before leaning in. "so, who's your main in street fighter?"

you grin, a rush of excitement at the chance to talk about your favorite character. "call me basic, but definitely ryu! i love his playstyle, and his hadoukens! they’re pretty gnarly."

"classic choice," spencer replied with a nod of approval. "i’m more of a ken guy myself. gotta respect the fiery spirit, you know?"

you giggle, nodding in agreement. "yeah, ken's cool. those shoryukens can really mess up the game though.”

he smiles at your reply, and the conversation flows on. you find yourself talking to him for the better part of an hour, eventually sitting at the bar with him.

“um, you don’t have to say yes,” he says, turning to you. “but, would you want to come back to my place?”

you smile at him, and tuck a strand of hair behind your ear “i’d like that.”

and so, you find yourself walking back to spencer’s apartment and talking to him about how much you love zelda.

stepping into his apartment, you’re immediately greeted by an array of nerdy decorations that cover every corner. posters of classic video game characters lined the walls, and shelves filled with action figures and memorabilia from various fandoms.

"wow, you have quite the collection!" you exclaimed, taking in the sight with wide eyes.

spencer chuckles nervously with a sheepish smile, scratching the back of his head. "yeah, i might have gone a little overboard."

but to you, it’s like stepping into a treasure trove of nostalgia, and honestly? you were jealous. you eagerly made your way around the room, pointing out your favorite pieces and telling him about the games and shows you loved most.

"that's a limited edition link figurine, right?" you ask, pointing to a display on one of the shelves.

spencer nodded, a hint of pride in his voice. "yeah, it's one of my prized possessions! i also have a few special edition zelda figures."

as you continue to explore, spencer watches you with a mixture of awe and admiration. he had never met someone who shared his passion for all things nerdy quite like you did. It felt surreal to have someone in his space who not only appreciated but genuinely enjoyed his interests.

before long, the initial awkwardness of the invitation fades away, replaced by a comfortable ease as you bond over your shared love for video games, movies, and everything in between.

the night continues, and you end up making him watch your favourite film - perfect blue, which you watch in comfortable silence.

as the credits roll, you stretch out comfortably on spencer's couch, feeling the pleasant weight of sleep pulling at your eyelids. the movie is intense, and you’re exhausted from the day's excitement.

spencer glances over at you, a soft smile playing on his lips as he noticed your drooping eyelids. he gently reached for the remote and turned off the playstation you were using to watch it, casting the room into a soothing darkness.

"you tired?" he asks, his voice low and gentle.

you nod sleepily, snuggling into the cushions. "yeah, it's been a long day. sorry for almost falling asleep on you."

spencer chuckles softly, shaking his head. "don't apologize. it's actually kind of nice having someone to watch movies with, even if they fall asleep halfway through."

you smile, feeling a warmth spread through your chest at his words. despite only meeting him tonight, you already feel a sense of comfort in his presence.

with a contented sigh, you let yourself drift off, the steady rhythm of spencer's heartbeat beneath you lulling you into a peaceful slumber.

later that night, as you sleep soundly against him, spencer can’t resist taking a picture of you, your peaceful expression illuminated by the soft glow of the tv’s ‘no signal’ screen. he texts it to courtney with a simple message: "she isn't too bad."

as he presses send, a smile tuggs at the corners of his lips.

courtney opens the message to see your face, her jaw dropping. she closes the messages from spencer, and immediatley texts anna,

‘u owe me 20 ;)’

[phantom-of-the-501st]

Fives Thoughts

Sooooo I literally just made a post being like 'here are some fun bits from Umbara because the arc is depressing and I don't wanna talk about the sad bits' but uh... I had thoughts in the last 15 mins and now I wanna share them. 😃

And of course tagging as usual for people I'm interested to hear opinions from: @saturn-sends-hugs @inkstainedhandswithrings @the-bi-space-ace

It's been a while since I watched these story arcs back-to-back, so a lot of the character development is really showing atm. And one I find interesting is a shift in Fives between The Citadel and Umbara.

Fives has always had a bit of a firey personality, but up until this point he's been a little bit held back with that passion for the most part. And I'm gonna touch in something that @novaceleste and @spaceyjessa spoke about in their podcast (@coffeeandclones I was just listening to it the other day and they talk about some interesting points. Defo recommend you check it out. Also #JusticeForDroidbait2024) because it really is the basis for this whole point. Despite Fives being the brasher, slightly more hardheaded personality, and Echo being the more by-the-books one, it's Echo that tends to do a lot of the talking when authority is involved. When they speak to Shaak Ti, it's Echo that takes the lead, while Fives is a little more hesitant.

And when they first meet Rex and Cody, Fives automatically introduces himself as CT-27-5555, despite being very open about his displeasure of being called that throughout their training. He has this louder personality but he tends to draw into himself and panic slightly when put in front of authority.

However, he still has these more fiery moments, like during his speech in ARC Troopers. When he's put in a fight, that spark within him comes out full force. "My blood is boiling for a fight." That's what drives Fives. That's where that passion comes from. He always wanted to make ARC trooper, to prove himself and to demonstrate that fire in the fight.

And yet when we get to the Citadel, he's surprisingly nervous. Echo seems to be fairly on board with everything, he's listening intently, he's down with the plan. But Fives is rather hesitant and doesn't seem totally enthused about the whole thing. They've made ARC trooper, they're being included in a specialist mission, the things that Fives so desperately worked for. But now that they're here? He's really not comfortable with it.

And I think that Fives' passion and drive is so prominent in the heat of battle because his adrenaline is going, he's got the energy to burn and so that's when we see this fire in him. But in the quieter moments, the meetings, the in-between fights? He's nervous. Those are the moments where he can sit on it and really think about what they're up against. And what becomes really apparent is that Fives is absolutely terrified of the thing that fuels his fire. The thing he worked so hard for scares the absolute shit out of him. And for good reason.

But it's never been so much of an issue because he had Echo. Echo, who's more level headed, who feels comfortable with plans and formats and authority. He could be the comforting presence that Fives needed outside of battle, while Fives could be the spark in it. They're like fire and water. They keep each other regulated, balanced.

But then The Citadel happens.

And watching the Umbara arc, I noticed that Fives doesn't have that very noticeable fear. It's not that it's absent, it's just that it isn't so obvious all of the time. Of course, some of that is going to come with experience, he's been an ARC for longer, he's know Rex for a while so there's slightly more comfort with that level of authority, but he's definitely more consistently confident than he was before.

So my suggestion is, what if that comes as a result of losing Echo (at least in part)? He doesn't have that calming presence anymore, the one to balance his nerves. He doesn't have someone to stand firm beside him or take the bigger step for the two of them, so he's had to learn to do that himself. I think part of it is natural growth that comes with experience (to quote Rex: "experience outranks everything") but I do also think it comes with no longer having that constant other half. Fives has had to learn to balance himself.

Like I said earlier, a lot of this links back to stuff said in Nova and Jessa's podcast, so I'd recommend checking it out. But I just wanted to add my extra thoughts on it, having just watched Umbara, because it definitely stuck out to me on this rewatch.

[rei-ismyname]

Uncanny X-Men #8 review - Raid on Graymalkin finale

Raid on Graymalkin has been a strange event in a lot of ways. It happened very early after an editorial and creative team change, it's only four issues spread over 2 books, and perhaps most of all, editorial both spoiled the ending and hyped up an ideological divide between Rogue and Cyclops. The big question is 'was the hype paid off?' Sadly, no - Uncanny #8 doesn't so much land the plane as crash it into a mountain. A plane crash can be a spectacle though, let's break it down. At the very least it looks great. This is a long one, so strap in.

We get to know Scurvy a little better.

X-Men #9 ended with both teams in Scurvy/ Philip's psychic thrall and Charles Xavier taking the stage after Kurt and Kwannon freed him. Uncanny #8 opens with his POV of his recent history, showing a 'Not All Mutants' mutant and how he ended up in an abusive relationship with a right wing podcast host. Well, it shows how they met, how his powers work, and how Warden Ellis has used him.

His powers aging him drastically explains why he's reluctant to go all out and perhaps how his powers helped an Infowars knock off to get this job. YMMV on whether this makes him sympathetic; it's certainly a 180 from the plain pathetic he has been portrayed as thus far. We spend a lot of time with him this issue, but it's all so vague I don't feel like we actually know all that much about him. He is portrayed as a victim, though he's also in the process of frying our heroes' brains and enslaving people. On the other hand, we get so little of his motivations and feelings that there's not much there. Villains/antagonists need to be developed to be interesting, and I'm not sure if Scurvy is a victim of Ellis' crusade or a self hating mutant who gave 'everything to a dream' for ... reasons. He's literally killing himself and it'd be good to know why.

Scurvy has been hyped as a Psychic on par with Xavier, something Xavier himself hasn't exactly confirmed but he has admitted Scurvy is an obstacle. They haven't met but Scurvy's been aware of Xavier, presumably because he's world famous and announced Krakoa to everyone on the planet. Scurvy suggests it's more than that - he and Charles are part of a group of five mutants called Avians, one of whom died - Harvey X. Chuck has had an oversized presence in Simone's Uncanny X-Men and another vague mystery about him takes up space that could be used to develop other characters - The Outliers, Jubilee, Nightcrawler. This 'Avian' business feels like The Twelve and other similar half baked plots, and how can Charles have a tumour if he's in a relatively new body? He died last in Inferno AFAIK, but more than that it feels unnecessary. I'm not invested in believing or disbelieving it, though Chuck dying might make X-Manhunt more interesting.

Chuck isn't showing up again until March, and Scurvy ages 10 years during this issue. Why are we spending all this time on these people that aren't main characters? Does Xavier really need to be part of some special unexplained group? He's been a very special and prominent part of the X-Men since 1963 - new old girlfriends and vague hints of specialness feel like mystery box overkill. Maybe Scurvy is lying as part of their psychic battle. Laws of narrative economy suggest otherwise, but either way - what's the point? Also, Avians? Are they birds? Maybe it's a Shi'Ar thing but right now it sounds ridiculous. Avians 🙄

Juggernaut knocks Rogue out of Scurvy's control and she thinks she has time to do the same to one other person. She apologises to Gambit for not choosing him and picks Cyke as the tactical choice, nearly knocking his head off. He snaps out of it too and shit gets bizarre.

For some reason Scott chooses this moment to berate Rogue for 'bringing kids into a war zone' which is a super valid point but I find it difficult to believe he'd bring it up while they're on the back foot and threats are everywhere. Rogue's answer is even more puzzling. I can believe she'd make an appeal to emotion but it's not a real answer. 'At least we don't have Magneto on our team' is not a rebuttal to nearly getting children killed, but it also does not make sense.

Magneto has been reformed for YEARS at this point and was a driving force behind Krakoa. She's saying like he's some irredeemable villain when he's the most heroic he's ever been. He and Rogue had zero interaction on Krakoa, where he was considered a national hero and famously was very tight with her hero Xavier. If she has an issue with the sins that came to light after Inferno, then she wouldn't be so charitable to Chuck, either. Maybe it's Scurvy's influence, but if so then what's the point? This isn't ideology, it's dodging the question at worst or petty bickering at best. Has Rogue forgotten her extensive history with Magneto, or her own start as a villain? What about her husband's involvement in the Mutant Massacre or her parents' unrepentant villainy? When considered in the context of Simone saying that Rogue and Cyclops would occupy the Xavier/Magneto relationship it looks like a missed shot. You'd have to ignore decades of history to make it work. Sigh, this was an unforced error and it really bums me out.

'I'm never going to be you and you're never going to be Professor X' is flat out weird. Cyclops answer of 'good' is consistent with his argument last issue, but it makes it look like they're not having the same conversation. Finally they realise they're in a war zone and only now does Rogue defer to Cyclops. Oookayyy. They say 'Magik and Wolverine' together in a moment that's both cheesy as hell and should underline their commonalities. I'm almost feel bad ragging on this, but it's not executed well. At least Rogue is consistently characterised as a cowboy. That's something.

Magik and Wolverine start freeing people then stop to agree not to kill each other. Deathdream says weird stuff, as usual, and the two make up. Jitter has her second instance of love heart emoji'ing a woman, which is cute but still deniable as actual WLW representation. I hope Simone cashes this cheque.

Queerness should be something that's not notable in a perfect world, just a part of the character. We don't live in a perfect world though, and we don't know a lot about Jitter. We know her powers, that she's Malay Singaporean, that she has a stutter, and that she possibly likes women. It's not enough for issue #8 of the flagship series. The choice was made to heavily focus on Xavier and Sarah Gaunt, and a casualty of that was getting to know main characters. It wouldn't be such a big deal if the payoff was worth it, but what did we actually learn? Instead of giving readers a break from Charles Xavier, he's been a regular presence. His appearance in this event could have been more impactful but I feel like we never had a chance to miss him.

Kwannon and Kurt reveal that Scurvy made them fight, which Rogue is aware of, and she adds that 'we're broken.' I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, but this undermines the stakes of the ideological conflict. Is it manufactured or isn't it? None of them consider attacking Scurvy while he's fighting Xavier, either. Nobody is acting like they're in danger. It feels unserious, like the characters are just waiting for things to happen to them.

At this point I don't really care who Inmate X is. Uncanny X-Men has been dropping these mystery boxes that readers can only guess at, and like with Harvey X being the one pulling strings, it comes out of nowhere. It's another Avian, which means nothing to us beyond a vague implication of specialness. We know that Ellis considers it a bad thing if he get out of his cell, but that doesn't narrow it down aside from it being a he.

Aw, cripes - popular gen Z saying

Interestingly, Xavier's astral form is that of his Cerebro-helmeted onesie twink. It could reveal that he hasn't changed at all in how he sees himself and his role as shepherd of mutantkind. It's very different from his classic astral battle appearance, and I love it thematically and visually. Scurvy and Chuck as astral giants towering over the schoolprison is striking, though the casualness of their dialogue mutes it somewhat.

Not sure how Ezra or Ellis can tell Scurvy is losing a battle on the astral plane, but she does what she should have done before this and gets a gun. Calico is overjoyed that the Outliers (except Jitter) came for her, but what could be a heartwarming moment is undercut by their dulled expressions. I can buy Deathdream doing this, but Ransom has been emotionally aware prior to this. We have zero details, but aren't these kids tight after months of being on the run together?

It's finally time to stop standing around, as Ellis and guards are here with guns. The X-Men, having already beat up plenty of these dudes, aren't impressed. They stand together (no idea where Chuck and Scurvy got to) and Cyke urges her to stand down, pointing out that they're not as nice as the Avengers. Rogue agrees in the shittiest way possible, thinking 'sometimes visor boy says jus the right thing.' Weird ableist stance from Rogue, but all it does is highlight how shallow their conflict is and remind us that Gail Simone doesn't like Cyclops.

Ellis doesn't blink, telling them her 'brother died because of trash like you.' We knew this already, and I'm wondering if there's anything else to her. She's established as a threat but she's not especially interesting. She helped with Sarah Gaunt out of empathy (?) but here she is flinging the same old slurs. I'm not sure if her dark skin is meant to be noteworthy or say anything. So far it hasn't been a part of her character in any way other than visual, no commentary on how someone who has experienced minority oppression becomes so hell-bent on dealing it out herself. How does a person become willing to enslave and torture, and even (as we'll see) destroy two towns with thousands of humans in them? Her brother died, sure, but that's thin characterisation for a multi-arc villain.

Chuck wallops Scurvy with an uppercut!

Ellis brings out The Trustees again (who the X-Men easily defeated) to have Blob recite 'the pledge.' Very messed up but it shouldn't exactly convince the X-Men to do anything other than smash this place to pieces. She threatens to let Sarah Gaunt loose from her comically large chains that shouldn't stop her for a second.

Cyclops points out that with Scurvy's defeat Ellis' big gun is down. She laughs at that, and for some reason Chuck doesn't immediately take over her brain. Her big gun is more literal - a fucking network of sonic cannon satellites. Who TF gave this lady a Death Star? She has Merle and Haven targeted but Rogue thinks she's bluffing. Logically, you'd think so. Would the US government really accept this maniac destroying towns with a space laser? Not sure how they'd spin that. Also, neither team have any leverage to stop her using it whenever she wants. I feel like she's forcing them to kill her right here and now, lest their strategic position becomes 'able to be killed at any time without effort.' They could even just send her on permanent vacation to Limbo, see how her bullshit flies with Maddie Pryor.

Ellis lets them take the people they came for (why?) but that's not enough for Rogue. Siryn speaks to Rogue personally while crying, indicating she's herself, as much as she can be with all the torture, mind control, and who knows what else? It's only when Xavier intercedes that Rogue listens.

Charles explains why he needs to be in prison (though we know he'll change his mind and escape in March) and they have an emotional exchange. It works, I guess, but Rogue looks super selfish and ignorant. Free Charles for personal reasons when he doesn't want it at the cost of two towns? Doesn't seem like much of a choice (other than knocking Ellis out while she's in your face.) It feels a bit regressive for Rogue, too. She is aware of everything from Fall of X (including Chuck manipulating one of her mothers and trying to permanently kill the other) and hadn't really had or needed a mentor in a long time. Sure, everyone is lost after Krakoa, but WTF is she so attached to Xavier? It's great that he was the first to believe in her but this feels almost infantilising. Rogue is better than this.

Scott has Magik open a big portal before 'she' can stop you. I assume 'she' refers to Rogue, except Rogue is shown willingly walking through it with everyone else. Ellis wasn't interested in stopping them. It's like everyone has the script and realises the event is over so it's time to go. I have difficulty believing any of these characters would just meekly leave, not because of Xavier, but the multiple sonic space cannons that can kill them anytime plus their enslaved comrades. There's eight regular ass humans with guns in the way and this is their shot to do anything about it. How many of these X-Men could take them all out by themselves? Cyke could optic blast them unconscious, Magik has multiple methods, and many of the others could just punch them while ignoring bullets.

Yo, where's Quentin? He arrived with you guys.

Once Rogue has walked through the portal (clearly willingly and without duress) she objects again - 'no. We can't leave him there!' Cyke echoes Charles' own words and promises to get the others out, but Rogue punches him maybe ten feet and not only repudiates Scott's promises (?) but places the blame entirely on him. He blasts her and tells her to grow up (kinda fair) but then their teammates hold them back. Beast tells Scott he won, but this looks like a narrative trick to pretend Cyclops wanted to fight or has any reason to.

Rogue turns to leave with mild venom and her team follows. Hank assures Scott that he had no choice and Scott disagrees but doesn't elaborate. I hate to see X-Men fight but it's even worse when it's over nothing. The post-portal events feel like Simone going 'hmm, didn't really sell that ideological divide or their falling out, fuck it, just have Rogue punch Cyclops.' I think Cyclops was mostly right here, but it's more than Rogue was wrong and the conflict was contrived. I just don't buy the degree of animosity Rogue has and all the reasons given feel out of character. If that's who Rogue is right now I can accept it, but it's not very heroic and she's had multiple egregious failures of leadership. If this is identified as a character flaw that needs working on or a mistake that she regrets it could make for interesting storytelling, but all the information we have suggests that's not the case. Uncanny is frankly a trainwreck, but at least it looks fantastic. The letters page and other media suggests a lot of people are enjoying this book, and I couldn't be happier for them. I just wish I was too. I'll keep reviewing it of course, and I'll be less harsh than this review was. It was hyped and it called shots and didn't deliver. Doing that sets expectations and gives me another metric to judge it by. Hopefully we can get on with learning about the characters who've been neglected.

As for Raid on Graymalkin as an event, it had its ups and downs. Most of the ups were in X-Men and most of the downs were in Uncanny. Ultimately it didn't fulfill the promise it made so I judge it as a failure. We didn't learn a great deal and it boiled down to a cynical excuse for X-Men to punch each other. The mysteries it introduced feel dull to me and I am not especially interested in the Avians or Inmate X. The solicits for X-Manhunt spoiled that Xavier wasn't going anywhere, which left us with forced conflict. I'm far more interested in the aftermath of the event, especially the Alaska team dealing with a visit from the O*N*E. They don't really need much reason to fuck with the X-Men so I'm not crediting the event with that.

Thanks for reading!

[bokettochild]

Links Meet Zeldas AU

4 am brain is 4 am brain-ing

I had an idea, and yes, that's probably not the best of things for me to be doing, but this head never stops spinning in all honesty.

Anyways! Remember how JoJo said (in the podcast) that we're doubling the cast eventually? Well, ever since that, I've had this vague notion that it would be fun to write a fic featuring all the Links and Zeldas meeting. Except, you know, for the part where that's ten whole new characters to familiarize myself with, and trying to work out all the dynamics at once with that many characters would be a nightmare.

But then it hit me: they don't have to be all at once!

Hear me out!

A major battle with the shadow, the boys are beaten down and bloody, but still pressing on. The shadow is also weakened in some way, it's not got that much longer, and while nobody's really winning, it is coming very close to losing. So, it creates a portal, jumping through.

The boys follow.

FSA style, none of them end up in the same location, but rather, scattered to the Four Winds (so to speak) in different eras of Hyrule, but none of them in their own. Shenanigans ensue as they try to either a.) fine their way home, b.) find the chain, or c.) find the shadow and defeat it. Over the course of said shenanigans, they each run into the Zelda(s) of that era, whom then decide to join them to get them home and help defeat the evil.

What's really fun to me about this idea though is that it gives me a chance to indulge in my "downfall princesses are badasses" hc. You all know I adore Scary Fable, but Feral-Cat Dawn also has a special place in my heart. Imagining the other heroes meeting a downfall princess for the first time is pure gold to me, especially without her respective hero there to explain why she's Like That, or help in some way.

Just- a fic focusing on random pairings of Links and Zeldas all trying to find each other across space and time.

And what solidified it for me? The name flying into my head

"How I Met Your Princess"

Yes, I'm hilarious, feel free to applaud LOL

[neodotexe]

I've been seeing a lot of those "guess which event isn't canon" polls so I'm doing one for my current hyperfixation

feel free to rb for a bigger sample size

[gothamsmom]

Headcanon: What Kind of Music the Justice League Members Listen To

Look, we all know the Justice League is made up of some of the most powerful beings on the planet. But have you ever stopped to wonder what’s in their playlists? Because, trust me, it’s a trip.

Batman 🦇

Classical. Dark orchestral pieces. Probably has an entire playlist just for brooding on rooftops.

Intense film scores, because every patrol needs a dramatic background soundtrack.

Secretly listens to 80s rock, but only when he's working late in the Batcave and thinks nobody can hear.

Alfred once caught him listening to Eye of the Tiger while training and has never let him live it down.

Superman 🦸‍♂️

Classic rock. The man screams Born in the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen energy.

Country music, but the old-school kind—Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton. Not the “beer and trucks” country.

Has a soft spot for Disney soundtracks because Ma Kent used to play them when he was a kid.

Absolutely plays Here Comes the Sun when he flies in the morning.

Wonder Woman 🗡️

Traditional Themysciran war hymns. Probably the only person alive who actually vibes to ancient battle chants.

Modernized Greek folk music. Has strong opinions about the use of bouzouki.

Power ballads from the 80s. You think she wouldn’t belt Total Eclipse of the Heart on a mission? Think again.

Absolutely a Beyoncé fan. Will 100% fight anyone who disrespects Lemonade.

The Flash (Barry Allen) ⚡

Pop punk and alternative rock. Grew up in the Blink-182 and Fall Out Boy era and never moved on.

Has way too many “Running Mix” playlists that are all just variations of Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen.

Listens to podcasts at 3x speed and can still understand them. Nobody else knows how.

Secretly jams to ABBA and will never admit it.

Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) ✈️

Classic dad rock. AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith—he thinks he’s the cool one.

Will never admit he has a soft spot for power love ballads.

Owns an “Ultimate Road Trip” playlist that’s just Born to Be Wild 20 times in a row.

Once got caught belting Total Eclipse of the Heart with Diana. They pretend it didn’t happen.

Aquaman 🌊

Deep sea ambient music and whale songs, because of course.

Anything with a strong drumbeat—tribal music, Viking war songs, stuff you’d storm a castle to.

Loves old sea shanties but won’t tell anyone. (Except Mera, who thinks it’s adorable.)

Blasted Under the Sea at full volume once just to see Bruce’s reaction.

Martian Manhunter 🛸

Cosmic, space-themed instrumentals. Probably meditates to the Interstellar soundtrack.

Really enjoys Earth jazz. Nobody saw that coming.

Has a weird fascination with 50s rock and roll—Elvis, Buddy Holly, The Beatles.

Sometimes just listens to white noise to drown out everyone’s thoughts.

Green Arrow (Oliver Queen) 🏹

Folk rock. Think Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, and The Lumineers.

Protest music. Woody Guthrie. Rage Against the Machine. The man lives for anti-establishment anthems.

Has a guilty pleasure for indie acoustic covers of pop songs.

“You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Wrecking Ball on a banjo, Bruce.”

Black Canary (Dinah Lance) 🎤

Pure rock and roll. Joan Jett, Blondie, Pat Benatar—the classics.

Thinks punk rock peaked in the 90s. Loves The Offspring, Green Day, and No Doubt.

Will break into karaoke at the drop of a hat and owns every performance.

Can and will drag Oliver to concerts against his will.

Cyborg (Victor Stone) 🤖

R&B, hip-hop, and early 2000s rap. The man knows his beats.

Also super into EDM. Has a whole playlist titled "Hack the Planet" that’s just Daft Punk and Skrillex.

Soundtrack nerd. Loves the DOOM and Halo soundtracks with a passion.

Will play Mr. Roboto at full blast just to mess with people.

Zatanna 🎩

Gothic rock and dark cabaret. Think Evanescence, The Dresden Dolls, and Florence + the Machine.

Old jazz and swing music. Loves the mysterious vibe of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra.

Theatrical show tunes. She owns The Phantom of the Opera soundtrack.

Has a playlist for every kind of magic spell.

Shazam (Billy Batson) ⚡

Whatever is on the Top 40 charts at the moment.

Thinks 90s boy bands like Backstreet Boys and NSYNC are legendary.

Has way too much Kidz Bop on his playlist (he swears it's ironic).

Jams to We Will Rock You every time he transforms.

And finally, Jason Todd (Red Hood) 🔥

Brother by Kodaline. On repeat. Don’t ask why.

90s grunge. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden—the angstiest stuff possible.

Classic rock, but only the emo stuff. If it sounds like it belongs in a tragic movie montage, he loves it.

Actually has really good taste in music. Nobody in the Batfamily expected that.

So yeah, the Justice League has a wild mix of musical tastes, and if you ever got a hold of their playlists, you'd either be deeply impressed or deeply concerned. Probably both.

[sshbpodcast]

Episode 152: Everyone's Fighting Always

DS9: "Battle Lines" and "The Storyteller"

DS9 left us in the lurch this week, with two different episodes about conflict resolution of varying quality. First up: an eternal war is being fought by the biggest idiots in the Gamma Quadrant in "Battle Lines". After that, the Chief is dragged into a centuries-old rite to keep a monster at bay while, back on the station, Jake & Nog woo a young ruler as she tries to do right by her people.

Also this week: how many episodes can we compare "Battle Lines" to? What the devil is wrong with Bajor? How successfully can we waffle when we run out of things to say?

Content warning: discussion of rape as a trope in mythology.

Timestamps: Battle Lines: 01:36; The Storyteller: 21:52

[alolanrain]

So regional Dragon type specialists right, youd think that they are the most put together based on their public appearances on TV and online right? Wrong

Lance keeps everything professional but behind closed doors or when nobody is watching he is an absolute menace, regularly spars hand-to-paw/claw with his pokemon (yes even his Hydregon and it thinks its funny whenever it fakes him out) this man also has the tendancy to seemingly teleport behind people especially during his G-Man work (ie Rocket Grunt thinks their safe and the next minute they know theyre being german suplexed by a red haired man in a cape like he's Batman or something)

Drake is an enigma being the oldest acting Hoenn League member but nobody really knows much about him (the man barely makes any live appearances and any League challengers over the past 20 years havent even gotten past his Flygon except for Steven of course) nobody knows where he lives or where he even came from (they ask and every single time they get a different awnser with the strangest being Poni Island, nobody knows how old he is and speculates that he is immortal) Briney knows everything about him and refuses to tell because its both hilarious and also just a straight up cognito hazard and will not elaborate

Draydon is relatively normal until back when he and Alder were young Alder saw him deadlifting a boulder with zero effort (the guy is insanely strong) people do speculate that he and Drake might be related and he refuses to dispute or prove it, the beard however is just gravity defying and what makes it worse is that he doesnt use gel or anything its just like that with no explanation (funnily enough he holds back in all of his battles and if he didnt he could easily become champion, Iris took after that energy and evicerated everything in her path while wearing her magical girl champion costume)

Drasna generally keeps to herself but she likes to piss off Seibold on occasion and sics him on paparazzi when she gets bored (usually in the form of 'oh dear it looks like youre getting review bombed again' followed by very angry mega blastoise noises and the loudest Kalosian swearing you can imagine) she was at one point a poison specialist with her Dragalge but partially moved away from it (she still has an insanely overpowered Naganadel that nobody knows where or when she got it)

Raihan knows just about anything you could ask for, need to know the history of the Turffield Rock Formations? He knows it at the top of his head, where to find a super specific type of phone charger? Wyndon Stadium Kiosk on the 45th floor the red ones suck get the yellow ones, Where to get a Japanese dub of Space Buddies? Spikemuth district apartment complex 3rd floor knock on the 4th door say you want butter noodles and the guy will slide you a copy on a burnt DVD, Where the hell is Leon? Put an air tag on his cape last year Leon is currently lost in a pocket dimension being taunted by a small green onion fairy (Raihan also has several alt accounts that just post anywhere from doing handmade cosplay weapons to baking to somehow a podcast with Clemont and Iono about the importance of RGB gamer light PC setups while neither of them know its him)

Everything about this ask that has graced my inbox is an automatic yes.

Lance having to spend a fortune on clothes and going through wardrobe after wardrobe because his clothes get torn by his play flighting/work out. Also having a little whiteboard on the fridge at the gym-men head quarters or at the elite four castle with “how many Rocket Grunts Lance has suplexed this month.” On it with the score.

The entire Hoenn league begs Mr.Briney to divulge information about Drake and he’s tight lipped. Steven has even worse luck since Drake keeps giving him “my paperwork’s already been filed when I started this position, it doesn’t need to be fixed or filed in any different way.” And said file is so officially redacted by a past Champion that has now sadly passed.

Somehow and somewhere hidden very strategically, there are polaroid photo’s of Drayden doing lunges across a gym with him holding Alders in a fireman carry when they were both young. There might be a video as well that may or may not have been accidentally lost in a city by the Champion and got snatched up off the street later in the day. Sitting somewhere in some poor persons drunk drawer because they saw a cute cam corder that doesn’t properly work anymore.

Drasna is totally scheming when it comes to Seibold. There’s always a little prank she’s writing down on scrap papers during long meeting or waiting for challengers to come through the elite four. Picking on her coworker and getting away with it is her favorite pass time.

Raihan is a walking encyclopedia on almost anything and everything. He gets text messages not only from the other dragon trainers in the leagues but also almost everyone else, including Clemont on the rare occasion, and he always takes time to respond back with either a link to a website with proper information or to craft a well knowledge text message.

[thenatezone]

DISCLAIMER: While I do feel very strongly about trans rights, at the end of the day I am still writing as a cis queer man so I highly recommend that you seek out trans perspectives and resources if you want to start supporting the community more actively

This is where compromise with transphobes gets you. One of the most high-profile Democrats in the country debuted his new pro-centrism podcast (already a profound embarrassment), during which he agreed with nazi bootlick Charlie Kirk that trans women athletes have an unfair advantage.

My guess would be that the spineless Mr. Newsom has heretofore had no real opinion about trans athletes one way or the other because he has not had to--or wanted to--think about them all that much. Despite the fact that CHUDS like Kirk have repeatedly painted the Democratic Party as radically pro-trans, most establishment Democrats like Newsom have refused to engage with the issue and instead keep trying to pivot to the economy or foreign policy or whatever they imagine will appeal to middle-class bigots. And meanwhile, as anyone who has had to actually live or work among them can tell you, said bigots will gladly choose the misery of others over their own prosperity or security. Every. Single. Time.

If establishment Democrats must discuss the trans "controversy" they've usually said things like "There are barely a dozen out trans NCAA athletes, this isn't a threat!" Technically true, but because they've refused to acknowledge the reality of a trans threat, they have also conveniently avoided any full-throated defense, as well as any condemnation of those who unfairly cast trans athletes as bullies and cheaters and liars and predators. And now, after the 2024 election, we see the "It's not even that many!" defense arrive at the logical conclusion of "Aaaand since it's not that many.....we'll let the Republicans have this one." Because the consultants say Democrats have to "pick our battles." I would have thought picking battles in MAGAWorld 2.0 meant something like throwing all the party's support behind a vulnerable minority group being used right now as a canary in the coal mine for government-sponsored persecution precisely because "it's not even that many." Apparently it means we have to find common ground with rancid sourdough starter like Charlie Kirk instead of trans folks who just want to exist.

And that's how the transphobes win. As this article points out, a bigger number of Americans are opposed to trans athletes specifically than to trans people in general, but now the transphobe activists have their foot in the door. If (in their view) they can successfully turn the country so completely against trans athletes, then how hard could it be to eventually force all trans people out of our public spaces? And hey, maybe that won't end with local and state governments strictly dictating everyone's gender performance to make sure we're all appropriately adhering to our "biological sex," but I live in fucking Texas. So.

Anyway, contact your representatives. Federal, state, local. If they are Democrats, make sure they know that you are not in favor of them abandoning trans rights. It's a damn shame if you didn't understand the simple and self-evident truth that trans rights are human rights before now, but please understand it now and don't be complicit anymore.

[mariacallous]

I'm sharing this because I think it's kind of atrocious. Hasan Piker *and* Richard Reeves?! And it gets worse from there.

By the time I landed at LAX and switched my phone out of airplane mode, Hasan Piker had been streaming for three hours. I put in an earbud and watched as I filed off the plane. Visible behind him were walls of framed fan art, a cardboard cutout of Bernie Sanders sitting in the cold, and Piker’s huge puppy, Kaya, taking a nap. Piker had already shown off his “cozy-ass ’fit” (sweatpants with kitschy bald eagles, a custom pair of platform Crocs), and recounted his experience the previous night at the Streamer Awards, a red-carpet event honoring A-listers on Twitch—the popular live-streaming site where he is one of the biggest stars, and the only prominent leftist. He’d begun the day’s broadcast by rattling off a standard opening monologue: “Folks, we’re live and alive, and I hope all the boys, girls, and enbies”—nonbinary people—“are having a fantastic one.” To anyone listening for shibboleths, this would have pigeonholed him as a progressive. Also within view, though, were three towers of Zyn cannisters, and a “Make America Great Again” hat, which he sometimes wears ironically. He has the patter of a Rutgers frat bro and the laid-back charisma of a Miami club promoter, both of which he was, briefly, in his early twenties. Now he’s thirty-three—so old, in streamer years, that his fans call him “unc.”

I ordered a Lyft, then flipped back to Piker’s stream. By then, he was talking about the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria, which had happened overnight. I watched as he cycled from BBC footage to Wikipedia, pausing every few seconds to add a diatribe or a joke. The angle he was developing was that Western journalists seemed too eager to portray the leader of the Syrian rebel forces in a heroic light. “I’m very skeptical of the fucking former Al Qaeda guy,” Piker said. A little while later, his doorbell rang, and he leaned over to buzz in a guest—me. I looked up from my phone to see him standing in his doorway. He doesn’t run ad breaks, so whenever he needs to do something off-camera, like answer the door or use the bathroom, he plays a video and attends to his business quickly, before his viewers can get bored. “I’m live right now, but we can talk when I’m done,” he told me, already walking away. “Try and stay out of the shot.”

In last year’s Presidential election, Democrats lost support with nearly every kind of voter: rich, poor, white, Black, Asian American, Hispanic. But the defection that alarmed Party strategists the most was that of young voters, especially young men, a group that Donald Trump lost by fifteen points in 2020 and won by fourteen points in 2024—a nearly thirty-point swing. “The only cohort of men that Biden won in 2020 was eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds,” John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a former adviser to Biden’s Presidential campaign, told me. “That was the one cohort they had to hold on to, and they let it go.”

Candidates matter; so does the national mood, and the price of groceries. Yet some Monday-morning quarterbacks also noted that, just as 1960 was the first TV election and 2016 was the first social-media election, the 2024 Presidential campaign was the first to be conducted largely on live streams and long-form podcasts, media that happen to be thoroughly dominated by MAGA bros. The biggest of them all, Joe Rogan, spent the final weeks of the campaign giving many hours of fawning airtime to Trump—and to his running mate, J. D. Vance, and his key allies, such as Elon Musk—before endorsing Trump on the eve of the election. “At no point was I, like, ‘Only I, a dickhead on the internet, am qualified to teach these kids why we need a functioning welfare state,’ ” Piker told me. “I just felt like no one else was really in these spaces trying to explain these things. Certainly not the Democrats.”

Piker has almost three million Twitch followers, and, as with most guys who talk into microphones on the internet, his audience skews young, male, and disaffected. At the peak of his Election Night stream in November, he had more than three hundred thousand viewers. He broadcasts seven days a week, eight to ten hours a day, usually from his house in West Hollywood, and he doesn’t use visual pyrotechnics to hold his viewers’ attention. Most of the time, what you see on his stream is an overlay of three things: a fixed shot of Piker sitting at his desk; a screen share of whatever he’s looking at on his computer; and his chat, where fans supply pertinent links, caps-lock shit talk, and puppy emojis, all surging in real time up the right side of the screen.

Although Piker hates Trump, he’s hardly a loyal Democrat. At bottom, he’s an old-school hard leftist, not a liberal. (On his bedside table he has some protein Pop-Tart knock-offs and a copy of “The Communist Manifesto.”) Many of his opinions—for example, that the “American empire” has been a destructive force, on the whole—would surely be off-putting to the median voter. But he is just one of many independent media creators with an anti-Trump message—in recent weeks, the political-podcast charts have included “The Bulwark,” “This Is Gavin Newsom,” and even a show called “Raging Moderates.” For a couple of weeks last month, a liberal show called “The MeidasTouch Podcast” beat out “The Joe Rogan Experience” for the No. 1 spot. “Corporate media, too often, has a both-sides perspective,” Ben Meiselas, one of the “MeidasTouch” co-hosts, told me. “We do not mince words about the threat to workers, the threat to democracy.”

One piece of fan art on Piker’s wall is a cartoon of him operating a day-care center, shielding a roomful of lost boys from the malign chaos of the open internet. “You gravitate to him because he’s just a voice you find relatable,” Piker’s producer, who goes by Marche, told me. “A lot of people don’t even put a political label on it, at least at first.” Piker gets up early every morning to work out, posting his daily stats so that his fans—his “community”—can follow along from home. He gives dating advice and motivational speeches. At a moment when there seems to be an ever-shortening algorithmic pipeline from bench-pressing tips to misogynist rage, Piker tries to model a more capacious form of masculinity: a straight guy, six feet four and movie-star handsome, who’s as comfortable wearing camo to a gun range as he is walking a red carpet in split-toe Margiela boots. Once viewers have come to trust him, they may be more open to his riffs on the rights of the poor or of trans people—delivered not as a primer on Judith Butler but in the register of “Bro, don’t be a dick.”

I pulled up a chair, just out of frame. Kaya ambled toward me, vetting my scent. Piker talked, almost without interruption, for four more hours, holding forth about recent internet drama, a documentary about the history of NATO, and the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O.’s assassin, who had not yet been identified. Within reach of his rolling desk chair was a mini-fridge full of cold brew and Diet Mountain Dew. Some of his takes were too unpolished for prime time. (“Bro, these guys are so cucked,” he said, critiquing a clip from a rival podcast on the right.) Then again, a live stream isn’t supposed to be a tight, scripted lecture. It’s supposed to be a good hang.

“I gotta end the broadcast here,” he said, shortly after 8 P.M. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” After turning the camera off, he seemed to deflate a bit. Comments were still floating up one of his monitors—the thousands of fans in the chat had dwindled to a few hundred, the inner circle who were devoted enough, or lonely enough, to keep one another company after the feed had gone dark. “The Democrats are smug and condescending, and everything they say sounds fake as shit,” Piker said. “Trump lies constantly, yes, but at least people get the sense that he’s authentically saying what he’s thinking.”

He put his feet up and reached for a fresh Zyn pouch. “Young men, like a lot of Americans, feel increasingly alienated,” he continued. They can’t afford college or rent, they can’t get a date, they can’t imagine a stable future. “The right is always there to tell them, ‘Yes, you should be angry, and the reason your life sucks is because of immigrants, or because a trans kid played a sport.’ And all the Democrats are telling them is ‘No, shut up, your life is fine, be joyful.’ ” No one has ever accused Piker of being a moderate, but in this case he is trying to forge a compromise. “My way is to go, ‘Look, be angry if you want. But your undocumented neighbor is not the problem here. You’re looking in the wrong direction.’ ”

In 2015, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton wrote that “white non-Hispanics without college degrees” were experiencing an anomalous spike in mortality from opioids, alcohol, and suicide. They later called these “deaths of despair.” In 2016, J. D. Vance, then an anti-Trump conservative, published a memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about the struggles of white rural families like his own. Promoting the book on PBS, he explained (but did not yet excuse) why such voters were drawn to Trump: “I think that the sense of cultural alienation breeds a sense of mistrust.” The first Trump Administration didn’t deliver many material gains to the rural poor—deaths of despair continued to rise, and wages continued to stagnate—but at least Trump spoke to their anguish and seemed outraged on their behalf. In retrospect, the question may not be why so many non-urban non-élites became Trump Republicans but what took them so long.

Around the same time, social scientists started to notice an overlapping crisis. The statistics were grim—twenty-first-century males were, relative to their forefathers and their female contemporaries, much more likely to fall behind in school, drop out of college, languish in the workforce, or die by overdose or suicide. The title of a 2012 book by the journalist Hanna Rosin declared “The End of Men.” The following year, the economists Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan published a paper called “The Trouble with Boys.” In one survey, more than a quarter of men in their teens and twenties reported having no close friends. When Covid hit, men were significantly more likely to die from it.

“In the fifteen years I’ve been looking at the statistics, the outcomes for men have not changed,” Rosin told me. “What did change, tremendously, is the culture.” The last Democratic Presidential candidate to win the male vote was Barack Obama. When Bernie Sanders ran for President, he had a zealous male following, but many top Democrats treated the “Bernie bros” less like a force to be harnessed than like a threat to be vanquished. A “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call raised millions for Kamala Harris’s campaign, but it would have been anathema to her base if she’d given a speech about what she planned to do for white dudes. This was, meanwhile, a key part of Trump’s appeal.

In a 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men,” Richard Reeves, a social scientist and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, blasts Republicans for exploiting “male dislocation” and misogynist fury at the expense of women’s rights. But he also lambastes Democrats for “pathologizing masculinity.” He gives an example from his sons’ high school in Bethesda, Maryland, where boys passed around a spreadsheet ranking their female classmates by attractiveness—behavior that Reeves describes as “immature,” even “harmful,” but not worthy of an international incident, which is what it became. He writes that “indiscriminately slapping the label of ‘toxic masculinity’ onto this kind of behavior is a mistake,” likely to propel young men “to the online manosphere where they will be reassured that they did nothing wrong, and that liberals are out to get them.”

At some point between Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and Hillary Clinton describing potential voters as “deplorables,” the Democrats came to be perceived as the party of scolds and snobs. Liberals used to be the counterculture; today, they’re the defenders of traditional norms and institutions. This may not have been the best political strategy at any time; it certainly isn’t now, when trust in institutions has never been lower. It’s impossible to know how many young men fit into this category, but there is clearly a kind of guy—the contemporary don’t-tread-on-me type who demands both the freedom to have gay friends and the freedom to use “gay” as an insult—who resents the idea of his morality being dictated by the family-values right or his speech being curtailed by the hall-monitor left. When pressed, many of these young men seem to have bought the pitch that, of the two parties, the Republicans were the less censorious. This may have been a miscalculation—the current Trump Administration has already banished dozens of words from government websites and, just last week, arrested a former Columbia student for what seems to be protected speech—but you can’t convince voters that they’ve been misinformed simply by lecturing them. The lecturing is part of the issue.

“Democrats got used to speaking about men as the problem, not as people with problems,” Reeves told me. “But of course men do have problems, and problems become grievances when you ignore them.” He knows a lot of well-connected Democrats in Washington, and for years he has urged them to campaign on men’s issues—“not in a zero-sum way, certainly not taking anything away from women, but just to show boys and men, ‘Hey, you’re also having a tough go of it, we see you.’ And the response I always got was ‘Now is not the time.’ ”

Rosin told me about a husband and wife she’d met in Alabama, in 2010. The husband lost his job, and the wife became the breadwinner, an arrangement he experienced as deeply shameful. “She would put the check down on the kitchen table, she would sign it over to him, and he would cash it, and nobody would speak about it,” Rosin said. “But then ‘man-victim’ became a viable identity.” As Rosin stayed in touch with the man, he started exhibiting a more “mischievous” expression of men’s-rights sensibilities, wearing a T-shirt that read “My Cave, My Rules.” This coincided with the rise of Trump, the man-victim’s patron saint. He didn’t offer detailed policy solutions to any of the underlying sociological problems, but, again, he addressed them directly. (“It is a very scary time for young men in America,” Trump said in 2018.)

Like most internet terms, “manosphere” is vague and protean; it has been applied to Ben Shapiro, a father of four who delivers conservative talking points in a yarmulke, and to Andrew Tate, a Bugatti-driving hustler who has been charged with human trafficking. In 2016, after a reedy Canadian professor named Jordan Peterson refused to use gender-neutral pronouns, he was taken up as a folk hero, like Galileo standing firm against the Inquisition. Peterson has almost nothing in common with, say, Dave Portnoy, another mascot of the bro-sphere, who mostly just wants to be left alone to eat pizza and drink beer by the pool. Yet they all seem to be meeting a demand in the cultural marketplace, one that could be as simple, at its root, as a dorm-room poster of Marlon Brando on a motorcycle or Johnny Cash flipping off the camera.

Last month, Richard Reeves was a guest on a popular podcast hosted by Theo Von, a formerly apolitical comedian who recently went to Trump’s Inauguration. Von, an infectiously affable guy with a mullet, presents himself as a curious goofball with essentially no prior knowledge on any topic. At one point he spoke—without much nuance, but also without apparent malice—about the plight of the white man. “I’m not speaking against any other group,” he said. “I’m just saying . . . you can’t make white males feel like they don’t exist.” Von grew up poor in a small town in Louisiana. “Yes, I know there’s privilege, but if you grew up with nothing you didn’t fucking feel any privilege sometimes.”

If Von had made this observation at a Trump rally, or on X, he might have been led from just-asking-questions guilelessness to more overt white aggrievement. If he’d made the same point in a liberal-arts seminar, or on Bluesky, he might have been shouted down. (When I got to this part of the podcast, I have to admit, my own inner hall monitor was on high alert.) But Reeves, looking a bit trepidatious, tried to thread the needle, introducing some academic caveats without coming across as a scold. “The U.S. has a uniquely terrible history when it comes to slavery,” he said. But he also noted that low-income white men were at particularly high risk of suicide. “Two things can be true at once,” he said.

The hallmark of social media is disinhibition born of anonymity. On the internet, no one knows whether you’re a dog, a Macedonian teen-ager, or the Pope wearing a puffer jacket. Podcasts, on the other hand, are built on parasociality: Michael Barbaro isn’t your friend, but, after making coffee with him in your ear a hundred times, you start to feel as if he were. And then there’s the world of always-on streaming, in which the temptations of parasociality are even more acute. The inputs are both aural and visual. The hosts respond to your comments in real time, at all hours. You can remind yourself not to bond with the pixels on the screen, but you may fall for the illusion all the same, like a baby chick imprinting on a robot. Piker treats fans in a way that can be confusingly intimate, giving them avuncular life advice one minute and thirst-trap photos the next. His Twitch handle is Hasanabi, “abi” being Turkish for “big brother”; his fans are called “Hasanabi heads,” or “parasocialists.”

Even as most of his fellow-streamers have drifted to the right, Piker has remained a staunch leftist. His explanation for this is that he is from Turkey, where “the idea that American economic and military power runs the world—that was, like, ‘Yeah, duh.’ ” He was born in New Jersey and grew up mostly in Ankara and Istanbul, in an upper-middle-class family, spending summers with relatives in the U.S. and watching a lot of American TV. (He speaks English with an American accent.) His father, an economist, is “more of a neolib, World Bank-loving type,” Piker told me. “We argue about it all the time, but it’s not heated.” His mother, an art-and-architecture historian, is more aligned with his politics. “The inequality is just so blatant,” she told me. “It was never fair, but now we have the internet—everyone can see it.”

Despite Piker’s brand as a brash outsider, he is, in an almost literal sense, a nepo baby. After graduating from Rutgers, in 2013, he moved to Los Angeles and got a job with his maternal uncle, Cenk Uygur, who happened to be the founder and host of “The Young Turks,” one of the biggest left-populist talk shows on the internet. The show had a considerable footprint on YouTube, but Piker helped it adapt to punchier formats that were better suited to Facebook and Instagram. “You’ve got to understand, I remember when this was a pudgy kid and I was changing his diapers,” Uygur told me. “Now, suddenly, he’s this handsome man, he’s dynamic, he’s killing it in front of the camera.” Piker hosted a recurring video segment called “Agitprop,” and picked fights with the right-wing influencers of the day, such as Tomi Lahren and Representative Dan Crenshaw. He got himself in trouble—“America deserved 9/11” was not a particularly good take, even in context—but he also expanded his name recognition. In 2017, BuzzFeed dubbed him “woke bae.”

Although he made some of the outlet’s most popular videos, he didn’t own the I.P. (Even when the boss is your uncle, you can still be alienated from the means of production.) So, in 2020, he decided to go solo, on Twitch. His mother joined him in Los Angeles, and they formed a pandemic pod in a two-bedroom apartment. “He was on there non-stop, shouting about video games or sex advice or whatever,” she told me. “His fans would see me in the background, cringing, and they would send me earplugs in the mail.” That year, he spent forty-two per cent of his time live on camera. (Not forty-two per cent of his waking hours—forty-two per cent of all the hours in the year.) In a call-in segment called “Chadvice,” Piker coached men through the small terrors and triumphs of daily life. One twenty-eight-year-old from Finland described himself as having an Asperger’s diagnosis and an “abject fear of rejection”; Piker, with solicitude and just enough amiable ribbing, spent half an hour talking him through the social mechanics of a first date.

When Twitch first launched, it was a niche platform where bored adolescents could watch other adolescents play video games. In 2014, Amazon bought it for nearly a billion dollars—an eye-popping amount, at least back then—even as mainstream analysts knew almost nothing about it. “My demographic hem is showing,” the columnist David Carr admitted in the Times; still, he concluded, “there is clear value in owning so much screen time of a hard-to-reach demographic of young men.” One article referred to Twitch as “talk radio for the extremely online.”

I first met Piker in February of 2020, on Boston Common, while covering a rally during Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign. Most of us travelling correspondents were youngish reporters from oldish outlets, wearing blue button-downs and carrying notebooks in the back pockets of our Bonobos. Piker wasn’t much younger, but he dressed as if he were from another planet, in black nail polish and cargo pants that, at the time, struck me as incomprehensibly wide. He carried an “I.R.L. backpack,” a portable camera setup that streamers use (I learned) when they venture out into the world. Admirers in the crowd kept interrupting him and asking for photos, a nuisance that, for whatever reason, didn’t afflict the rest of us. I still didn’t get why viewers would hang around on his stream all day when they could get an unimpeded view of Sanders’s speech on YouTube. Obviously, my demographic hem was showing. You might as well ask why a fan would watch a football game at a bar when he could concentrate better alone, or read a summary of the game in tomorrow’s paper. Piker’s followers wanted to watch the rally through his eyes because they wanted to be his friend.

In October, 2020, Piker spent a couple of hours playing the group video game Among Us with some special guests, including the congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They occasionally mentioned the ostensible purpose of the event—getting out the vote—but mostly they made easygoing small talk. On Election Day, Piker streamed for sixteen hours straight, chugging energy drinks. His mother made several onscreen cameos, delivering him plates of home-cooked food. “I wouldn’t do it for this long if it wasn’t for you,” he told his viewers at the end of the night. “Love you bro!” a commenter typed. “See you tomorrow.”

After the 2024 election, Democratic strategists argued that what the anti-Trump coalition needed was a “Joe Rogan of the left.” There once was such a person. His name was Joe Rogan. “I’m socially about as liberal as it gets,” Rogan said earlier this month. He has a live-and-let-live attitude about sex, drugs, and abortion. (He is also extremely open to conspiracy theories about 9/11, J.F.K., and Jeffrey Epstein, an inclination that was left-coded until very recently.) In 2014, when Rogan was a fan of “The Young Turks,” Piker met him at the Hollywood Improv, and they sat and talked for two hours. (The topics included “weed, psychedelics, the state of media and girls,” Piker wrote at the time. “Top ten coolest moments of my life.”) During the 2020 Democratic primary, Rogan interviewed three Presidential candidates—Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, and Bernie Sanders—and concluded that Sanders was his favorite. “I believe in him,” Rogan said. “He’s been insanely consistent his entire life.”

It’s hard to fathom now, but Rogan’s support was then considered a liability. “The Sanders campaign must reconsider this endorsement,” the Human Rights Campaign wrote, citing transphobic and racist remarks from Rogan’s past. In retrospect, this was the height (or perhaps the nadir) of a kind of purity-test politics that was making some swing voters, including Rogan, feel less at home in the Democratic coalition. In 2022, Neil Young removed his music from Spotify to protest Rogan’s vaccine skepticism; Rogan took ivermectin, which CNN mocked as a horse dewormer. “I can afford people medicine, motherfucker,” Rogan told CNN’s chief medical correspondent, adding that the medication had been prescribed by his doctor. “This is ridiculous.”

In 2016, every one of Trump’s baby steps toward normalization—doing a goofy dance on “Saturday Night Live,” getting his hair ruffled by Jimmy Fallon—was treated as a scandal. But by 2024 anyone with access to Spotify or YouTube could find hours of flattering footage of Trump looking like a chill, approachable grandpa. While interviewing Trump at one of his golf clubs, Theo Von used his free-associative style to great effect, prompting as much introspection in Trump as any interviewer has. (Von: “Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie.” Trump: “And is that a good feeling?”) Trump invited the Nelk Boys, prank-video influencers with their own brand of hard seltzer, to eat Chick-fil-A on his private plane. He sat in a Cybertruck with the baby-faced, fascist-curious streamer Adin Ross, testing the stereo. “Who’s, like, your top three artists?” Ross asked. “Well, we love Frank Sinatra, right?” Trump said. Ross invited him to pick a song, and Trump, “thinking that it’s gonna come back under proper management,” picked “California Dreamin’.”

Collectively, these shows reached tens of millions of potential voters. Most were presumably young men, many of them the kind of American who is both the hardest and the most crucial for a campaign to reach: the kind who is not seeking out political news. Trump ended his parasocial-media tour by sitting in Joe Rogan’s studio, in Austin, for three hours. That’s too long for anyone, even a champion of rhetorical rope-a-dope, to go without gaffes—which was part of the point. While repeating his timeworn case that the 2020 election was rigged, Trump let out a shocking Freudian slip—“I lost by . . .”—before quickly trying to recover: “I didn’t lose.” Rogan laughed in his face. No one cared. On YouTube alone, the episode got more than fifty million views, and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. “Unedited/uncensored interviews should be required of all candidates,” one of the top comments read.

Harris tried. She appeared on a few big podcasts—“Club Shay Shay,” whose audience is primarily Black, and “Call Her Daddy,” whose audience is mostly female—but she never made inroads with the comedy bros. (The closest she got was an interview with Howard Stern, a former shock jock who now seems wholesome, like Little Richard in the era of Lil Baby.) Harris’s staffers tried to get her booked on “Hot Ones,” the YouTube show on which celebrities answer innocuous questions while eating sadistically spicy chicken wings, but even “Hot Ones” turned her down. Her campaign staffers insisted that she wanted to do Rogan’s show, but that it fell through for scheduling reasons. Rogan claimed that he was eager to interview her, and that he was even willing to keep certain topics off-limits. “I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ ” he told Theo Von. “I feel like, if you give someone a couple of hours, and you start talking about anything, I’m going to see the pattern of the way you think . . . whether you’re calculated or whether you’re just free.”

Imagine the set of a prototypical man-cave podcast, and “Flagrant,” co-founded by the comedian Andrew Schulz, wouldn’t be far off: four dudes lounging around, with a few plastic plants and a shelf of brown liquor behind them. Trump sat with them in October, and Schulz and the other hosts buttered him up, asking him about his kids. “Barron is eighteen,” Schulz said. “He’s unleashed in New York City. Are you sure you want to reverse Roe v. Wade now?” An hour in, they cut to an ad break. “Hard-dick season is upon us, and you gotta make sure that you’re stiffed up,” Schulz said. “BlueChew has got your back.”

“Flagrant” is taped weekly at a studio in SoHo. I visited one Wednesday in February. Schulz arrived just after noon, opened a fridge stocked with cans of tequila- and THC-infused seltzer, and grabbed a bottle of water. He sports a mustache and a chain necklace, and his hair is tight on the sides and slicked back on top. (During a show at Madison Square Garden, a fellow-comedian described Schulz’s look as “the Tubi version of Adolf Hitler.”) He’s a throwback to an old New York archetype: the melting-pot white guy who tells hyper-specific ethnic jokes with a sly smile and, for the most part, gets away with it. He did a crowd-work special that included sections called “Mexican,” “Colombian,” and “Black Women.” His newest special, about his wife’s experience with I.V.F., includes moments of real tenderness, but he still insists on his right to do old-fashioned bits about the battle between the sexes. “We all have feelings that are a little bit wrong,” Schulz said. “ ‘Take my wife, please’—that’s a fucked-up premise, but there’s a seed of a feeling there that’s real. It’s the comedian’s job to make you comfortable enough to laugh at it.”

Schulz grew up in lower Manhattan, where his parents owned a dance studio and he went to public school. “My family was super liberal,” he told me. “This was in the nineties, when being a liberal, to me, just meant ‘I don’t hate gay people or Black people’—normal shit.” He now thinks of himself as apolitical, and he acknowledged all the reasons to distrust Trump, but the word he kept using, whenever Trump came up, was “enticing.” “I still appreciate a lot of the policies Bernie talked about, universal health care and all that,” he said. “But culture-wise? Vibe-wise? When all you hear from one side is ‘That’s not funny, that’s over the line’—realistically, where are people gonna feel more comfortable?”

Trump is known for his bloviating, but Schulz suggested that his greater talent may be a kind of listening. “Democrats are tuned in to what people should feel,” he said. “Trump is tuned in to what people actually fucking feel.” Schulz noted that, as a boundary-pushing performer, this was also one of his own key skills: gauging micro-fluctuations in an audience’s reaction. When Trump appeared on “Flagrant,” he talked about being taken to a hospital in rural Pennsylvania after he was shot, and how impressed he was with the “country doctors” who’d treated him. “I laughed at that, ’cause I just thought ‘country doctors’ was a funny phrase,” Schulz told me. “He clocks me laughing at it, and in the next sentence he immediately says it again, and he watches me to make sure I laugh again.”

“Flagrant” bills itself as “THE GREATEST HANG IN THE UNIVERSE!” I spent the rest of the day watching Schulz and his co-hosts tape an episode (and then an extra segment sponsored by an online betting platform, and then an extra extra segment for Patreon), and I could imagine some places in the universe that would have been greater. One of the running gags in the episode was that the hosts kept pronouncing the word “prerecorded” as “pre-retarded.” At one point, a host volunteered how many times he’d masturbated in a single day, and his record was so formidable that the others looked worried for him. In fairness, though, even a solid hang can’t be scintillating all the time. One function of a long-standing friendship, including a parasocial one, is simply to while away the hours, even when there isn’t much to say.

When it comes to parasocial media, MAGA has had a long head start. Before Dan Bongino was Trump’s deputy F.B.I. director, he was a popular, blustery podcaster; after Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration as Attorney General, he announced that he would host a TV show and a podcast (his third). During the Biden Administration, about a dozen Republicans were both active podcast hosts and sitting members of Congress, while most Democrats hardly seemed interested in trying. Before the “Flagrant” taping, Schulz and I had been discussing which qualities the Democrats should look for in their next crop of leaders, and afterward he returned to the question. “They need someone who can really hang,” he said. “Obama could hang. Clinton, for sure—Bill, not Hillary. Trump can hang.” I ran through the shortlist: Pete Buttigieg? Schulz wrinkled his nose—too polished. A.O.C.? “When she’s being the working-class chick from the Bronx, I could see it,” he said. “But when she starts going on MSNBC and doing ‘We have an orange rapist in the White House’—then you start to lose people.”

Schulz said that he’d invited Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to appear on the show “numerous times,” to no avail. (The Harris campaign says that Schulz never sent a formal invitation.) He couldn’t be sure why Walz had stayed away from podcasts like his, but he had guesses. “If we’ve got on a guy who was in the military for twenty years, at some point I’m gonna go, ‘Cut the shit, Tim, you know how guys really talk,’ ” Schulz said. “And then let’s say we start busting balls, making gay jokes, whatever—does he laugh? If he does, he pisses off his people. If he doesn’t, he loses our people.” Walz was added to the Presidential ticket because he was able to talk like a regular person who could make the opposition seem “weird” by contrast. But, things being as they are, Schulz said, “the Democrats can’t let a guy like that loose.”

When Trump was on “Flagrant,” Akaash Singh, a co-host who refers to himself as a “moderate,” encouraged him to consider practicing self-restraint. “What we love about you as comedians is you shoot from the hip,” Singh said. “If you get elected, would you be a little more mindful of how powerful your words are?”

“I will,” Trump said. “And I’m gonna think of you every time.”

“Let’s go!” Singh said, jumping up and pumping his fist. “I might actually vote.”

Piker starts streaming at eleven every morning, so everything else has to happen before then, or at night. At 7 a.m. one day, he drove Kaya to a nearby park, to take her for a walk, then played basketball for half an hour. He saw me eying his car, a Porsche Taycan. “It’s not the flashiest model I could afford,” he protested, before I could say anything. “But yes, admittedly, it is a fucking Porsche.” When Piker is criticized by the right, it’s usually for soft-pedalling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis, or the Chinese Communist Party. (Piker is such a relentless critic of Israel that, last year, the advocacy group StopAntisemitism nominated him for “Antisemite of the Year”; when asked his opinion of Hezbollah, he once shrugged and replied, “I don’t have an issue with them.”) By the left, he is more likely to be dismissed as a limousine socialist who lives in a $2.7-million house. He has his own clothing brand, called Ideologie.

While driving home, he took a call from his manager. A major production company wanted to discuss a potential TV show, hosted by Piker, in the vein of “Borat” or “Nathan for You.” His manager asked if he wanted to be interviewed by Megyn Kelly on her radio show. “No.” A daytime show on Fox News? “No.” Buttigieg’s people had asked if Piker would interview Buttigieg on his stream. “Probably not, but I’ll think about it,” Piker said—too centrist. “If he’s thinking about running for President, I don’t really wanna be giving him clout.” In his kitchen, he took a few fistfuls of supplements: creatine, fish oil, Ashwagandha. Still on the phone with his manager, he sat at his desktop, skimming stories he might cover. Then, a few minutes before he went live, he started seeing news alerts: Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the UnitedHealthcare assassination, had just been arrested. Whatever else he’d been planning to talk about was now irrelevant. “Holy shit, they got him,” Piker told his manager. “I gotta go.”

“Mamma mia!” he said, on air. “This is the first day where there will be no Italiophobia on this broadcast.” Already, his chat was full of spaghetti emojis and “FREE LUIGI!” Piker walked a fine line—celebrating Mangione as “hotter than me” and speaking in generally exalted terms about “the propaganda of the deed,” but trying to stop short of overtly glorifying murder, which is against Twitch’s terms of service. “We, of course, do not condone,” he said repeatedly. “We condemn.” (Recently, he was suspended from Twitch for twenty-four hours after musing that someone may want to “kill Rick Scott,” the Florida senator.)

In fact, he reserved his condemnation for the finger-wagging from the “corporate media,” as exhibited everywhere from Fox News to CNN. “Bro, they can’t let anybody have anything,” he said later. For six hours straight, his chatters sent him links to new information as it emerged—Mangione’s Goodreads account, his Twitter history, his high-school valedictorian speech. On my own, I would have been tempted to spend the day following the same bread crumbs, struggling to retrace Mangione’s path to radicalization. But it was easier to let Piker and the forty thousand internet sleuths in his chat make sense of it for me.

Many of Piker’s viewers come to him with inchoate opinions. He aims to mold them. But, he told me, of the stream, “at the end of the day, it still has to be relatable and entertaining.” One of his maxims is “Read the room.” In his case, this means posting many hours of content about nothing in particular. Stavros Halkias, a comedian and a friend of Piker’s, told me, “He’s built up enough trust with his audience that, if he’s being boring and academic for forty minutes, they’ll stick with it until he starts doing something more interesting, playing a Japanese dating simulator or whatever.” Some days, he puts on a Trump hat and streams as Hank Pecker, a “Colbert Report”-style satirical character updated for the MAGA era. In another room of his house, Piker records a weekly podcast with three buddies, an apolitical chat show on which one of the most heated topics of recent debate was proper manscaping technique, and another was whether one of them farted. Marche, the producer, was proud to tell me that the podcast’s audience is about sixty per cent male—“which sounds like a lot, but actually most shows in this space are eighty-twenty male, or eighty-five-fifteen.” One theory for this lopsidedness is that, given all the “End of Men” statistics, women have better things to do with their time, such as holding down meaningful jobs and cultivating lasting relationships, while men are stuck playing video games with their imaginary friends.

Recently, on a MAGA-bro podcast, Piker reached across the aisle, adapting “eight hours for what you will” to the current decadent moment. “Deep down inside, most people just wanna be comfortable,” he said. “They wanna have a roof over their heads, they want a fuckin’ nice meal, get some pussy . . . play Marvel Rivals.” In recent years, Piker has stopped using the word “retarded,” but he still uses the word “pussy,” even though it may sound misogynist, and “lame,” despite fans who consider the term ableist. “I don’t give a shit,” Piker said. “If you can’t handle it, then I guess I’m not for you.” When his commenters try to tone-police him, Piker will often single one of them out and say, “Congratulations, chatter, you’ve won Woke of the Day.” It’s not a compliment.

The day after Mangione’s arrest, Piker had back-to-back interviews with Lina Khan, then the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, whom Piker called “the LeBron James of regulators,” and with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, promoting his new book. In the chat, a user named PapiJohn36 wrote, “Not to be parasocial, but I love this man.” Piker’s mother stopped by during the Coates interview. “Hasan, check your messages!” she shouted from the kitchen. Piker, grudgingly but dutifully, read his mother’s message aloud: “I got his book for the content and fell in love with his writing.”

“Thank you, Hasan’s mom,” Coates said. In the living room, Piker’s father was sprawled on the couch watching “Love Actually.”

Halkias, the comedian, showed up later that afternoon, with a bag of dirty laundry and a calendar featuring photos of himself posing in the nude. While many of Halkias’s comedian friends have taken a reactionary turn, he has stuck to his progressive principles, but he has never been a hall monitor. (He got his start on a podcast called “Cum Town.”) “Ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls, and enbies,” Piker said, “we’ve got the left’s Joe Rogan here in the building!” In the “Rogan of the left” discourse, both Piker and Halkias are frequently mentioned as top prospects. Even if they were secretly flattered by the designation, the least alpha thing they could do—the least Roganesque thing they could do—would be to thirst for it. “Free Luigi,” Halkias said, taking a seat. “He’s too sexy to be behind bars.”

As a model for the future of progressive media, Piker checks only some of the requisite boxes. A while back, he was a guest on “Flagrant”; when I asked one of the show’s staffers about Piker’s performance, he gave it a middling review. “Good guy, clearly knows his shit, but he sort of comes off like he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.” Piker sometimes succumbs to the socialist bro’s cardinal sin of pedantry, and he can seem like a jejune know-it-all trying to reduce any societal problem to a one-word culprit, usually “capitalism” or “imperialism.” Some segments of the Democratic coalition would find Piker to be edgy, or crass, or even despicable. But, if “Rogan of the left” is to mean anything, it would surely mean a higher tolerance for controversy, even at the risk of alienating parts of the base.

On the scale of “whether you’re calculated or whether you’re just free,” Piker is freer than most Democratic surrogates, Ivy League overachievers who sound like chatbots trained on stacks of campaign brochures. But he is less free than the average MAGA bro, who is unconstrained by the need for any consistent ideology. “He’s funny, but not that funny,” Halkias told me. “You can tell him I said that.” Halkias has his own podcast, on which he gives advice to callers. On the normier part of the spectrum are liberal influencers like Dean Withers and Harry Sisson, who have transferred the “debate me, bro” spirit of early YouTube to TikTok Live.

One afternoon, in L.A., I visited the office of Crooked Media, which was decorated with some Yes We Can iconography and had glass-walled conference rooms with cheeky names such as “Sedition” and “Conspiracy.” When the company began, in 2017, its three founders, former Obama staffers named Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Favreau, were treated as audacious upstarts challenging the media hierarchy. Now they are middle-aged bosses in Henleys and tapered jeans. We sat in “Legitimate Political Discourse.” A long table had been laid with LaCroix and PopCorners. “We have become the out-of-touch lib establishment,” Vietor said. Lovett added, “My, how time flies.”

Crooked now has more than a dozen podcasts, including its flagship show, “Pod Save America.” Vietor recounted a time, a few years back, when a friend invited him to appear on a show put out by Barstool Sports, a bro-y podcast network that leans right. Vietor, worried about guilt by association, turned it down. “Looking back, that was so stupid,” he said. “The ‘how dare you platform someone you disagree with’ era is over. Fuck that.” (He has since appeared on the show.) In 2018, Favreau was hosting a show called “The Wilderness,” about how the Democratic Party lost its way, and wanted to include a clip of Obama reaching out to the white working class. “A younger producer listened and went, ‘I’m not sure this plays well today,’ ” Favreau said. “And I went, ‘That’s part of the problem!’ ” After the 2024 election, Piker appeared on “Pod Save America.” Lovett got pushback from moderate fans, who objected to Piker’s anti-Zionism, and from progressive fans, who objected to Lovett’s next interview, with a Democrat who wants restrictions on trans women in sports—but he shrugged it off. “It’s a big tent,” Lovett said. “It’s got Dick Cheney in it. It’s got Hasan Piker in it.”

The “Rogan of the left” formulation isn’t entirely vacuous, but it’s easy to misinterpret. Rogan-like figures can’t be engineered; they have to develop organically. Their value lies in their idiosyncrasies—their passionate insistence on talking about chimps and ancient pyramids, say, rather than the budget ceiling—and in their authenticity, which entails an aversion to memorizing talking points. Many Democrats assume that what they have is a messaging problem—that voters don’t have a clear enough sense of what the Democrats are really like. But it’s possible that the problem is the opposite: that many swing voters, including Joe Rogan, got a sense of what the Democrats were like, then ran in the opposite direction.

The good news for Democrats is that the right does not have a monopoly on relatability. A week before his interview with Trump, Theo Von conducted an interview with Bernie Sanders while wearing a Grateful Dead shirt. “You ever see the Grateful Dead?” Von said, as an icebreaker. Sanders, apparently unfamiliar with the concept, frowned and said, “Um, no.” From any other politician, this would have been malpractice, but with Sanders the crankiness is part of the crossover charm. (“He literally just talks common sense,” one of the top YouTube comments read.) A few months later, Rogan interviewed Senator John Fetterman. “Trump is not polished, but you get a sense of who he is as a human being,” Rogan said. Fetterman agreed, alluding to a line from “Scarface”: “All I have in this world is my balls and my word.”

Reeves, the social scientist, told me, “There is a strong correlation between which Democratic lawmakers are in my inbox and which ones have the year 2028 circled on their calendar.” Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, read Reeves’s book in 2023 and praised it on X; many of Murphy’s constituents, including his fourteen-year-old son, took issue with his post. Nevertheless, he persisted, writing a follow-up on Substack: “We should try to do two things at once—fight for the equality of women and gay people, while also trying hard to figure out why so many boys are struggling and why so many men are feeling shitty.” Sanders and Fetterman share what could be described as populist instincts, but ideologically they are leagues apart. On the level of pure affect, though, they may represent elements of a style that other politicians could crib from. “Personally, I find the performance of masculinity to be totally boring,” Hanna Rosin told me. “But if that’s what fifty-one per cent of Americans need—someone who reads as some version of ‘gruff, manly dude,’ but whose heart is still in the right place—then I’m willing to go along with it.”

Twitch stars often appear on one another’s streams, hoping to pick up some new fans. One afternoon, Piker headed to Zoo Culture, a gym in Encino owned by a streamer and fitness influencer named Bradley Martyn, to do a “collab.” It would also feature Jason Nguyen, a twenty-year-old Twitch star from Texas who goes by JasonTheWeen. “Bradley’s a big Trump guy, and we talk politics sometimes, but mostly we just talk about gym-bro shit,” Piker told me. “Jason probably leans Trump, if I had to guess, but his content isn’t really political at all.” (“I dont lean towards anyone,” Nguyen wrote when reached for comment. “I dont want anything to do with politics 😭.”)

By the time we got to the gym, Nguyen was already there, performing for the camera by flirting with a woman on a weight bench. “Is Jason rizzing right now?” Piker asked Martyn, who nodded. “Is it working?” Piker asked the woman. She replied, “A little bit.” Before she left, she gave Nguyen her Discord handle.

“Bradley, I’ve got something for you,” Piker said, removing his long-sleeved shirt. Underneath, he was wearing a tank top with a Rambo-style cartoon of Trump and the words “LET’S GO BRANDON.” “I was coming into hostile territory, so I had to fit in,” Piker said.

“It’s perfect,” Martyn said.

Martyn, who is six feet three and two hundred and sixty pounds, looks vaguely like Bradley Cooper on steroids. (Martyn has taken testosterone supplements, which Piker once brought up in a jocular debate about trans rights: You do hormone-replacement therapy, so why can’t they?) Nguyen is much smaller. “My chat just said, ‘There’s three muscleheads in the gym right now,’ ” Nguyen joked, not even pretending to look at his phone. Piker roasted Nguyen with a fake comment from his own chat: “Jason looks like a twink.” They wandered from station to station—first bench-pressing, then deadlifting—as their cameramen followed. “We’re just here to have fun,” Piker said. Then, dropping into a mock P.S.A. voice: “And also reach out to the young men out there who are lost—who feel anchorless, rudderless—by lifting some heavy weights.”

One flat-screen TV showed Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk, on mute, with no captions. Two shirtless guys, between reps, compared crypto wallets. “During Covid, they let liquor stores and strip clubs open, but they shut us down,” Martyn told me. “And then all the inflation, all the wars—it’s not like I trust any politician, Trump or Kamala or anyone, to be a perfect person. It’s just—if we never try anything new, how can we get a different result?” Last fall, when Martyn interviewed Trump, he brought up “the deep state” and asked, “How would you actually make an effective change there?” It wasn’t a specific question, and Trump didn’t have a specific answer. “We’re changing that whole thing around,” he said. Apparently, this was good enough for Martyn.

The day after the 2024 election, Martyn appeared on Piker’s stream to explain his support for Trump. They started with small talk. “Why do you have so many Zyn containers behind you?” Martyn said.

“I fucking slam those bad boys daily,” Piker said.

“Look at us relating, bro,” Martyn said.

When they got around to politics, Piker said, “One side at least acknowledges that people are angry—the Republicans.” The Democrats’ proposed solutions were inadequate, he said, but Trump would only make things worse. Martyn smiled and replied, “You’re gonna have to say sorry when he does what he says he’s gonna do.”

They ended the gym session by daring each other to take turns sitting in Martyn’s cold plunge. Piker resisted at first—“I didn’t bring a towel, a bathing suit, nothing”—but he went in anyway, in his gym shorts, and his commenters went wild. “Hey, Hasan’s chat, I hope y’all are happy he took his shirt off,” Nguyen said, facing Piker’s camera. Then he checked his phone: the woman from the weight bench had already sent him a message.

“Wait, she did?” Piker said, with a grin. “You’re about to lose your virginity, I think.”

[wtslpod]

We were immediately fans of Arondir, played by the incomparable Ismael Cruz Córdova.

“It is believed that one of the Valar watches over growing things and those who tend them.” Arondir spoke this line before the Battle of the Southlands, a clear reference to Yavanna, the Giver of Fruits. It’s also a pretty good summary of Arondir himself and his role in the narrative — a grower turned reluctant soldier who nevertheless uses his skills in warfare to protect those who cannot protect themselves.

We know that Arondir and Theo will meet up with the Ents, and that Arondir will eventually end up on the battlefield in Eregion, facing off against the mountain troll Damrod. Does Arondir have a greater mission to uphold for Yavanna? How will his legacy play out across the Second Age and into the Third? Will he gain a promotion from the High King Gil-Galad? One of our theories is that he will end up founding Imladris (Rivendell) beside Elrond, and carry Bronwyn’s legacy to the healing gardens there.

Whatever happens, we’re so excited to see our favorite elf back on screen! For more Arondir content, check out the podcast.

About the pod: Where the Shadows Lie is a Rings of Power fan podcast with Kat and Wren. Join us as we prepare to go wild about Season 2, dive into all of our favorite character arcs, speculate about twists, and celebrate the amazing cast and crew. Catch up on our Season 1 episodes or dive into our Season 2 spec, and tune in when Season 2 premieres on August 29th for weekly episode recaps and discussion. This is a positive, analytical space for fellow Rings of Power fans – all are welcome!

Find us on buzzsprout or your podcatcher of choice.

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