#the best internet drama is the one i piece together in my head from vague references

[beeseverywhen]

peak tumblr culture is everyone on the dash vaguing about the latest drama and the drama just never ever crossing your path in any other way

[azariaspace]

In which I make a BIG TEXT POST about my most recent relationship (of what kind?  who knows) drama for all those who are interested, chronicling as much as I can

THE FALL:

1.  I join Calvin Theatre Company.  CTC is dope.  CTC casts their fall play -- I decide not to audition because I have a busy fall and want to adjust to college first, but the object of my affection (I’m calling him Jared because for some damn reason when he first texted me his number he introduced himself to me as Jared and now Siri keeps trying to call him that.  It’s not his real name, though.) gets the main male role.

2.  In CTC, if you’re not in the cast, you have to be on a crew.  I get assigned to the Set Construction Crew.  When I show up to work, I find out that there’s also a bunch of people who are Scene Shop Employees.  Lo and behold, Jared is one of them.  I work for two hours on Mondays and three hours on Fridays, and Jared is always there when I am.

3.  I have the biggest crush on my RA for most of the semester, but Jared and I like working together (I like working with him more than anyone else -- at first I assume it’s because I actually know him from CTC, but maybe it’s something else -- and we switch between roasting and encouraging each other pretty frequently.  We also develop a banter outside of that that’s super cool.)

4.  I go see our fall production, and that’s when I start subconsciously asking questions about how much I like my RA and how much I like Jared.

(Bonus stories:  I find out he’s ethnically Jewish, and I’m one of the few people who knows enough about Jewish culture to understand his Jewish jokes.  I’m also outed as nonbinary to him after the show I watched by a friend, who we’ll call... Tall Gay Boy?  My friends know who he is, and nobody else needs to.  Anyway, he took it well at the time, but has clearly forgotten, because Tall Gay Boy also talked about pronouns and Jared has not been using those pronouns.)

THE INTERIM:

1.  During interim, I realized I was over my RA.  I also realized that I had really strong feelings of some kind for Jared.

2.  I was a bad first-year student and didn’t take the type of class I was supposed to during interim.  Instead, I took the theatre class.  Jared didn’t, but he was still working in the scene shop.  I was assigned to light crew.  We worked around each other, but some days we did the same stuff.  The banter continued.

3.  I got my first hug from him.  I got three hugs from him in one month.  Perhaps it was just because it was an emotional show and they were all after watching it, but still.  He is the best hugger I have ever encountered.

4.  In the middle of interim, he said he would kill to have me in the scene shop again.  At the end, I was joking about not wanting to start working because I didn’t like who my coworkers would be without telling him where I was working, and he said I should preemptively quit, and I then revealed where I was working, and he went on a five-minute speech about how I should give it a chance.  In front of other people.

Bonus things:  this was when I first noticed how good his beard is.  This was also when I first started talking about him with other people.  And other people like him and like me liking him.

The Spring (as of March 2nd):

1.  Jared has reduced his hours to 2.5 hours one day a week because he has a real job as a real professional marketer in the real world.  I work 4 days a week.  (We do work the same day.)

2.  Jared and I also are in the same religion class 3x a week (whenever he comes) and will be on the same run crew (meaning we’ll spend every night for two weeks together with only two other people -- and like the rest of the show).

3.  Like I said, his attendance at religion is questionable.  So I got his number to text him notes (sure).  And I saw that he was texting someone with the ❤️  emoji in the conversation (on his side, I believe), but got his number all the same.  In addition, I heard from other people that he’s single.  So he’s either liberal with his emojis or secretive with his relationships.

4.  When he’s there, the banter is exactly the same as it was last semester, except stronger.  And I’m pretty sure it’s now entered the flirting territory.  He’ll give me random pieces of scrap wood, and then I’ll ask how long I should keep them, and he’ll say five minutes, and then after five minutes I’ll throw them back at him.  He lets me steal his hat.  I apparently was the only person to wish him Happy Purim yesterday.  We texted about his broken car for three hours today.

5.  A TEXT SAYING “I love how misplaced your trust is.”  (Listen I dunno why this is so significant to me but it is.)  (Also in context we’re talking about his car don’t think I can’t trust him.)

Bonus Material:

1.  When I made this post,

I have to come out to the scene shop kids.  Because they somehow all didn’t find out during the great coming out crusade of last semester. And a friend of mine is working in there for his scene shop hours, and he volunteered to have the awkward conversations, but the one kid I want to find out most doesn’t work when the kid who’ll have the conversations works.  So.

it was about Jared (and Tall Gay Boy as my friend).

2.  When I made this post,

rules: tag 9 people u wanna get to know better Tagged by: @lumos-of-pi relationship status: Single Pringle. Getting over a pretty long-term crush and feeling out some others, also think maybe one or two people have flirted with me (there may have been some overlap between crushes and flirters — I’m unsure), pretty tired of loneliness

it was about Jared (and my RA).

3.  When I made this post (featuring the tags),

I’m writing songs again! #I HAVEN'T WRITTEN ONE IN LIKE 5 MONTHS? #I HAVEN'T WRITTEN A GOOD ONE IN LIKE EVER #BUT I'M EXCITED #IT'S A LITTLE GARBAGE BUT WHATEVER #IT'S IN ITS EARLY STAGES #ALSO I'M LISTENING TO NEW GENRES SO THAT'S PROBABLY GONNA INFLUENCE IT #ALSO HOW VAGUE DO SONGS HAVE TO BE IF THEY'RE POSTED TO THE INTERNET? #PROBABLY MORE THAN THIS

it was about Jared.

4.  These posts

I like a very handsome boy man child person. The hot guy from the theatre department. Rumor has it he’s a senior or a super senior; rumor also has it he’s a junior in years and a sophomore in credits. Strong rumors and Instagram snooping point to a transfer. He either is or just used to be a big flirt; he may have a girlfriend (different social media say different things, and I’ve never heard her mentioned). I was outed to him and he’s chill and he’s chill in general and either flirty with everyone or flirting (different from being a flirt; this is nice while his past/possible present is douchey). I’m definitely flirting with him and I don’t know if he knows; if he does, he hasn’t let on.

“I’m an enigma, [Azaria],” he says.  Is that a challenge?

Also he’s a junior who took a gap year to backpack around Europe.  Um.  Excuse me.  (Though there’s hesitation about whether he should be counted as a junior or not; perhaps because he’s as old as the seniors or perhaps because he would be a junior without the gap year so they let him do his thing.  But I believe the former.)

Also I’m now going to be working with him three days a week so #yeet.

are both from a private tumblr I have just for venting but are both about Jared.

Also this is not a post but I made a playlist of songs from the scene shop (and some not) that remind me of him.  That’s a thing I do for people and events anyway, so it’s not as creepy, but it’s still a little creepy.

He's so kind and thoughtful and funny and smells really good and he's smart and I like his beard and he's nerdy and I wish he wouldn't be so self-deprecating because there's this light in his eyes and this light he brings everywhere and he's so encouraging and he's short-minded but it's because he juggles both as a metaphor and actually.

Like what kind of guy juggles?

The Future (as far as I’m Concerned):

I want to date him, and so low-key I'm looking for advice on how to make that happen with 100% certainty, but I guess I'm just throwing this into the void to get it out of my head (and for my friends to see).  Mostly, I’m doing my best to enjoy this as a friendship, to appreciate that it might be more, and to give it time and him signals while not pressuring him.

[lunawings]

Yuri!!! On Stage Event Report!

So today (4/29/2017) I went to the Yuri on Ice Yuri on Stage event. To clarify though, I was not at the actual Tokyo event, rather a live viewing at a local movie theater. Which of course does alter the experience but it’s the next best thing. At first I thought the theater was only doing the afternoon session, but very last minute I ended up being able to attend both!

For starters, the voice actors of most the skaters were there +Nishigori. When everyone came out they more or less came out in order of popularity from lowest to high so it was all like... YURI ON STAGE... Here is Nishigori!!! to start which got a good laugh. 

(Georgi just existing always got a good laugh too.)

Characters of voice actors who attended: Yuri, Victor, Yurio, Phichit, Chris, Georgi, Minami Kenjiro, Leo, Guang Hong, Seung Gil, Emil, Nishigori.

Characters of voice actors who did not attend but appeared on video: JJ, Michele, Otobek.  And Kubo-sensei.

Victor’s voice actor cosplayed for both showings. First he was in a suit, and second he was in a black shirt and pants like his the new figure. YES he did the pose. He even dyed his hair. Apparently he kinda killed it dying and redying it though. 

Yuri’s voice actor was wearing a necklace that could have possible been interpreted as a silver medal. 

After everyone came out and introduced themselves with a key line from their character, we moved into the talk show section. Unfortunately I don’t have that much to say about this part because they just talk so much so fast that I only understand about 70% to begin with and only half of the jokes... 

Georgi’s voice actor was the moderator and they split up the characters into different groups. Afternoon session was.... Teens: Yurio, Emil, Leo, Guang Hong Kyushu: Yuri, Kenjiro, Nishigori 20-somethings: Victor, Chris, Phichit, Seung Gil

Evening session was...  Not not just cute: Guang Hong, Emil, Chris, Leo? “My Pace”: Victor, Emil... Phichit? (I might have mixed up some of these... sorry I don’t remember.) Surprising gap: Yuri, Yurio, Seung Gil, Nishigori

Kubo-sensei was very involved in this section. It was funny because at other events I have been to the voice actors were always like “lol well I think my character would be like this...” but at this event she kept interrupting like the voice of God to be like “Well, ACTUALLY.....”

Chris was only in the “cute” group because of his cute butt.

He put Chris character badges on his butt to show off too.

I think Kubo-sensei said something about when she starts drawing Chris she just starts with a butt.  The “My Pace” group refers to the characters all having a “do whatever I want” attitude. They came out wandering all over the stage. I had no idea how to translate “surprising gap”... it meant like, characters who have two sides to them. Like Yuri with his eros, and Seung Gil when he got really upset after losing. 

During the “gap” group Nishigori’s voice actor describes the gap with a very long convoluted story that ended with the birth of the triplets? So they were like Kubo-sensei did you know about this? Apparently she DID write it... then forgot about it. 

At one point they were talking about who they look up to as voice actors, and Kenjiro’s said he looked up to Yurio’s voice actor. This was during the Kyushu men segment, so he wasn’t on stage. But they pushed him out and made them sit VERY CLOSE. It was... a moment. 

There were a lot of innuendo jokes about how Phichit’s name sounds like “pichitto”, Japanese for “tight” or “snug.” For example: Phichit’s ass is pichitto.

Anyway, next came the world quiz section. 

So they separated everyone into four groups. During the afternoon session they drew cards from a box on stage, but for the evening they just did it in advance to save time. 

Every group got a table with a buzzer. They really liked the buzzer. 

So basically, what they did was they translated an anime scene into another language featured on the show and had a native speaker read it. Then the voice actors had to guess which scene it was.

In the afternoon session the language was Thai and it was basically impossible to guess right away. SO they had JJ’s voice actor, good old Mamoru Miyano, appear on the screen give a clue. He basically just gave us the Thai word for “onsen” then showed a several minutes long JJ montage to the theme of King JJ and then told us to enjoy “JJ On Stage.”

Also during the Thai reading the guys were laughing because a part of the Thai sounded kinda like “chinsuko” which sounds like an Okinawan snack which sounds like “penis.” Anyway.

After two more clues, first “hold back”, and then “internet” I was able to guess the scene and so did Yuri’s voice actor. (It was the Chinese restaurant scene.)

For the evening show however, the puzzle was MUCH easier. Even in the original Russan I could make out “piroshki” and a very heavily Russian-accented “katsudon.” You could tell from their reaction that the voice actors knew it too. But if someone guessed too early we would miss Mamoru Miyano’s clue so everyone stayed silent. 

Mamoru Miyano gave us the Russan word for “grandfather.” And at this point somebody (I forget who) said “Well clearly we all know it’s the scene where Yuri and Yurio eat piroshki--” BUT TOO BAD because we were shown the JJ video anyway ahaha.

So at this point everyone knew the answer but to keep the segment going they just decided to fuck around instead by buzzing in and saying random words in Russian. Phichit’s voice actor tried to make “miso soup” sound like a Russian word and the hosts got mad at him when he defined it as “japanese soup made from miso” without any other ingredients. Yuri and Guang Hong’s voice actors were on the same team with Phichit and both were wearing glasses so they were all like “which one is which???” and Phichit’s actor didn’t have glasses so he had to improvise with his hands and this foam thing he found. Victor’s voice actor tried to use the “grandfather” clue to tell long fairy tales “a very long long time ago there was a grandfather....” It’s so hard to describe well but this was so amazing and everyone was just having such a great time. 

Oh, and the Russian speaker’s name was Emil so we had a brief WHOS THE REAL EMIL contest. (If they were speaking English surely they would have said “would the real Emil please stand up?”)

So anyway, Kubo-sensei had to chose the winner in the end and she picked Yuri’s team twice in a row. This is interesting because she got to put gold medals on the winners both times. After that the winners also got to eat samples of the katsudon piroshki they are currently selling at Namja Town. 

After that they did some script reading of key scenes and it was very artistic and beautiful. While Yuri, Victor, and Yurio were reading on stage they somehow raised a TINY ice skating rink where a woman did Yurio’s Agape in the afternoon and free skate in the evening (or at least as much as she could on a tiny square of ice, no jumps or anything). 

And now, what you have all been waiting for... the original drama. 

(No, this was not animated. They could not. They just stood and read a script. Quotes are of course translated from memory and probably not 100% accurate.)

It starts off with Victor reading something vague about how unforgettable the previous night was. Yuri is making noises that sound increasingly sexual until we realize... actually he’s throwing up.  Phichit: Green stuff is coming out of Yuri’s mouth... I have to put this on the internet!! 

Seung Gil: I have something to say to you. Yuri: What do you mean, you’re just looking at me with that same unreadable expression as always. Seung Gil: Put some clothes on.  Yuri: HUAAAAHHHH.

So Yuri is naked with Russian written on his back that Yurio translates to “Overcome Chihoko” and a strange cap on his head which is actually Victor’s underwear. And his body is extremely sore. And he remembers nothing. And Victor is gone.

Yurio: Yuri Stinking Katsuki what did you do with Victor. Yuri: Don’t say “stinking” like it’s my middle name.... 

And so, piece by piece we figure out what happened. So the setting is that everyone is in Hasetsu for a “Onsen on Ice Victor With Friends” show and the night before they were all drinking at the Katsuki place. Victor is poking Yuri’s soft belly. But Chris comes into the picture and soon Drunk Yuri starts to get whiny and jealous...

Yuri: Victor... stop looking at Chris... look at me.... Victor: I am looking at you.  Yuri: No you’re not. Victor...... let’s do it...... Victor: ...........................do what Yuri: Do... what people do when they drink..... And to be honest I do not know exactly what he said next, but from the next few lines I gathered it was a drinking game where you get naked. So Yuri was like “SO I LOST THEN” but the others explained that.... ACTUALLY, Yuri then ripped Victor’s clothes off to practice a naked Eros routine and then also needed his underwear for a coronation ceremony. I may have missed a couple things but I’m pretty sure this is not supposed to make sense in the first place and Yuri basically wants to die. 

SO everyone is blaming Yuri for Victor’s disappearance when detective Minami Kenjiro steps in to solve the case. He mentions Yurio is the only one with a motive since he found a list Yurio made of different names for a show he is planning to take over the Victor With Friends show with. I wish I could remember them all but the only one I remember 100% accurately is Yuri on Tiger. Yurio denies it though. But also apparently Otobek came up with half of them. Also Yurio has no idea who Minami is even though they were “rivals” in junior.

To make everything worse we suddenly find out from Nishigori from the triplets that the skate otaku are flipping out because the Victor With Friends show will not have Victor in it. Somehow they found how he is missing. SOMEBODY uploaded photos to the internet of their get together... PHICHIT! 

But this is a blessing in disguise because now they can check the photos. And they find... Seung Gil kissing Nishigori.... AND IN THE BACKGROUND is Victor stretching out Yuri. (”Oh, that’s why I am sore all over,” says Yuri.)

Georgi then comes in to reveal that Victor and Yuri actually had a fight last night (Phichit: YOU... GOT DIVORCED...?!) , but about what he does not remember... he rattles off some words that sound vaguely like “penis” before they realize it’s “Chihoko”! The word on Yuri’s back! So, it’s in Russian, and if Yurio and Georgi didn’t write it, that must mean... VICTOR. 

So then Emil comes in, who apparently came to Japan on jet skis or something, and informs them that he knows where Victor is... He’s at Hasetsu Castle... on the roof, naked. 

So they all run down there and it’s revealed what really happened. 

While they were stretching Victor commented on how Yuri’s belly is soft but his back is rigid. Yuri says of course he can’t compare to Victor, but there is someone more limber than Victor... “Sha... Chihoko...”

Okay so. The joke here is that Victor hears this and thinks it’s the name of Yuri’s ex-lover and gets jealous. But the thing is, I have NO IDEA what Yuri was actually trying to say? It had to mean something because people in the theater were laughing. I know it also sounds vaguely like “penis” but that alone cannot be the joke... HELP. 

EDIT: OKAY. I think I got it. It’s a mythical carp which bends backwards. I should have known this because it’s also Nagoya thing. The statues of them are on Nagoya castle too. This ties in with them going to the castle in the end OF COURSE.

(EDITEDIT: Guys I’m sorry but it’s NOT that Yuri was saying Victor was too tense. I know you must think I’m nuts but grammar wise Yuri was comparing Victor to a person or an object. I know that sounds like that could make sense but you’ll just have to believe me. The whole point was that Victor IS flexable... but not as flexible as “Shachihoko”... Yuri even refers to “Chihoko” as “aitsu” as in “that guy” which makes Victor’s blood boil. And once again the castle part completes the joke.)

So Victor writes “Overcome Chihoko” in Russian on Yuri’s back and then goes off to train. There is this whole montage of scenes from the anime as Victor reflects on the fact that Yuri had a past before him but... VICTOR IS HIS NOW.

So, in present time Yuri shows up at the castle to find Victor bending over backwards on the roof:

Victor: IS THIS BETTER THAN CHIHOKO? Yuri: WHO THE HELL IS CHIHOKO. Nobody is better than you. 

In the end he convinces Yuri to strip and do stretching too as the skaters below gaze up at the amazing one in a million sight. 

Phichit: MY BEST FRIEND GOT REMARRIED...!!!!

The end. 

What followed was a live performance of “You Only Live Once” and a really cool ending ceremony. Everyone came out with laser pointers imitating the fireworks in the ending. Then they showed a slideshow of photos from the event (as in stuff that JUST happened) also to mimic the anime ending, and finally at the very end they showed a time lapse photo revealing that the voice actors were not waving the laser pointers randomly. They were spelling out the words “thank you”....... AWWWWWWWWWGHHHH--

So at the afternoon show the end was the end.

This meant if there was going to be any announcement it would be in the evening show. As it wound down I was skeptical there would even be one because Kubo-sensei actually said something about taking a “season off”... and I was like NO... NOOOO.

But then the display dimmed and we say that one card which said “All new original movie has been decided!” I wish I had more info, but that was it! No key visual or date, just... we’re getting a movie! It’s coming! It’s not a second season, but, I guess they have their reasons. 

[12izzy3]

Webcomic Recommendations No One Asked For:

I......... Spent 2 hours putting together a list of my webcomic recommendations, with summaries and reviews, because I was reworking my blog... And really I don’t think anyone ever goes directly on to my blog proper, so it feels kind of foolish to have that there where no one will see it, so I’m actually going to post it as well:

Webcomics are honestly just so tight, and there’s such a vast variety of them that there’s something for everyone, if not a few somethings for everyone! I’m personally all about indie games, but if there’s another indie market that I feel like the internet has created a space for it’s comics. After I started writing this I realized I have a uh… Lot of recommendations. Also, I may be an idiot for not using the author’s own summaries???

Regularly updating:

KILL SIX BILLION DEMONS - A comic about a college girl, Allison, given mystical powers beyond her understanding, and thrust into a celestial world filled with angels and demons, where the lines of good and evil are blurry at best. With the help of friends she meets along the way, she must navigate her new powers, and save her boyfriend from forces that would destroy existence. Kinda dark thematically (with very rare and minor gore), but a great comic if you love action, fantasy, and fantastic art. One of my favorites.

AWFUL HOSPITAL - Another one of my favorites. After her child becomes terribly sick, and doctors tell her that there’s nothing that they can do, a mother wakes up in a mysterious, otherworldly hospital. She must navigate this confusing and sometimes horrifying hospital to save her child and get home, and on the way, she makes many odd friends and unknowable enemies, and learns that her child’s sickness may be part of something larger. This comic is funny, has cool action, a unique format, and lots of great, though ghastly, character designs.

GUNNERKRIGG COURT - A coming of age story about two girls, Antimony and Kat, as they try to find their place in each other’s lives, and the two clashing worlds that surround them, the massive technological complex that is their school and home, Gunnerkrigg Court, and the forest across the river, where magic and fantastic creatures thrive, under the watchful eye of the trickster god Coyote. Another great one for if you like fantasy, but is usually a lot lighter, with a peak of intensity about equal to… Like, Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, I think. I’ve only gotten into this one pretty recently, but it’s good.

PARANATURAL - After his family moves to his dad’s old home town, Max discovers that he has magical powers, and becomes part of the Paranatural Activities club at his school, a group of students and their adviser who all have magical powers, and use them to protect the populace from ghosts, as well as investigate the many magical mysteries of the town. This comic is great, and mostly focuses on action and comedy. The art is a very colorful cartoony style, and the characters are drawn very… fluid, rubbery. The best way to put it is that the artist has really put a lot of effort into making characters consistently as expressive as possible, and that good old Disney/Looney Toons/Tom & Jerry stretchiness makes for very good visual comedy.

HOUSEPETS! - Another one of the earliest webcomics I ever read! Housepets is… largely a comedy comic, following the lives of anthropomorphized pets in a small neighborhood. They go on adventures, and live the fun yet complicated lives of an open society of people with unbelievable amounts of free time. However, sometimes there are bigger drama/adventure arcs, which are really good! A lot of the times amazing art or cool action are what draw me into adventure stories, but I just think the plot of this comic can be really good and surprisingly deep for a humor comic. And it’s still loose enough, and in the newspaper comic style that you can usually jump in very often (not every strip, mind you but in pretty small arcs) without feeling like you’ve missed a ton. Long too, lots to read, recommend.

STAND STILL STAY SILENT - SSSS is a comic that takes place 90 years after the end of the world. A zombie-like virus with strong mystical qualities has wiped out not just human, but much of the world’s mammalian life. In Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, and Denmark), in spite of the virus, society continues to exist, and most people live normal, happy lives. Our comic follows a research team, formed on a hairstring budget to travel into the infected zone, collect information on the virus and state of the fauna there, and, secretly, to collect books to sell back home. A great fantasy adventure drama that updates very often, and has really good art.

CUCUMBER QUEST - In spite of order this is actually the last one I’m writing, and I’m tired, so I’m going to copy the book one summary from Amazon:

What happens when an evil queen gets her hands on an ancient force of destruction? World domination, obviously. The seven kingdoms of Dreamside need a legendary hero. Instead, they’ll have to settle for Cucumber, a nerdy magician who just wants to go to school. As destiny would have it, he and his way more heroic sister, Almond, must now seek the Dream Sword, the only weapon powerful enough to defeat Queen Cordelia’s Nightmare Knight. Can these bunny siblings really save the world in its darkest hour? Sure, why not?

Cucumber Quest is good, the art is colorful and bright, all of the characters are relatable and real, including the villains, there’s cool adventures sequences and plot, and it’s a very fun comic. There’s humor and love and struggle in the comic, and it’s very well done.

GIRL GENIUS - Girl Genius follows Agatha Heterodyne, up and coming mad scientist, on her many adventures to save herself, her friends and the world if it’s along the way. It’s hard, however, competing with an entire world of mad scientists, as well as the Heterodyne legacy, one filled with chaos and bloodshed up until recently. I like Girl Genius a lot. It doesn’t move through the story very fast, but there’s a lot of solid world building, and more importantly, very intriguing sci-fi action and adventure happening inside of that world! I’m also pretty sure they do a radio show or podcast or something with additional Agatha adventures on top of the comic.

SUPERNORMAL STEP - After leading a life as a drifter after the death of her father, Fae is pulled into an alternate world where magic is real. There, she tries to find her place in life, master the magic that the world around her runs on, and get home to plain old earth in one piece. Lots of cool action, every character has really got their own style of magic. I can honestly tell you that it’s good, but I read it over such a long period of time that it’s got a pretty vague impression in my head.

ATOMIC ROBO - Robo is a skilled an dedicated scientist. He’s also an atomic robot built and raised by Nikola Tesla. Atomic Robo follows the titular character on the many adventures of his life, from WWII to the present. As the head of Tesladyne Industries, Robo is dedicated to researching the outlandish, the weird, the impossible! And when the world calls on him, he and his Action Scientists defend it from giant monsters, cosmic anomalies, and mad science. Atomic Robo is great if you love action, robots, monsters, humor, and velociraptors duel-wielding uzis. Highly recommended.

DUMBING OF AGE - As the title would imply, Dumbing Of Age is a pretty standard coming of age comedy! Starring a wide cast of likable and complex character, DoA follows a group of college freshmen as they learn more about themselves, and grow beyond the bubbles that they were raised in. I think the underpinnings of the comic are pretty strongly on humor, but there’s a lot of drama, and conversations about meaningful things too. There are lots of varying depictions of drama, depression, anxiety, and the ways people deal with pressure, and fear. But there’s also a lot of love and friendliness. It’s a good comic, and probably the only solid slice-of-life on my list.

MANLY GUYS DOING MANLY THINGS - This comic follows The Commander, a bio-engineered super soldier sent back in time to run a temp agency. This particular temp agency specializes in reintroducing particularly brutish video game, comic, and movie protagonists back into normal polite society. Duke Nukem isn’t much of a man for customer service, however. Later on the comic drifts more toward Commander’s personal life. (So slice of life, but with a buff, and actually surprisingly sensitive and forward thinking, super commando from the future.) Has been in a bit of a slump in terms of updates recently, but they still happen.

GRRL POWER - Sidney, a slightly hyper nerd who works at a comic shop, stumbles upon an artifact that gives her a variety of superpowers. After being exposed, she becomes a member of the government’s brand new super hero organization. This comic is a lot of fun, with some cool superpowers and super fights. Lots of humor, very consistently, in any given scene. Sadly, it is a bit fan service-y, though in the grand scale of things it’s not the worst offender (though definitely the worst you’ll see on this list).

SWORD INTERVAL - This is a pretty new one for me, but it’s great. At some indeterminate point in the past (potentially as far back as the civil war, if not farther), the earth became exposed to monsters and magic in ways that it wasn’t before. Humanity still exists and survives, but plagued by supernatural forces. Our main character is Fall, a very new monster hunter, who after years in witness protection, has decided to track down and kill the Hierophant, the powerful monster that killed her parents. Sword interval does a lot of really cool fantasy stuff, with new takes on classic monsters, and magic and monsters in settings that we don’t often see them in, out in the open in present day. It’s something I wish we could see more. Good action and art, particularly character design.

BACK - Abigail is back. From the dead? From a very long sleep in a box underground? She doesn’t know either. She doesn’t know a lot of things. What she does know is that she’s got two guns, is nearly indestructible, and is prophesied to go north to the capital and end the world. With the help of the young cleric Michael, who supplements her absolute lack of all knowledge and common sense, Abigail fights her way through the kingdom, and past the kings many superpowered deputies. Back is cool, back is funny, and sometimes has some good action. I wouldn’t consider it one of my favorites, but it’s a comic I started and I’ve kept up with, so that’s saying something.

MARE INTERNUM - Not very long yet, and I only recently read it, but Mare Internum is really good. I don’t want to spoil it too much, honestly, especially because it’s so short, but it’s a sci-fi adventure comic about being trapped, underground, on Mars, and finding life there. The art is great, the story so far is well written, and the dialogue is good. I really don’t want to spoil it, but there are some great concepts in it and you should read it.

OPHIUCHUS - A very new comic about an ancient stone guardian who is whisked away to another, far off world. Here, he is employed to help two of this world’s denizens defeat the blight that has corrupted and destroyed their once almost utopian world. The art for this is really good. The comic is not currently long enough to comment on much else, but it seems interesting, sci-fi with a touch of fantasy.

Slowly Updating:

AVA’S DEMON - Ava’s Demon is about a girl, Ava who has spent her entire young life haunted by a ghost that torments her, before finally making a deal. The ghost, Wrathia, will help her become a normal girl, with friends and a normal life, but first, Ava must track down the ghosts of Wrathia’s most powerful allies, and help her dissolve the massive interplanetary empire that is TITAN. Ava’s Demon is amazing. The story is good, but I think the comic’s greatest strength is absolutely stunning and polished art. Strong recommendation.

THE PROPERTY OF HATE - RGB is a self-described monster, a sharp dressed man with a TV for a head. However, he’s looking for a hero to guide on a quest. RGB whisks our young protagonist, the Hero, to a world that exists beside our own a world completely fueled and inhabited by our creativity, our stories. RGB protects the Hero from these dangers, guiding her on a mission unknown, through a world that, although mystical, seems to have lost its hope.

HE IS A GOOD BOY - Slow but large updates. This comic follows the life a sentient acorn, Crange, after the death of his parent (a tree) to a lumberjack. Crange is kind of a bit of a loser, and stumbles around his world of sentient rocks and bugs getting into all sorts of trouble and hijinks. These hijinks almost always result in someone’s death, which Crange is impressively unphased by. HIAGB is fantastic, in my opinion. The art is great, the humor is great, especially the visual comedy, and the story is good. However, it gets real dark, and gory. But if you’re fine with that, it IS a (dark) comedy comic, and a good one.

THE LAST HALLOWEEN - One Halloween, the darkness opens up, and monsters pour out from the seams between our world and theirs. Approximately 7 billion monsters, in fact. Mona, a young girl and horror fanatic finds herself thrown into a world of chaos and horror, on the run from her own monster, and forced to look for a way to save the world, with the help of ghosts, zombies, vampires, and even monsters themselves. In spite of the fact that this comic can be VERY dark, I think one of its big hooks is humor and likable characters, on top of great art and plot. I really like it. This comic maybeshouldn’t be on the slow update list, but the artist is just picking up speed after a long hiatus, so…

ROMANTICALLY APOCALYPTIC - The apocalypse happened, and Charles Snippy missed it. Humanity was wiped out in a war against it’s own, ever-present AI, and Charles Snippy, a scientist/tour guide without the implants made it out alive, only to wander alone this is until he meets Zee Captain, an ever positive, gender question mark, maniac who wanders the wasteland with their insane assistant Pilot. Snippy, Captain and Pilot wander the wasteland, facing off against monsters, raiders, and the laws of physics in a mind warping and illogical adventure.

On Hiatus:

DERELICT - Like a surprisingly large number of comics on this list, in Derelict, the world has ended. A strange Miasma travels the world, killing billions, and bringing with it gargoyle-like monsters who fear the daylight. However, the world goes on, in a small, broken way, and our story follows a scavenger in this new world.

HELVETICA - So, you die, and then what? Well, life goes on. This is what Helvetica learns, after he dies and reemerges into an afterlife that seems shockingly similar to the world of the living, with work, pressure, responsibility, danger, and just plain old boring life. Except everyone is a skeleton. Helvetica is very resistant to accept this new life in death. This one is pretty short so far, and hasn’t updated in a while, but it’s good.

VIBE - Hasn’t update in a year and a half, but what’s there is good (Honestly, it’s super sad it hasn’t update, I like it a lot). Vibe follows Baron, a young shaman, a spiritual master who is able to expel negative emotions (bad vibes) from the human body. Only those emotions then become monsters, who a shaman must fight to complete the process! With the help of his Loa (they’re like familiars), he navigates life as a teenager, and his increasingly complex and dangerous life as a shaman. I really like this comic. There’s a lot of very cool and dynamic action, and the artist makes great use of a ton of bright colors.

THE ABOMINABLE CHARLES CHRISTOPHER - This one hasn’t updated in about a year, but what’s there right now is good. Charles Christopher is a Sasquatch, living in the woods on the edge of society. Though he himself is fairly soft, and simple, the wilderness around him is full of anthropomorphized animals who go about shockingly human social and professional lives. The comic follows Charles Christopher as he interacts with the world of these animals, and becomes tangled in a vast spiritual quest.

POWER NAP - Hard to know exactly where to put this one. It’s currently VERY slow updating. Power Nap takes place in a world where the majority of mankind is reliant on a drug that allows them to live 24/7 without sleep. However, there are those who are allergic to the medicine, who live their lives out of sync with their peers, protected by the government, but effectively second class citizens. However, in a sleepless world, over-saturated by virtual reality, the human subconscious has found ways to seep into reality.

THE FANCY ADVENTURES OF JACK CANNON - I want to start this out by saying this comic is probably dead, without a 100% resolution. However, it’s currently 492 pages, and a LOT of the storyline covered in that span was resolved. Such that, if they’d wanted to, I could’ve seen the author wrapping it up. I digress. Jack Cannon is about a kid moving to a new school, where he finds the bullies are able to hack reality. Somehow immune to hacks, Jack fights the bullies, and in doing so, puts himself on the stage of a worldwide battle against hackers. Lots of really cool action in this, one of the first few webcomics I read.

Complete:

HOMESTUCK - If you’re here, you are probably at least aware of Homestuck. It’s about a bunch of goofy awkward teen friends who get sucked into a cosmic (video) game, with the fate of the universe at stake, but you know, they’ve still got that teen angst. Time travel is involved. It’s a very long, fun, and dramatic comic which is heavily influenced by RPGs and point and click adventures.

THE ADVENTURES OF DR. MCNINJA - The pressures of being a doctor AND ninja are immense, but on either front, you can trust that Dr. McNinja is the man for the job. Born into an Irish ninja family, Dr. McNinja longs for a life where he can do medicine in peace, but finds himself constantly pulled into a string of action packed adventures, fighting giant monsters, bandits riding velociraptors, and dueling radical interdimensional kings. This one if fairly long, a bit over 1800 pages, but it’s really good and well done. Again, there is a lot of both action and humor (I’m big on that), with some surprisingly meaningful and well-done story arcs in spite of how silly the premise is.

REMIND - This one is about a girl who lives in a lighthouse on the edge of a town whose main draw is the “Lizard Man” legend that her own father made up. However, after her cat one day starts walking on two legs and talking, claiming to be one of many said lizard men, they both go on a journey to discover the truth. This one was OK. The story and sci-fi elements are both alright bot not great. But it’s not super long, so if you have the time, maybe read it.

[bpdbiscuitblog-blog]

How Many Did You Take? How Many, My Angel? ***TRIGGER WARNING***

Woohoo is one of my oldest friends. She’s an ordained Wiccan priestess and performed the marriage ceremony for my second husband and me. She’s been my spiritual advisor and counselor since before I was old enough to drink, and I’m 34 now.

Before I was diagnosed with BPD, back when I hit the Big Red Button (the one that says - DO NOT TOUCH because the consequences are catastrophic) on my life, Woohoo was still there for me. I was obviously going insane, up and leaving my 13-year marriage with my then 35-year-old husband and my 14-year-old daughter, Moon, and my house and my entire existence to move in with Gypsy, a 33-year-old failed musician-turned-gamer who lived with his mother and had no job, education, hope for his future, or even basic social skills, where I immediately began a life of weird, unsatisfying, and infrequent sex, binge drinking, and running from past and present trauma-drama. On a positive note, I became a teacher again, a fulfilling experience speaking to my soul, as I am a teacher in more than just career, but completely mentally incapable of taking care of myself, much less a group of 17 8-year-olds, and became overworked, exhausted, and an emotional hurricane in a matter of months.

But between the Big Red Button and the hurricane was a time of destruction and devastation where I used the fires of my own personal hell to burn every possible bridge to my old life that I could, many of them badly in need of burning, as I would never return to walk them again, but others, like the Bridge to Woohoo, one of the few structures still anchoring my rapidly deteriorating mind in reality. Woohoo never traumatized me. She never hurt me. She never sought to control me. But the night I lost my daughter Moon and what remained of my ability to cope with the pain I was experiencing, in my grief and despair, she became just another representation of that trauma, and in the days that followed surviving my suicide attempt (notice I did not say my first suicide attempt) she became one of several targets of my BPD-strengthened rage at that long-buried trauma, a casualty of Hurricane Biscuit, although I was still more of a Tropical Storm back then.

Woohoo is a force of nature herself at times. Just as crazy, just as sarcastic, just as devastating a wit as myself, Woohoo brings with her a kind of controlled chaos, a tornado-in-a-bottle personality, ready to let loose a barrage of her own hellfire if the mood strikes her, but mostly just fun, easy-going, patient, a breeze that could whip up into a frenzied tornado if the mood strikes, but content at the moment just to enjoy the current. Voluptuous, sex-driven, raven-haired, loud-mouthed, and profane could all be used to describe her accurately, as accurately as kind, generous, soulful, and motherly.

I no longer believe in soulmates, but I do believe we have, say, connected souls, and as much as anyone I’ve ever met, she is one of my connected souls. And yet, when she stepped up to do what needed to be done to save my life, I turned my back on her.

She warned me about Gypsy. Told me there was something “not right ‘bout that boy,” in her Oklahoma twang. They had an immediate dislike of each other, Gypsy and Woohoo. Gypsy called her a man-hating feminist. Woohoo called him a lazy, worthless piece of shit, among other things. Neither of them were wrong.

My response to her warnings, over and over again, like a love-struck teenager fawning over a, well, a worthless piece of shit, was a protesting, “But, I love him, Woohoo! He’s my one and only.” (I am now picturing myself striking a dramatic pose, forearm to my forehead, turning away and looking plaintively out the window into a setting sun, while declaring that she just wouldn’t understand.)

I blatantly ignored the mounting evidence that this pairing would only leave me broken and broke, and continued blissfully unaware along my journey of self-destruction, orchestrating a series of events that would leave me running from my home, my marriage, my family. I’m not saying I should have been leaving these things, at least the marriage and the home, but I shouldn’t have been running towards Gypsy, of all people. Woohoo would have been a better choice. She did offer me a place to live, a chance to “get my shit together” in a relatively peaceful environment, free for a few months at least from financial worry, a safe haven to start anew. Meanwhile, I waved merrily from my car window as I drove away, hollering, “Nah, I got this!” as I hauled ass down her driveway, blaring Gypsy’s music at full blast and heading back to the city, to his mother’s house and the tiny 10x10 room that was to be my new prison of my own making for the next several months.

Meanwhile, still unable to communicate the massive amount of emotional stress and pain I was under to anyone, my mind began bringing all my fears and the traumas of my past to bear, forcing me to deal with them however I could. Financially, I was surviving, barely, in no small part to Woohoo herself, who kept my business running mostly smoothly as the day-to-day operations manager, supplying me with a steady income even when I wasn’t actively working.

My ex-husband meanwhile had no intention of patiently waiting out my midlife crisis, immediately replacing the vacated space in our marriage bed with the first woman who would tumble into it. He convinced Moon that my mental state was due to the fact that I was a bad person who did not love her, and therefore she had no need to further associate herself with me.

The day I received that smug text message from him, superior in his position as head of a new family to control, I gave up. Oh, not without setting a few more fires of course, screaming and stamping my foot and using whatever means I could to manipulate my ex-husband into returning my daughter to me, letting me hear her voice, even if it meant terrifying a complete stranger, his new bed buddy, into thinking I was going to share photos of her in lingerie with the world. And where did I get these photos? Oh, Mr. Manipulation himself had provided those just days before when he was so very interested in seeing if I would join them for a threesome. But, that’s another story for another day.

After several hours of realizing that torturing Mr. M and and the future Mrs. M was not going to get me my daughter, my emotions spiraled me into a well of despair that I was not capable of pulling myself out of. I seized upon a bottle of pills, a prescription Mr. M procured from his doctor that I had been told was for helping me with anxiety from my ADHD, but in fact were mood-altering antidepressants that, when prescribed incorrectly, could lead to suicidal ideation.

Google is a useful source for immediate access to the LD50 of literally anything. LD50 is the amount of a medication that will, when consumed, lead to death in 50% of the population of those who take it. The LD50 for this particular medication was 15 pills. I had 30. While texting Woohoo, Mr. M, and the future Mrs. M., telling them my intentions unless they returned my daughter to me, I began counting out 15 pills. I continued the threats as I used the Everclear under Gypsy's bed (where he was currently snoring after taking a dose of Benadryl after a long weekend of my emotional drama), to swallow them one by one. At eight pills, Woohoo warned me that she was calling the police. Hours away from my location, she would never arrive in time herself to stop me. She did the only the she could to prevent my death at my own hands - she narced on me.

At ten pills, for some reason, Gypsy stirred in his allergy-med-induced coma, and seeing me swallow the tenth, realized what was happening. He took the pills away as I screamed at him, “Just five more, please, just five more!” while he screamed back at me, “How many did you take? How many, my Angel?” (Gypsy didn’t call me Biscuit. No one did at this time, actually.) After counting and recounting, doing his own internet search, and counting once more, he sighed with relief, realizing I’d only taken enough to give myself a stomach ache.

My sobs had subsided at this point, and I sat in stony silence as Gypsy stared at me, seemingly in shock at how close I had come to leaving his life, and my own, at my own hand. Then one of those loud knocks that apparently policemen are trained in, one that can echo through a house to the back of a bedroom and enter into even the fevered dreams of a hallucinating woman who just wanted to be happy, smoke weed, and eat a chocolate bar in peace, sounded through the house, setting Gypsy's mom’s chocolate labs off in a frenzied bark as well as my wails of panic.

“Tell them I’m okay, Gypsy. Please, tell them I’m okay. Tell them she lied. Tell them they lied. Can I stay here? I’m so scared, Gypsy.” With an irritated sigh, he put his khaki shorts on over his boxers, pulled me gently to my feet, and guided me to the door. “No, you’ve got to talk to them. They’re going to want to see you.”

As if I was a frightened toddler meeting Santa for the first time, he guided me to the front door. In my head, I was psyching myself up. “You can do this, Biscuit. Just act normal. Act normal. Be angry. If you’re angry, you can’t be sad. If you’re angry, you won’t cry.”

After a heated discussion between me and the cops, a worried discussion between the cops and Gypsy, and phone calls and screenshots of my texts to Woohoo and Mr. and Mrs. M. between the cops and Woohoo, it was decided that it would be in my best interest if I was detained involuntarily at a mental institution for a three-day psych hold.

In the front yard of a house I had only recently moved into, in front of people I barely knew, in front of my beloved Gypsy, I was handcuffed, crying and scared. As the cuffs clicked into place, I could see Gypsy at the front door, watching behind the glass, mouthing, “I love you,” across the void separating me from the only vaguely familiar thing left in my life. Physically, I was being kept safe, but I was being traumatized all over again, my hands behind my back all over again, forced to do something I didn’t want to do all over again.

But what else could Woohoo do? Physical safety trumped mental safety. I could never be mentally safe again unless I was kept physically safe now. At the time, I couldn’t see that. At the time, all I felt was fear and anger. For someone with BPD, fear and anger are terror and rage.

By the time I was released from my prison 48 hours later (instead of 72, as apparently I wasn’t that crazy), my mind had been fueled by this terror and rage for days, consuming my thoughts completely. Unable to turn that rage onto the people who had hurt me, I instead hurled it at Woohoo, now the sole symbol remaining of that night. I stripped her from the business, allowing Gypsy to spew venom through social media as the new voice of the company, coming to my defense as Woohoo tried to warn our contractors that there was something seriously wrong with my mental stability now.

In my gathering momentum of destruction, I decided to strike one more blow against my former friend, business partner, and soul sister: I refused to pay her. I kept her final paycheck, using it instead to shower Gypsy with books and games, gifts for his loyalty perhaps. Meanwhile, Woohoo, still in shock over my behavior thus far, now had to figure out how to make ends meet without the money she was owed, how to provide for my own godchildren, her sweet son and daughter, now just that much shorter of being able to cover expenses.

The only wise decision I made in those days was enrolling in counseling. But of course, showing up to the first session did not instantly make me see what I had done and was continuing to do. That would take time, more self-destruction, more mistakes, more trauma, and finally, finally -- partly due to that first step and the hard work of a southern Biscuit, partly due to the luck of finding her Gravy -- peace.

[danielcooperrp]

They Fuck You Up

A drabble for @msppctts

When Daniel’s parents ask him to come into the living room, he thinks that they are finally, finally letting him get a puppy. He’s been begging since he was six, but he’s ten now, practically an adult. He’s clearly responsible enough for a dog, so when he enters the room, he can barely contain his grin.

The grin turns slack when he learns the truth. We love you more than anything in the world, his mother tells him, gripping one of his hands in both of hers with tears in her eyes. We chose you because we love you. You complete our family.

His father is more stoic about it, not that Daniel is surprised; his dad favors logic over emotion. Still, his voice quakes when he tells Daniel, You may not havve come from us, but you are ours. We want you to know because you deserve the truth, but don’t think for a second that you are not our son.

It’s a shock, at first. He may be the first ten-year-old high school freshman in his school’s history, but he’s still only ten. He doesn’t cry about it—what’s there to cry about? Lots of kids are adopted—but it still follows him around, a tiny, constant reminder that he is never going to run out of ways to be different than everyone else. 

And then, of course, being adopted is the least of Daniel’s concerns. Just a year later, he stands beside his father, ironed into a too-stiff black suit, watching a shiny mahogany box be lowered into a hole in the ground. He doesn’t cry about it—crying can come later, when he’s safely locked in his room, when his dad doesn’t need him to be strong—but he does make a silent promise to the mom who will never playfully tug on his curls again: You and Dad are the only family I will ever need.

So he works harder, longer, reads every piece of scientific literature his dad leaves lying around the house, and he graduates high school at just fourteen, with straight As and a mouthful of braces, his father and grandmother, who pats his cheek proudly and calls him Bumblebee, are the only family at the ceremony. Brilliant, he’s been called, a prodigy, and yes, he’s about to be shipped off to England, because Oxford is the only university that seems to know what to do with him, but even as the plane is rolling down the tarmac, all he can think about is the offer his father made after graduation. It was a closed adoption, he had said over dinner at Daniel’s favorite hole-in-the-wall Italian place, but if you want, we can start looking.

He spends a few weeks thinking about it as he settles into the room in his boardinghouse. He doesn’t know what legal hurdles they’ll have to jump through to find out the names of the person or people who gave him up, and he doesn’t know if the jumping will be worth it. What can learn that he doesn’t already know? Someone was pregnant, and he was an unwelcome presence in their life. His parents, the people who raised him, the people who knew exactly what combination of soup and ice cream he wanted when he was sick, the mother whose gravestone now sits an ocean away from him, the father who tried his best to pick up the pieces after her death, they wanted him, chose him, carved out a space in their life specifically for him. 

He tells his father no. He doesn’t cry about it. 

University is a whirlwind, too many classes, too many hours in a lab, too many eyes watching the American whizkid breeze his way through undergrad, through the Master’s program, through his doctorate. By twenty, he has his Ph.D., biochemistry, and he’s back on a plane, flying home to the father who now feels like something of a stranger to him. Now more than ever, Daniel is determined to show his dad exactly the kind of man he’s become, one who is just as dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge as he is, one who wants to make his mother proud. 

Almost as soon as he touches American soil, he’s shaking hands with everyone at his father’s lab. Lernaean Laboratories, the logo at the top of his offer letter reads. How many hours did he spend here as a child, not even tall enough to see atop the lab benches, so close in his father’s shadow that if he stopped too fast Daniel would bounce off of the back of his knees? His father’s career in this lab, for Hydra, has been the blueprint for Daniel to follow, the legacy for him to inherit. He falls into the work as easily as stepping off the T in the morning, quickly assimilating into his research team and getting to work. His efforts don’t go unnoticed; soon, he’s leading a team of his own, doing the kinds of experimental research he’d only dreamed of back in England. 

And then, as it is wont to do, everything falls apart. Hydra is no longer the vague parent company of the lab to which he and his father have dedicated their careers; it is a fascist shadow organization, a parasite lurking in legitimate government organizations with the almost cartoonish goal of reshaping the world into their authoritarian vision. Daniel’s entire worldview is flipped upside-down on a dime, and as the truth of his research, of his father’s research, of his life spills out for the entire world to see like some messy tabloid drama, all he can think is, Did Dad know?

Of course he did. He was naive to think otherwise. For as brilliant as Daniel is, he has never had the cognizance his father has had, has never been able to navigate the world as deftly. Of course his father knew exactly what he was doing, what he was contributing to, and of course he has an answer to every question Daniel hurls at him as they fight in the same living room where all those years ago his life was upended for the very first time. 

You’re a monster, Daniel croaks, the ache in his chest so profound it’s a wonder his ribs don’t crack. And you’ve turned me into a monster, too. 

When he stumbles back into his own apartment, bone-weary and limp, he collapses onto his bed, and he cries about it. 

The next few weeks pass in a haze. He has no job, no prospects, no relationship with his father. His roommates, best friends made across the pond, two other too-smart Americans too good at finding trouble where they least expect it, do their best to cheer him up, but all of the RuPaul’s Drag Race in the world isn’t going to make him suddenly able to face himself in the mirror.

He doesn’t know what sparks the interest, what first gets the question rolling in his head. One night, he googles the phrase closed adoption, and then immediately closes out of the window. A few nights later, he tries again. How to open a closed adoption. 

So the search begins. Two searches, really. The first for his birth parents, the second for a lab that will hire someone with a stain on their résumé like his. Much to his surprise, the latter is easier to find; within a year of his life falling apart, Daniel is hired on to work at the organization that he once viewed as the enemy: S.H.I.E.L.D. It’s rough there, of course, because no one trusts him, and why should they? These days he feels like he can barely trust himself to keep his shit together. 

When it comes to his birth parents, however, it’s not so simple. The lawyers can only do so much, and there’s only so much he can afford. He briefly considers a private investigator, but feels too icky about it; he doesn’t want his birth parents to think that he is more interested in his own curious self-interest than their privacy, even though he definitely is. He still isn’t on speaking terms with his father, but somehow he finds out what Daniel is up to, and the rift between them only widens. So what, I’m not good enough for you anymore? he snaps over the phone to his son. You have to go find your real parents? 

It would have been less painful if he had just slapped Daniel across the face. 

It’s his roommate Connor’s suggestion that solves the puzzle. So many people are doing those online ancestry kits these days, and even though Daniel is extremely skeptical of them—what exactly are they doing with his DNA once they’re done with it?—he sends of a vial of his spit and waits. A few weeks later, he logs into an online profile to see a list of distant blood relatives who are also curious about where they come from. The closest relative, he is pleased to learn, is a second cousin: the cousin of one of his birth parents. 

A few phone calls later, and he’s driving out to Long Island, where his second cousin lives, along with most of his extended family. Over lunch at a sub place, Daniel learns that his second cousin has a cousin who was in college in New York in 1989, the year Daniel was conceived, and who, according to the family grapevine, may have gotten knocked up by some trust-fund kid from Uptown Manhattan. Everyone is pretty certain that there was a baby, but no one knows what happened to it.  

Just to twist the knife, this guy Daniel has connected with via the Internet then lays on the bad news: his cousin died three years ago. Ovarian cancer. If she really was his mother, he’ll never get to know her. 

Her name was Chaya.

So he gives up. He goes back to Boston, back to his life, and tries to forget about his quest. He redoubles his efforts into his research, convinced that if he works hard enough, maybe, maybe his new coworkers will stop hating him for being Hydra scum.

And then one day, just a month or so after his twenty-eighth birthday, he receives an alert email from the DNA company. A new relative wants to connected with you! Even as he reminds himself not to get too excited, Daniel eagerly opens up the website, where he starts chatting with some guy in New York. Another second cousin, it looks like, but on his father’s side this time. There is less mystery around this one; this new relative only has one cousin, only one person who could be Daniel’s biological father. 

You’re never gonna believe this, kid, he writes. Daniel waits with bated breath for the next message to come in. My cousin? Tony fucking Stark.

There’s a buzzing in Daniel’s ears. He stares at the screen, seeing nothing. More messages come in—You know, Iron man? Hello? Kid, you still there?—but Daniel is long gone, sinking into a feeling unlike any he’s ever had before.

Holy fuck. His father is Tony Stark.

He sits with this. For a long time, he sits on the information, not breathing a word even to his best friends. He wakes up, he goes for runs, he showers, he heads into work, he talks to no one, he comes home, he sleeps. Day after day, he lives his life, but for weeks, there is only one thought preoccupying his every waking moment: My father is Tony Stark.

He doesn’t google him. He doesn’t have to. Everyone knows Tony Stark, billionaire tech genius, war profiteer-turned-superhero, the guy who flew through a wormhole to save all of Manhattan. He’s in the news enough that even the most casually engaged citizen can’t help but keep up-to-date on all of his escapades. To think that he came from that...if this isn’t evidence for nurture over nature, he doesn’t know what is.

Eventually, though, the processing has to stop and the decision-making has to start. He has this information now, and he needs to figure out what to do with it. Going to him seems laughable; how many people must have tried to claim that Tony Stark was the father of their child over the years? Everyone knows what kind of guy he was when he was younger, why couldn’t it be true? Does he try to get a lawyer? That seems hostile right off the bat, but how else would anyone believe him unless he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is?

He doesn’t get to make up his mind. He’s on his lunch break, up on the roof of the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility in Boston—technically speaking he’s not supposed to be up here, but the idea of going into the giant cafeteria full of S.H.I.E.L.D. employees who hate him is far worse than any reprimand for being in a restricted area—looking down at the bustling city below, when suddenly, he doesn’t feel very good. He sets his ham and Swiss sandwich down and clutches at his head. What is happening? Slowly, he lowers a hand in front of his face, and with a mixture of confusion and awe, he watches as the tips of his fingers start to dissolve into dust before his very eyes.

And then the world goes black.

When he wakes up, he is immediately overcome with the certain sense that something is wrong. He sits up, and his lunch is gone—didn’t he just put his sandwich down fifteen seconds ago? He stands, and when he peers out over the edge of the roof, he is stunned to see his beloved city in ruins. Garbage lines the streets, and buildings are falling into disrepair. When he looks down onto the sidewalk below, it’s filled with people who are looking around, just as confused as he is. They touch themselves, and each other, and even though he can’t hear them, he knows they’re asking the question, What just happened?

Life after the Hulk snapped everyone back into existence is messy. Half of the world has lived five years of their lives that people like Daniel just...weren’t there for. Of the people in his life, only his roommate Connor and his grandmother survived, which casts an icy grip around his heart; he lost five years with his grandmother, his mother’s mother, five years that he will never get back. His English bulldog, appropriately named Hulk, because Daniel has had a crush on Bruce Banner long before he was saving the world from apocalyptic destruction, also died in the snap, so at least Daniel didn’t lose any time with him.

His father is shaken by his own death and by his son’s. He wants to reconnect, to put the past behind them, to put right what once went wrong, but Daniel just isn’t ready for it. Yes, the world kept spinning for five years, but for him, the wound between him and his father his still raw, tender. 

But his biological father is a whole other story. Now that he’s died and been brought back to life, Daniel is more ready than ever to reach out to him. He doesn’t care if he’s laughed at, or doubted, or called a liar. He has to shoot his shot. 

Once again, he finds out, he is too late. His father, Tony Stark, sacrificed himself to save the entire universe. A hero, they’re calling him, the truest hero we’ve ever had. Memorials spring up everywhere, with Iron Man instantly immortalized as the most important hero in the universe. 

And Daniel will never get to tell him that he’s his son.

But Tony Stark isn’t the only one dominating much of the cultural conversation. Most of the world is only now learning that in the five years between the Snaps, he and Stark Industries CEO Pepper Potts had a daughter.

Daniel has a sister. 

Which is how he ends up here, driving down this winding gravel road alongside a lake, fingers tapping nervously atop the steering wheel. This is dumb, far dumber than just reaching out to Tony Stark. Pepper Potts is a grieving widow, a single mother with a four-year-old child, a woman with a company to run and a life to live. The last thing she needs is one of Tony Stark’s youthful indiscretions showing up on the front porch of her supposedly classified lake house (though he’s not ready to repair things with his father, Daniel is more than willing to let him try to curry favor by calling on an old friend to do some digging for him). When he gets out of his rental car, he approaches the front door and retreats over and over again, balling and unballing his fists, trying to work up the nerve to knock. All of the starter sentences he practiced on his drive from Boston to upstate New York are entirely gone now, and he thinks if he opens his mouth, he might just vomit. 

He has to do it. He lost his chance to know both of his biological parents. He simply cannot risk losing the chance to know his sister. He steps carefully up to the front door, takes a deep breath, and knocks.