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outofangband · 3 years ago

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Masterlist/Explanation of the Dark Arafinwë verse

Other masterlists

Maedhros is attending a formal event near Alqualondë and is accosted by another elf. Unable to wrangle the truth from the ages of pre-existing biases and feuds, Teleri wardens arrest both the accoster and Maedhros who finds himself fighting against his own memories. When, to his very great surprise, Arafinwë himself intervenes on his behalf, Maedhros is brought back to the palace to be kept under supervision until the matter is investigated. (More details at the end notes)

CW: forced stripping (non sexual), abuse of power, callous disregard of past trauma/exploiting trauma responses, dissociation, gaslighting

Edit: I’ve had some people tell me that the gaslighting in this story is very difficult to read so I wanted to give an extra warning for that element

Tag list: @iwenttomordor @elarinya-nailo @mozart-the-meerkitten @tears-and-lilies @much-ado-about-whumping

“Strip.”

There was no malice in the command, simply an almost weary calm. Nelyafinwë was aware of his own eyes widening just as a sense of unreality came over him. The soft warmth of the evening felt suddenly oppressive and the clean and comfortable room he had been lead into twisted and distorted. He took a step backwards and his half uncle raised an eyebrow.

“I know you carry weapons upon thy person, Russandol. For rather obvious reasons I cannot allow you to keep them.”

The room did not come back into focus but Maitimo gave a small sigh, apprehension as much as relief. He raised one booted foot and undid the laces, pulling out a small blade and handing it over to Arafinwë who pocketed it with a small nod of acknowledgment. Maitimo then undid the other boot to show there was nothing in it.

Arafinwë looked impassively at the other elf, fingers pressed together at his chest.

“It would not be very prudent to simply take thy word, Russandol. Remove the rest, I will give you something to wear.” Maedhros’s gaze traveled to his face, his own expression of startled disbelief. He waited for a few moments for Arafinwë to leave or turn away. Arafinwë does not.

Maitimo swallowed, aware of the tingling, almost trembling in his arms or legs. He started on the buttons on his tunic so it fell into two sides, revealing the scars on his chest. Including the numerous iterations of kinslayer carved or tattooed into his flesh. He winced as he thought about this, not wishing to force Arafinwë to view another reminder of what had happened here so many years ago.

But he handed the tunic over over. Arafinwë set it and his boots on the bed, more of an examination table than for rest. He gestures for Maitimo to continue when the Noldor prince pauses again. Next come the trousers, slightly scuffed from the altercation that had landed him here in the first place. The heat rises to his ears and he can no longer maintain any sort of eye contact, directing his gaze to the floor instead.

Maitimo procrastinates pulling off his leggings until Arafinwë makes a soft sound of impatience, jarring him back to the present. The present where he is standing almost completely naked in front of the king of the Noldor in Valinor.

“I was there when Angamando fell and I have worked as a healer. I know you are scarred. Please remove the rest.”

Maitimo hands over the last of his clothes and finally Arafinwë looks away from him, gathering up his leggings, tunic, trousers and boots along with his jewelry.

“Stay here, Russandol. I will bring these to my guard to examine.” He starts towards the door.

Out of the corner of his eyes, Maitimo sees that the beaded bracelet Rôg had crafted for him is visible in the pocket of his trousers. He longs to hold it, to rub the smooth stone between his fingers as he does when the memories of the past intrude so vividly into the present.

“Lord Arafinwë?” He starts to say but the look on his half uncle’s face, that same impassive, cool interest, prevents any more words from leaving him and he merely shakes his head and waits as the other leaves.

...

Arafinwë returns nearly half of an hour later and Maitimo has not dared to move, even to try and cover himself. Loathe as he is to admit it to himself, any scolding or reprimand he might receive is likely worse than the shame of being so exposed. The door is closed, perhaps it was locked.

The king moves past him to take up his previous position. His expression has not changed.

“I am afraid you will have to be restrained for the night, Russandol. I do not have guards to spare.” Maedhros looks up at him, his heartrate spiking again.

“I do not need to be restrained, My Lord” he says slowly, carefully, “I am hardly going to attack you nor anyone else, naked and with no weapon.”

Arafinwë studies him. “I have absolutely no idea whether or not you will attack another should you become frightened or angry. I cannot afford the possibility that you enter such a state and harm someone. Lay down,” he gestures to the narrow bed before continuing, “This is a process that would typically be done by our wardens. Are you not grateful you are not suffering this under the hands of strangers?”

Maitimo was more acutely aware than ever of his nakedness as he took the few steps forward and lay down on his stomach. He hears rather than sees Arafinwë come to his right side, using a strap made of a soft leather to fasten his hands down. He urges himself silently to breathe through his nose, to remain calm. By the time his ankles were also strapped down, he had to actively count his breaths to keep them steady.

“Open your mouth.” This next command is spoken as calmly, coolly as the others, it is only Maitimo who is experiencing the dizzying panic. He doesn’t obey this time. Arafinwë approaches him again, kneeling beside his head and holding out what seem to be more of the leather straps.

“Your teeth are a weapon, Russandol,” now there is something like sarcasm, mocking in the king’s voice, Maitimo is sure of it.

(Is he sure?)

“You can hardly be surprised that you are not trusted here. Do you not understand I have made this process significantly better for you? Open your mouth. This will not hurt you and it is only until the morrow.”

Maedhros tastes cleaned leather as something is forced into his mouth, preventing him from moving his tongue. More straps are fixed around his head. Arafinwë is careful to keep his hair out of the way of them so it does not become caught or tangled. But the parts that press against his face irritate the old scars made when less considerate hands strapped similar devices over him.

Finally, Arafinwë takes a step back. Maedhros’s shallow breathing is softened slightly by the piece in his mouth.

“Good. Get some rest, Russandol. I will check on you in the morning.”

To be continued

Author’s note: This type of gaslighting used both implicitly and explicitly throughout here, the “no, of course there’s nothing sinister about me doing these things, that’s just how you’re interpreting them because of Angband and it’s really offensive of you to compare me to the Dark Lord” is incredibly insidious and makes me really angry! Unfortunately it will only get worse from here.

Author’s note: Maedhros was caught off guard here and his shock as well as his guilt is used to manipulate him into thinking this is legitimate procedure however he soon starts to understand more how dangerous Arafinwë and please know that he becomes an absolute nightmare to hold hostage. Or well he’s not currently a hostage but he’s soon to be

There is more about why Ara is doing this linked in the AU masterlist and more will become known as the story progresses!

More backstory here:

Maedhros is attending a formal event near Alqualondë and is accosted by another elf. Unable to wrangle the truth from the ages of pre-existing biases and feuds, Teleri soldiers arrest both the accoster and Maedhros who finds himself fighting against unpleasant memories of being confined and restrained. He’s alone in his cell, trying not to flinch whenever a guard comes by and alternating rapidly between the instinct to fight and scream and lash out and the instinct to hide and be subdued. He sees the guards stop and bow and he stands and walks to the door and sees Arafinwë. To his astonishment, he’s told that Arafinwë has agreed to have him released into his custody. He can’t leave the city for a few days, at least not until the matter gets sorted out. Maedhros starts to refuse just on instinct, saying it’s not necessary, etc. Arafinwë looks loftily at him.

“Do not speak foolishness, Russandol. Come with me.” And the guards unlock the door and nod to him and he can’t exactly insist on staying in prison especially because he is actually innocent in this encounter so he agrees reluctantly and follows Arafinwë to his carriage.

#the silmarillion #maedhros #finarfin #Arafinwë #splinters like jewel shards #short writings #saved

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descentivity · 3 years ago

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Depression, Trauma, (and Most Importantly,) My Thoughts on Hello Charlotte EP1 & 2

Eating has been difficult for me for as long as I remember. It started off as an aversion to food, in favour of spending my time more efficiently on what my dumb little mind viewed as more important: Homework, video games.

Over time, it turned into anorexia. I had already gotten used to eating just under 500 calories a day, and my depression took my poor habits and twisted them into a cowardly and slow attempt at suicide.

On my road to recovery, I’ve found that years of poor eating choices have lead to my body struggling to process food. I have to eat at a painstakingly slow pace lest my stomach turns against me, and the smell of food is sometimes enough to diminish my appetite altogether. My bowel movements are, for lack of a better word, a shitshow.

This brings me to today, the 10th of August, 2021. 6 or so years of barely eating enough to survive later, I’m setting the world record for the slowest consumption of a fillet o’ fish in the history of mankind.

In my absolute boredom and unfathomable stomach pain, ManlyBadassHero’s playthrough of some random horror game (I can’t remember the name) appears in my YouTube recommended, and I’m reminded of a horror game I bought on sale on Steam, the last of a trilogy. In all honesty, I only bought the game because it was dirt cheap and one of my sisters’ names is Charlotte. I was too horrified at the time to process the story nor play the previous two games, so I did a quick achievement run and left it at that. I was certainly very confused as I had no idea who any of the characters or what any of the concepts were, but the gore had me too mortified to go and find out myself.

A year later, I’m looking the trilogy up on ManlyBadassHero’s YouTube channel, and decide to start from the beginning of his Hello Charlotte journey, in 2016.

Hello Charlotte EP1

I’m going to be completely honest with you, the first game really didn’t resonate with me too well. It was a cute, quirky, RPG Maker horror game, with two loveable main characters and an interesting world. However, with context from the third game, the events felt too self-isolated and inconsequential. Felix and Charlotte are in a little self-contained TV world created by a fictional race called Pythia - creatures with 3 or 4 eyes that can create miniature dimensions, once brought into a hivemind by an “Oracle,” which seems to be some sort of god. They all seem to be falling apart and have taken a horrific turn as most of the Pythia have been “executed,” and those who haven’t have either gone mad or into hiding in their own bubbles of (albeit temporary) safety.

The ending of the game is somewhat misleading, too. Once Charlotte and Felix escape the TV world by having Charlotte merge with the Oracle itself, the game almost plays off the previous events like they were all a story made up by a young and imaginative Charlotte. Did they happen at all? Is she a reliable narrator or point of view to begin with? (Spoiler alert, she is not.) The explanation for it all seems to be that Charlotte herself is a schizophrenic, though the legitimacy of this is brought into question in the third game, which I will talk about later. Altogether, the game didn’t bring out many strong emotions in me, and I was starting to zone out as I moved on to the second game’s playthrough.

Hello Charlotte EP2

What struck me as odd in the second game is that while the first game seemed to bring Charlotte out of her own strange, black-and-white world and back into reality, we’ve found out that she’s right back where we started last game. A black-and-white world, inhabited by her imaginary friends. Aliens, gods, and the like. However, Charlotte’s seemingly made-up world feels more alive this time. I’m not sure if this is the consequence of the game developer improving their skills or an intentional detail, but even more characters are introduced, and previously shallow tenants of Charlotte’s home are given more depth. The hazmat-suit wearing aliens have faces, personalities and whole backstories attached to them, now. Charlotte has a best friend at school named Anri, who has a obsessive crush on her. She’s friends with a bullying victim named C with horrible germaphobia, who has almost identical struggles to her (more on those struggles later.)

What also surprised me is the continuity between the first and second game. For some reason, I thought that this Charlotte would be starting from scratch, completely oblivious to the fate of the first game’s iteration. However, this concept only seems to be used in the third game, so I guess I was simply mislead. This game, in fact, takes place 3 years after the first, and the Oracle still lives on within Charlotte’s conscious. However, it’s a dying god, on its last leg. It had already been dying during the time of the last few Pythia, but it had used the last of its strength to free Felix and Charlotte from their world. As the Oracle’s health declines, so does Charlotte’s mortal body.

Unlike the first game, most of the themes in this game hit way too close to home. The feeling of second-hand helplessness when someone you barely knew ends their own life. Anri’s obsessive and outright manipulative lesbian crush on Charlotte, bordering on bullying. The schooltime harrassment and trauma Charlotte underwent. The fear and dangers of social interaction. Feeling unlawfully punished by your school teachers for seemingly nothing at all. Depression, self harm, and the primal urge to escape from it. Getting roped into others’ mental health, until both of your issues converge into a disgusting amalgamation of the need but severe lack of therapy and a break from it all. Delusions of what could’ve been and the possible, yet near impossible future ahead. Looking back on everything you’ve ever done and regretting every second of it.

While I ticked off the trauma presented to me on a silver platter in the form of a fucking RPG Maker game like a twisted bucket list, I found myself relating more and more to not only Charlotte, but the students around her. Scarlett, whose life was so perfect that nobody had even thought about her possible mental issues until it was far too late. Anri, who would lay down her life for a girl who simply doesn’t feel the same way. C, who desperately wanted to escape from reality by any means possible.

An interesting fact about Hello Charlotte is that there are numerous omnipotent beings amongst its cast. They aren’t shy about providing very in-depth character analysis to Charlotte, and in turn, to the puppeteer (I suppose now is a good time to inform those who are unfamiliar with the series that the puppeteer refers to a species, character, and the player, all at once. Charlotte has a puppeteer controlling her by the name of Seth. You are/are controlling Seth as the player. Capiche? Capiche.)

What this meant for me watching Manly’s playthrough was the feeling of two gods (in this game, at least) peering right into my soul, analysing characters that reflected my exact experiences and even my personality during my school days. I learned and realised things about myself that I simply hadn’t known before. Just like Charlotte, I’m simply looking for direction in life, and I’m too afraid to act without instructions. I found myself bullied, manipulated and abandoned by someone who simply wanted my affections, and only learned to miss them when they were gone. Like Anri, my desperation for love and approval from an individual in turn lead to anger and resentment for them. Like both Charlotte and C, I eventually turned to hurting myself to make all the pain go away, refusing help from others and developing a shell of false optimism and naivety to forget about the damage I had dealt to my body, personality and relationships.

As much as I hate to admit it on my little obscure Tumblr blog with 0 followers and 0 traction, I still struggle with these things. I have no direction in life, and wander aimlessly, hoping for one of my offshot attempts at content creation to take off. I find myself missing the girl who emotionally abused me to hell and back every day. I resent another girl for never feeling the same way I felt about her. I still don’t take care of myself, and spend every day in a state of denial about my physical decline and sickliness. I’m so incompetent emotionally that I spend days ignoring my own boyfriend, starving him of the proper relationship that he deserves all because of how broken, fragmented and distant my own mind is.

Hello Charlotte EP2 has four endings. All four of them, in my eyes, are bad.

In the first, C and Charlotte overdose together, leaving their mortal realm to become gods. They choose to ignore and forget the pains of their mortal lives, and live the rest of their godly lives in ignorant bliss. Do I want to forget about my depression and trauma? Learn nothing, and forget about everything that made me who I am today? Or worse even, do I dare take the plunge into “godhood,” and leave this mortal plane to end my suffering altogether?

In the second, Charlotte discovers that C isn’t who she thinks he is, and she finds him without a soul. Alive, but empty. Charlotte could not save him. Consumed by grief, she ascends and becomes a god, consuming the entire world around her. After all is said and done, she realizes her mistake. All of her friends are gone, C is still empty and unresponsive, and now she is alone. Sometimes, I feel as though I’ve already gone through this ending, many times over. Countless times I’ve let my depression become all-consuming and take over my life. I’ve pushed so many people away and hurt so many more, and for what? I have nothing to gain from every fit of depression, and the consequences make it seem nothing more but a selfish attempt to make myself feel better.

In the third, Charlotte is the only one who dies. In her last moments, the Oracle comforts her, like a mother cradling her child. They embrace, and say goodbye to each other, as Charlotte’s own life was the only thing keeping the dying god alive. At this point, I’ve started to draw parallels between the Oracle and depression. Depression isn’t always a horrible thing that beats you down and keeps you from being truly happy. Sometimes, wallowing in my own sadness and depression would be the only thing that keeps you sane, stable, and calm. The feeling of hopelessness really is bittersweet, and in desperate times, goes hand-in-hand with acceptance of one’s circumstance. Oftentimes, I find that this is the most realistic way I’ll go out. One day, I may just accept depression, and succomb to it. There may not be a struggle at all. Rather, a quiet, submissive hum, which will fade away into silence.

In the fourth and final ending, Charlotte and C die alongside each other. After her death, Charlotte confronts the Oracle, and wishes to save everyone, and for everyone to be unhappy. Of course, this is where the classic saying: “Be careful what you wish for” comes in. Because of her wish, everyone’s soul, what makes them individual and unique, is erased. After all, no one can suffer if they cannot think at all. In some ways, emptiness is pure bliss. This once again goes back to the bittersweetness of depression. The sheer emptiness it may bring on, at times, is bliss. Feeling nothing isn’t always a bad thing. It’s a way to cope with the horrors of the world. To remember nothing at all is such a tempting yet unattainable solution that I can’t say I haven’t longed for in the near or distant past. Charlotte, of course, is distraught that her friends are all gone, their identities and souls lost forever. Following this, she has one request to make of another god, the observer. She wishes to be killed, as all of her actions have lead to nothing but pain for others and herself. The observer, however, refuses this offer. Instead, he comforts her and takes her hand. They go on a journey together. He suggests that one day, she’ll learn to control her power, and she can recreate the world and her friends. As they leave, Charlotte reflects on her hopes and dreams for the journey. She hopes to learn to be kind, and not hurt others. She wants to change her ways, and become an honest, good person. Charlotte, slowly but surely, is on the road to recovery.

Putting the unsettling sequel to this game aside, maybe I could learn a little bit from Charlotte.

#tw suicide #tw depression #tw anorexia #tw self harm #disordered eating tw #hello charlotte #charlotte wiltshire #anri warhol #scarlett eyler #charles eyler #indie horror #review

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regrettablewritings · 4 years ago

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Animatic/Storyboard Music

Got bored/procrastinate-y on coloring in this ultra intricate card for my mom. So I’m just gonna make a list of songs I think make for good animatic material. Because why not/I wanna foist my musical tastes on people/ @locke-writes got me in a music binge. For the most part, it’s just gonna be me explaining the meanings or the vibe or what they generally tend to be used for, but really it’s mostly subjective so imaginate whatchu wanna.

“Trust Me” - The Devil’s Carnival Originally depicting a story about the Scorpion and the Frog, it’s the perfect song for when you want to depict the dynamic between a gullible or at the very least more grounded character and a figure whose intentions . . . may be less than pure. Or good for anyone, really.

“The Dismemberment Song” - The Blue Kid I have a playlist dedicated to songs whose content and sound are just . . . not married to one another, but got a weird flirtationship situation going on. Anyway, I’ve seen people say that they like to imagine it’s sung through the POV of a scorned housewife who’s finally Had Enough™️. And . . . They’re really not wrong for it. Really, though, it’s just the right song for when a sadist is just ready to gut a fucker but is disturbingly jolly about it.

“Love Me Dead” - Ludo Continuing with my trend of songs about people in less than ideal situations, “Love Me Dead” is straight to the point: The relationship is just awful and the guy gets nothing from it, but he can’t help but be hopelessly in a state of adoration for the woman he’s latched on to (“You’re born of a jackal! YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL!!”)

“Constellations” - The Oh Hellos There actually isn’t a plot to this song, it just feels really good (as all songs by The Oh Hellos are prone to be). However, if you feel a need to portray the concept of having to reorganize your thoughts after realizing that maybe they weren’t what you initially thought, and then coming to the conclusion that even though everything changes as a result, you’ll be alright? This is the song for you.

“A Kindling of Sorts” - The Oh Hellos An instrumental piece that is like . . . It’s related to another song of theirs about nationalism called “Torches”, so make of that what you will. (I personally have been using it to imagine storyboarding an opening for an animated The Witcher series.)

“The Other Side” - The Greatest Showman I know everyone and their mom has used this to portray situations like villains trying to get good guys to join their side. But I dun curr, it’s a fun song. That, and I like what Emilyamio did with her interpretation. It’s fun. For a basic rundown, know it’s another song about two characters’ dynamics being explored, with one coming to the other with a proposal that they join them in whatever endeavors they have in store. It’s often portrayed as something evil, but it really doesn’t have to be, as the original context was more about letting loose than anything.

“The Thief and the Moon” - Shawn James A much more mellow piece. Simple and straight to the point: A thief tells the Moon that he plans on stealing her light to shade the world in darkness. The Moon insists that the thief would only doom the world by doing so, to which the thief clarifies that he doesn’t care; if the world is shrouded in shadow, it means he will be able to steal with more ease (“My very existence is a race to attain wealth”). Disgusted, the Moon essentially curses the man with a warning that his greed can and will bring about his end -- and leave him to be forgotten by the rest of mankind, once it happens.

“Villainous Thing” - Shayfer James I’ve seen people say that this song is about singing to a cadaver but I can’t quite find anything confirming that (translation: I’m too lazy to look too into it). Regardless, it’s a fun ditty that yet again portrays someone with less than pure intentions encouraging someone to join him in some good old fashion villainy, as they’ve clearly endured their fair share of hardships and surely wanted to do evil anyway (“You’ll find no ever after here, it’s clear that isn’t what you came for“).

“Necromancin Dancin” - Bear Ghost Straight forward and fun as fuck: A necromancer apparently seems to cross classes and try his hand at barding by not only raising an army of the dead, but by also making them dance in order to make conquering the world easier. Because . . . a body doing Disco Duck isn’t scary, I guess.

"Aquaman” - Walk the Moon A song about one half of a couple wanting to become more involved in their relationship, but still having some nervousness about doing so. If you somehow haven’t heard this song yet, you gotta because it’s the cutest shit.

“Jenny’s Tale” - Ren I’ll be brutally honest, it’s about a woman named Jenny who just wants to get home after a long day of work and an unfortunate encounter with a 14 year old named Screech who gets way in over his head. As in, like, a death happens. That being said, I need. Like. An animated music video of this song. I imagine this shit in gritty charcoal or painted on glass, it just needs this. Somebody who isn’t me who knows what they’re doing, please look into this.

��The Curse of the Fold” - Shawn James As cheesy as it sounds, it basically boils down to not giving up or yielding. But what makes it so cool is the fact that Shawn James makes all his songs basically sound like a western gothic soundtrack. Which helps, because he admits that the title is also a reference to poker, in which giving up too often or too easily can often rob you of a delicious reward gained through perseverance and sacrifice.

“Thank God I’m Not You” - Himalayas I prefer to imagine this for an arrogant asshole of a character. Because that’s exactly what this song is about: They’re a liar and a thief, they’ve been called the son of Satan, and yet they consider themselves lucky -- ‘cause at least they ain’t you! If you have a character in mind who’s a delightful, punchable little shit, this is probably either their anthem or at least on the playlist you inevitably made for them.

"Passerine" - The Oh Hellos So there’s a common trend in The Oh Hellos’ discography that tends to explore the two founders’ experiences with faith and their growth in how they understand it or recognize it. With “Passerine”, the concept being explored is the experience they had when it came to taking a step back and realizing just how many of their supposed “fellow Christians” were actually doing some rather unchristian things, so to speak. When they “prune[d] their feathers”, it became clear that they had less in common with certain people proclaiming to be Christian while also spouting bigotry and greed. However, the desire to move away from such influences comes with the feeling of being torn, as moving too far away from the Bible leaves the singer feeling as though she is betraying something she holds dear. As a result, “Passerine” symbolizes not a breakage from faith, but a breakage from blind faith as they understood it, and the inevitable feeling of being torn that comes along with expanding upon how one views their beliefs and those around them. It’s therefore not uncommon to see Good Omens animatics using this song. (Something I also noticed is that throughout the song, you hear pieces of “Constellations”. TOH have a tendency to reference previous pieces, and considering “Constellations” is a song about changing perspective and the meanings we apply to them, it fits in beautifully with a song about reevaluating one’s stance.)

“Like the Dawn” - The Oh Hellos As stated before, a lot of TOH’s discography draws inspiration from their faith. In this case, it’s an outright retelling of the Garden of Eden, specifically when Adam awoke to find Eve had been created. What makes this iteration stand out to most, however, is that the singer is female, which seems to change the vibe you get. It sweetens the feeling of wonder we often forget the first man might’ve felt upon seeing somebody made for him, creating an air of beauty yet comfort with such lines as “And like the dawn, you broke the dark and my whole earth shook” or “You were the brightest shade of sun I had ever seen.” Even without the awareness or an interest in religious influences, it still manages to be a very feel-good song -- which is the mark of an overall good song in general!

“Confession” - RED Dealing with the constant battle of feeling ashamed that how you feel on the inside isn’t in sync with how you present yourself on the outside. That you should feel bad for smiling out at the world while screaming and thrashing -- like it’s a lie. But you can’t help it: It’s what you’re accustomed to. Though it does end on a hopeful note with the singer deciding that they want to reach out for help and rid themselves of this feeling of pain they have inside.

“When I Grow Up” - Matilda . . . Only if you want to cry. Seriously. When you’re a kid, everything seems difficult but you’re positive that once you grow up, everything will change: You’ll be tall enough to climb the trees you were too small to, you’ll be able to carry everything because you’re stronger, you’ll be brave enough to fight the monsters hiding in your room, you’ll finally have all the answers. . . . But life isn’t that simple. We wish it were, but it isn’t. There’s this bittersweetness about this song, about a sense of purity we unfortunately grow out of where we think things will be just the same enough for us to do what we want when we want, but things are more complicated than that. We still struggle to reach, to bear the weight, to not be afraid, to have even a fraction of the answers. But! We’re reminded that just because we’re told life isn’t fair, doesn’t mean we have to take it. After all, nothing changes when nothing happens. And even beyond that? It helps to remember that we’re never quite done growing up; there’s always more to learn, so remember to be patient with yourself.

“Hand Me My Shovel, I’m Going In!” - Will Wood and the Tapeworms This is . . . a song. The lyrics are honestly kinda all over the place and shooting rapid fire, making it a bit difficult to discern what exactly the singer is going on about. It makes for a pretty crazy song that suggests somebody’s going unhinged, which is apparently precisely the intention?? I’ve seen a lot of people interpret this as a song about a guy who is already at a low point in his life but nonetheless is going, “. . . I bet I can go deeper. Hand me my shovel.”

“No Reason” - Beetlejuice God if i had a youtube channel the segment i would spend on this song would be so juicy just ripe and thicc with thoughts and feelings i tell ya rich like a fresh fatty peach the apple that tempted Eve and gagged Adam yes ‘Nother song that explores the dynamic between two differing people and their worldviews. At its simplest, “No Reason” is about two opposite ends of a spectrum coming to a head: Idealistic and hippie-dippy Delia is convinced that everything happens for a reason, while cynical and depressed Lydia asserts that everything happens at random and it doesn’t matter anyway because we’re all going to die. And even though the delivery is ultimately a comedic one, you get more insight as to why one another feels the way that they do: Lydia, as we’ve previously learned, has recently lost her mother to an illness, which has left her depressed and feeling invisible (a theme in the show); whereas Delia’s failed marriage and desperate attempts to nonetheless be happy have left her dependent on the idea that these things had to have happened for a reason, otherwise, her pain would’ve been for nothing. What’s important is that neither side is actually appointed as the winner, with the song ultimately ending that the universe is random for a reason.

“Barbara 2.0″ - Beetlejuice Without spoiling anything (or at least too much), “Barbara 2.0″ is about growth. It’s about learning to put your foot down after a literal lifetime of being passive out of fear of what might happen and just accepting that nothing will happen if nothing happens -- but that doesn’t make whatever happens good.

“Bleed Magic” - IDHKBTFM It’s either about a killer or a vampire. No, seriously: When Dallon Weekes was asked about what the story of the song was, that was his answer. I personally prefer to think of it as a vampire or demon of some kind, given that the song came out around Halloween. Perfect for yet another example of somebody (likely supernatural) having an upper hand on an unsuspecting mortal. ...I have way too many of these on this list, I swear I don’t have a problem —

“Feel Good Drag” - Anberlin A toxic relationship of sorts. In that it shouldn’t be a relationship to begin with. Depicts the singer being approached by an ex, who seeks a one-night stand while her current boyfriend is out of town. However, the singer is aware that trying to continue anything regardless of the situation is a moot point: Even when they were together, their relationship was doomed from the start, and nothing about that is going to change -- especially now.

“Soviet Trumpeter” - Katzenjammer (It’s kinda difficult to work with this one but I’ve seen people work with less or stranger.) Based off the life of one Eddie Rosner, a Jewish Polish trumpeter whose fame within the USSR unfortunately faded due to the Soviet Union’s heavy censorship. Even if nothing is to be done with it, it still paints a melancholic picture of a talented man’s skills being largely unknown as a result of things beyond his control. All wrapped up in a song that denotes a strange deterioration in a way I can’t quite place.

“Apple Blossom” - The White Stripes On its face, it’s a very sweet song: The singer encourages his beloved to be vulnerable enough with him to tell him her troubles and to let him “sort them out for [her]”. She’s clearly saddened, and seeing so distresses him to where he insists that he will do whatever he can to make her happy. However, the tone of the song and certain lines make it easy to twist into yet another song of a character attempting to seduce somebody into a state of vulnerability . . .

“You’ve Got Possibilities” - It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman The one singular song people actually liked from this forgotten musical. Perfect for when somebody intends on giving somebody else a makeover. Y’know, after totally roasting them on their posture and clothing. If you want to add a lil something extra, know that the context is that a lady wants to give Clark Kent a makeover, insisting that in spite of his schlubby appearance, there’s gotta be something underneath. I repeat: She is telling this to Clark freaking Kent.

“Still” - Anastasia In the context, the show’s antagonist (not bad guy, there’s a difference) finds himself torn between obligation and personal interest: Does he fulfill his duty and live up to expectations set upon him by his father and the society he’s been selected to help uphold? Or does he let a woman he has become fond of go? Is she truly as innocent as she claims? Or is she well aware of what she’s doing? And every time he thinks he’s reached a conclusion, he can’t help but thing, “But still . . .” Good for when you want to portray a character conflicted between obligations of politics and what their heart wants.

“Two Nobodies in New York” - [title of show] Two young men plan on entering an upcoming theatrical festival but struggle with what to even submit. This song in particular focuses on them trying to figure out what to even write, the concept of fame, and if wanting the certain things that may come with fame can mean anything from being sell-outs to getting a sitcom. It’s admittedly specific, but it’s a cute and funny interaction between two guys who are, for the most part, actually in sync with their thoughts and anxieties. For the time being.

“Into the Unknown” - Idina Menzel Look, I refuse to watch that movie. I just do. But I will take this song over That Other One any day. Mostly because I personally like to imagine that the singer in this song is about to embark on a Pixaresque journey after accidentally leaving her home during the night of The Wild Hunt, accidentally separating her spirit from her body and thus giving her a very limited time to get back to it before she remains a soul trapped in a whirlwind of ghosts forever. But first: Let’s sing about that strange howling that coaxes her so.

“You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid” - The Offspring I sure do long songs that can characterize a shithead . . . Anywho! The smoothest way to go is just to portray some cocky, manipulative shit who’s used to just lying and cheating their way to get what they want before slipping away without any consequences -- to a point. There’s the option of portraying the betrayer’s comeuppance, but there’s also the frustratingly delicious option of just letting them get away with whatever to lie another day.

“Why Should I Worry” - Billy Joel When in doubt, go to earlier Disney. Because like it or not, they had some bops. And when in the need of portraying a happy-go-lucky (probably idiotic) doofus and his more neurotic or cynical friend going about their life with the former just Mr. Magooing it while the latter suffers more realistic consequences? You go with this song. If you want. That’s just me.

“Transformation” - Brother Bear For when you want to invoke a mystical or otherworldly feeling. There’s really not much more I can say except to encourage you to listen to it and watch the scene if you can find it. You’ll get the vibe.

“No Girl’s Toy” - Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure It’s a big shame this movie is relatively unknown and never got a proper VHS release or anything -- mainly because the music in this cult classic is definitely stuff I could see becoming standards. I could see people performing “I Never Get Enough” for little shows, or recycling “Blue” for a different show. Thankfully, somebody was able to upload a clear enough sounding recording of “No Girl’s Toy”, so at least we have that. In context (just...follow me on this), Raggedy Ann’s brother, Raggedy Andy, has had enough of being subjected to “girly things” while in the nursery. Additionally, though, the way the song was written means it can also be interpreted as just a guy who refuses to let himself be yanked around regardless of how thick the sugar being laid on him is. . . . If you wanna poke fun as a character for trying to appear tougher than what he is, here’s the song. (That being said, Andy is a sweetheart at the end of the day. No amount of tough-fronting will hide that.)

“I Enjoy Being a Girl” - Flower Drum Song (It is by sheer coincidence that this song follows the above.) Really, it’s exactly what it says on the tin: The singer enjoys being a girl and what all it entails for her. She loves her feminine form, she loves the attention she gets, she loves dolling herself up, she loves frilly dresses, and she hopes to one day marry a guy who enjoys “having a girl like [her].” And honestly? Good on her! Love whatcha love, lovely! Seriously, though, it’s a cute song for anyone who just wants to indulge in some girliness.

“Chip on My Shoulder” - Legally Blonde Come on: It’s Legally Blonde. You know what this bop is, or at least have an idea of it. But since I love this song, I’ll indulge: Disheartened by her failure to both win back her ex and succeed in the fast-paced environment of Harvard, the normally bright-eyed Elle is ready to call it quits. That is, until junior partner Emmett gets involved. Unimpressed by her story, Emmett reveals that he got to where he was by busting his ass due to having a chip on his shoulder from his rough beginnings — and maybe a chip on the shoulder is exactly what Elle needs to survive. And as somebody driven by spite, I can appreciate that kind of message. Anywho, it all in all is a song about growth and learning how to be “driven as hell” to keep up with an opportunity that may not be easy to take, but is not one to be passed by.

“What Do I Need with Love?” - Thoroughly Modern Millie “What Do I Need with Love?” asks exactly that: He could date a different girl every night of the week if he so wanted, and never once had any desire to go steady before. He considers himself lucky to have never fallen for anyone -- until now. Which he’s not! He’s not in love. ...He totally is and, by his own admission, he’s got it bad it’s terribly adorable.

“Interlude IV” - Zach Callison The entire album is actually a narrative about a failed relationship of Callison’s and I’m sure the other songs are just as great fuel for animatics -- I’m just too caught up on listening to this one over and over. Sometimes, we just wanna listen to Steven Universe cuss and be openly furious. Seriously, though, even without the context of the rest of the story, you get the idea well enough: A spiteful Zach decides to get back at the one that broke his heart in such a painful way, whereas a well-meaning friend insists they just leave it be and move on. While this technically would be the better and healthier option, Zach is just too far gone with rage to let it go and decides to take care of things by himself.

“Evermore” - Beauty & the Beast Look, I know the remake wasn’t anything crazy. But also I don’t honestly care too terribly much. Besides, this song was nice and it really gets me after that key change. We all want a royal doofus to be enamored enough with us to let us go for our own happiness but still know that their life will forever be changed because they met us. Animate that shit. Over and over.

goddamn this list is long lemme just stop this now byyyyeeeee

#long post #boop #music post #sorta

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paragonrobits · 3 years ago

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a friend asked me to give a shot at doing an entry in this tier list they linked me to, of the video games inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame since 2015, and I opted to give it a shot!

My rankings are generally biased towards games I personally enjoy playing, though I will give some commentary on their historic relevance:

S-Rank

Super Mario Bros: The game that repopularized video games in the US, that arguably began the entire platforming video game genre and all its imitators and spin-offs, that spawned a new generation of video games after the Atari Crash in the US, and still a DAMN FUN game in its own right! I simply had to put this at the top ranking. After the disillusionment caused by Atari’s failures, this game brought home consoles back in a big way to the US.

World of Warcraft: Now, I’m not much for MMORPGs. Nevertheless, I’ve followed the lore and general information in the Warcraft setting for years now, and a couple years back, my brother asked me to play it with him. I had a ton of fun, honestly! Playing a goblin mage, I believe. WoW is notable for being THE MMORPG, and still going strong. Admittedly, nowadays many games do what it does better, and the time when it was dominant as THE single game to play is past, but it was still an enjoyable experience and I really have to like how sincere the game is about its aesthetics and campy vibe. Given that the entire setting is reputedly a reskin of a Warhammer Fantasy Battle video game that went south, it’s cheery and colorful, morally gray tone is... an interesting complication in its history. (Also, HORDE. I STAN THE HORDE VERY HARD.)

The Sims: A bit of history; I did not play this game as enthusiastically as a kid as my sister and mom did. We ALL spammed the hell out of the Rosebud cheat, though; not until recent times did I actually wind up playing the game properly, when the most recent iteration of the series was free for a while. My mom didn’t care to play the game, she just liked building houses. In any case, while my attention drifted from the game now and then, I always am fascinated by the actual gameplay of caring for your simulated humans, and the way you don’t actually control them directly. This sort of hands off experience is actually a bit similar to the ‘dungeon simulator’ genre, and while the game is notorious for enabling cruelty (something I never saw the appeal of!), it’s a surprisingly wholesome experience, and it can’t be understated how unique this gameplay was at the time.

Legend of Zelda: It’s actually rather interesting how different OG Zelda is from modern games. Not just the top down perspective (which DOES pop up, now and then); the game is non-linear and allows you to go to any dungeon at any point, completing the game at your leisure, and the story is extremely barebones compared to what we may be used to. It’s quite a far cry from the linear gameplay of gradually collecting tools and working through plots that the games are known for. Breath of the Wild is, in fact, a return to form rather than an upheaval of the formula. I’ll also admit that I have a lot of affection for the gameplay of this one, as well as Link To The Past.

Donkey Kong: When you’re talking old school, as far as what you might call the modern generation of games goes (which is to say, the games that resurged after the Atari Crash), it’s hard to go wrong with Donkey Kong. It’s certainly notable for being a weird stage in Mario’s character and something that is generally ignored; it’s just strange thinking that at one point he was supposed to be abusive towards a pet ape that went in an innocent, well-meaning rampage! Personally this one kind of breaks a mold for my S-class rankings because while I like this one fine, I don’t like it THAT much; i mostly played it in the DK 64 game, and found it very difficult and that’s stuck with me. Still, I place it here for its momentous position in placing Nintendo on the map, with the influence and revolutionary technologies and gaming mechanics they would introduce, to this very day.

Pokemon Red/Blue: Hoo boy. HOO BOY it is honestly something of an oversight that I didn't immediately shove this beauty straight to the front of the S-line because good god I love this game. It's been years and years, long since I was but a whee Johnny playing a strange new game for the first time just because there was a cool turtle creature on the cover (because I was super into turtles back then), and I still love this game. Even with the improvements made to the formula since then (getting rid of HMs, the fixes and new types introduced since) there's still something lovable about this game, even as something as basic as the official artwork that just tugs my heartstrings. This game is highly notable for being an RPG that popularized the monster collecting/befriending gameplay (so far as I know), and as an autistic person, i really appreciate knowing the whole thing grew out of an autistic man's bug collection hobby from when he was a child. Pokemon is an absolute juggernaut of a media influence, and THIS is where it all began. It's first stage evolution, you might say. And not like a Magikarp or anything. This one's more like one of the starters... appropriately enough. Final Fantasy 7: This is probably a bit of a controversial take, but FF7 was not actually one of my favorite Final Fantasy entries back in the day. I never played much more of it than the beginning missions, as my cousin owned the machine in question, and I moved out before i could play it much. Final Fantasy 3 (in the US; it's more generally referred to as 6 now) was my favorite for a long, long time, and that game pioneered many of the traits that would be associated with 7: the epic story, the complex ensemble cast, though 7 really expanded on that basic idea, and previous games were hardly shabby in that regard. 9 is my favorite of the pre-10 era, with its extreme shake ups to the mechanics of the game. No; what makes 7 stand out is that it was a shift towards making Final Fantasy a constantly shifting, unique franchise where every entry was its own thing; it introduced 3D graphics with a fun and cartoony style mixed with a story that wouldn't be out of place in a cyberpunk story, and heralds Squaresoft (as it was called at the time) splitting off from Nintendo, with its censorship policies, and doing its own thing with Sony, with a great deal more freedom to write as they pleased. The party design also stands out, which each character having their own unique function in the party while the Materia concept allows a degree of modular skills to be installed, customizing them in ways that, in my opinion, the best entries in the franchise (on a gameplay level) would revisit. Colossal Cave Adventure: I'll be honest; I never played this game, and I don't believe it's particularly familiar to me at all. However, I chose it for this vaunted spot in S-rank because games of this nature, of text-based prompt and responses, are some of the most interesting things imaginable! Games like AI Dungeon are similar in some respects, and its impressive to think just how dang old this game is, and yet it managed to pull off basically being it's own DM. It has an interesting history; created by a man who worked on the precursor to the Internet, the game was made to connect with his daughter and was inspired by recent entries into Dungeons And Dragons, and later expanded upon by other programmers. It's notable that while Zork is the sort of game that would probably involve more immediate recognition (I actually mistook it for Zork at first, from the screenshot), this game was the first of its kind, and that always deserve some recognition. Minecraft: I absolutely LOVE Minecraft, and it's rightfully one of the most popular games, if not THE most popular game, of the last couple of decades, and it's interesting to think just how unconventional it is; the game is, effectively, a LEGO simulator, and as someone who honestly always wanted tons of LEGO sets as a kid but could never afford them consistently, there's something genuinely very appealing about Minecraft's basic set up. It's open approach and lack of a goal, just gameplay mechanics that encourage you to build and do as you please, makes for a very relaxing and unusual mentality not often seen in games until this point; it doesn't even have a storyline, it simply gives you a world to play around in. Of note, Minecraft's entry seems to have relevance towards video games becoming a cultural touchstone; Minecraft's visual aesthetic leans towards both blocky LEGOs and retro graphics, and certainly proves that games don't need to strive for hyper realistic graphics to be appealing. ----- A RANK Doom: I genuinely like Doom, a lot! I still have memories of replaying this game frequently, long before Doom 2016 and Eternal were glimmers; it's just genuinely very fun to play. That said, I feel that there's other games that are a bit more historically notable and while i like this game, not quite as much as other entries. But it cant be understated that this was THE first person shooter, and more to the point, was fundamental towards game design as we know it. Of note, it pioneered the idea of a game engine, which has had tremendous impact down the road in terms of making a flexible baseline system that latergames were programmed around. Additionally, the first three episodes being free, with the additional ones being purchased as part of the full game, this was, I think, the first demonstration of a demo. Back then, we called this shareware; a game which was free but had full features locked off, but otherwise you could play it however much you wanted. There's a REASON Doom winds up on more systems than Skyrim! Ultimately, while it's not one of my favorite games, it's impact on the business of gaming and the functions of game design cannot be overstated. Pac-Man: This game, is THE game that made video games a phenomenon and its worth thinking about that and how video games as a modern institituion can be drawn, however broadly, from Pac-Man's commercial success. I should note that while I've played this game extensively, it's not something I'm particularly good at; there's a LOT going on here and its a bit much for me to handle. That's probably a strength; there's a reason people had to fake their accomplishments and falsified high scores. It's worth noting that Pac-Man is a unique thing in that it has been rereleased many times over, and every generation has found it enjoyable and fun, unlike other games that set trends only to be lost out in the end. (Goldeneye, for instance!) The Oregon Trail: Like many other people I assume, I first played this game as something available on school computers. Purportedly made as an educational game to teach students about history, this game may be notable for, among other things, being an entry point towards the idea of resource management in video games (as well as being hellishly difficult, by the standards then, but that DOES illustrate a point, does it not?). It's also the oldest, most continuously available game ever made, even now being ported to smartphones, or so I hear! It seems to be a very early example of edutainment games, and a genuinely great one at that. It probably helps that a selling point is that it doesn't really mince around with its subject matter; anyone who's played this game knows that total party kill is the default assumption, as it was in life. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat: I place these two together as I feel that they form a duo of sorts, and defined fighting games of my childhood and modern gaming experience; name a fighting game, from Injustice to something as deliberately different as Smash Bros, and it has SOME relation to these games, even if its in terms of doing something completely different. These games set a mold for fighting games! Among other things, both games feature iconic characters as a selling point, and to this day fighting games make their mark based on how signature their characters are. Mortal Kombat is of course an incredibly violent game (though very tame, by modern standards), and its fatalities and depicitons of violence sparked thought and arguments on what video games ought to be allowed to depict, for better or for worse. It's not implausible to suggest that the overly strict restrictions on what video games could depict go back to Mortal Kombat's fatalities, specifically (since there's far worse games predating it, though too graphically primitive to be obvious). Street Fighter, conversely, strikes me as having more characterization and depth, especially as far as fighting systems go; I find it hard to be interested in many fighting games now, if they don't offer as much depth as the likes of Street Fighter 2. Street Fighter stands out for innovating multiplayer play, initially in the arcade, and its not implausible to say that the likes of Smash Bros is a descendant of sorts of the specific mentality Street Fighter brought to the table. Consider also that it is STILL a mainstay in the remaining arcades and cabinets in service today! Tomb Raider: This is a game i legit liked back in the day, and there's some part of me that's sad that the platforming, puzzle solving and focus on exploration has not really made it back into the modern Tomb Raider series, last I checked. There's probably something interesting in that Lara Croft represents a bit of an intermediate period between platforming mascots and modern Edgy Protagonists; you know the ones. Balding white dudes with vague dad vibes, but this is not a slight on Lara; she definitely has a ton of personality, even just at a cover glance. This game had a strong focus on exploration, and that's honestly something I really like. Super Mario Kart: I'm going to be controversial here; complaints about the Blue Shell are kinda overrated. It's not that different from, say, a red shell hitting you from behind when you're close to the finish line. But, jokes and old 90s memes aside, this game has some interesting status in that it started the idea of making spin-off games in dramatically different contexts; Crash Team Racing and Sonic Drift, for example, are listened as similar games. On a franchise level, this began the trend of Mario becoming a truly flexible character who could do pretty much whatever was required of him, not just the original platforming games, and its possible his imitators never quite learned the same lesson. Though one wonders what Miyamoto might have thought if he'd known how many thinkpieces he would spawn with 'why does mario go-karting with Bowser when they're enemies?'. For my part, I favor the idea that the other games are in-universe fictions they're actors on and this is their actual dynamic, or that Mario is a relaxed dude who doesn't mind playing kart games with his foe. (I mean, he's not Ridley. Bowser's easy enough to get along with.) Animal Crossing: Again, I have to emphasize that I've never actually played this game, at least on a consistent basis (and by that, I mean I MIGHT have played it on the Gamecube, once, in the early 2000s), and have to speak from what I've seen of what it sparked. And I really do like the way it really codified the sub-genre of relaxed, open-ended games where the player is free to do as they like, without much stress or fear, which is something I think more games could stand to do. On my personal list of features that my ideal video game would have, Animal Crossing would definitely offer a few ideas. I am reminded of farming simulators, such as Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley; while they are different beasts entirely, there's a familiar sense of non-combat relaxation that's pleasant to see. Spacewar!: This machine is GODDAMN old, and like an old fogey predating modern humans, it deserves our respect. It's so old, it predates Pong. Supposedly created as part of predictative Cold War models, with an emphasis on emulating sci fi dogfights, producing a game that soon proved popular, for over a decade remainign the most popular game on computer systems, and a clumsy foray into arcade gaming (that didn't pan out, unfortunately) led to the creation of Pong by its creator, which is another story all its own! And Pong is directly responsible for the idea of the video game itself; this game launched the entire video game industry as we understand it! No small feat, indeed. ----

B RANKED Sonic The Hedgehog: I must state that I DO like this game, though not as much as later entires like Sonic 3 and Knuckles, or the Sonic Adventure series; the fast paced action seems a bit hobbled by the traps and need to be careful of surroundings, which would seem to run counter towards the whole idea of GOTTA GO FAST, y'know? But the game presents an interesting viewpoint on the nature of mascot gaming; created specifically, so it is said, as a rival to Mario, Sonic was designed as a mascot with attitude, and inspired a host of imitators; he's probably the only one to escape the 90s more or less intact, and this may have something to say about his flexibility, star power, and also the fact that he's a pretty mild character, all things considered. This game certainly has its place in gaming history, giving an important place in the console wars of yesteryear. Believe me, I was a kid in the 90s, Sonic was a HUGE deal. Space Invaders: This game is noted to have catapulted games into prominence by making them household, something outside of arcades, and it shows! An interesting detail of note is that supposedly, the Space Invaders were meant to all move at high speed, but this was either too hard to play against, or too costly on the processor; it was found that by making them speed up as they were defeated, it created an interesting set of challenge. You have to appreciate game history like that. In general, its success prompted Japanese companies to join the market, which would eventually produce what I imagine was a thriving, competitive market that would eventually get us Nintendo and it's own gamechangers down the road. Grant Theft Auto 3: I'm going to be honest with you. I don't much care for this sort of game. The Saints Row series, with its fundamental wackiness, is the kind of game I really DO like if I'm going for something like this, and GTA sort of leaning towards the 'cruel for fun and profit' gameplay is really unappealing for me. However, I'd be remiss if I didn't address this game, and what seems to come up is two things: the game's sheer freedom in its open world (which certainly pushed the bar for games of that nature, and has made it a byword for gamers screwing around in a game just to see what ridiculous things they could or couldn't do) and the infamous reputation from the mature aspects of the game. Personally, I'm not much for this game's take on maturity (if I wanted to discuss a game of that nature, I'd suggest, say, Spec Ops: The Line) but I really do appreciate what this game and its series did for the open world genre, and the sheer possibilities presented for letting you do what you wanted. King's Quest: I've never played this game, but I am a HUGE fan of the point and click genre (also known generally as the adventure game genre) that it spawned; without this game, there's no Monkey Island, no Sam and Max, no The Dig or Full Throttle, or Gabriel Knight. This game was similar to previous text-based games, with a text parser to input commands, but with the distinction of a graphical interface to move their character around, which would be the seed of later games such as the SCUMM engine of Monkey Island and other Lucasarts games (which, to me, ARE Adventure Gaming). The puzzles, comedic sensibilities, and interface innovations originated with this game, and codified those later adventure games i love so much. Starcraft: This is another one those list of 'games I should have already played by now'. I'm not much of an RTS person, barring forays with games such as Impossible Creatures, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, and more strange entries such as Brutal Legend, and I contend that the combat aspects of 4X games like Civilization DO count on some level; the specifics of troop movement and unit strengths/weaknesses are a bit beyond me, when you get to more complex stuff. Starcraft, reading between the lines, really introduced the idea of multiplayer culture especially for RTS, pioneered the Battle(dot)net system (which I mostly recall from Diablo, if I'm being honest!) as well as the idea of relative strengths and powers for individual factions so that they became characters in their own right. It's still a very popular online game, and that says SOMETHING. Also, I tend to use zerg rushes, so I would probably play Zerg. Probably. (There is much speculation on whether or not, like Warcraft being a failed Warhammer Fantasy game, if the same holds true for Starcraft and Warhammer 40k. I lean on the side of 'probably not'; the differences are too notable. The Zerg and Tyranids have some similarties, but that's probably because they're based on the same broad hive mind evil insect aggressor trope, and they have enough differences from there to be very distinct from one another. It's not like how OG Warcraft's orcs were very obviously warhammer orcs with less football hooliganism.) Bejeweled: This is a firm case of a game that I don't play, but I really have to respect its influence on gaming as a whole. Apparently it started as a match three-type game with a simplistic formula that proved wildly popular (perhaps making a point that simpler can be more effective, in game mechanics), with a truly explosive record of downloads; over 500 million, it seems. Thus its fair to say that this game set the precedent for casual games, which have become THE market. Regardless of your feelings on that genre, this one was a real game changer. (Pun intended, absolutely.) ----

C RANK Pong: "By most measures of popular impact, Pong launched the video game industry." This line alone saws it all, I think. It wasn't the first video game, but it was one of the more early ones, and its the one that really made video games and consoles successful, gaining widespread attention from the mainstream audience, as well as getting Atari recognition (for better or for worse, but perhaps that was just a development of being on top, so to speak; maye the console wars at least kept the big three honest). It also started the arcade revolution of games, and this humble game is essentially responsible for the entire state of video games as a concept, as we know it today. Halo: No disrespect to Halo, but it's just a game series I've never quite been able to get into. Those games are very hit and miss for me; games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Gears of War and everything like that are just... hard for me to get into. It takes something specific like Borderlands or the Besthesda Fallout series, or something else, for me to get hooked, and Halo just doesn't do it for me! Nevertheless, I would be QUITE remiss if I simply dismissed it, and there's reasons for it to be inducted into the hall of fame barely three years into the hall of fame making inductees. Firstly, it was Microsoft's big entry into the console wars, and it must be said this was a MASSIVE upset and a completely unprecedented shift in the assumptions of the console wars back then; NO ONE expected microsoft to actually do this, let alone redefine gaming out of Sony and Nintendo's favor like that. At the time, PCs dominated FPS games, and Halo showed that consoles could do it just fine. It must also be said that it has a very intricate and complex system of lore, backstory and material that was quite distinctive for a new setting back in the day, and while I've seen people object to it's gameplay, I suspect that its with the benefit of hindsight; Halo offered an extremely unusual degree of freedom in achieving the goals set out for you. (Cortana also didn't deserve getting her name slapped onto that search assistant that eats up all your RAM.) Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego: Surprisignly enough, based on the article, this game was NOT an adaptation, but the source material of this character. This is where the fancy, mystery lady in the red coat started! Evidently this game was originally an edutainment game with a cops and robbers theme, and inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure from higher up on the list, and one must appreciate the effort that went into it. This one is ranked low, mostly because it didn't seem TOO notable to me. Honestly I'm surprised this is where Carmen Sandiego started. (And that she doesn't get enough credit as an iconic theatrical villain who won't go a step too far, but that's another rant.) -

D LIST

Here we are. The D LIST. The bottom of the sorting pile; the lowest of them all, the... well, the ones that I honestly don't necessarily dislike, but couldn't place higher for reasons of notability, personal interest, or perceived impact on the history of gaming. John Madden Football: Sports games, as a whole, really do NOT do it for me. I don't like real like sports at ALL (with, as a kid, a brief interest in boxing and that was just because they had gloves like Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog) so its hard for me to say that I find the history of this one all that compelling. Even so, there's some interesting elements in how this game was a sequel to a previous failed attempt, with a bold new attempt at a more arcade-style action game with a more dramatic take on the players, who would in turn be rated in different skill sets. The Madden series is STILL going so... it worked out pretty well, I'd say. (FUCKIN EA WAS BEHIND THIS ONE??? wow, EA is older than I thought.) Microsoft Flight Simulator: It's honestly a bit painful sorting this one so low, since I had many happy times as a wee Johnny playing this game back in the old days. I mean the OLD, old days. This was like, the days when Usenet was the preferred way for people to talk online. (Not me, though. I didn't talk to people, then. I was even less social than I am now, which is saying something!) All the same, I suppose that it was important to not crowd too many entries in a specific folder, and statistically, something had to keep getting knocked down, and in the end, I couldn't honestly say I still enjoyed this one enough to place it higher. Still, credit must be given where it is due; this game stands out for being an early foray into simulator gaming, showing a realistic depiction of actual flight. It has apparently been updated and rereleased many times since, which is impressive! Tetris: I like puzzles. So it might be surprising to hear this seminal game ranked so low; firstly, I like different KINDS of puzzles (like weird ones where you have to fling your sense of logic to the moon and back, or make use of gaming mechanics) and honestly this game is kind of stressful for me. You gotta keep an eye on a lot of different things flying around all at once, and constantly move things around, and that kind of attention and quick thinking does NOT come easily to me. All the same, I really have to admire how it was born from it's creator's pleasure in solving mathematical puzzles about sorting shapes into boxes, in a manner strangely remniscient of Satoshi's bug collecting that became Pokemon. Certainly the game's simplicity has proven a universally appealing thing, and may say something about the value of keeping it simple. Microsoft Solitaire: This game apparently became pay-to-get some time ago in recent computer generations, and let me tell, you, it was genuinely depressing to find that out. I remember younger decades, from the 90s and on, when this game was a regular and free feature in Windows computers fir MANY years. You got a computer, this game was on here. I was a kid, and i remember watching my mom play this game and makign the cards go WHOOP WHOPP all over the place and marveling, because I couldn't ever do the same thing. (A related note: I am terrible at this game. Go figure!) Of note, this game was massively widespread, and just EVERYWHERE, and I think everyone who ever played a computer back in those days instantly remembers it in some way. It was just... ubiquitous. Centipede: Oh, ol' Centipede. I don't mean to be mean to you. But between the likes of Pokemon and Super Mario Bros, even the arcade Donkey Kong, someone had to keep dropping down the leaderboard that is this tierlist, and unfortunately, there were other games that felt higher up than you. All the same, you're a very good game, and honestly, I like you more than some other games ranked higher for reasons of relevance to gaming history. Certainly more than anything else in D-listing. The colorful and appealing palette is noteworthy. That trackball controller! Amazing! (More games should use trackballs. They're fun and easy to use.) At the very least, Order of the Stick did a joke with you once, and that's better than anything I can do for you. All the same, you're a cool game.

#tier lists #video games

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notbang · 4 years ago

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the pursuit of happiness

or, an examination of happiness and the chase as recurring motifs in the character development of Rebecca Bunch and Nathaniel Plimpton

rethaniel appreciation week day 2 → pursuit

I could write a small novel cataloguing the endless parallels between these two—I have, in fact, thought about attempting it many times—but honestly the list is so long and varied and sprouts off in so many different directions that I’ve yet to think of a logical way to go about it. Which is why for the time being, I’m choosing to focus instead—in some degree of detail—on this particular mirrored thread between them.

As our protagonist, Rebecca functions as a major catalyst for change in West Covina, and just as surely as she stumbles along in her journey we see the (for the most part) positive effects of her friendship on those around her. With perhaps the sole exception of White Josh, all of the characters end the show as happier and healthier iterations of themselves, with many of the major aspects of their growth traceable to their involvement with Rebecca in some way. Nathaniel is no exception to this rule; arguably, his development, more so than any other character’s, is directly tied to Rebecca’s influence on his life. The main difference here lies in the fact that he moves to town good a season and half after her—putting him that much further behind in his inevitable development.

One of the major, ongoing setbacks Rebecca faces over the course of the show is her tendency to conflate happiness, or personal fulfilment, with romantic love, and more specifically, for the first half of the series at least, conflating it with a single person. Nathaniel, by comparison, at the time of our introduction to him, has little interest in the concept at all, something Rebecca is quick to sympathise with in 2x09—‘You know Nathaniel, I used to be a lot like you. Ruthless. But then one day I was crying a lot, and I decided to flip things around. Decided to put happiness before success. And when I did that, the world rewarded me with true happiness.’ Nathaniel doesn’t verbally dismiss the sentiment, but the wealth of facial expressions he supplies in response suggest what he thinks of that: happiness is frivolous, and he doesn’t have space for it in his busy schedule.

Nathaniel, probably: Sounds fake but okay.

In the season two theme Rebecca declares that as a girl in love, she can’t be held responsible for her actions, and the sweeping duet Nothing Is Ever Anyone’s Fault follows a similar thread of eschewing culpability. While this certainly works to help dismiss a season’s worth of questionable behaviour from the two of them—including, but not limited to, infidelity and conspiracy to murder—I’m not convinced the touted concept behind the song—that Nathaniel has learned the wrong lesson from being in love with her, as explained in post-finale interviews at the time—flies in the face of our understanding of Nathaniel’s character thus far. As a rich, straight, white, cis male whose privilege the show has only made clumsy attempts at dismantling, a disregard of consequence seems a lot less like something he needed to be taught by anybody and a little more like something that was probably ingrained in him at birth.

If we want to talk about misguided takeaways within their relationship, though, their relationship to happiness is the perfect place to start. Nathaniel begins the show with no concept of the pursuit of happiness, so it makes sense that when he does adopt an interest in it, he takes a page right out of the book of the person that introduced him and pins it all in the one place. Unlike Rebecca, though, Nathaniel’s preoccupation seems to be less wilful delusion and more of a case of ignorance being bliss—being with her feels good, so why change anything or interrogate the situation any further? For all his earlier talk, he is quick to give up the thrill of the chase under the hedonistic guise of contentment. Unfortunately, what he lacks is the emotional intelligence to navigate the implications of Rebecca’s disorder, highlighted by his belief that the mere fact that he and Josh are two vastly different people is reason enough for him to be able to dismiss her obsessive behaviour as ‘cute’ and ‘flattering’. Rebecca’s recent breakdown and consequential suicide attempt can’t exist as warning signs in their (what he perceives as superior) relationship because he isn’t planning on leaving Rebecca at the altar; he isn’t privy to the realisation that it ‘wasn’t about Josh, and maybe it never was’.

Nathaniel: I don’t want to get in the way of your therapy thing, but isn’t the point of all this to be happy? We’re happy. That’s what matters.

It’s a shame because despite there being so much more going on with Rebecca than Nathaniel is capable of comprehending at this point in time, he actually, perhaps entirely by accident, manages to get a few things right—he checks in with her about her therapy when her appearing on his doorstep contradicts the information she’d given him earlier (even if he is, at this point, all too easy to convince), counters her suggestion that they play hooky at Raging Waters with the compromise of a more sensibly scheduled dinner they’ll both enjoy, and, when they do come in to conflict over her obsessive behaviours, takes some time for himself before having a serious conversation with her. Though it’s certainly naive of him to think it’s a problem as easily solved as getting Rebecca to promise she’ll never do anything like this again, it suggests the capacity exists (given, with great guidance) for him to approach Rebecca’s mental illness within their relationship in a thoughtful way.

(This of course completely ignores the inherent issues in their boss/employee relationship, which come to a questionable forefront when Rebecca makes the decision to return to work after having broken things off, but we’re starting to get a little off-track from the intended scope of this discussion.)

The idea of romantic love as a chase—if not already sold to us by Rebecca literally moving across the country in pursuit of Josh—is hammered home most effectively in episode 2x11, but Nathaniel actually brings it up in the episode prior; before Rebecca and Josh leave for New York, at the same time as setting up the whole ‘man of my dreams’ idea that also carries on into the next episode, a sweaty Nathaniel beseeches Rebecca to imitate a land-based predator so he can amp up his workout under the threat of chase. Within this alignment, Josh, who ends up proposing to Rebecca at the end of 2x10, becomes even more clearly representative of an end goal—love, marriage, and, as an expected by-product, ultimate happiness. Nathaniel, by contrast for the time being, is all about the chase that comes before. After his speech at the beginning of 2x11 boasting of his dogged approach when securing clients, his passionate buzz words begin to permeate Rebecca’s subconscious, with ‘pursuit’ in particular going so far as to in an echo in a similar way that ‘happy’ does in the pilot. Such is the effect of his words on her that she parrots them back to Josh when she tells him she’s moved up their wedding—‘Finally, it’s coming to an end. The pursuit is over and I just want to celebrate that’. The title of the episode title may pose the question Josh is the man of my dreams, right? but in the most literal sense, the star of her dreams becomes Nathaniel, along with his personal brand of terminology.

Where Nathaniel thinks life is all about playing the hunter, Rebecca insists she doesn’t care for the chase, which makes sense—she doesn’t want to be chasing Josh, and furthermore, admitting that she’s chasing him would only be contradictory to her belief that they belong together. She wants her happy ending. She wants to arrive at her final destination—her destiny—because thus far all her journeys (which have in actuality been more of a kind of stagnation) have been left her unfulfilled. However obsessing over an idealised future only postpones her happiness with her inability to focus on the present. Ironically, the point at which she makes an active choice to begin shifting that focus—in 3x07, when Dr Shin encourages her to live in the messy in-between—is right around the time Nathaniel starts buying into her idealisation himself.

In a similar way to Rebecca, regardless of his purported love of the pursuit, Nathaniel’s infatuation is seemingly tied to the concept of a destination—several times quite literally. In 3x04 he’s ready to whisk her away to Rome to evade any obstacles to their being together, and in 4x01 proposes a similar escape to Hawaii, causing him to lash out when Rebecca turns him down—‘I want us to just be happy and be together. That’s what I want. You just said you love me, right? So can you just do that for me? Can you just stop overthinking everything? …seems like every time we’re happy, you try to ruin it.’ He sees their shared happiness as a nirvana state he’s caught a glimpse of that Rebecca is now determined to deny him access to, to the point that he seeks to make their version of a love bubble a physical one, where no outside interference (or, more accurately, internal reflection from Rebecca) can keep them apart. Still degrees behind Rebecca in the parallel arcs of their development, he’s stuck in the mindset that them being happy and in love is the only thing that matters. His behaviour is far from flattering, but with a quick review of his history of being on the continual receiving end of her rejection, it’s not entirely difficult to see where he’s coming from.

(As an aside, Rebecca’s relationship with the destination versus the journey as it pertains to the mural on her wall is something I’ve already discussed in a previous meta.)

When she breaks up with him at the beginning of 3x09, Rebecca responds to Nathaniel’s protest of ‘but we’re happy!’ with the qualifier that she’s ‘happy, but it isn’t real’, which probably isn’t the most pleasant thing to be told, even before you factor in Nathaniel’s implied inexperience with serious relationships. While her behaviour prior to this definitely calls for some self reflection, it’s an interesting backflip from extreme infatuation to sudden dismissal, and while it does align with the black and white thinking associated with BPD, it’s easy to see why Nathaniel feels blindsided and, consequently, spurned. She begged him not to break up with her not only to then turn around do exactly that, but to also (presumably unintentionally) throw in the humiliating implication he cared more than she did.

Dr Akopian: Maybe now you can see that your father’s behaviour in the past has set a pattern for you, seeking the love of men who don’t fully love you back. Who you have to pursue. Men who are taken or emotionally unavailable. Like your father. Like Josh. Like Greg. Like other men, I’m sure.

Nathaniel is an outlier amongst the three main love interests in that, for all his grandstanding about humans being hunters by nature, he’s the one constantly falling over himself to win Rebecca’s affection rather than the other way around; it’s ironic that the love interest that asserts himself as being all about the chase is the one that ends up later having to assign himself the title of ‘king of declarations’ based on his ongoing habit of blurting out to Rebecca how he feels, never achieving the level of emotional standoffishness he hopes to exude. Nathaniel’s unavailability—and subsequent cementing as one of the types of men Dr Akopian calls Rebecca out on being predisposed to pursuing—comes only when he enters into a relationship with Mona, and Rebecca, who supposedly ‘never cared for the chase’, with interest reignited finds a skewed sense of security afforded by the romantic roadblock, something Nathaniel seems to understand on some unspoken level, as hinted at by his eagerness to maintain the fragile status quo of their morally questionable arrangement.

As a result of this subversion of power dynamics within Rebecca and Nathaniel’s relationship, in amongst the many other parallels between them that only serve to support this, it starts to become apparent that, narratively speaking, Nathaniel is to Rebecca as Rebecca is to Josh, something that is visually co-signed by the show during 4x03, when we see the same golden glow of romantic epiphany crest behind Rebecca in the church during her speech at Heather and Hector’s wedding that suffuses across Josh when Rebecca encounters him in the streets of New York.

Nathaniel’s takeaway from Rebecca’s speech is that because he loves her, he should do everything within his power to get her back, which of course leads to his (frankly embarrassing) attempts to manipulate her and win her over in 4x04. (Fittingly enough to this discussion, the opening line of the Slumbered quote he plagiarises is ‘you are the only thing that makes me happy’. The irony of his failed use of her teenage diary to win her over is that I honestly do believe the speech is an accurate summation of how he sees Rebecca, and had he only chosen to put it in his own words, that final scene between them might have played out a little differently.) The part he probably should have focused on, though, is the part Rebecca is currently pouring all her professional energy into (and not so coincidentally, it’s right there in the episode title)—love (and therefore happiness) being about finding your own path.

Rebecca: I don’t believe in destiny anymore. I just believe in taking responsibility for your own happiness.

This is not the first time Nathaniel makes the decision to actively pursue Rebecca while her attention lies firmly fixed elsewhere. In 3x03 and 3x04, he is forced to grapple with his feelings alone when a distracted Rebecca eventually goes where he cannot follow, putting an abrupt end to any potential for chase when she flees back to New York in 3x05. Consequently, Nathaniel embarks on a mini-arc of struggling to accept the idea that Rebecca may never come back—initially incomprehensible to him, owing to the fact that she bears importance to him, personally—to conceding that his (thus far relatively unexamined) need for her to be in his life is secondary to her own wellbeing, something that acts as a precursor to a major thread in Nathaniel’s (often one step forward, two clumsily-written steps back) character development in the back end of the series.

Nathaniel: I just hope wherever she is, she’s happy.

In 4x11, Nathaniel’s dream world amalgamation of Maya and Rebecca begs him to let her be happy, and as the former fades into the latter we get another callback to the pilot—an echo of 'happy, happy, happy…’ reminiscent of the empty shell of New York Rebecca latching onto Josh’s description of laid-back West Covina. Unlike its instance in the 1x01, however, this is a wake up call of an entirely different kind—it is not the blossoming of a brand new delusion but the sobering dissolution of one. And unlike the speech a radiant Rebecca gave at Heather’s wedding about finding the one you love and holding on tight, this particular iteration is here to impart the contradictory wisdom ‘if you really love me, you have to let me go’.

Nathaniel: I want you to be happy, I do.

This moment is arguably the true beginning of Nathaniel’s lesson that his happiness isn’t necessarily (or in this case, due to the current circumstances, can no longer be) inextricably linked to Rebecca—she has the opportunity to find happiness independently of him and that in itself is something that should make him happy, as someone that loves and cares for her. His assertion to dream Rebecca that he wants her to be happy manifests in his concession to Rebecca in the real world—‘I’m glad you’re happy. I really am. And it makes me happy too’—an exchange that echoes two similar moments between them back in season three, during which Rebecca expresses the same sentiment regarding his relationship with Mona, first following the cool down from their 3x10 conflict, and again in the aftermath of their ended affair in 3x13:

Rebecca: I’m happy that you found someone else. Mona seems lovely.

Rebecca: I’m happy for you… I want you to be happy.

The more interesting callback here though, of course, is to Rebecca’s conversation with Greg at the duck pond way back in 2x02. After finally tracking down an AWOL Greg with the intention of breaking the news of her involvement with Josh, Greg makes peace with the situation by way of reassuring them both that everything worked out fine as long as Rebecca is happy. ‘You and Josh—you should be happy together. You’re happy, right? And he treats you well?’ Rebecca responds to this in the affirmative, though her expression—and the context of the episode—belies her answer. In contrast, her exchange with Nathaniel goes a little differently:

Nathaniel: Because you’re happy, right? You’re happy with Greg. Rebecca: I mean, I don’t know. I’m not there yet. But I could possibly be, yeah.

The evolution of Rebecca’s response is of course evidence of her development as a character and her own understanding of her relationship to happiness, but what I find most noteworthy is not that she lies in 2x02, but that in 4x11 she chooses to tell an unusual truth. She could just have easily have said yes the second time around and it would have functioned as a clear enough juxtaposition of what she considers close enough to happiness; after all, at the time of 4x11 she and Greg believe they are approaching their relationship in a mature and thoughtful fashion, they are warm and affectionate towards one another and, unlike in 2x02, she is not having to compete for her partner’s attention. She would, by all accounts, be completely justified in giving what could be considered the normal response to being posed such a question—that yes, she is happy with Greg. So even though it’s encouraging to hear Rebecca verbalising her newfound knowledge that happiness is so much more than such a simple dichotomy of yes and no, it feels significant that Nathaniel, as a person currently knee-deep in untangling his own complicated relationship with happiness, is the one that gets to be privy to this particular brand of truth.

And while it can be argued that all the strides Nathaniel makes in 4x11 are undone over the course of the following episodes, setting aside the very real fact that human emotions are fickle, and we can’t always stick as completely to our guns as we’d like, his blessing here still comes with a telling caveat: ‘I’ve got to let you go… because you’re happy’. And who shows up on Nathaniel’s doorstep during 4x12 to poke holes in that perceived state of happiness between her and Greg? None other than Rebecca herself.

Rebecca: You just want me to be happy, which is what I want too, and god, Greg… Greg doesn’t know what happiness is.

Such is the shared significance of this concept of happiness between them that the second Rebecca alludes to their conversation in the foyer, Nathaniel’s previously good-natured, albeit slightly confused, response to her drunken presence in his apartment quickly and very clearly dissolves into alarm bells and he eventually sends her on her way. Though he could easily have wielded Rebecca’s visit as a weapon to create dissonance between her and Greg in 4x13, he merely probes for clues by way of a convoluted metaphor, resigning himself to the fact that the issue has been resolved, while Greg, in actuality, is at this point none the wiser. It’s only once Greg himself tells Nathaniel that it is over between him and Rebecca that Nathaniel returns to entertaining his feelings for her.

Though we the viewers are all too aware (and at this point, probably screaming at the TV!) that Rebecca’s happiness is not, contrary to recurring belief, a vacant role that she needs someone to fill; unlike us, the characters have not had the good fortune of being able to watch the show Crazy Ex Girlfriend on the CW network. Nathaniel is still a fledgling in terms of self enlightenment, and it makes total sense for him to be nudged towards into pursuing her again once the clearest obstacle to her affections—her relationship with Greg—is no longer an issue.

When she breaks the news of her decision to Nathaniel in the finale, Rebecca is quick to assure Nathaniel that ‘the times that [they’ve] spent together have been some of the best of [her] life’, which is an interestingly bold statement all on its own, but it feels somewhat satisfyingly like finally giving Nathaniel a real-life answer to the ‘we’ve had such happy moments, you and I, haven’t we?’ that he throws at his Maya-shaped projection of Rebecca in 4x11; affirmation that contrary to what she says in 3x08, something in there between them was real.

‘You only get one life,’ he tells her in return. ‘And you’ve got to live that the way you want.’

Neither of them uses the word ‘happy’ in this exchange, but as we fast forward in time, we get:

Nathaniel: Happy to be here.

Rebecca: For the first time in my life, I am truly happy.

Nathaniel (who in an amusing reflection in 2x09, reveals that he, in a roundabout way, moved to West Covina because of Rebecca—‘it’s kind of your fault that I’m here’) has finally made the actual change that Rebecca taunted him with on their first meeting. And unlike Rebecca, he’s had a chance to interrogate what happiness for himself, removed from another person, might look like before he does so. Rather than starting with a life-altering change, he gets to make incremental changes along the way—which very much are tied to his entanglement to Rebecca—in order to make a more meaningful and deliberate life change for himself later on.

“When you find someone that melts the iceberg that is your heart…” - 3x03

“Provoking me, and zinging me, and challenging my world view. And warming my heart.” - 3x04

“You make me feel like I can be a different kind of person.” - 3x08

“You’ve awakened my heart and unlocked my soul.” - 4x04

“You’ve changed my whole life. Who I am, who I can be.” - 4x11

Rebecca describes her moving to West Covina in Nathaniel’s first episode as ‘[deciding] to flip things around. [Deciding] to put happiness before success. And when I did that, the world rewarded me with true happiness.’ In the finale, she tells the audience how he, by comparison, ‘upended [his] life’—‘You changed everything. But unlike me, you did it for the right reasons. And I am in awe of you.’ Alongside the nice progression from her proclamation in 2x09 that she ‘came to West Covina to search for happiness’ to her more self-aware announcement at the open mic that ‘for the first time in my life, [she is] truly happy’, (which feels like a subversive callback to a certain infamous butter commercial) we also get a reiteration of the sentiment— ‘I came to this town to find love. And I did. I love every person in this room’—that conflates happiness with love in what is now a healthy and satisfying way. It’s the perfect twist that she’s rewarded with the thing she was searching for all along just as soon as she realises she was looking in all the wrong places, and that the place itself still gets to play such a large part in that. And she is able to see Nathaniel’s journey as all the more meaningful in light of her own missteps along the way.

While I have my reservations on the bow they tied Nathaniel’s arc in for the finale (because despite Rebecca’s realisation that there is no such thing as ‘ending up’, there is in the sense of the scope of this series) being a well thought out resolution as opposed to leaning on a previous gag without laying any actual groundwork, the truth is it’s unclear what the true nature of Nathaniel’s sabbatical is/was/will be—mere extended vacation, permanent new career path, or just the initial spark of inspiration in some extended self discovery. That being said, much like Rebecca evolving towards a point where she can appreciate the interconnectedness of love and happiness in a less troublesome way, it is neat that Nathaniel’s resolution follows on from his tendency to want to escape to far-off destinations in an attempt to control his desired status quo. Though his fleeing town is still inextricably linked to having his heart broken by Rebecca, Guatemala, for once, isn’t about transposing his current circumstance to another place in order to cling to something, but rather a carefully selected, specific site for welcomed change.

Independent of any potential that may or may not exist between them as the show closes out—romantic or otherwise—it’s undeniable that these two characters have left indelible marks on each other, and without their respective involvement in each other’s lives, their journeys—and resulting transformations—would not have been the same.

#crazy ex girlfriend #rebecca x nathaniel #rethanielaw #rethaniel #rebecca bunch #nathaniel plimpton #crazy ex meta #stop! meta time

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2manyfandoms2count · 4 years ago

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#MarichatMay Day 24

Long post ft. a Reveal, Marichat, lowkey other sides of the lovesquare and fluff :3 Hope you guys enjoy! xxx

Based on the prompt list by @marichatmay

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Day 24: Confession

“Purr-incess? I might have to confess something.”

“What have you done this time?” Marinette sighed, barely looking up from her newspaper. She was reading the fashion pages, regularly bookmarking pictures from the Paris Autumn Fashion Week report. She wasn’t so much interested in the stars as she was in the trends that were emerging, although there were a couple of good shots of Adrien Agreste that would definitely be making it to her picture-board.

Had Marinette been focusing on Chat Noir instead, she would have noticed how fidgety he was, a lot more hyper than usual. He paced around her room, biting his claws in a nervous habit. Ever since he’d found out Ladybug was, in fact, Marinette, he’d done his best to conceal his own identity, while secretly trying to get her attention, but not knowing how to. He hadn’t meant to follow Ladybug Home. In fact, he hadn’t realised he was until he had gotten close enough to Marinette’s flat. He’d been blinded by a familiar red flash just as he prepared to jump onto her balcony, and seen his friend casually walk out from behind the chimney, fishing in her bag to get a macaron out for the red being that floated next to her.

Chat had been meaning to visit Marinette that particular night to welcome her back after her holiday. Which, now that he thought about it, matched Ladybug’s own time off. He thought about all the times he’d missed the connections. How Marinette had never been akumatised. How fast Ladybug appeared when the attacks happened at school, how well she seemed to know the targets. How the only time he’d seen both Marinette and Ladybug together, Trixx had conveniently been amongst the kidnapped Kwamis. How similar Ladybug and the illusory Marinette had looked, down to the hairstyle. For somebody whose main line of business was looks, he certainly had been very blind.

Chat had almost collided with a wall as he ran back to his room, laughing about his discovery and the irony of him calling Marinette an everyday Ladybug. Knowing his Lady, she probably had been panicking inside at the thought of being unmasked. Yet it made so much sense that the most caring, mindful and genuinely kind person he knew was the person behind the mask. How had it escaped him for so long?

He’d spent the rest of the Summer pondering what to do with the information. Should he come clean to Marinette? At least about him knowing? She was the guardian after all, surely it was only a matter of time before she ended up knowing about his identity anyway.

When school started again, still unsure about what to do, Adrien had probed Alya and Nino to figure out if they also knew. Alya being hot on LB’s tracks all the time, surely she must have been aware that her favourite superhero was her best friend. After talking with her, he concluded that either she didn’t know, or she played her cards reaaaally close to her chest. She’d let something slip about Marinette liking him, though, which, once he’d calmed the butterflies in his stomach -the girl of his dreams liked him back-, had lead him to spend a lot of time trying to get closer to her. He thought it would be perfect; he’d know the truth, but she didn’t have to.

Except that to everyone’s disbelief, Marinette had gently rejected Adrien’s date invitations. Once. Twice. Three times. Alya could not fathom what was going on in her best friend’s head, and she wouldn’t tell her. She just said she had a secret crush, but that she couldn’t say anything more. Adrien’s heart ached a bit, but guessed that after all the time he’d made her suffer by calling her a “good friend”, it was normal that she had moved on. He might have been slightly jealous, but he had respectfully backed away.

Until tonight. Chat Noir had been visiting Marinette (just because she wouldn’t date him didn’t mean he didn’t want to hang out with his friend), and she’d left him for a bit to get some croissants from the bakery. Left unsupervised, Chat had skimmed through her latest sketches, her talent never failing to impress him. And that’s when he’d seen her diary, open wide. It had been pushed back behind her computer monitor, probably when he’d arrived. He really hadn’t meant to pry, but as his gaze landed on the page, he saw his name. Chat Noir.

His curiosity getting the better of him, he had read the diary entry, his cheeks warming as he read her silent confession that she liked him. She seemed a little conflicted about her feelings, but his bad puns were the main thing she held against him. It was all he could do not to waltz with her when she came up the stairs.

Marinette mistook his delight for over excitement at the thought of eating pastries, which she faced every time she gave Chat anything to eat. She refrained from worrying about his eating habits, given that he’d admitted to being a high level, part time sportsman (he wouldn’t say which sport, but the fact that his right arm muscles were a bit more developed than his left had made her assume it was tennis). His enthusiasm had made her smile, but she hadn’t paid much attention to it as she opened the magazine Chat had brought her.

“I might have agreed to us going on a double date? Adrien Agreste asked if I could organise a dinner with Ladybug, and well, I didn’t want to be the third wheel so I said we’d both go...” Chat was making it up as he went. This could be a solution to his conundrum. An opportunity to tell her who he was, that he knew, and (he could dream) to make out with her on the Paris rooftops.

“You what?” The magazine fell flat on her lap as all colour drained from her face.

“I’m so sorry, I know I should have asked first, but he has a photo shoot opportunity for us and wanted to meet her in another context first... And Ladybug said yes.” He looked straight into her eyes as he iterated the last sentence, daring her to contradict him.

Marinette gaped at the audacity. The blatant lie. It hit her that there was nothing she could do, nothing she could say except accept the proposition. The way Chat looked at her told her he at least suspected there was a link between her and Ladybug. She couldn’t call him out on Ladybug’s supposed agreement to go. Outright refusing the dinner invitation would be fishy.

She took a deep breath before replying. “Okay, fine, then.” She could always make up an excuse closer to the date.

Her answer took Chat by surprise, but he did his best to hide it. He promised he’d be in touch as he left, and pressed a longing kiss on Marinette’s forehead, drawing a bright shade of crimson to her cheeks as he did so.

---

Ladybug swung from chimney to chimney on her way to the rooftop. She’d decided it would be Marinette bailing tonight. How could she explain getting there otherwise? And after all, it was Ladybug whom Adrien wanted to see.

She landed at the meeting point, expecting to find the two boys she’d ever had feelings for. Instead, only one was present.

“Good evening, Adrien.” She smiled. Her romantic feelings for him had melted as her relationship with Chat bloomed. Adrien’s recent interest in her had further confused her, but she was certain now that her heart belonged to a certain leather-clad cat. “Has Chat not made it yet?”

“Actually, he has.” He gave her an oddly familiar smile, one she wasn’t used to seeing on him.

“Oh?” She asked, discreetly looking around. She noticed the candle-lit table in the center of the rooftop, a single rose laid on one of the two plates. Ladybug stared at him blankly, her brain taking a minute to register the information. “Is he not staying for dinner, then?”

“Just as much as Marinette will.”

“Do you mean...”

“Plagg, claws out.” Adrien called out, holding his hand out. A black blur cycloned towards his simple, silver ring, and in a green flash, the model was replaced by her partner.

Her face was tense from trying very hard not to gape. Her jaw would probably have hit the floor otherwise.

“You knew.” She managed to articulate.

“I did.”

“Tikki, spots off.” She felt more comfortable speaking as herself. Which she knew was stupid. She was Ladybug. And Adrien was Chat Noir. “I can’t believe you managed to make me fall for you twice.” She knew there were more pressing matters. They were out in the open, they’d both transformed. They now both knew who the other was. But for once she let her heart speak for her first.

“In my defense, you claw-ly have a type.” He chuckled. They were facing each other now, close enough for his hand to come and cup her face, his thumb gently stroking her cheek.

“As if you don’t!” She snorted, her eyes lost in his green ones. They reflected the flickering candles in a warm way, making her feel at Home.

“Never said I didn’t.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead. On her nose. On her cheek. “You know, I lied the other day when I said I had to confess something.” He whispered as he continued trailing kisses on her face, behind her ears, just below her jaw.

“Oh yeah?” She sighed, savouring the moment.

“My actual confession is, I love you, my Ladynette.” He smiled tenderly as he drowned into the sapphire of her eyes.

“And I love you, my Chadrien.”

Their lips found each other like two butterflies as they stood in their own bubble, the Eiffel Tower erupting in lights behind them as the clock struck the hour.

#slightly cringing at the ending #but i actually didn't know where i was going until i got there #and then i just sort of embraced it #marichatmay2020 #marichat #marinette dupain cheng #chat noir #ladybug #adrien agreste #miraculous ladybug #miraculous #the miraculous tales of ladybug and cat noir #miraculous fanfic #miraculous fanfiction #miraculous reveal #confession #elle writes

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aurorawest · 4 years ago

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⭐️⭐️Hi! Can you give a commentary for anything at all you'd like to talk about? 😊

Thanks! I’ll talk about far away from here and closer to somewhere else. I wrote this fic for Froststrange Week 2021. This fic is about Loki and Strange running into each other in Hong Kong. I did a lot of Google Streetview-ing of Hong Kong, and just a lot of random googling to get some sense of what the place looks like. I’ve never been, clearly. And now I want to go! It looks really cool. I decided to set it on Lamma Island, which is right offshore and has regular ferries. There are two towns on the island and a hiking trail that goes between them.

I went through a couple different iterations of what I wanted the plot of this to be. I knew Loki and Stephen would get drunk and play truth or dare, because those were the prompts, but one of my ideas was that they actually went to a restaurant and ate dinner together. Then I was just going to have them go to a bar. In the end, I settled on them basically having a picnic and drinking the booze Loki had earlier bought to share with Thor.

Throughout this fic, Loki is real thirsty for Strange. There is a lot of innuendo (if you thought to yourself, ‘did she mean to word it that way...?’ the answer is almost certainly YES). As he gets drunker (on baijiu, which I also researched, and have never had), he keeps having these really vivid fantasies. This is kind of the first time, chronologically in my verse, that Loki really confronts that he has feelings for Stephen. He starts out the fic sort of reveling in his sexual attraction, but by the end it’s freaking him out, because he’s kind of realizing that it’s more than that.

This is the section where they play truth or dare to the end. Loki chooses dare. Stephen thinks really hard about it.

He breathed out slowly. “Are you thinking of something?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Strange said. “I don’t—” He swayed. “—don’t want it to be boring. Like, I could ask you to sing. I’ve never heard you sing.”

“You don’t want to,” Loki said. “‘S’not good.

My head canon is that Loki has a truly terrible singing voice. He also hates singing.

Also!” Coup de grace—Strange couldn’t dare him to sing after this. “I am far too…too…too plastered to remember the words to any of the songs you like.”

Womp womp. Shouldn’t have admitted to that, Loki. I just wrote a bit in an upcoming fic where Loki actually thinks about the lyrics to a song Strange played a lot and about how they apply to his situation (that fic takes place shortly before this one).

“You know them?” Strange asked. There was surprise in his tone.

Stephen is a way better actor than Loki gives him credit for. Loki thinks that Strange doesn’t give away what he’s feeling. And while that’s true...it’s kind of more than that. This thrills Stephen. Absolutely thrills him. It’s a sign that Loki knows his favorite songs. It’s a sign that Loki is interested in music.

“Maybe,” Loki said, only realizing at the last second that he shouldn’t have admitted this. “Or maybe I’m lying,” he added. “That’s why I didn’t choose truth, you know. Because I’m a liar.”

I both love and hate writing drunk people. This line makes me laugh because Loki sounds like an idiot.

“Uh huh.” Strange’s hands were resting on top of his thighs, twitching now and then. “Okay. How about this. I dare you…to tell me the truth about something.”

At first, Loki laughed. But Strange just watched him, looking smug, and Loki’s smile faded. “That doesn’t really seem in the spirit of the game, Steph—St—Strange,” Loki slurred.

This was one of the first exchanges I thought of once I had the plot of the fic nailed down. Strange basically cheats, Loki lets him...and also nearly calls him Stephen.

With a sloppy looking shrug, Strange said, “That’s the dare.”

Loki stared at him in consternation. Then his eyes flicked down to Stephen’s mouth, set into a crooked smirk, and he couldn’t help thinking, The truth is that I want to kiss you right now, but even as drunk as he was, he wasn’t drunk enough to say that. Was it even true? Or was it just…alcohol? Probably just alcohol. He was sure, quite sure, that if he were sober, he wouldn’t want to kiss Stephen Strange. So what if his lips looked full and soft; so what if Loki had always had a weakness for the feel of a well-groomed beard against his face? Just alcohol. And heatstroke, probably.

Does Loki even believe himself here? That’s kind of the question throughout the entire slow burn. Does Loki actually, really believe the bullshit he keeps telling himself, that he’s not in love with Strange? The fun thing with Loki is that he’s perfectly capable of lying to himself. In fact, he often elevates his lies over the actual truth, because he would prefer the lie to be true. So even when he knows it’s a lie, he almost gets into this state where he thinks if he just repeats it enough, he can will it to be the truth. This is actually something that Loki thinks about Thor sometimes - that Thor can just mold reality to his will if he wants something enough. Loki sees himself as telling stories, and he desperately wants the stories he tells about himself to be true. The fairy tale that he isn’t in love with Stephen, though, that’s a losing battle.

His mind turned to the ‘dare.’ There were many things that Strange didn’t know the truth about, some innocuous, some much less so. Some, they had talked about haltingly, but never in great detail.

This was me hedging—when I wrote this last November/December, I knew that I was going to have Loki and Strange talk about their respective tortures at the hands of the Black Order in an upcoming fic (I’d already written some of that dialogue, in fact).

He could say, I know what Ebony Maw did to you because it was done to me too;

Somehow, despite shipping Loki and Strange for over a year and adoring both of them, it didn’t really occur to me that they have this in common until like, six months ago.

he could say I understand what it’s like to think you’re someone and find out the opposite. He could tell him about sneaking Jotuns into Asgard, about the fact that he had delighted in being wicked during the Battle of New York because it was exactly what everyone had always expected of him and he was giving them the performance of his life. He could tell him how he’d hated Thor so much, but loved him with an equal fierceness.

But Loki thought Strange might know that last one already.

Strange doesn’t know about sneaking Jotuns into Asgard, but he actually knows both of the other two things Loki lists here.

Taking a deep breath, Loki said, “I think you have a nice singing voice.”

Strange actually looked stunned. That was worth something. For a full thirty seconds, he stared at Loki, a comically befuddled expression on his face. Finally, he asked, “You do?”

Loki compliments Strange very rarely. This is one of the most uncomplicatedly nice things he’s ever said to him.

Loki rubbed at a smudge of dirt on his pants. “Yes.” Flicking his eyes to meet Strange’s, he said, “Nicer than mine. But actually just…nice.”

It would have been so much easier for him to stick with the comparative here. This is character growth, that he admits that Stephen has a good voice, full stop.

There was another long pause. Then, Strange said, “Thanks.”

With a shrug, Loki looked out over the sea. “You dared me to tell the truth about something.” Clearing his throat, he said, “Well then? What about you? Truth or dare?”

Strange rubbed at his beard and Loki wondered what internal debate he was having. What the pros and cons of each choice were. Because Loki knew Strange.

You can really see the absurdity of Loki’s repeated assertion that Strange and he aren’t friends right here. Loki is absolutely right - he does know Strange; he knows him so well that he can guess what he’s thinking, even though Strange tries pretty hard to hide what he’s thinking from Loki.

He knew that was the reason for the hesitation. Strange was trying to guess how far Loki might needle him.

Another few seconds of silence passed, and then, Strange said slowly, “Truth.”

Oh.

Oh. No jk. Believe it or not, the Oh. Oh. trope doesn’t appear in this series, because Loki never really has that moment of realization about his feelings.

Loki had assumed he would choose dare. Dare was easy. Loki would have dared him to do something stupid, like create a barbershop quartet composed of himself and invite the Avengers and their new young acolytes to a special performance.

I really struggled to come up with a stupid thing that Loki might dare Strange to do, for some reason.

But truth? Oh, he wanted to ask, is that something you want to talk about? The truth?

This was one of the prompts for the event.

Which he supposed would have been a question that Strange could have told the truth in response to, and Loki could call it done, but…even that felt like opening a box he didn’t want to open.

Questions flickered through his mind. Impossible questions. Does the way you look at me sometimes mean anything? Do you even like men?

Loki still thinks Strange is straight at this point.

Do you find me attractive? Do you want to kiss me? Do you know what a spectacularly bad idea that is? Do you understand why I can’t?

Loki doesn’t even quite know why he can’t. This moment is almost like...please tell me why I can’t, because I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t quite come up with a good enough reason.

He was so drunk. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck, he clearly couldn’t drink this much, ugh, no, not around Strange, not when it was so hot and it had been so long since he’d had—since he’d been with—since he’d had any kind of romantic partner except his own hand.

The last time Loki had fully consensual sex (where he reached climax) is at least decades in the past. Possibly longer. In The Real Asgardians of the Galaxy, Kalmsh goes down on him, but Loki stops him.

That thought made him giggle a little. He had made supremely poor choices today. He was just sensible enough not to make another one.

Strange was staring at him. There was an odd look on his face. Loki couldn’t identify it.

But if he had to, he’d call it…expectant. No.

Hopeful.

Loki knows and tells himself he doesn’t.

Loki’s fingers curled into fists and he asked, “How did you and Wong meet?”

@mareebird suggested this for the question.

The change on Strange’s face was subtle. Nearly imperceptible. Loki was surprised he was able to detect it, considering the state he was in. The hope, if that was even what it had been, dropped away, replaced by…resignation. “I wanted to borrow a book from the library,” Strange said. He smiled, though it seemed joyless. “In Kamar-Taj. He took it too seriously.”

I wanted this moment to be absolutely devastating. To be honest, I don’t think I really pulled it off. C’est la vie. I plan on rewriting this and adding it to my series, so maybe I can fix it then.

“As always,” Loki said. His voice felt like it was coming out far too heartily. As though some line had been crossed and they both needed to retreat, but Loki was acutely aware, horrifically aware, that he had done something wrong, or if not wrong, then something that had wounded Strange in some way, and that was…idiotic. It was stupid. Nonsensical. There was nothing Loki could do to emotionally wound Strange. The man had proved that time and time again. He didn’t take Loki seriously. If you didn’t take someone seriously, they couldn’t hurt your feelings.

It really, really bothers Loki that Strange doesn’t take him seriously. He’s wrong about that, of course, but it’s something that’s driven him absolutely insane from the moment they met. At first it’s more of a like, dick measuring contest, lol. But it becomes much more than that, and the anger turns to this kind of...desperate hurt. Loki wants Strange to take him seriously. His unhappiness over the perceived slight appears many times.

Which was why Strange had never hurt Loki’s feelings, incidentally, because Loki didn’t take him at all seriously,

Uh huh yeah sure.

this human sorcerer with his lovely eyes, blue or green depending on the light, and his soft-looking lips and neat goatee.

Riiiiiiight.

The two of them lapsed into silence. The drunken buzz had gone out of Loki’s veins entirely. Alcohol—it was fun until it wasn’t. Now he just felt foggy and slow. The world was spinning unpleasantly. How the hel was he going to fly back to New Asgard like this? He couldn’t. Sourness sloshed in his stomach. He’d probably be lucky not to be sick.

Now, this, I felt I described pretty well. It’s such a distinct feeling when you’re drunk and having fun and suddenly you cross some line that you didn’t know was there...and you’re not having fun anymore. And there’s no way to get back.

Loki’s legs felt stiff and he extended them. That other buzz had gone from Loki’s veins, too. It had been stupid. Stupid fantasies. [...]

His mouth was starting to feel dry. The sourness in his stomach was gaining more bite. The humidity in the air wasn’t helping, either. Loki felt like he couldn’t get a breath. He wasn’t quite nauseated, but the possibility didn’t seem far off. If he could breathe some cool, crisp air, he was sure he’d feel better. Everything would probably be better if he could just do that.

Me, writing this: Think back to all the times you’ve felt like shit walking around Disney World!

Strange shifted. Their shoulders had been touching, Loki realized. And now they weren’t.

“I s’posp…s’posp…” Loki grit his teeth. “I…suppose you need to get back to Yew Nork. New York.”

Realistically there would be a lot more slurring in both of their speech, but who wants to read that, honestly. I use that sort of thing sparingly.

There was a silence, so Loki turned his head to look at Strange. He was staring out over the sea, his gaze faraway, like he wasn’t here at all. Not thinking about Loki at all, let alone what had just happened.

IDIOT. Obviously, Loki is exactly wrong here. Stephen is absolutely thinking about Loki and absolutely thinking about what just happened. His heart is breaking.

Whatever had just happened. Stupid thought. Nothing had happened.

Since nothing had happened, the barren hollowness inside him was just an illusion. And Loki knew about illusions. He was good at them. So that made sense.

I wrote Loki’s internal monologue in a simpler, almost more childlike way here to try to capture his inebriation. And also his sadness. He’s sort of like a kicked puppy here.

“Guess so,” Strange finally said. Without looking at Loki, he laboriously climbed to his feet, swaying alarmingly. Norns. What if he stumbled right off the cliff into the sea below? Flashes of that played out in front of Loki’s eyes, intrusive and horrible, and something that felt awfully like panic clutched at his chest. The idea of Stephen dying suddenly seemed so terrible, so very terrible.

Foreshadowing. Stephen will die in about fifty-five years. Loki will be devastated and never get over it.

Loki got to his feet too, ready to grab Strange if he wobbled too close to the edge of the cliff. But Strange seemed steady enough on his feet, now that he was standing. Silently, Strange unhooked his sling ring from his belt, shakily slipping it onto his fingers, as Loki vanished the empty food containers into his pocket dimension. They were a problem for a future version of him.

Just like Future Emily often has to cover for freaking Present Emily. She’s the worst.

The empty bottle, though—he bent over to pick that up, sliding his fingers over it. He was seized by a sudden, violent urge to fling it into the sea. Except you couldn’t fling a bottle into the sea on Earth without putting a message into it. That was a cliché here. A message in a bottle. A message you couldn’t send any other way because you were stranded. A message that had no hope of actually reaching its intended recipient. What kind of message would he send?

I hate you. I hate this.

Even if it was the opposite.

They’re caught in this limbo where neither one of them has the guts to tell the other how he feels. They quite literally have to resort to games, but even then, they both chicken out. Loki can’t even imagine being able to be honest with Strange about this. He can’t even be honest with himself.

Loki closed his eyes, then vanished the bottle into his pocket dimension, as well. Where had he actually landed his ship? Would he be able to find the way back? Everything seemed murky in his mind. And—this thought hadn’t occurred to him until now—was the ferry even running anymore?

This is your author realizing at the same time that Loki took a freaking ferry to get here.

Perhaps he’d have to spend the night here, leaning against the rocks until he nodded off into fitful, drunken sleep.

As though Strange was reading his mind, he said, “Let me bring you back to your ship before I go back to the Sanctum.”

“Oh.” Right. Stupid. Strange could bring him anywhere, instantly. “I…” It felt as though his head was full of wool. “Yes, that would be…thank you. Don’t think—don’t think the ferries are running anymore.”

Strange finally looked at him. “You think I’d let you walk back to your ship like this? Even if they were?”

His ship is the same one from The Real Asgardians of the Galaxy, The Bifrost, but I don’t name it in oneshots because I don’t like to assume that people have read that fic.

“Like what?” Loki asked. Drunk off his arse, clearly. Why was he even asking? Just to hear Strange say it? Even an Asgardian could be taken advantage of in a compromised state.

Loki has been sexually assaulted many, many times. He’s not really too concerned about it here on Earth, but it’s certainly something that would occur to him. His most recent experience is with the Grandmaster.

But Strange didn’t answer this question. Instead, he asked, “Where is it?”

There had been ships. Big boxes. Loki knew the kind of place. He knew the word. “Um, docks,” he said. “Container ships.” He closed his eyes. “It was Container Terminal 8.” Complete sentences—look at that.

Yes, this involved more Google Streetviewing.

“Okay,” Strange said. He extended his arm and circled the other. The portal started to bloom in front of them, swelling a little before it shrank back down. Orange sparks sputtered weakly. Loki stared blearily. There was a joke here, but the idea of making it seemed devastating in a way that he couldn’t articulate.

I checked with @mareebird before I made this erectile dysfunction joke because quite honestly she’s the queen of sexual innuendo, and I needed to see if it passed muster.

But Strange tried again, and this time it worked. [...] Uninvited, Strange followed him on board, where he stood as Loki drifted to the bridge. Loki mostly just wanted to lie down. He didn’t know why Strange hadn’t left yet.

Clearing his throat, Strange asked, “You’re not going to fly home right now, are you?”

Part of him wanted to say yes, just to see the look of horror on Strange’s face. Would Strange go into Good Guy mode and tell him he couldn’t? There were signs on some of the roads in Norway admonishing people not to drive their cars while intoxicated. Imagine what they’d think about flying a spaceship when he could barely walk in a straight line!

A stylistic note - I almost never use exclamation points in prose like this.

The thought amused him and he started to giggle.

The feeling faded quickly and he swayed on his feet, then took several unsteady steps to his berth. As he flopped down on it, he said, “I’ll stay here. I’ll sleep it off. That’s what you want me to say, right? You want me to be good. Good Loki, he’s so well-behaved, doesn’t put a toe out of line. Can’t really, can I? I’m a guest here on Earth. We’re all guests.”

This is also me vagueing, because I knew future plot points but didn’t have them totally nailed down. Now that I’ve almost finished with the fic that will directly precede this in the timeline, this was actually pretty spot on. It completely calls back to that, which I didn’t really do on purpose. Gonna pat myself on the back for that.

He stared up at the underside of the other berth. A hard, swollen feeling rose into his chest, a feeling of wanting. Just…wanting. He didn’t know what he wanted. All he knew was that as good as things were now, as much as Thor and he had repaired things, there was something gaping inside him. It would be easy to say it was New Asgard, stupid tiny ugly reeking fishing village New Asgard, but it would be a lie.

Then again, he liked lies. Well, he didn’t like them. They were just easier. Lies were so much easier. The truth was hard.

Lies are easier, which was why he just repeatedly lied to himself in the paragraph above. Doesn’t know what he wants? Right.

He turned away from the raw ache and rested a wrist on his forehead. “Well?”

There was a metallic scrape as Stephen’s feet shifted on the deck. “I don’t want you to crash into the ocean and never be seen again.”

Loki snorted. Suddenly, he felt as though he was going to cry. “I’m sure you’ll see me again, Stephen.”

Every time Loki thinks of Strange as Stephen or calls him Stephen, it’s very intentional.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Strange take a step closer. He looked unsteady, too, swaying, his gaze unfocused, his hands shaking. Mentally, he dared Strange to come closer. Truth or dare.

Why the hel had Strange chosen truth?

The truth was too much. The truth was difficult. The truth was impossible. It was vulnerability and pain and handing your heart and soul over to another person. The truth was something Loki had no interest in. Certainly not whatever truth Strange would tell.

Deep down, Loki knows how Strange feels about him.

Slowly, Strange nodded. He was starting to look a little wan, as though he wasn’t feeling well. Wouldn’t be much of a shock. Loki didn’t feel well and presumably he could hold his liquor better, even with the heat. “Hope so,” Strange mumbled.

Head canon: Stephen actually doesn’t hold his liquor well at all. He never has. Because he sometimes takes painkillers from his hands, he’s even worse at it (I have to thank @nonexistenz for that one). Presumably he hasn’t taken a painkiller in several days in this fic, since he’s still conscious after drinking half a bottle baijiu.

The two of them looked at each other. Loki’s vision kept fuzzing around the edges, but he concentrated on Strange, Strange in his t-shirt and his jeans, looking so human.

In earlier fics, Loki admires how Strange looks in his Master of the Mystic Arts get-up. That shifts over the course of the future fics and Loki begins to find Stephen’s everyday clothes much more endearing and attractive.

Terribly human. Stay, whispered a traitorous voice in his mind. It was a voice that would have him move over on the berth and hold out an arm. An invitation. An acknowledgement.

This is the closest Loki has ever come to an admission of his feelings.

Impossible. Loki closed his eyes and rolled over onto his side, facing the bulkhead. “Good-bye,” he said, knowing he sounded pitiful. He had officially reached the stage where he wondered why he’d ever touched any alcohol ever in his entire life.

It’s a cliché but it will never not be funny.

“Thanks for dinner,” Strange said.

“Welcome.”

“Thanks for…” But Strange trailed off.

Strange probably doesn’t even quite know what he’s going to say here. He’s just stalling, hoping Loki is going to make the move that he (Stephen) is too afraid to.

“Strange.” Loki’s head was starting to hurt. “Good-bye.”

There was silence, then the sound of a portal, which spit, hissed, and closed.

The truth. The truth could go to hel.

Loki hoped he didn’t remember any of this in the morning.

He does remember a lot of it, but he’ll pretend he doesn’t, or chalk it up to drunkenness.

Thank you for asking!! Hopefully you liked what I chose 😊

Fanfic Writers: Director’s Cut

#Anonymous #froststrange #strangefrost #loki #stephen strange

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thanksjro · 4 years ago

Text

Zero Point, a Last Stand of the Wreckers prose story- I Sure Hope You Like Eye Imagery

Ooh, an artsy start to our prose this go around.

This story takes place after the events of Last Stand of the Wreckers, with our dear friend Springer well into his Overlord-induced coma.

Roadbuster is a gentle soul, when he’s not busy ripping people’s spines out.

Roadbuster’s been put in charge of the Debris station since Springer’s out of commission. It’s boring. He’s bored. He has a routine he follows, but there’s only so much grave-visiting/security-checking/weapon-building/eyeball-cleaning a guy can do within a 120 hour day before it becomes less of a routine and more of a compulsive habit.

Springer’s eyes are a specific shade of blue known as Matrix Blue- supposedly a marker for being Matrix Compatible. Considering that Senator Shockwave had to go and get multiple guys some nonconsensual plastic surgery to make sure they could actually fit the Matrix, I’m going to go ahead and say that that’s some bunk someone made up to hype up the mysticism of Primehood.

Springer’s obviously in a bad way, and it’s not looking like things are going to get any better. You can tell, because this is the point where his internal monologue kicks in, reflecting on just what it’s like to die, and his past. Sure hope they don’t have any vats filled with corrodia gravis on this space station.

Back before the war was The War, Springer was young and naive, but his boobs were just as awesome as they are now.

Springer became slightly disenchanted as his time on the front lines went on, thinking that he needed to do more to help the Autobot Cause. He decided he wanted to join the Wreckers, though he knew next to nothing about them at the time, and everything that he’d heard probably should have sent him running in the opposite direction. Decepticons caught by Impactor and friends would kill themselves in the middle of the street if they managed to escape.

But we’re dealing with a mind that’s been shaped by a civil war, now aren’t we? Impressions are warped for Autobots, because Decepticons are evil, and therefore they deserve that sort of thing, now don’t they? Nobody is immune to propaganda.

Springer first met Impactor at Sherma Bridge, where he saw him punch through a ship’s windshield, spear the driver’s head with his drill-hand, and then land the thing in front of a memorial statue. Gee, what a guy.

Springer, even though he’d seen all this and was feeling a little wary about this whole situation- which is a very valid reaction to witnessing a murder, no matter who’s been killed- decides to get put on the list of reservists for the Wreckers.

It’s amazing they even bother with Rung at all, isn’t it?

Springer’s interview is a violent one, because this is the Wreckers, and we don’t ever go half-mast on anything- Impactor falls out of the fucking sky in the middle of a huge battle and tells Springer that he’ll be coming with him. And that was that.

Oh hey, it’s the IDW2 eating chairs. And hello, Kaput, it’s nice to see you again.

Kaput’s diagnosis is as bleak as it is cryptic- Springer’s probably for sure going to die. Kaput seems to only exist to tell people they’re dying or dead, unless they’re the once and future Optimus Prime.

Kup’s pretty bummed out about this whole thing, pacing like a 1950’s father in the birth and delivery waiting room. Kaput doesn’t seem to notice, or is too lost the the medical sauce to realize that him going on about how they fixed that weird humming noise Springer’s legs used to make is making folks anxious.

Roadbuster asks just what exactly’s wrong, if they fixed everything from his ripped-off face to his weird humming legs. Kaput doesn’t like confrontation, so he blathers on for a bit before admitting that they haven’t found the zero point.

Roberts, how many times are you going to do this to Kup? First Rodimus, now Springer- did Kup bully you in primary school? I’m starting to get concerned.

That was six months ago, and while Roadbuster had been polite about it at the time, all the nothing that’s happened since has made him feel a little less kindly toward Kaput.

Okay, who’s ready to find out why doctors and mechanics aren’t the same thing on Cybertron? Because I sure am!

So they have to account for the soul, is what you’re saying. Is this about having some sort of bedside manner, because the mental aspect of healing has to be taken into account? Or is it more to do with the bizarre implications of the soul being physical as opposed to metaphysical, and therefore capable of being destroyed? The ethical conundrum that the spark presents is fascinating.

If a break happens between these two nerves, it can cause the energy of the spark to be redirected away from the points it’s meant to go, like a heart with a hole in it. Yes, the blood is still inside the body, but it’s not inside the veins and is therefore useless, and in fact is directly harming the body.

Roadbuster, after reflecting on the grim reality Springer is currently living, breaks out Wreckers: Declassified. This isn’t reading for personal enjoyment or ego-stroking however- Roadbuster actually greatly dislikes reading about himself in Fisitron’s datalogs. No, this is more of a last-ditch effort to save Springer’s life.

Roadbuster learned to read to act on a theory brought up by Rung- he and Kup are friends, on account of both of them being very old- that the spark is psychosomatic in nature. It can be influenced by intense emotional responses to potentially heal the physical self. They’re willing to try this, because nobody really knows how exactly a spark works, so Rung’s guess is as good as any.

Story time for the evening picks up on a chapter in a story called “The Wreckers’ Air Attack”, getting right into where Megatron’s about to shoot Impactor in the back of the head. But not without pontificating first.

This is so over the top, so romantic- and I’m talking Romantic as in the literary style. I don’t even know what to say here. Luckily Impactor does.

Fisitron may not know what this whole scene is about, but we as the reader do. The hardcover trade edition of Last Stand was published roughly a six months after “Chaos Theory”, where we got THIS exchange:

If this is what Megatron’s poetry is like, it’s no wonder Impactor isn’t a fan. Purple prose out the wazoo, incredibly flowery imagery- I’m sure there’s an audience for all that, but I doubt Impactor’s a part of that crowd.

Megatron is distracted just long enough for Springer to descend upon him on the sky sled, like a murderous Santa Claus, jumping off so the sled can slam into Megatron and send him careening down the side of the mountain.

That’s taken care of. What next?

It’s at this point that Roadbuster checks what chapter they’re on, because he’s really not the biggest fan of Fisitron’s writing style. Guess he isn’t one for fanfiction, or adverbs. Turns out, each of these datalogs are less blog posts and more fully-fledged books. Every single one of them.

Roadbuster’s feeling kind of hopeless at this point, and it’s not hard to understand why; there hasn’t been any sort of response from Springer at all in all the months he’s been reading to him.

He considers the contents of the only datalog he hasn’t cracked open yet, outright skipping over it every time- #113, the one about Pova. He doesn’t ever read it because it’s full of false information, as was made very clear in Last Stand #5.

Springer joined the 17th iteration of the Wreckers, after a hazing ritual so brutal, it required the addition of an amendment to the Misuse of Weapons Act. Horrifying. None of the original members of the Wreckers had survived the war by the point Springer had been brought on- except for Valve, who does not count because he left the Autobots to go be a Decepticon, a fact which will never be expanded upon, much like Eugenesis Skywarp having been an Autobot for some friggin’ reason.

Springer, once on the inside, realizes that maybe the Wreckers are a little too dark a shade of gray for him to be able to sit comfortably with- the battering of POWs just a little too enthusiastically, the bending of the rules a little too sharply, the blatant disregard for the Tyrest Accord being smoothed over with an “oopsie doodle!” It’s looking like the Wreckers aren’t completely on the straight and narrow; shocking, I know.

Still, he doesn’t really see the point in arguing with it, instead just trying to make sure that he’s not the one doing the maiming and such. Complicity is not the answer to this sort of behavior, Springer.

When Squadron X came onto the scene, Impactor was so upset at the perceived slight- because obviously if Squadron X was the Decepticons answer to the Wreckers, and they were a bunch of murderous assholes, what did that make the Wreckers?- that he made it everyone else’s problem. The Wreckers WOULD destroy Squadron X. It was his new goal in life.

This went exactly where you’d expect such a singleminded hate-boner to go.

After the execution of eight POWs who should have been let go due to being on sovereign territory, Springer decided that enough was enough and called the cops on Impactor. High Command had been itching to get this guy back under control, so things moved pretty quickly after that.

Springer resigned from the group afterwords, but then everyone started coming out of the woodwork, pestering him to come back and LEAD them, because they were worried about being shut down. The likes of Roadbuster and Whirl don’t exactly make for good executives. After thinking about it, and after the trial, of course, he agrees to come back on as the leader of the Wreckers. So began a new era.

Back in the real world, Roadbuster’s trying to read the falsified account of Pova, but just can’t go through with it. He decides to tell Springer the truth, if only so he won’t die with a bunch of bullshit bouncing around in his brain.

Springer did so many drugs in Eugenesis, he BECAME drugs in Last Stand.

So Springer is apparently the greatest hype man to ever live, as he pumped everyone up so much about getting Squadron X, they just went completely feral the moment they saw their ship. Squadron X wasn’t even doing anything, and the Wreckers were frothing at the mouth.

When this lead to the inevitable, and Springer was trying to break down the door to prevent Impactor from racking up eight war crimes in under two minutes, Roadbuster and Whirl had a little moment. They knew what had happened, they knew that they couldn’t stop it, they knew that Springer couldn’t stop it, and they were pleased as punch about it.

Once Impactor had been arrested, the other Wreckers were worried that they’d be the next to get ratted out. To try and prevent this, they created a false narrative to lure Springer back into the group, placing him in a position of leadership to soothe his worries about the others having been complacent in the murder of Squadron X.

Roadbuster finishes off this horrifying admission with a non-apology, complimenting Springer on being a good leader. Then he notices that Springer’s got a tear in his eye.

That’s a [ tair ] , not a [ teer ]. It took me a second, too. English is a nightmare of a language.

He tries to buff the tear out, manually peeling back Springer’s eyelid to do it, only to find that maybe Rung wasn’t completely full of shit after all.

#transformers #jro #last stand of the wreckers #zero point #maccadam #Hannzreads #text post #long post #prose writing #wreckers trilogy

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backupblogforjg · 5 years ago

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The racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism and cruel tropes in Voltron

So, it’s the anniversary of the ending of Voltron. And I’m getting really, really tired of people saying that only shippers hated the ending. There were many issues with Voltron, and they were neither limited to shipping nor to S8.

So, I’ve decided to compile a list.

It gets LONG. Turns out there was a hell of a lot of racist, sexist, ableist and cruel tropes in VLD.

In fact, I had originally planned on writing a list of both the terrible tropes and the plot holes. But there just wasn’t enough room for both. The post is huge as it is, and with the plot holes, it would have been twice as long, so I had to focus on only one thing.

Salt, obviously. So, so, so much salt. I could turn a lake into a sea here. You’ve been warned.

RACISM:

1) The Alteans are genocide survivors. Out of all the Alteans, only the black Altean was used for a Reverse Racism story where she resents a teammate for belonging to the race that exterminated hers. The white Alteans are totally cool with him, and with his race in general, and only hate the bad people. But the black one had to be taught that hating people because of their race is wrong.

2) VLD Allura is also the only version of Allura who is black. In every other Voltron media (several different cartoons and comics), Allura is blond with blue eyes. All the white versions of the character get a happy ending, while only the black version ends up dying to save the world.

While "hero sacrifices their life to save the world" is not a bad trope in and of itself, it becomes bad when it kills off one of the extremely few black female characters in leading roles. You kill off a white male hero, there are 463278462387 more. You kill off the black female hero, you are kinda screwed. Making it worse, Allura had been portrayed as suffering from depression throughout the latest seasons, so that her death comes across less as heroic sacrifice and more as suicide.

3) The brown Cuban kid who dreamed of being a pilot, and never once in 78 episodes ever expressed anything but sheer love for an exciting life, in the final two minutes of the final episode ends up realizing that the place for him is a farm.

4) As told in interviews, Lotor was meant to be a bad example of mixed-race person, to contrast him with Keith as good example of mixed race person. Do I even have to point out how messed up this is?

5) Even before they became Space Nazis, back when they were still on the side of the angels, the Galra invaded and conquered planets. This is portrayed as totally cool when they happily name the prince after a "hero" who invaded and conquered a lot of worlds, and the peaceful Alteans think the guy is just as heroic as one of their greatest scientists. Apparently there is such a thing as ethically killing people to steal their land.

6) They whitewashed Keith, a character who is poc in every other iteration of Voltron.

I’m sure a lot of people are going to get angry here, claiming that I hate Keith. Let me assure you, I don’t. I love Keith, and I hate what was done to him. I hate that they took a traditionally poc character and went to frankly ridiculous lengths to erase that part of his character. Keith should be Asian, and it would be incredibly easy to make him so in VLD (seriously, all they’d have to do is update the freaking bios, an intern could do it right now in 5 minutes). But they refuse to do it.

A lot of people don’t realise that the surname “Kogane” in VLD is fanon.

I’m serious. Check his official bios page. Keith is not actually called Keith Kogane in VLD. Fans started calling him that in fanfiction, and it stuck, but it’s not canon.

In every other Voltron media, Keith is an Asian guy. But in VLD, they:

- went out of their way to always avoid giving him an Asian surname

- gave him a Texan father

- refused to confirm his race, even when every other character had a specific race. Again, check his official bios. All the other characters got a race, Keith gets “human.” It got so ridiculous it would be funny if it weren’t sad. It pretty much went like this:

Fans: Keith is half alien, but about his human half, what is his ethnicity? EPs: oh, we couldn't possibly say, because the story takes place in the future, and in the future, everybody is mixed up! So, Keith is HUMAN, we can't give him a specific race because there are no specific races in the future! Fans: ok. And what are the races of the other characters? EPs: Pidge is Italian, Lance is Cuban, Hunk is half-black half- Samoan, Shiro is Japanese. Fans: but Keith...? EPs: HUMAN! There is no such thing as race in the future!

Some people at least hoped that Keith's Texan father had Asian ancestry because he kinda looked like Shiro, who is Japanese. But the EPs confirmed that the resemblance was just a coincidence, they never meant for the dad to look Japanese.

At this point pretty much the only evidence that Keith is Asian is that he is voiced by an Asian person. But then, Josh Keaton is not Japanese, is he?

7) After whitewashing Keith, they claimed he is the best leader of Voltron, better than his poc predecessor, because he has Galra blood.

So, instead of bringing up any sort of legit reason to justify why Keith should be in charge (like his empathy or pilot skills), they go with "the half-white guy is also half space-nazi and that's why he should give the orders instead of the poc guy."

If you think I’m bashing Keith here, please ask yourself why you are getting angry at the person pointing out the whitewashing instead of getting angry at the whitewashing. Especially when, again, making VLD Keith canonically poc could be done anytime with zero cost and zero effort, and DW just doesn’t want to.

- Hunk, the half-black half-Samoan guy, was going to be killed and replaced as Paladin by a blue alien. The EPs were pissed when DW forbade them to, and complained in the interview about it.

SEXISM:

Every single woman who is ever put in charge ends up going insane, making terrible decisions that endanger her planet, or losing all of her authority.

Allura starts out as co-leader of Voltron and leader of the Coalition. Ends up as a foot soldier who takes orders from the new leader and his right-hand man, and is treated as a cadet by the Earth military.

HOMOPHOBIA:

1) Dreamworks, Netflix and the EPs very, very, very heavily promoted S7 as GLBT-friendly. The EPs gave whole interviews about the past relationship between Shiro and new character Adam, retweeted a ton of posts celebrating Shiro’s homosexuality, and enthusiastically sent tweets like "you are going to see more of Adam in S7! :D" from their personal accounts after they showed the episode that introduced him.

In S7:

- Shiro's homosexuality is so ambiguous that even the Brazilian voice actor didn't realize that he was supposed to be gay. Just by watching the show, without knowing the World Of God, you can’t tell he and the other guy were engaged.

- Adam gets about 30 seconds of screentime after that one episode they had already shown. Then he dies screaming in pain and terror in a fire.

A lot of people claimed that it was okay to kill Adam because Shiro was supposed to be our rep, not Adam, who was a brand new character we knew little about. And, out of context, that would be true. Adam was pretty much a NPC, why would his death matter?

But the problem here is the context:

- Shiro is closeted in S7, you need to read interviews to know he is gay. So, if only Shiro is meant to be the rep, they couldn’t even do that right.

- They very heavily marketed both Shiro and Adam as gay rep, and specifically talked at length about Adam in several interviews.

In THAT context, REGARDLESS of what you ship, killing off Adam revealed a complete willingness to manipulate the audience to the point of outright lying. Even if you hated Adam, even if Adashi is your NOTP, the clear evidence that the creators had absolutely no problem making empty promises was NOT a good sign.

2) The moment Shiro is revealed to be gay in interviews, he is practically quarantined from the Team.

3) Shiro is also given a Totally Not AIDS deadly disease.

Making it even worse, Shiro never actually gets cured in canon. We are told he is cured in interviews, but the show itself drops the topic entirely. Depending on where you lean in the Word Of God VS Death Of The Author debate, Shiro may be doomed to die.

4) A female villain is revealed to be a lesbian. 30 seconds later she gleefully tortures a little girl. Then she, too, dies in a fire.

(Fan outrage about pulling two Bury Your Gays in the Season that had been very heavily promoted as GLBT-friendly caused DW to retcon her death and bring her back in S8, but she was originally meant to die in the explosion)

5) Shiro ends up marrying a random character who doesn’t even get a name in the show.

ABLEISM:

1) Shiro's PTSD magically disappears offscreen. In interviews, the EPs claimed that he "got over it" between S6 and S7 because "he is a professional." Wow! Who knew being a professional magically cures mental illnesses!

2) Shiro is an amputee. The EPs admitted that they never put any thought into his status as disabled rep, they just wanted a character with a cool-looking arm. It literally didn't occur to them that making him lose his arm (TWICE! First up to the biceps, then up to the shoulder) meant anything. Also worth noting that Shiro’s new arm makes him look like the guy who tormented him.

3) Shiro is systematically robbed of his agency.

- He is the only Paladin who never gets to use his bayard.

- He loses his bond with Black for no given canon reason (and the reason they give in interviews makes no sense, they basically say that transferring his soul out of the Black Lion makes her stop loving him. But she still lets Zarkon fly her!).

I know that Keith is traditionally Black’s pilot in Voltron media (although that shouldn’t matter, because VLD made a lot of huge changes to the traditional status quo). But if they wanted Black Paladin Keith that badly, they could have given some non-insulting reason for it. For example, say “because Shiro has spent so much time within Black, their bond is now so strong that he will get absorbed again if he flies her again.” Or co-pilots in Black (if Pidge can co-pilot with Matt, why can’t Shiro co-pilot with Keith?).

- He is defeated not only by Sendak, but also by a bunch of random Alteans. He basically can’t win a fight anymore unless it’s played for laughs.

- His new robot Atlas is bigger than Voltron, but also much weaker, and can only buy a few minutes for Voltron to come save the day.

- Every single enemy he ever defeated comes back to be finished off by somebody else (even the friggin' Gladiator from S1 comes back in S8). In the epilogue, he retires in his twenties.

4) Narti, the disabled General, is fridged shortly after her introduction. For a while at least it seemed like her death had affected the remaining three Generals, but then it turns out that the "For Narti" line was a trick and they never actually planned on avenging her.

CRUEL TROPES:

1) They intentionally baited the fans by pushing the plot thread that Lotor would be redeemed. They named the episode where he defects "A New Defender," they kept saying in interviews that they come from Avatar and they are very familiar with Zuko *hint hint*, they showed his family as incredibly abusive and Lotor himself as desperate, they showed that Lotor was a victim of severe racism (he is mixed race, and as stated above, the Galra are Space Nazis and are pretty obsessed with blood purity).

Then, after revealing him to be a villain, they gave an interview where they practically dislocated their shoulders by patting themselves on the back as they gleefully bragged that "we made them think we would give them a Zuko, but we gave them an Azula!"

(Nevermind the fact that Azula herself was a 14-year-old child, not a monster, and that Aaron Ehasz himself confirmed that he always wanted her to be redeemed).

When fans who are survivors of child abuse told them that the bait-and-switch was really hurtful, they laughed it off, and claimed that Lotor was just beyond redemption. Then they proceeded to redeem Lotor's abusive parents, who were objectively much worse.

2) Shiro’s clone, who sincerely believed he was Shiro and always meant well, was dehumanised, demonised and discarded like his life meant nothing. His short existence was full of pain from literally the moment he first opened his eyes, as Haggar kept torturing him with migraines to manipulate him. In the end, she brutally violates him body and mind, and brainwashes him to force him to turn on the family he was so desperate to find in The Journey. He dies in incredibly questionable circumstances, without ever getting to learn that his family survived Haggar’s plans. He is victim-blamed for the things she forced him to do against his will with mind-control, and is never mourned because the only family he ever had writes him off as a “thing” and “evil.”

In fact, the horrific treatment of Kuron foreshadowed S8. The Medium article “It never stops at one - Why Voltron: Legendary Defender's tragic ending wasn't a surprise and why more DreamWorks' series will follow suit” explains how.

The tl;dr version is that, when a story posits that the circumstances of your birth determine the value of your life, so that good intentions and hard work mean nothing, and long-established bonds can be discarded with zero thought and care, and your very humanity can be revoked over something you have absolutely no control over, and the whole sociopathic disaster is celebrated as a happy ending... it really, really can’t end well. Not just for you, but for the entire cast.

#voltron critical #vld shiro #vld keith #vld lance #vld allura #vld lotor #voltron #voltron salt #takashi shirogane

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deepwoundsandfadedscars · 4 years ago

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May I please request an info dump about an OC of your choice? Ngl I’m super intrigued by the things I see you posting and I’m the nosy gay who wants to know moooooore 😁

Look what you’ve done, you’ve made me ramble 😂😂 were you aware when you sent this that you’d set off a 1,200 word monster of a post?? The only thing I considered but decided to leave out was gathering the links to the stories involving these characters that I have already posted (though if anyone is interested in that, I will absolutely do it, I don’t have a proper master post for these guys 👀)

But oh my god, I’ve never had someone request an info dump before, I don’t even know where to start! Well, I will fully admit it’s not a super developed world that these characters are in, I haven’t determined any specific overarching story that they all fit together in, I basically just made a little family who have made it good in not completely legal means who occasionally get caught up in fights with their antagonist duo who just won’t leave them alone.

(The rest is going under a read more cause it’s a lot haha)

Tyr is my first character, as in like. He was one of the first characters I wrote with when I was like ten, but he has changed a lot since then, his name, his appearance, even his background, basically everything about him except for his ability has changed. Maybe I should have just made Tyr a new character and kept the original one as is, but he just evolved so gradually and even if he’s nothing like he was almost (god, fml) 20 years ago, I still know it’s the same guy, so it doesn’t feel right to try to have both iterations as two separate characters coexisting in the same world. Maybe I’ll recycle bits of his past that aren’t relevant anymore and tack them onto another character, but I haven’t done any of that yet.

As he is now, Tyr is a black man with his long hair done in box braids that fall past his shoulders, 5’6”, and about 28 years old, with a heavy British accent. He’s protective of his friends and isn’t afraid to fight for any of them, no matter how short of time he’s known them, as long as they’ve given him reason to trust them. His ability is the power to manifest and control flames, which he doesn’t do often but is very adept at controlling it.

Brennan is another character in the group, I came up with him about five or so years ago and he hasn’t gone through nearly as many changes as Tyr, but his name did change a couple years ago and I pinned down a couple other details around that time. Brennan is a pretty big human being at 6’5”, he towers almost a foot taller than Tyr with broad shoulders. In every way he throws a very intimidating silhouette, built like a rock and hard to knock over, but if one were to somehow pick him off the ground they would find him to be strangely lightweight.

And that is do to his ability, two huge black wings that he’s had since he was very young. Though he is a large person, his bones did not develop the same way an average humans would so that his wings can lift him. They are strong enough to carry him, he is a very skilled flyer with them, but they’re not strong enough to carry another person for very long, though he has managed to catch someone to slow their fall and at least get a little further away from danger. (I think I wrote this incident out but not sure if I ever finished it enough to post, but maybe I shall)

Brennan is white but tanned, short light brown hair and light blue eyes, 30, and uses he/him and they/them pronouns, which I do incorporate both of their pronoun options into my writing, it feels natural to me now when I'm writing and I hope it comes across clearly who is being referred to each time. Another important fact about Brennan is that they are non-verbal, they used to speak as a child but due to circumstances in their childhood that they haven’t divulged to the group just yet, they just eventually stopped speaking. Whether or not he is physically capable of saying anything, even he’s not sure, but he and everyone else in the group have grown comfortable enough with ASL that they can all communicate without speaking as well.

And then there’s Kaipo! Or Kai for short, she is black/Polynesian, 26, 5’8” with thick curly afro hair. She has a bubbly personality and is really good with computers. She is unfortunately not the most detailed character I’ve ever made, I regret that I haven’t written as much with her, but in the fluffy musings I have about this little family, she is the one that drags everyone out of their bad moods and gets them to laugh through jokes and pranks. She is very much a meme master. Tyr and Brennan can both be heard groaning often at her terrible puns.

Trevor is a relatively new addition (I just went to look at the first thing I posted with him, it was two years ago already what the heck! It doesn’t feel like that long ago) Trevor is lean, 6’1”, white skinned with black hair and brown eyes. On his own, he is a normal human being, nothing unique about him to speak of aside from the fact that he will very much die early. I have not disclosed why, but he is terminal and would die within a matter of weeks. The only thing keeping him from an early demise is the mutual partnership he has forged with Algamoth, a lesser demon that Trevor unwittingly freed from captivity while saving himself.

Trevor is around 28 years old, while Algamoth is not entirely sure how old he would be considered, but he has been on Earth for upwards of 1,200 years. He is able to exist without Trevor, though not in a very tangible way. Without being in a humans body he is not much more than a cloud or puddle that can fit in the palm of a hand. He is able to heal Trevor’s body, which makes their partnership beneficial to both; Algamoth is protected within Trevor’s body and Trevor gets to keep on living.

I started writing a blurb that would tie them in with the rest of the group, but have not finished it, I need to add it to my to-do list and post it haha

And then finally we have Michael. Everyone seemed to love Michael when I posted the first story that featured him, which that story was the result of a prompt from a Discord server I was on a few years ago. At the time I had no intention to mix him in with everyone else, but I think he would fit in pretty well. As you could probably tell from my ramblings last night, I’m not entirely sure which direction I want to take him, but I do have some thoughts on how to get him from where he is to where I want him to be and it does involve whump, but still pondering if I want that whump to reveal an ability he till now was not aware of. I have a vague idea of what he looks like but it’s not set in stone at all yet.

Other characters that have appeared in my writing are Malichi (Tyr’s boyfriend), Allison (the main antagonist), and Remy (Allison’s right hand). Another character that exists but has only appeared on page once is Promise, who is Kai’s girlfriend. That single story-ish thing with Promise only got one note lmao but tbf it wasn’t a full story, just a song inspired AU.

As of yet I don’t think I have any characters who are definitely straight, they’re all pretty queer in some way. Tyr and Brennan are both ace and panromantic, Kaipo is bisexual, Malichi and Promise are both gay, Algamoth is pansexual. I have not discovered yet what Michael and Trevor’s sexual or romantic orientations are nor pinned down what Allison and Remy are since they in general aren’t super fleshed out, though I have leaned towards them being girlfriends as well, but I’m not 100% convinced on that yet.

AAHHH Wow, ok I didn’t expect for this to get so long, but I hope this was of interest! Typing this out and regathering info of these characters reminded me of a few WiPs that have never seen the light of day that I would like to finish some day, so hopefully this has given me the spark to do that.

#Thanks for the ask~!#my OCs #ocs #original characters #also fun fact! Tyr is based on a character from the game that made me realize I like they/them pronouns for myself #he's inspired by the main character from that game though I felt like he was a he/him user rather than keeping with the main characters in-#simplygrimly #the main characters in-game pronouns #(stupid tag character limits)

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sirspud · 3 years ago

Text

A Vulgar First Impression of Coromon

Playing Pokémon games recently has been something akin to hiring a fairy princess to perform for your daughter’s birthday parties. The first few times she came around were fun, she made all the kids laugh and play their games, but now the princess has grown lazy, idly watching YouTube while disinterestedly mumbling the same four or five lines she’s been spouting for the past twenty-three years. But you keep hiring her regardless, even though your daughter’s trying to point out that she’s not into princesses anymore because she’s pushing 30, and you’re starting to think she might not be worth three hundred bucks a visit. And she’s starting to smell.

So as the Pokémon community sits and waits for the Diamond and Pearl remakes, because what is Pokémon if not a prolonged exercise in nostalgia bait, some indie developers have been trying their hand at doing Pokémon, but properly this time. First came along TemTem, which was, “Like Pokémon but online”, and now there’s Coromon, which is “Like Pokémon” and that’s it.

I’ll admit, I was attracted to Coromon not because of any underlying nostalgia or a want to replay Pokemon, but because the devs put out a free demo for the game, which is a rarity in this modern age of Early Access and delayed release dates. Intrigued, I decided to take a closer look, to see which warts they cut off and which ones they allowed to fester.

The game starts with our protagonist waking up in a small town with his mother about to go get his OR HER first Pokémon. So far, so standard. But where Coromon differs is that you aren’t some apple-cheeked youngster with a criminally neglectful parent, but a college kid who’s been selected for a prestigious university that studies Pokémon – sorry – “Coromon”. And incidentally, Pokémon scores the first point for having a name that actually means something. They’re monstrous creatures that can be caught in a ball and put in your pocket – “Pocket”-“Monsters”. What the fuck does Coromon mean? Because Coro only has a meaning if it’s in Italian, and I’m pretty sure these things aren’t meant to be called “Choir Monsters!”

Anyway, a dude in a wheelchair who was apparently the guy in charge gives you a magic glove and tells you about these glowing elemental orbs, which are important for some reason I wasn’t clear on, and he sends you out on a journey to collect more by finding six elemental titans and – as far as I understood the process – murdering them and stealing their essence in the name of science.

We choose our first Pokémon from a choice between the fire-type, the water-type or the… ice type? And then, we set out on our journey to fight trainers, make new friends, and shuffle about in the grass for an hour because your gobblefrog isn’t level sixty-two yet.

The first thing that struck me about Choirmon is that it really isn’t being coy with its desire to ape Pokémon. Everything, right down to the statistics of each monster, is identical to the way Pokémon does things. The types have the same names, evolving is still called evolving, it even gives you berries and other items for your monsters to hold. You can battle monsters in the wild, blundering into tall grass to scare them out of hiding and capturing them after beating them into a bloody pulp, or you can battle monsters owned by other trainers in unregulated dog fights. So it isn’t trying to be like Pokémon, it is Pokémon. It stabbed Pokémon in an alleyway, cut off its skin and is now swanning about performing a perverted Face/Off act.

Now, I love Pokémon just as much as the next guy, but I’m no deluded fanboy. Pokémon is not perfect. In fact, it’s a game with a lot of flaws. And in its desire to imitate, Collectamon inherits a lot of the same problems that Pokémon does. Using items, for example, takes up an entire turn, and while this can be forgiven in a party-based RPG, where you have other actors to make up for the guy losing a turn, you can only put out one monster at a time, and using anything other than a healing item in the thick of battle just makes you an open target.

Trying to think strategically is also a lost cause, because again, it’s fucking Pokémon. The only strategy is “use whatever the opponent is weak to” or “mash attack until one of you dies”. And while you could argue that Pokémon’s strong point is its simplicity, it does mean that winning a fight is more a matter of patience than a matter of skill.

At time of writing, I’ve been playing the demo for 7 hours. An impressive run-time for a demo, to be sure, and that’s only up to the first boss. Incidentally, it’s in that area that we meet the evil team of this game, because Pokémon had evil teams, and so must we! I don’t even understand their motivation, or who these people even are! They’re presented to us as if we already know what their deal is and why we should hate them. All I know about them is their name and the fact that they like to hang around in caves. Pitch-black ones that you navigate by wandering around aimlessly getting lost in the samey-looking environments.

Really, guys? You thought it’d be a good idea to preserve one of the shittiest areas in Pokémon? Actually, they follow it up with an even shittier level that plays like the gym leaders from the annoying puzzle gyms got together and tried to devise the most efficient backtracking machine, culminating in a game of Mastermind out of fucking nowhere.

Well, so far I’ve just been going on about how the game is the same as Pokémon. What’s different? Well, for a start, each monster has a well of stamina points that they spend to use their special abilities, limiting how many times you can use those moves before your monster has to have a little rest. So you have to weigh up whether or not you want to waste stamina using that really powerful move or whether you want to keep a steady pace with the weaker moves. Except, Pokémon already did that with each move having limited uses. So we haven’t gone anywhere. All we’ve done is paint the walls a different colour.

Erm… what else? Well, your character speaks for one thing, despite you being able to name them and customise them to your liking. I think we tried the talking player avatar thing back in Fallout 4, and it was just as unimmersive back then too. It means that you don’t really get to impose your own character on the avatar, because the avatar makes his OR HER own decisions without your input, accepting every single quest that gets handed to you without even flirting with a dialogue box because it means oh so much to them to help this random faceless NPC, whose unique name and appearance does nothing to make him feel any less forgettable.

…Ah, that’s something different. There’s a quest system. I’m not sure why. In an open world game, quest systems give the game a structure and a reason to explore the world. But, as we’ve established, Crackmon is Pokémon, and so progression is strictly linear. It’s hard to tell just how much it’ll impact the game, since it’s just a four-hour demo, but a quest system like this can easily turn into a to-do list of tedious tasks for rewards that you don’t need. One of the sidequests early on had me capture a pissweasel for some guy, only for the bloke’s mentor to smack him across the head and have him hand the pissweasel right back! This is the very definition of wasting my fucking time! The only reason I caught that pissweasel was for your quest, and I don’t want to deal with its incontinence issues!

Another way that Cloacamon tries to differentiate itself is though its Potential mechanic. Get this – whenever your pet cockcrab reaches a certain XP interval, you get to directly increase its stats by a total of 3 points, on top of the cockcrab’s normal stat increases, so you don’t have to muck around with effort values and breeding to optimise your stats. Each monster also has a “Potent” and “Perfect” form, with each form reaching these intervals sooner than the normal version of the cockcrab. So the game encourages you to abandon your monsters frequently, exchanging them for their shiny, better versions, which I would argue goes against the whole point of Pokémon. At its core, Pokémon is a game about going on a journey and creating a bond with your tag team of beasts, a bond which is impossible to form if you’re encouraged to chuck your friends in the bin the second you find their better, newer models.

I could go down my list of subtle differences, most of which are quality of life changes, like the ability to evolve mid-battle, or the ability to swap out different moves instead of permanently forgetting them, or the fact that you use HM moves yourself instead of teaching them to your Pokémon. But I’d rather finish this first impression by once again re-iterating that Cocaniumon is just Pokémon. It’s not writing any new rules, it’s not even reworking old ones, and it seems content to merely lie on its back and spin its wheels. And while you could argue that Pokémon’s formula doesn’t need to be changed, I would argue right back that not having the ambition to change has long been part of the fucking problem!

If all you want is more Pokémon but with less bullshit, then go ahead and give Coromon a try. Personally, I wasn’t motivated to continue playing past the first boss fight. Part of the problem was that I had no idea what I was ultimately working towards. Collect all the titan essences, so that we can research them! Research them for what? So we can finally uncover the mystery behind shitty Netflix sci-fi originals?

#why yes I do watch zero punctuation how could you tell #coromon #pokemon #review #comedy #first impressions #opinions #TRAGsoft #Freedom Games #that's a reference to the netflix movie The Titan by the way #god knows how many people I thought would get that

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sammysdewysensitiveeyes · 4 years ago

Note

Ranking Brotherhood of Evil Mutant members (including all interations) from your, most to least favorite and please expound why. I do like asking for opinions.

Hmmm....there have been several iterations of the Brotherhood, and I’m not very familiar with some of the later versions, so I’m just gonna go with the earlier versions that I know. Bear in mind, this is entirely subjective, and I like most of these characters, so a character being lower down doesn’t mean I hate them. Going from favorite to least favorite:

Pyro:

Anyone following this blog has probably noticed I love this dude. I’m not exactly subtle about it. I think he’s interesting and fun, as villains go. He’s snarky and cocky, and actually rather friendly when he’s not trying to kill you - very Affable Evil. He’s not necessarily a very good person - he’s self-interested, and can be rather vicious, but he’s a character that I thought could potentially come over to the good side. He seemed, at times, to get into the whole “Freedom Force” thing, and clearly enjoyed saving people alongside Longshot. He seems to bond a great deal with his team-mates - Mystique, Avalanche, even Stonewall (although he was a dick to him and Commando when they first joined). He even pals around with Blob, even though he also snarks at him sometimes. In AOA, Pyro was the only one helping and being protective of Phantazia. And now in Marauders he refers to them as his “friends,” and is perfectly happy traveling around with people that used to kick his ass, even appearing impressed with them (especially Storm), and being a surprisingly good team player. I don’t think Pyro would necessarily become a good guy for altruistic purposes, but I think he enjoys having “adventures” and getting attention and hanging out with his team-mates. I think if Pyro was on an X-Team, and was made to feel welcome, he’d probably be content to fight alongside them and follow the rules (which is basically what he’s doing right now with the Marauders), and maybe some of his team-mates’ virtues would rub off on him a bit. (There was apparently a version of X-Factor pitched to Marvel years ago that included Pyro on the team, and I’m disappointed that never happened, although I loved the X-Factor that we got.) And of course, there was also Pyro’s somewhat redemptive death, where he came to regret his past actions with the Brotherhood and wound up sacrificing his life to save Senator Kelly (fat lot of good it did, since Kelly got assassinated shortly after, but hey, he tried!)

Along with all of that, I am also really intrigued by Pyro’s back story of being a romance author and journalist. There’s the whole dichotomy of a guy who callously burns people to death and also writes gothic romance novels in his spare time. And honestly, it sounds like he’s lived a really interesting life before the Brotherhood - traveling all around South East Asia, working as a journalist covering Indonesia and Vietnam (I’d assume he speaks at least a little bit of Indonesian and Vietnamese to be able to live there and cover news). His motives for joining the Brotherhood have never been established, and I’m dying to know more about how he met Mystique, and why he decided to leave what was apparently a successful career and probably fairly comfortable life to go be an international terrorist. Was it money? A promise of adventure? Did he really believe in Magneto’s cause? Was he already getting into criminal activity before he joined the Brotherhood? There’s a lot of potential for development there, but unfortunately most writers (except Claremont) tend to completely ignore all of Pyro’s backstory. I’m still hoping that Duggan at least makes some reference to it, even just a throwaway comment about how Pyro used to write novels.

TL,DR: I like Pyro because he’s fun and clever, he makes friends with his team-mates, and he’s a writer.

Toad:

Toad is a really intriguing character, but mostly I like him because he’s actually got a lot of potential, but he’s had a shit life and can never seem to catch a break. In the earliest issues, he was just Magneto’s abused lackey, and appeared quite sniveling and pathetic, but later on it was revealed that he’s actually quite intelligent (and good with machines), he just appeared “stupid” due to all the abuse he suffered during childhood. Toad also has a lot of interesting powers - writers seem to give him a new one every other appearance. His stamina, agility, and super-strong legs could actually make him a pretty good fighter if he got proper training. Plus he’s got the prehensile tongue, pheromone secretion, acidic saliva, secretion of a paralytic resin, mind control over frogs - his Marvel bio is a long, long list of secondary powers. Toad could be quite formidable if he actually got his shit together, and there are AU’s (like House of M and Age of Apocalypse) where we see a much more stable, competent, intelligent Toad who is living up to his potential. But 616 Toad remains a joke, He’s either a low-level bad guy (they tried to level him up in the 90′s by making him the leader of the Brotherhood, but it didn’t last) or a pathetic sad-sack used for humor, or both. His attempt to “join” the X-Men led to him being the janitor and basically getting treated like shit (he literally had no bed?) then getting kicked out when he follow Husk to the Hellfire Academy, even though he did that largely out of concern for Husk, and actually helped her and Quentin escape.

Basically, Toad has been subjected to horrible abuse pretty much his entire life, he has a mutation that makes him appear “ugly”, and everyone treats him with, at best, pity, and at worst, hatred and disgust. I’ll admit, he’s had a few chances to better his life that have fallen through because of his own bad choices (and he’s done some horrible things, especially when he was leading the Brotherhood in the 90′s), but most of the time he’s just getting continuously kicked while he’s down. To a certain extent, it’s really a matter of comic writers not being willing to take Toad seriously - he’s considered a joke villain, and therefore gets written that way, because he’s there as an accessory in someone else’s story. At least the Toad/Husk storyline seemed to focus some on Toad himself as a character, even if it ended badly for him. Sometimes, I kinda think Toad is written as evil or pathetic so that writers can justify other characters being shitty towards him. Like, Magneto’s early treatment of Toad was absolutely, inexcusably horrible. Magneto treated everyone in the Brotherhood badly, including his own children, but it seemed like Toad caught the worst of it. Pietro and Wanda were also disgusted by Toad, although they had good reason, since his affection towards Wanda was pretty creepy. Later on, Magneto was revamped into more of a noble, morally grey character, and his past abuse of Toad was mostly forgotten. I don’t think the writers are necessarily doing this on purpose, but it kind feels like Toad remaining a pathetic bad guy was partially a way to excuse Magneto’s poor treatment of him, since Magneto was being reinvented as a more likable character. And not just Magneto, but just about everyone who finds Toad disgusting or cracks jokes about how gross he is – it’s okay, Toad is awful so it’s totally fine to have the physically attractive good guys mock him and treat him like garbage. (Hell, the artists can’t even decide what Toad’s physical appearance should be. Is he skinny? Fat? Does he have green skin? Is his nose ridiculously long or closer to normal? Who knows what we’ll get in each issue. And God forbid he be drawn without his tongue lolling out of his mouth.)

Also, I think that a lot of Toad’s worst personality flaws are at least partially due to the abuse he suffered. To be clear, I’m not justifying the things that Toad has done. He set up death traps for people who wronged him, murdered Sauron’s girlfriend, and stalked and attacked Wanda multiple times. That’s pretty shitty of him! But I also think the abuse had a huge effect on Toad and how he interacts with people. Like, his tendency to obsessively latch onto people, and act like a sniveling lackey – the dude has had pretty much no love his entire life, and he’s always been treated like garbage. Of course he has no self-esteem, of course he’ll fawn over anyone that shows him affection. He’s been raised to believe that he is garbage. Even his tendency to gloat over others being punished, and his whole “I’ll tell Magneto, and you’ll get in trouble!” thing is an understandable survival mechanism – other people getting in trouble means that he’s not the target, for once. Obviously I can’t condone Toad trying to murder people that wronged him, but his anger and resentment is also understandable after the poor treatment he’s suffered. In fact, I think it’s actually healthier for him to be angry than to think that he deserves it. And a lot of the shitty things he did as Brotherhood leader also felt like him desperately wanting to be taken seriously, to be respected – also not a bad thing to want, even if his actions were terrible. Basically, Toad has a lot of personality flaws, and he’s also had a lot of experiences that created or exacerbated those personality flaws. The guy needs serious, long-term therapy, and I think he could become a better (or at least more competent) person if he got the help that he so obviously needs.

TL, DR: Basically, Toad deserves better.

Avalanche:

I have to admit, a lot of my love for Avalanche is all about his relationship with Pyro, be it friendship or something more. (It’s something more in my headcanons, I will forever ship them.) But he’s also a character that we don’t know much about, in part because he tends to talk a lot less than a certain chatty Australian. He seems, more than anything, to be a practical-minded punch-clock villain, who is mostly in it for the money. He doesn’t seem to enjoy putting on a show and reveling in his powers like Pyro, and he doesn’t seem to have the same mean streak that can be seen in Blob (and Pyro, to be fair). I’m sure there are probably instances of Avalanche being dickish and cruel, but in a lot of his appearances that I’ve read, he seems very practical. Do the job, get paid. He also seems fairly content to be a follower or a lackey – happy to take orders from Mystique, or even follow Pyro’s lead when Mystique isn’t around. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his own ideas or opinions, but he doesn’t particularly feel the need to be a leader. Like Pyro, we also don’t know much about his past before the Brotherhood, except that he was married at some point. Where’s his wife now? Why didn’t it work out? Was it because of him being a mutant, or was it his activities with the Brotherhood that drove them apart? Does he still love her? Why did he join the Brotherhood in the first place?

Avalanche also seems to care somewhat about his team-mates, although he’s not as openly friendly as Pyro. During Freedom Force’s disastrous last mission, he made the difficult call to abandon Pyro and Blob to save Commando, something that he was clearly broken up about. And of course, he was willing to go on a mission in the Savage Land with Pyro to get a Legacy Virus cure (that unfortunately didn’t actual exist). Avalanche is selective about who he cares about, but he still shows that he cares through his actions. I don’t want to make this all about Pyro, but I really love their relationship. The stoic, quiet guy/chatty energetic guy dynamic is great. They just love being bros and committing crimes together, and they are quick to work together and back each other up, even in their earliest appearances. I would totally read a min-series focusing on the early days of Mystique’s brotherhood, especially if it gave us some good Avalanche, Pyro and Blob development, and didn’t just center around Rogue and Mystique (both fantastic characters, but they’ve both got a lot of attention directed at them already.)

Also, Avalanche likes to garden, which is nice. And at one point he just got fed-up with everything and tried to retire and become a bartender, which is very relatable. Unfortunately Red Skull murdered him after that. Sorry, Avalanche. I hope you are resurrected on Krakoa, living your best life.

Blob:

Another character who is often not taken seriously. Blob is mean-spirited, crass, and often self-interested, much like the rest of the Brotherhood members. He also was extremely close to Unus, and clearly devastated when Unus’s powers went out of control and killed him. Blob is one of those characters where I think his physical appearance has led to him being designated as a bad guy by the writers – he’s big and gross, so, just like Toad, he’ll be portrayed as a bad person in order to justify the good guys being terrible to him. (Yes, I know there are “ugly” good guys, but let’s face it, they are rare. Most of the good guys look like models.) Blob also, like Toad, gets a lot of crap for his physical appearance, something that is literally part of his mutation. I think some of Blob’s nastiness is definitely a defense mechanism, lashing out at others because he is used to being attacked. It also seems like Blob is really lacking in close friendships, like what Mystique and Destiny or Pyro and Avalanche have (“friendship”). He was really the odd man out in Mystique’s brotherhood. He’s willing to pal around with various Brotherhood members, including Avalanche and Pyro when they’re not picking fights with each other, but he doesn’t seem to have a best buddy after Unus’s death. I kind of admire Blob’s toughness. It would be easy for him to completely lose his self-esteem, like Toad, but he stands up for himself and never grovels to others. He is frequently insulted for his mutation, but he also seems comfortable in his own skin, which is good. He shouldn’t have to feel bad about his own body.

There was an AU story that showed a softer, more thoughtful Blob who wound up in a relationship with Psylocke, so we know he’s capable of showing a better side of himself. To some extent, I like Blob’s crass, take-no-shit personatliy, but I’d also like to see writers give him more depth. I’d especially like to see him reunite with Unus on Krakoa, and the two of them hanging out enjoying each other’s company. I’m also enjoying the cameos we get of bartender Blob on Krakoa, I hope he is also living his best life.

Phantazia:

Honestly, I mostly just want to know more about her. All we really know is that she has a PhD (in some kind of scientific field, I think….she is reading a book on astrophysics in one comic), and she was willing to join Toad’s Brotherhood (and she was also the only Brotherhood member that received an invitation from Exodus to Asteroid M). Why? What was her life before that? Who knows? Most of the time, she seems rather cold, and a bit distant from her team-mates (but I can’t entirely blame her, the Brotherhood is a rough crowd. It’s hard to be the new team-mate, and probably especially hard to be the only woman.) She did seem concerned about Pyro when he was suffering from the Legacy Virus, but she kind of dropped out of sight when the Brotherhood disbanded. She seems like she was mostly in it for personal gain, especially since Toad’s Brotherhood was more about petty crime than mutant rights. Apparently she was deeply affected by Wanda’s reality alterations, which took a toll on her mental health, and was last seen in a SHIELD holding cell. I hope she pops up again on Krakoa.

Rogue:

The only reason Rogue is so low on the list is that I sometimes forget she was ever a Brotherhood member, and because I like to focus more on lesser known characters. But I really like Rogue! She’s tough but sweet, and an incredible badass. Leaving the Brotherhood for the X-Men meant walking away from her team and foster-mother(s), but she still did it, and became one of the X-Men’s most dependable and valued members. I love Rogue’s past, her relationship with Mystique, her relationship with Gambit. I love how she doesn’t take shit, but she also doesn’t go around acting like a jerk, like some of the “tough” characters. (Wolverine, basically.) I like the complexity of her struggles with her powers, and her knowing that her strongest abilities, like strength and flight, were basically “stolen” from someone else. I feel like I should say more, but Rogue is very popular and has had loads written about her already. Rogue is cool, and she deserves the best!

Mystique:

A truly fascinating character. She’s also lower on the list because she is fairly well-known and popular, and also because she can absolutely be a manipulative piece of shit, willing to throw everyone except Destiny under the bus. Yet, at the same time, we see her appear to genuinely care about people, like Rogue, Nightcrawler (after the unfortunate “toss baby off a cliff” incident), Destiny, even Pyro occasionally (she has a nice moment with him on Muir Island, and also calls him “friend” in X-Factor). She’s a character who can never be entirely trusted, which is a large part of what makes her interesting. I think she truly does care about a few, select people. Hell, there’s an early issue in which Mystique fights a bunch of robots programmed to look and act like the X-Men (courtesy of Arcade), and she completely breaks down after having to “kill” the Rogue robot, then hesitates to attack the Nightcrawler bot. I think Mystique can also be extremely callous, cold and manipulative, but I don’t think she is completely evil, just very self-interested, like a lot of villains. Also, she’s probably seen and experienced a lot of shit over her long life that contributed to that callousness (I figure if I’m gonna cut Toad and Blob some slack, I should do the same for Mystique.) I do wish she would stop committing rape by deception in stories (meaning sleeping with someone while disguised as someone else). It’s something that gets glossed over, even though fandom generally despises rapist male villains (and rightfully so), but Mystique pretending to be Blink and sleeping with Mimic is barely a story blip.

Mystique is also interesting just because she’s such a badass. She’s cunning, a good leader, a good strategist, excellent spy, good at hand-to-hand combat (she only loses to Arcade’s X-Men robots because she hesitates). She is damn formidable! She’s also lived a varied and interesting life. There’s a reason she’s gotten so much exposure in comics. I can also understand her being short-tempered while leading the Brotherhood, as she has to deal with the three stooges of Pyro, Avalanche and Blob. Then things get even more complicated during the Freedom Force days. Mystique has a lot of shit to deal with keeping those idiots in line. Her relationship with Destiny is probably my favorite thing about Mystique, they are beautiful wives, and I hope she gets Destiny resurrected so the two of them can live happily together on Krakoa. (Unlikely.)

Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch:

I don’t have much to say about these two, even though I like them. I’m starting to run out of steam in terms of character analysis, and I tend to think of them more as Avengers than Brotherhood members. They both deserve better. Also, they are mutants and Magneto is their dad. Retcon? What retcon?

Destiny:

I don’t have much to say about Destiny because she is very mysterious – always working according to some plan that only she knows. So it’s hard to really know her as a character. She seems like a very intelligent and calm woman. She’s always chilling while the Brotherhood guys are freaking out or picking fights with each other. She also faced her own death bravely and willingly. She seems to have a good sense of humor. One of my favorite stories is Mystique disposing of Destiny’s ashes after her death. She is throwing them off a boat at a specific time and place, according to Destiny’s instructions – and the wind blows them back into her face. Obviously Destiny planned it as a last prank, and I have to like a character who sets that up. Also, one time she let a rock wall collapse on Avalanche and Spiral because she knew they wouldn’t be seriously hurt, and she hated Spiral and wanted to enjoy her humiliation. That’s some impressive pettiness. Destiny is cool, and I hope she comes back.

Sauron:

I don’t really care about him at all.

Mastermind:

Seems like a real creep, especially with his manipulation of Jean Grey/Phoenix in the Dark Phoenix saga. At least he apologized to her at his death. Also, he’s got three daughters, the dude gets around. Regan, Martinique, and Pixie (WTF?! I just read that in his bio.) I am really confused by there being two Mastermind daughters with the same powers, but apparently it was actually a mix-up between two writers. Oops!

That’s all. I know there have been later Brotherhood iterations with other members, including one or both Lady Masterminds, but that was during a time when I wasn’t reading much X-Men, so I’m not familiar with most of those characters. I might have more to say if I eventually read some of the later Brotherhood stories.

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jacksgreysays · 4 years ago

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audiatur et altera pars "let the other side be heard also" (aka free pass to dig up and expand any of your previous works :p)

A/N: Hm, I do love digging through my own old work, anon, like a narcissistic raccoon, so having a pass to do so and further write about it is pretty nice :P

I will be honest though, a lot of my time was trying to figure out which previous work I wanted to do or which best fit the prompt or which I've been wanting to do and needed the excuse to touch back on...

So I narrowed it down to nine. Which isn't particularly narrow, but considering the list I started off with... is pretty good? (Although, one of the nine could be considered technically three for an actual total of eleven? But... uh... yeah...)

At this point I'm typing out my thought process so as to help me eliminate/figure out which 'verse I want to use for this prompt. And also, in a very meta way, this kind of fills the prompt since it's like the other side of the curtain? Anyway, here's the honorable mentions:

9. Torifu POV of Ascendant : an outside (but still close enough to witness) POV of Danzo is in theory a cool idea. Because he can't have always been that megalomaniacal sadistic bastard, surely. But for Torifu, depending on how much he knows about his former teammate/friend's actions, how sad this would be? Not just in seeing all of his former teammates/friends turn into increasingly bitter people but also, if he tried to save any of those ill-fated Hokage candidates it would just be a series of failures. And that's mondo depressing. Plus, part of the... fun? challenge?... that was the original Ascendant was to do a... not necessarily unreliable narrator but a villain's POV and mitigating it with Torifu's POV would peel back a layer unnecessarily.

8. rockstar!Shikaara AU AU : here's the problem, because it wasn't a full fic (this 'verse originated way back in the ask box three sentence fic event) I don't have a proper tag for the rockstar!Shikaara AU. Best way to find it is probably through the Sabaku No Gaara tag, chrono, and then search for rockstar!Shikaara. It is not a great method. However the reason why it came to mind was because of the literal "hearing" part of the prompt and, well, muuuuusic. So then I thought, hey, what if it's an AU of this AU in which Shikako is the rockstar? However, I think we've established that the Nara twins actually aren't that musical and I have to admit that I do still love Shikaara, I haven't been in those feels for a while. And I'll be honest, that ficlet would've been mostly froth.

7. The Saga of Windy Strife: I'm just very fond of them. Unfortunately, it does need to be revamped. And also, I haven't actually FFVII, not even the remake! Something about Windy Strife is just... they're always against something. Which is... there's a difference between being a champion of something vs being a soldier fighting something and they've always been in the latter. And I guess in that same literal "hearing" part of the prompt, it would work well to address the language barrier of Unto The Climate. But again, I'm just not vibing it :(

6. Tamed (aka, the fairy tale!AU) : There's no real plot to this one which was largely the problem. I was thinking about--hey, what if I added a war in there and the team of misfit fairy tale protagonists have to use their unique talents to stop the war before it consumes the land? But then that was a little meh... while there is some misunderstandings about Sasuke hating magic because of his brother and Shikako having magic its largely. That's just drama and rehashing friendship that I'm not so keen on.

5. dragon rider!AU (another one of those “lost” ‘verses): baaasically for the same reason as above but the conflict already exists there. And like, I'll be honest, I did have a little bit written which I've let stagnate on my laptop for literally years and given the premise of it was Shikako showing up and trying to convince the Sand dragons to aid against probably Akatsuki. And literally about getting herself heard by Sand's government. But again! A little meh!

4. Indelible: I mostly wanted to play around in this world because of how hyper-political it's become. I mean, I made it so of course I'm enjoying the drama, but it's one of those things where it's just--hey, a tiny thing can be blown so out of proportion and have so many consequences but it's not out of anything evil or mean. If anything Danzo's bullshit machinations were made obsolete because of this. Which is a little hilarious. The only reason why this didn't win at being the prompt fill is that, kind of like the Torifu POV for Ascendant, this fic would have to be either a Gaara/Sand POV during the chuunin exams (which is so far removed from the original butterfly flapping its wings) or a Nej POV as the only person other than the Nara twins to be in on the secret. And I don't really write Neji well... or at all...

And now for the top three, in no particular order:

Cadmium City/Counterclockwise/Ode to 11010201: ie, my original fiction world. Mostly because, uh, yeah. There's a lot that's happening in that which the prompt could apply to. I was thinking about using the framework of Twelve Sessions since of my original fiction series I think this one is the best received. And, also, the literal "hearing" this also applies to this in multiple ways. But for the prompt this would mean its about Curtis learning about Simone's backstory which isn't as fascinating as a literal superhero going to therapy. Maybe more of an exploration of the other Could/Should/Actually 'verses? Alternatively, and this is a little weirder, I was going back over the Ode to 11010201 'verse and just like. Realizing all the personal shit I put into its foundation and thus how inherently biased it is. I was considering trying to write from R's sister's POV but its almost too personal? Because then I'd have to reexamine the IRL analogue of the situation and consider what pushed me there in the first place. And why, conversely, I haven't written that much in that 'verse since. Emotional Maturity is not here right now.

Iron Will: the only thing stopping me here, tbh, is that I still haven't figured out which iteration of Tetsuki is the one I'm going with. Is she actually the semi-feral, Earth Kingdom, would be Freedom Fighter? Or is that a cover that the Fire Nation heiress uses to manipulate and murder on Azula's behalf? I legitimately do not know.

Primadonna Girl (Says No Thank You): specifically, the dark future AU. It's such a bonkers AU that I don't think I'll ever really be able to justify playing around in it, truly, but dang. I went real bleak with it.

... so less of a fill and more of a fanfic equivalent of a clip show, I guess. Sorry, anon. If any of these struck your fancy, let me know and I'll try my hand at it. Otherwise, uh, feel free to send in a different prompt.

Ask Box Advent Calendar 2020

#jacksgreyson #anonymous #prompt response #brainstorm #links #fanfiction #original fiction #ask box latine dictum

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abitnotgoodiebag · 5 years ago

Text

Blur

Title: Blur

Square Filled: I1 - Did they or didn’t they?

Warnings: drunkenness and terrible mental gymnastics

Word Count: 2,881

Summary: Sam thinks he needs an aspirin, better yet, he needs to get up outta here.

Link to AO3

Blur

Sam groans as he swims back into consciousness. Both his brain and his tongue are unpleasantly fuzzy and he wants nothing more than a cool washcloth, a cold glass of water and complete darkness and silence for the next decade. He is too old to be drinking himself into terrible hangovers. He knows the importance of staying hydrated and yet, here he is again, wishing for death to claim him. Sam can certainly say that he has never been the best at making good decisions.

As Sam debates the pros and cons of moving from his comfortable cocoon, he becomes aware of the sounds of soft snores uncomfortably close to him. He feels the body heat of someone else underneath the sheets of his (is it his?) bed. He also realizes very suddenly that he doesn’t have a single stitch of clothing on.

Shit.

Sam tries to think of who could possibly be behind him snuffling softly in slumber. The fact that he’s naked probably means that they are too and Sam could slap himself for the second time in as many minutes. The pounding in his head doesn’t help at all with his mood and Sam may have finally found the reason to quit drinking altogether. Waking up with strangers in bed is definitely something that is part of his twenties, not to be done when he’s staring at the front steps of forty.

Sam curses the fact that he is the first one to wake up and debates whether or not moving will wake his bedmate. His memories of the night before are patchy at best and the more he tries to piece together his time at the hotel, the more alarmed he becomes.

-------------------------------------

It was the one year anniversary of the battle against Thanos and Sam would rather have been anywhere else. The country was not as accepting of Sam as they had been of Steve. Sam didn’t want to think too closely about why exactly that was (because it was way too easy to get angry and what would that solve?), but there were days that he just wished his detractors would say what they really meant, and not use their carefully-coded acrimonious checklists on why Sam would never be Steven Grant Rogers. Every single decision Sam made was examined under a microscope in the media. /r/notmycap can’t go a week without some viral thread castigating him and slightly less often, Bucky (It’s always the ‘Winter Soldier’ or ‘The Asset’ though, they seem determined to remind the world that Bucky had a violent and unsavoury past).

If the bad press wasn’t enough, the list of full time Avengers was embarrassingly short. The Defenders did their own thing, as did Reed’s little group. It almost wasn’t worth anyone’s time trying to talk to Charles Xavier unless the subject was mutant rights (not that there was a problem with that, Sam definitely knew how stupid people could be around anything they perceived as 'different'). No one wanted to work with the reformed psychopathic (his words, Sam wasn’t convinced) mercenary, well, Peter was trying to tell everyone that he wasn’t so bad but Sam wasn’t touching that with a ten foot pole. Sam, Bucky, Rhodes, and Wanda were all that was left of the Avengers Initiative. Sure they had emergency and consulting members, but the fact was, Sam was barely captain of anyone.

Sam’s cheerless thoughts had him spending his time at the bar, after quickly making the initial rounds to greet everyone. He had to admit, Pepper knew how to throw a party. While there weren’t a lot of full-time Avengers, Thanos had united the entire world against him, and so the rented ballroom (in the most fashionable of hotels) was full-to-bursting. He scanned his eyes across the room taking in the small groups that didn’t quite mesh together. Thor and his new traveling companions, the Guardians of the Galaxy stood in a loose circle laughing entirely too loudly. Thor finally found a group who also lacked inside voices, Sam was happy for him. He looked better than he did that day. That too-long day that Sam went to battle in the fields Wakanda and ended the fight on the remains of their battered home in New York five years and mere seconds later.

Sam was glad he wasn’t around to see Thor's slow slide into misery. He had heard Steve (over the phone, Sam still can't quite look at his wrinkled face) tell him the stories of Thor’s grief at losing his father, brother, best friend, and planet within a week only to lose half of existence the very next day. Sam couldn’t imagine that pain.

Sam dealt with a different sort of grief. He had missed five years. Five years of his mother's life, five years of his niece’s life. Unfortunately so had her mother, his sister. Sam would never understand how his mother dealt with losing both of her children for five years, believing them gone for good. His house and belongings were all long gone, leaving him and Bucky to scramble to find an apartment together in the aftermath on the ‘Unsnappening’ (fucking twitter called it that and unfortunately it seemed to be stuck). He refused to put any more stress on his mom by moving back in when Kayla had to get used to her mother being back. Besides, it was just easier to live with Barnes. He didn’t have any memories of those five years, as far as he could tell no one did, but he couldn’t help but feel it in his bones that he had spent the time with Bucky.

Shaking his head to dispel that line of thought, Sam looked for his best friend. They had arrived together, as usual, but Bucky was quickly called over by Yo-Yo and Shaw, both of them eager to hang out with the soldier (he’d taken to being a SHIELD operative surprisingly well, all things considered, he even had work friends, Sam was proud of him).

Turning back to the bartender, Sam ordered an old fashioned. He had recently discovered that between the two of them somehow Sam was the hipster, even though Bucky had refused to give up his ridiculous (fucking beautiful, if Sam was being honest) man bun. Sam refused to listen to modern music (unless it was Beyonce, but really, it’s Beyonce it goes without saying) and read his paper at the table instead of staring at his phone all the time. Sam couldn’t help it, he was an old soul and he had endured Bucky’s teasing goodnaturedly. He absolutely drew the line at handlebar moustaches and penny-farthings though.

“Birdman number two!” Clint said in what he probably thought was an acceptable volume, clapping Sam on the back.

Sam startled and grinned as he saw his fellow bird-themed hero. “Barton! How is life treating you?”

“Can’t complain.” He said with a cheeky smile as he leaned toward Sam and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “If I do, Laura will give me the old boot. But I’d deserve it because she is the world’s greatest wife.”

“Damn right I am.” Said Laura as she appeared next to her husband.

Sam sipped his drink and watched them bicker gently. He loved that in a couple. Sure the schmoopy ones were cute and all, but life is always better with laughter and it was clear the Barton’s were full of laughter. They excused themselves after two rounds, Laura saying that she was tired and Sam was once again left to his thoughts.

Before he could sink into them too deeply, his eyes landed on Bucky standing next to a scowling Valkyrie and taking a swig out of Thor’s comically enormous flask (Just because he was doing better didn’t mean that he wasn’t still struggling). Sam smiled slowly at the blush that spread across Bucky’s face after his second long pull. Seems like Thor brought the good stuff.

Sam, armed with his bourbon and a liquid loss of inhibitions, (after the second old-fashioned, Sam wondered why he was even pretending to do anything other than get hammered and stopped bothering with anything more complicated) pushed away from the bar and headed in Bucky’s direction.

“Hey there my good people.” Sam smiled lightly as he reached Bucky, Thor, and Valkyrie. “Is this the 5000 proof section?”

Bucky rolled his eyes fondly after his last pull and passed the flask to Val, Thor letting out a brief sad noise in his throat, knowing he wasn’t going to get another swig any time soon. “Sure is, pigeon. This is the cool kids table and you can’t sit with us!”

“Ten points to Hufflepuff for correct use of Gretchen Wieners.” Sam said as Bucky looked confused. Belatedly, Sam realized that they hadn’t gotten to the Harry Potter series yet, Bucky picking both Star Wars and Star Trek (every single iteration, Bucky was obsessed) instead.

“Friend Falcon-Captain! It feels good to have a night of revelry with all of my shield-broth-” Thor stopped, his smile faltering slightly. “My shield-mates! Let us toast!”

Sam tossed back the last few drops of his bourbon while Thor waited for Valkyrie to pass him the flask. Bucky just snorted at Thor’s naivete and headed towards the bar to grab a less alien drink. He reappeared a minute later with three glasses and handed two to Sam and Thor respectively. They clinked their glasses and drained half of their short tumblers as Valkyrie finally drained the flask.

Bucky and Valkyrie let out loud (and surprisingly deep) twin belches sending Thor and Sam into a fit of giggles. Bucky joined in their laughter while Val just rolled her eyes and walked off in the direction of the bar, no doubt in search of a bottle or two to occupy her hands.

“What’s so funny?” Shaw asked, coming up behind Sam and throwing his arm around Sam’s shoulder and resting his chin on the other one. Yo-Yo circled around to bump robotic shoulders with Bucky causing Sam an immediate sharp flare of jealousy in his gut. Yo-Yo and Bucky shared too many similarities for Sam to not see her as a potential threat for Bucky’s time and affection.

“Bucky was just showing us how to play the tummy pipes.” Sam said, his words slightly slurred. His laughter stopped abruptly.

Sam’s smile fell away and Bucky noticed immediately. He glanced briefly to Shaw draped over Sam before he was somber as well, leaving Thor confused as to what exactly was happening.

“Oh-kaaaay.” Shaw drawled as he picked his head off of Sam’s shoulder, leaving his arm curled around Sam's neck. Sam was confused, Shaw was Bucky’s friend, they’d met maybe 4 times total, but if Sam were to guess, he’d bet he was less intimidating to use as a prop than the once-king of Asgard or a super soldier.

Yo-Yo raised an eyebrow. “It seems like we need to catch up with you guys. I could smell you from a foot away.”

Shaw hummed in agreement even though he was clearly ahead of Yo-Yo too if his inability to stand up straight was any indication. “Valkyrie went off for more, but I fear that she does not intend to share anything she finds.” Thor said, sounding vaguely disappointed. “So I must go and fetch us another round!” He looked very proud of himself for thinking of that as he turned and strode away.

“He is amazing.” Shaw sighed, “What’s his deal anyway? Why doesn’t he stay here full-time?”

Bucky glared at Shaw and Sam watched on in confusion. So now it’s not just Yo-Yo he has to worry about, now Bucky has a thing for Thor? Sam (not for the first time) thinks sadly, that he’s just a man. He’s no Inhuman, he has no enhancements, he’s from plain old Harlem, not some mythical planet, and he can’t call lightning with a thought. He’s just Sam and maybe all he would do is slow Bucky down. So zoned out, Sam jerked when Shaw and Bucky laughed, making the room wobble unpleasantly. His obvious distraction just caused them to laugh harder while Yo-Yo’s lips curled into a small smile.

Sam, who realized he was the butt of some joke, flipped them off, making Shaw start all over again, finally taking his arm off Sam’s shoulder to cradle his midsection as he bent forward, cackling madly.

Thor returned with a tray full of shot glasses. “Let us drink!”

“Damn big guy, you do not mess around, do you?” Shaw sounded awestruck as he straightened up and Sam was not at all bitter about everyone’s obsessions with Thor.

Yo-Yo and Bucky grabbed two apiece, taking them in rapid succession just a hint of redness on their cheeks indicating that they were drinking anything other than water.

Shaw grabbed two shots, holding one out to Sam smiling wide, “Us normies gotta stick to our singles. I can’t believe we’re more meat and no tech and still manage to be the lightweights.”

Sam laughed at Shaw’s dig, even as he seethed inside at Bucky leaning down to murmur something to Yo-Yo, eyes on Sam the whole time. Thor ignored all of them in favor of knocking two shots back one-handed, looking disappointed at their flavor.

Sam, now unable to remember exactly how much he had already had, felt that being upright was overrated and sat down, hard. Bucky glanced at him in concern, opening his mouth to ask if Sam was alright, but Sam glared back insolently and Bucky’s jaw snapped shut and he turned back to Yo-Yo who had been watching them in amusement.

Shaw grabbed two of the last four shots and again passed one down to Sam, shrugging. “To bad choices!”

Sam quickly echoed the toast and gulped the offered drink before clumsily getting off the floor, not finding it comfortable craning his neck up at everyone. Yo-Yo ambled away, tray in hand, clearly off to refill it. Sam saw Bucky moving out of his peripheral vision, but by the time he turned his head to get a proper look, Bucky was nowhere to be seen.

---------------------------------------

Sam squeezes his eyes shut as he realizes that the last person he can remember talking to was that irksome weirdo, Deke Shaw. Bucky had left him at the party alone with Shaw, clearly chasing after Yo-Yo. Sam is gripped by a combination of self-loathing and envy that almost chokes the air from him. He will never forgive himself if he has tumbled into bed with that asshole. This whole situation is entirely backwards. He’s pining after a grumpy, nerdy, absolutely gorgeous white boy from the past, not a strange, trouble-magnet from god-knows-when in the weird-ass future.

Sam knows who he wishes it was behind him. Every day he tries his hardest to be the best friend (who is he kidding, he’s doing a great boyfriend audition and has been for months) to Bucky. After living together for almost a year, they have a certain bond, but not quite the type Sam wants. He thinks Bucky wants it too, most of the time, but Sam knows better than to try and rush something before its’ time. Sam’s father always told him that anything worth having was worth waiting for if necessary and James Barnes was definitely worth having.

The person behind him snores loudly once, before Sam feels a hand reach around his middle, drawing him back into a firm torso. Sam freezes immediately, afraid to look down and finally solve the mystery. The body he's trapped against is mostly warm. Mostly, because Sam can definitely feel the not-quite-cool smoothness of what Sam will bet everything he owns is vibranium against his shoulder blade.

Sam relaxes and very slowly, smiles. All of the hatred at himself for possibly ending up with anyone else leaves him as almost quickly as it came. He can't wait for Bucky to tell him everything. Or Thor. Or even Yo-Yo, even though Sam will make Bucky do all the talking if that's the route they have to go. Sam is willing to bet he has some interesting message on his phone if he bothered to check it (If it was even still on at this point, who knows how late in the day it is). Knowing that he’s lying here with Bucky surrounding him makes the not remembering much easier. He has no regrets other than not committing every single detail of the previous night to memory to constantly replay over and over and over again.

Satisfied that it is indeed Bucky he’s woken up with (Sam breathes in deep and could slap himself, how did he not smell the traces of his own body wash? Bucky is always stealing it instead of using his boring bar of soap and smelling himself on Bucky drives Sam crazy) makes it easy to let his eyes fall shut and let the hangover pass. His best friend (and maybe, hopefully, probably, finally more) is curled around him keeping out the noise and light of the world and Sam needs to sleep this hangover off. He smiles to himself as he focuses on the soft snores and drifts into a peaceful sleep. Sam knows that everything is going to be just dandy.

#sambucky #sbbingo1 #winterfalcon #k's sambucky playlist #did they or didn't they?#I'm still unclear #fanfic #Sam is way too hard on himself #Bucky and sam are shits #Thor needs all the hugs #I'm only on season 1 of AOS so sorry about yo-yo and deke I have no real frame of reference yet

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sofiessketches · 5 years ago

Text

NASASocial experience at JPL

This is a LONG one, so I’m gonna put it under a readmore!

This was my first ever NASA Social, so I didn’t really know what to expect when I applied, what the chances were or what other sorts of people would be there. I was surprised I even got in, because compared to some of the other people I have very few followers, but I think there’s more to it than that! As Stephanie, the head of social media at JPL, said, “You were chosen for your insatiable curiosity, and for the stories you tell”. I really appreciate that the selection process was more about being a creator of SOMETHING that you truly care about.

I’ve been to JPL several times for tours and lectures, but it’s always exciting to come up to the front..there was a really long line, I’m assuming because of the event and also traditional media that was there to interview people.

Got my badge and headed in, and said good morning to the Curiosity model! (which I wish was as detailed as the real thing..I still love her tho. I’ve just been spoiled having gone on tours and doing a lot of research on Curiosity that I was able to spot what’s missing..)

Admiring how the light hits her..er..Chemcam

I never get tired of looking at this piece, but this was the first time I actually checked out the plaque next to it, which had a helpful diagram!

An installation displaying the information from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and GRACE Follow-on missions, which in the words of my friend Sirina, shows us how screwed we are, in a beautiful way! I also realized the reason the screens are this shape is because the spacecraft are shaped like that...!

JPL’s inspiring slogan in a beautiful geometric typeface B)

We got to the meeting/conference room, with portraits of all JPL’s past and present directors around. The last seat at the front table appeared to be taken by the Mars 2020 wheel, so I asked if I could sit there with the wheel, and my day was made! I have to admit this may have been the highlight of my day. One of the first JPL-specific drawings I did was a study of an image Curiosity had taken of her own wheels on Mars, and after that I read a lot about how the wheels worked and how the design was less than ideal..it makes me happy to see the next iteration and how it’ll work out!

No pointy grousers for the sharp Mars rocks to snag on here!!! Just this...veeeeery shallow S-curve.

Everyone hanging out and social media-ing before the event began, waiting for more people to get there. I happened to sit next to a couple people I had pre-stalked on Twitter from the list they made of participants!

LOSING MY MIND EVEN MORE THAT WE COULD TOUCH AND PICK UP THE WHEEL???!?!!? It was pretty light, since it was a 3D model and not made of actual aluminum.

Lookin cute together. This is Kevin Baird, an awesome photographer! The only patches we had in common were the NASA meatball (not even the same one, though) and the SOFIA patch, which was strangely almost in the same spot on both of our jackets.. (on the back left side)

Then Stephanie, JPL’s social media head, came and proposed to us with space grade aerogel, and of course we all said yes.

After an introduction, Linda, another social media expert at JPL, brought over a top secret looking box, which she explained will have some cool graphics relating to Mars 2020 on the front and inside soon (excited to see that!!)

Inside were material samples of several components of Mars 2020, including the many layered thermal blanket, the ropes that will lower the rover onto the surface of Mars (which can hold the weight of 1 car EACH, and the rover will be suspended by 80 of them) as well as the parachute material (orange), which was remade for better strength and lightness.

We also got to hold a replica of the sample cache tubes that Mars 2020 will be filling!

At 10:00, the event we were there for, the State of NASA, came on (a budget rollout explaining briefly how much money the government will be giving to NASA in 2021 and what it’s for) so we watched Jim Bridenstein in front of some incredible engines...

And I just..get excited when I see the rover on the screen ok..

There was a super cool internal view of how the Mars 2020 will be depositing sample caches! The video is below:

youtube

Anyway, the budget rollout declared 22 billion to NASA and 3.3 billion of that to the development of the human landing system, which will go toward landing humans and science on the moon for the Artemis program. You can read more here about this.

After that, Director Watkins and Dr Zurbuchen came to answer questions, and we learned a bit about Mars Sample Return, and the mission that will come before that but after Mars 2020, which will map icy areas in Mars’ poles. (Really looking forward to learning more about that!!) I gave Dr Zurbuchen some stickers I made and he gave me his card......!

Soon after, we headed to the Science building, to learn about MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) (I’ve noticed, the bigger the budget on these missions, the more effort they put into making the acronyms for everything sound cool) This technology demonstration is on Mars 2020 to prepare for larger scale carbon dioxide to oxygen conversion from Mars’ atmosphere for human use. This size of MOXIE creates only about enough oxygen to keep a small dog alive. Still impressive!!!

Wandered around the MOXIE lab a little and took a peek at the rest of what was on the walls and tables..

After that, we went to the Spacecraft Assembly Facility, where Mars 2020 was not, but that’s a good thing! I’m actually not sure which part is in the box there.. but soon after we left, it left too!

Teeny tiny Mars 2020 model hidden at the end of the viewing area...

Best.

At the indoor mars yard, a couple InSight engineers talked to us about how they use this area to test software before they send it to Mars. Here from left to right are the engineering models for Mars2020, InSight, and Curiosity.

Her name is Maggie!

One of my goals in life is to be able to stand in front of the arm and draw it until I understand what the hell is going on.

Also going to insert some pics I took last week because I was lucky enough to get a tour from my friend Sirina, where there were engineers inside working on the arm:

Next, we headed to the Mars Sample Return testbed!

It makes me excited to be in the rooms with dirt regolith inside.. also SmalBoSSE is the best acronym I’ve seen all day...

The “volleyball” that Mars 2020′s sample caches will eventually be stored in, to be fetched by another rover, launched into orbit around Mars and picked up to be sent back to Earth!

More freaking out about rover wheels. This is a prototype of one that will be on the rover to pick up the samples; the wire is slightly deformable which is great for offroad Mars action.

The rover will be a joint effort between NASA and ESA.

I love seeing these posters with hints of other projects going on. So cool!!

Last stop (cry) was Mission Control, aka The Center of the Universe, where all the data the Deep Space Network gets from spacecraft comes in.

The view from inside from my previous tour!

*eyes emoji when I see Mars 2020*

The darkroom and Curiosity’s Ace’s desk, where they send commands to Curiosity at 10:30AM Mars time.

Spitzer’s end of mission from Monday (top) vs the day after it was decommissioned (bottom).

Center of the Universe!!!

Ouagh don’t step on it! Well you can..

It was sad to say goodbye to our excellent guides, but we’ll be keeping in touch!! ;)

I also got a bunch of awesome pictures taken of me, which I was surprised by, because usually I’m the last one people take pics of..!

My jacket, which they posted on JPL’s instagram... gosh!!!!!!

And some stickers/new business card design (did I post this here yet??) I gave to everyone I met!

Displayed at Shannon Forrey’s desk!

This was a truly amazing experience, my first time attending one of these events, I learned so much and had such a great time surrounded by inspiring and talented people. Thank you again to everyone at JPL who made it possible and to all the scientists and engineers who took the time to share their work with us! I’ll never forget this day.

Also, I want to make some art based off what I learned, so keep an eye out for that in the upcoming weeks!

#nasasocial #nasa #nasajpl #jpl #mars 2020 #mars sample return #mars insight #mars curiosity #curiosity rover #stem #science #space #deep space network #mission control #state of nasa

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