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thefifthnetwork · 4 months ago

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About This Project

The Fifth Network is a project where I watch The WB and UPN on a 30 year delay. The WB and UPN were both attempts to launch a fifth broadcast television network in the United States in 1995 following the success of Fox (the fourth broadcast network) in the prior decade.

While a single fifth broadcast network might have been successful given the TV landscape of the late 90s, the two simultaneously-launched fledgling networks largely ended up competing with each other rather than challenging the Big 3 or Fox. While both networks had some successful shows, they constantly lost money, and both threw in the towel in 2006 after 11.5 years, replaced with The CW, a new single fifth network co-owned by Time Warner and CBS (the final owners of The WB and UPN, respectively).

The Project

Who are you?

My name is Jen Lastnameredacted (she/her). You can follow me on Tumblr @nullpointerintime or on Bluesky @nullptrintime.bsky.social.

Is this a nostalgia thing?

Nope! I was only 10 when The WB and UPN ended, and I didn't watch anything on either network while they were actually on the air. Prior to starting this project, the only UPN shows I had watched were Voyager and Enterprise [1] and the only WB show I had watched was the first season of Supernatural [2].

Why then?

I find this period of TV history fascinating. It's a transitional period where there was clearly more demand for TV shows than the Big 3 could fulfill (as demonstrated by the success of Fox and various first-run syndicated shows), but TV itself was also changing as you started seeing more serialization in stories and eventually fully serialized shows.

Maybe a single fifth network could have found a sustainable place in the TV ecosystem, but the hubris of media executives launching two new networks ultimately doomed them both. By the time they got their act together and merged in 2006, the broadcast landscape was firmly established as a Big 4 (now including Fox) and cable networks were now also producing their own series.

Like its parents, The CW found modest success with niche audiences [3] but continued to constantly lose money. Sports seem to be the only thing people are willing to watch live these days, so maybe pivot to live sports that The CW's new ownership is making will pay off? [4].

Meanwhile, the whole cycle has repeated with streaming, as Netflix became the Fox that demonstrated the new market and then every other media company assumed they could replicate that success with their own streaming service even if they all launched at the same time.

Anyway... another goal of this project is to force myself to watch shows without bingeing them. In August 2023, I started watching Survivor, and by the end of the year I had watched all of Survivor. Shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer have been on my list for forever, but I don't want to just watch all seven seasons in a blur. This project forces me to slow down while also giving me a sampler of a wide variety of other shows I might not otherwise watch.

Will you watch everything that aired on these two networks then?

Definitely not. For one, it's literally impossible, as there are some shows where I'm unable to find a source to watch them today. Aside from that, I do expect to end up watching most of what aired for the first year or so while both networks were limited to just a day or two of programming each week. As the schedules expand to more days, I'll probably continue watching roughly the same amount each week and be more willing to drop shows that I'm not feeling.

These are the rules I'll generally try to keep myself to:

I should watch a least a couple hours of programming each week, unless everything scheduled is either unavailable or a rerun of something I've already seen.

I should watch at least one episode of each show that aired on The WB or UPN and is available in some form. This will typically be the pilot, unless the pilot is unavailable and some other episode(s) are.

For shows that last more than one season, I should generally check in with them at least once per season, even if I'm not watching otherwise. This rule is relaxed for reality shows.

This whole project is supposed to be fun though, so I reserve the right to change these rules if they become too restrictive. No guarantees that I actually finish all 11.5 years either. If I finish this project I'll literally be 40 when it's done. Even if I'm still fully enjoying it, it's possible that it becomes too much work to continue depending on what else is going on in my life. If this project becomes a chore rather than something I enjoy...

When are new recaps posted?

A recap post of what I watched in the preceding week will be posted when it's Saturday thirty years ago, since neither network ever scheduled anything in primetime on Saturdays (even The CW only started scheduling Saturdays in the past few years).

This means that recaps will initially go out on Tuesdays in the present day. Due to leap years and 30 not being a multiple of 4, this will switch between Mondays and Tuesdays in March of every even year.

The new networks didn't expand to Thursdays and Fridays until Fall 1998, so posts may occasionally go up earlier if I finish a week's writeup early.

How strict are you about watching week-by-week?

I won't watch any episodes from beyond the week I'm currently on. A large part of the motivation for this project was to avoid binge watching, so I plan to be fairly strict on this.

That being said, I may occasionally watch ahead of the actual 30-year gap in order to build up a buffer before some weeks where I know I'll be traveling or otherwise too busy. Posts will still go up 30 years later, and I'll make sure to finish one week's watching completely before moving on to the next one. I expect this to be particularly common with summer reruns where there is less to watch and it's easier to just batch weeks together in my actual watching.

Within each week, I'm giving myself flexibility to watch in whatever order works best to allow for things like coordinating watching a particular show with friends, or leaving shows I'm marginal on/have already seen until the end of the week if I have time.

What's your spoiler policy?

Since I'm watching week-by-week anyway, I won't even know any spoilers for future episodes of most shows, but for the few shows I have watched before, I'll try to avoid any explicit spoilers. I may discuss vague spoilers around the direction of shows to the extent I'm aware of them. How long each show actually runs is obvious from the embedded schedules, so that's completely fair game.

I'm watching 30-year-old shows here, so I don't expect to completely avoid spoilers, but I'd appreciate it if you don't send explicit spoilers for something I'm watching directly to me. Things like "you'll really like where this show ends up going" or "you should definitely make sure to watch this episode" are great though! I'd prefer if you don't tell me bad things about the future direction of shows I'm enjoying though. Let me be disappointed when I get to the bad stuff rather than preemptively telling me something sucks.

The Website

While I'm cross-posting on Tumblr, my posts about this project primarily go up on my website, which includes interactive schedule elements that can't be included in Tumblr posts.

In addition to the specific elements embedded in these posts, the site also contains a fully interactive schedule for the entire runs of both networks, which you can browse here.

The Tumblr versions of each recap post will include text-based versions of the relative schedule entries, with links to the interactive versions on the site.

What's included and what's not?

Every primetime schedule slot for The WB and UPN should be filled, and I also filled The CW's schedule for the rest of 2006, as well as most airings of most WB/UPN shows that continued on The CW for the rest of their run. Initial airings of episodes that premiered on another network and later re-ran on The WB or UPN are included in infoboxes, but won't appear on the calendar.

The following is not included:

anything that aired outside of primetime (8-10 PM on weekdays; 7-10 PM on Sundays)

any shows or specials that premiered on The CW in 2007 or later

any continuations of WB/UPN shows on other networks, including airings of episodes that were ordered for WB/UPN, but never aired on them

new episodes of WB/UPN reality shows on The CW in 2007 or later

Supernatural season 6 and later (I didn't feel like adding all 15 seasons, especially given only one season aired on The WB, and season 5 seemed like a decent stopping point).

some reruns of other WB/UPN shows in 2007 or later

Where-to-watch info is added on an ad-hoc basis. I did a cursory search for streaming and DVD availability of all shows, but I've only searched more extensively for shows that I will be watching soon. All streaming info is for the United States; if you live outside the US, you'll need to look up availability on your own. If a given show is available on multiple services of the same type (paid, subscription, and free), I may not include all of them, especially for shows that I won't get to for a while, given availability changes regularly.

Links to taped episodes on YouTube or the Internet Archive are only included when I'm unable to find a legal streaming service or in-print DVD. I don't host pirated content on this site, but I don't have any qualms about linking to it when it's the only way to watch it.

Where did the data come from?

All schedule data was manually compiled by me from a variety of online sources, particularly TV Tango, IMDb, TheTVDB, and Wikipedia. These webpages by Aaron Greenhouse were also useful references.

When sources conflicted, I made judgement calls/guessed to decide what to include. I'm fairly confident that I got the airdates and times for most first-run episodes right, but reruns may be less accurate. Some reruns only list a show rather than a specific episode. If you have evidence that I got something wrong, please send it to me here.

What do the different colors and indicators mean?

Purple schedule entries are for UPN. Yellow schedule entries are for The WB. Green schedule entries are for The CW. Most reruns will use faded versions of the network's color [5].

The interactive schedules on the website include additional indicators, such as when a given schedule entry is the last known airing of a given episode. See the website version of this post for more details.

Example schedule that demonstrates these elements:

Monday January 18, 1999 Malcolm & Eddie S3E05: "Dream Girl" - 8 PM on UPN 7th Heaven S3E12: "All That Jazz" - 8 PM on The WB Guys Like Us E12: "Good Old Days" - 8:30 PM on UPN The Sentinel S1E01: "The Switchman" - 9 PM on UPN Buffy the Vampire Slayer S3E06: "Band Candy" - 9 PM on The WB

Can I browse the calendar if I don't have JavaScript enabled?

Clicking on a schedule entry relies on JavaScript to dynamically generate the infobox, but you can see pre-rendered calendars for each year here and pre-rendered infoboxes for each show here.

How can I follow you to see when new recaps are posted?

You can follow this blog on Tumblr, where I post auto-generated conversions of each new post here. You don't get the interactivity of the embedded schedule, but each post will appear on your dashboard. I also post a link to each new post on the site's Bluesky account.

At some point, I'll try to get an RSS feed up on this site directly. If that's something you're interested in, let me know so I can prioritize it.

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Both binge-watched in 2020 ↩

Binge-watched during high school, because I was active enough on Tumblr back then that of course I did. ↩

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend my beloved ↩

Hearing about college football on The CW was one of the sparks that got the idea for this project going in my mind. ↩

The exception is when an episode premiered on a different network. In that case, the first time that episode is aired on WB/UPN, it will be colored like a first-run episode. ↩

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pavjosanuw · 18 days ago

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"Bhaag Milkha Bhaag" and nationalism in South Asia

By: Pavandeep Singh Josan

When planning this post, I had initially intended to write a critical media analysis of one of the final weekends of Premier League action in England for the 2024-25 season. However, on Tuesday a terrorist attack took place in Kashmir (a region of South Asia contested between India and Pakistan). 26 people were killed in the attack. The majority were Indian tourists to the region, but one was a Pakistani civilian. This attack has led to a sudden and dramatic plunge in relations between India and Pakistan and has also drastically changed the focus of my post today.

With the sudden plunge in relations between the two nations comes a litany of calls from prominent media and political figures in both countries for retaliation against the other. There is now real fear amongst many South Asian communities as to what the consequences of retaliation from both sides could be. These fears are reflected amongst global political leaders too, given that both nations are nuclear powers.

Where this ties into sport, however, and the focus of my post today, will be about how the rivalry between India and Pakistan is reflected in sports movies produced in India. In particular, I will be reviewing perhaps the first modern sports biopic produced by the Hindi cinema industry (also known as Bollywood). This movie is called “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag” (literally translated as “Run, Milkha, Run”), and is centred on the life and sporting achievements of Milkha Singh. Milkha Singh was an Indian sprinter who won Commonwealth and Asian Games gold medals in the 400m and placed fourth at the 1960 Olympics. He has been referred to by journalists (such as Rohit Brijnath), as “…the finest athlete India has ever produced.”

“Bhaag Milkha Bhaag” was released in July 2013, and stars well-known Bollywood actor Farhan Akhtar in the title role as Singh. The film was directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, and distributed by Viacom Pictures (a key distributor of Hindi-language films across the world). The film was based on Singh’s autobiography called “The Race of My Life”, which was notably also published in July 2013. It’s important to note here that the film was a huge commercial success, both in India and globally, having been produced on a budget of 410 million Rupees, the film grossed 2.1 billion Rupees.

The film, as a biopic, naturally traces the life of Singh and narrates his sporting achievements. However, the film also focuses heavily upon Singh’s early life, particularly with regards to his experiences as a teenager during the Partition of India in 1947. Singh was born in British India in 1929, but the area of British India that he was born in became part of Pakistan when the country was partitioned in 1947. The film narrates Singh’s experience of violence during Partition, witnessing the killing of his siblings and parents, and focuses on how these experiences both spurred on Singh’s sporting achievements and acted as a source of trauma that held him back from performing at his best during parts of his career.

As a scholar of Partition, I would argue that many of the current tensions and the distrust between India and Pakistan exist due to the violent nature of Partition. A film that focuses on sporting achievement that interrogates Partition is therefore a fascinating (and very relevant) lens through which to assess the situation that exists between these two nations today, and the way that sport is used to entrench (or alleviate) these tensions.

I have many qualms with the presentation of Partition in “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag”, and I would argue that as a pedagogical tool, it should be used as an example of how Partition should not be portrayed in the media or taught in schools or colleges. The film portrays Partition violence as being solely one-sided (instead of being perpetrated by individuals on both sides of the border between India and Pakistan). Additionally, Singh is situated as an intensely Indian character, and his athletic endeavours are portrayed as a way of serving the nation, instead of as a way of excelling at a personal level (the fact that Singh joined the Indian national athletics program after being recognised during his service as an Indian Army officer also strengthens this perception). Therefore, “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag” portrays a highly nationalist form of sporting competition, and sport in this case is not a form of ‘conscious resistance’, as we investigated in week 2 of the quarter.

Having laid out this film’s shortcomings in terms of its portrayal of Partition, and its use of sporting excellence as a form of nationalist pride, I still believe that “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag” possesses a pedagogical use. The film can be used in South Asian (and particularly Indian) community and religious spaces to speak to a range of audiences (especially audiences who are teenagers and older) about the dangers of nationalism, and how sport can be used to further nationalistic narratives (especially in the case of sport in South Asia becoming a way to defeat regional rivals in a wider political game).

Thinking of different pedagogical environments, this film could definitely be used in college classrooms to educate college students about the same lessons regarding nationalism and sport. However, whilst the pedagogical environment of the college classroom is useful, in this particular instance reaching out to members of South Asian communities is more important in order to create change within South Asia itself.

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tiltingheartand · 2 years ago

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"so a professor and a sniper walk into a gay bar in florida"

I need to know.

ahahaha. so, actually, counting the dreamling fic i posted in november (which came third) and the jack/daniel fic i posted yesterday, at one point i had three separate “so these two people bump into each other in a gay bar” WIPs. the jack/daniel one came first; this one came second, so the name was mostly me making a joke at my own expense.

this one is for numb3rs, and i have no idea if you’ve ever watched that! the professor in question is charlie eppes, the main character, and the sniper in question is ian edgerton, the fourth-best sniper in … the country? i wanna say the country. (another character, at one point, calls him “one of the best snipers in the known universe”.) the show takes place in LA and LA-adjacent areas, which is why the florida part is relevant.

i find the dynamic between charlie and ian fascinating. the first time they meet there’s so much friction, but as the series progresses you can visibly see them thawing toward each other. when ian is trying to clear his name in “ultimatum” one of his initial demands is charlie, on a video call, in 20 minutes; when charlie gets there, ian apologizes for getting him involved, and you can see he genuinely means it. and in the last episode, ian’s “i cannot believe your brother didn’t invite me to his wedding!” is something he never would’ve said after their first meeting. neither of them probably would’ve believed they’d get to that point, after their first meeting.

this also stems from my general dissatisfaction with the charlie/amita relationship — don’t get me wrong, i absolutely loved amita as a character, but the will-they-won’t-they got so, so, so old. and even after they finally settled down together it … i don’t know. sometimes when i’m watching a tv show two characters will get together and my thought is “awwww, finally!” or something like that, and sometimes two characters will get together and it feels like they’re only getting together because the writers thought it was a good idea. which, like … i realize the inherent nonsense of that statement, don’t worry, but i can’t think of a better way to put it. it felt very forced, to me.

so that’s where this picks up: a year or so after the season finale, charlie in florida because he’s been at loose ends for a few months since the visiting professorship and his marriage both ended and he figured, hey, why not? and ian in florida because his last assignment was in florida and his bosses have been Strongly Hinting that maybe he should take some of his vacation days, perhaps, please.

also, here, a snippet:

“Well well well,” he hears, a second and a half later, and turns his head despite himself, because that sounded an awful lot like Ian Edgerton, which is ridiculous. Except when he looks, Ian just raises his eyebrows a little, looking like he’s trying very hard not to smirk.

“Ian,” he says. “Hi.”

“Professor,” Ian replies, nodding slightly, letting a bit more of the smirk out. “What’s a nice young man like you doing in a place like this?”

“Well,” Charlie says, “I’m guessing you’re looking for a more detailed answer than drinking, even though it would be accurate?” He holds up his half-empty glass as proof.

“Good guess, although you don’t actually have to answer,” Ian says. Then, after a pause, “Also, what is that you’re drinking?”

Um. “Hmm,” he says out loud, looking down into the glass thoughtfully. No drink name written on the underside of the glass; that would be too easy. Also too complicated, probably, in the long run. “I don’t remember what it’s called, actually, but it tastes like pineapple and coconut and blue.”

“Blue is a flavor?”

“Absolutely.” Probably.

(ask me about any of my WIPs, if you would like!)

#asks answered #ask meme #my fic lives here #numb3rs #in retrospect probably more rambling than you expected

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sammysdewysensitiveeyes · 3 years ago

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Kinda fascinated by that trend in the 80′s and 90′s of taking movies and turning them into kids cartoons, whether the original movie was actually child-friendly or not. So you wound up with stuff like:

The Real Ghostbusters

I feel like this must have been the success that started the trend, because this show ran for several seasons. I watched this cartoon before I ever saw the 2 movies. It makes sense, I think. A comedic series about ghost hunters using laser packs fits neatly into a weekly cartoon series. The first movie is mostly okay for kids, despite some scary imagery and that one dream sequence of Ray getting a ghost blowjob. The second movie is even more child-friendly, despite Vigo the Carpathian being fucking terrifying. I was a big fan of all Ghostbuster-related stuff as a child.

Beetlejuice

This was another franchise where I saw the cartoon before the movie. When I finally got around to the movie, I surprised that lovable scamp Beetlejuice was actually the villain. But hey, even in the movie he’s just kind of a funny guy. We’ll just pretend that him trying to force-marry Lydia didn’t happen. In the cartoon, they are platonic buddies who hang out together in the Netherworld, Beetlejuice usually pulling some kind of sleazy scheme. I can understand making him the star, he’s the most interesting part of the movie, and he makes a more fun companion for Lydia than the dead couple in the movie. (Although I liked them, they were nice.) I watched this one, too, not as devotedly as Ghostbusters.

Police Academy

The movies were just dumb, slapstick comedy, so okay, I kinda get it. I remember seeing most of the movies as a kid, although my Dad thought the first and second were “too adult” for us kids. (I’m guessing they must have gone down a rating and gotten more family friendly starting from 3 onward.) Whatever critics might say, the movies made money, and they already had a wacky, cartoon ensemble cast assembled. But I just think of the Simpsons here: “Why do you think I took you to see all those Police Academy movies? Because they were funny?! Well, I didn’t hear anybody laughing, did you?!” I admit, I did watch this as a kid, though.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

On the one hand, the idea of fighting mutant tomatoes, and the “Tomato Task Force,” including a scuba diver, a cowboy, a gymnast and a guy dressed like a WWII pilot, plus a teenage boy and a girl who is secretly a mutated tomato all sound like a recipe for a successful cartoon. On the other hand, the movies themselves, both Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Return of the Killer Tomatoes (where most of the characters come from) were not exactly box office hits, more cult films. I will say, I thought Return of the Killer Tomatoes is actually pretty funny. It doesn’t just break the fourth wall, it kicks down the fourth wall and stomps on it. At one point, they run out of money to complete the film and have to get brand sponsorship, so you see all the generic food items suddenly become Snickers and cans of Coke that the actors conspicuously hold up to the camera. The cartoon wasn’t that clever, from what I remember.

Little Shop of Horrors

I mean.....the plant eats people. I know it was a hit musical and there was a movie with Rick Moranis that had a much happier ending than the Broadway version, but.....the plant eats people, and Seymour is a murderer. I guess they were trying for another Beetlejuice by making the colorful movie villain into a mostly harmless protagonist. I don’t think he ate people in the cartoon. I didn’t really watch this one. The musical is a banger, though, you should all listen to the soundtrack.

Robocop

Hey, you know that ultra-violent and bloody action movie about corporate greed and corruption and crime and the militarization of the police force? Let’s turn that into a kid’s cartoon. It’ll be perfect. I will say, though, kids did watch the original movie. I remember watching the first part of it at a friend’s birthday party, when I was way too young to see that scene in the executive boardroom where that one guy gets shot dozens of times by a malfunctioning robot. That’ll live in my memory forever.

Toxic Crusaders

Okay, I really want to know who greenlit this one. Because the movie this was based on, the Toxic Avenger, was NOT remotely child-friendly, and more of a cult movie than a box office hit. At least Robocop was popular, and older kids might conceivably enjoy it. The Toxic Avenger was a campy B-movie satire with gruesome violence, as the hero, Toxie, murdered people in horrible ways. It made even less money at the box office than Return of the Killer Tomatoes. I can only guess that some executive thought a cleaned-up version of the movie would attract kids who liked Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with it’s weird mutated group of heroes. Kind of like how, after the success of X-Men: TAS, every conceivable super-hero team was getting a cartoon, so we got short-lived stuff like UltraForce and Wild C.A.T.S. At any rate, in the cartoon, Toxie and his mutated friends fought for environmentalism and cleaned up pollution, and for some reason their enemies were aliens instead of corporate polluters. I think I watched like one episode of this. If nothing else, I admire the dedication to taking a Troma movie and making it wholesome and kid-friendly.

And there were so many more. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Bill and Ted, Rambo, if it was remotely popular as a movie, and they thought they could market it to kids, it got a cartoon. As far as I know, they’re not doing that as much any more. Maybe because all the action movies these days are Marvel and DC, which already are comic-book adaptations and have had multiple cartoons. Otherwise, I can only assume that the same people who adapted The Toxic Avenger would be giving us The Conjuring, Midsommer and Wolf of Wall Street cartoon series. You know, for the kids. Or maybe a Hereditary cartoon featuring the adventures of Charlie and her best friend Paimon, a mischievous demon, as they have magical adventures with her older brother Peter and learn important lessons.

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everseeking · 4 years ago

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hello!! It's your relief story anon!!! i friken love what you wrote!!! may i have another request 🥺 similar to the relief story, Levi's s/o gets into a near death experience right in front of him and he freezes for the first time. everyone's super shocked abt it after the mission and he gets reprimanded just for formalities (erwin n hanji rlly just wanna check up on him personally) but they all understand since he's been through a lot. Levi can't deal with his emotions and he wants to say i love you to his s/o (first time saying it) but he doesn't know how and yes HAHAHAHA

- OMG HI AGAIN ! IM SO HAPPY THAT YOU ENJOYED IT THANK YOU SO MUCH !!!!! thank you again not only for requesting that, but also for requesting again, it’s so awesome when u guys come back and request more :) plus your ideas are always so great. i had a lot of fun writing this, i hope u enjoy <3 (and i got your second message tysm for adding it ! i tried to include as much fluff as possible but my dumb brain always defaults to angst hahaha)

how to say i love you

- levi ackerman x reader

warnings: season 2 and ova spoilers (if you haven’t watched the ova’s yet they’re on youtube but this only references ‘a choice with no regrets’ aka levi’s ova)

levi has never had...feelings for anyone before.

the romantic kind, of course. he's felt plenty of things towards people on a regular basis—anger. hate. disgust. confusion. annoyance. frustration.

to be fair he has had the occasional friend, or the occasional person who he respected, and others who he flat out wanted to protect. just never anything romantic.

this didn’t bother him, falling in love wasn’t his top priority or anything. his life has been one traumatic experience after the other. there was no time for him to be romantically involved with another, nor was he willing to take the risk of potential heartbreak that would add to his constantly growing list of traumatic events.

when he first met y/n l/n he acknowledged her as nothing more than another member of the survey corps. someone he would work with. someone he would train with. someone who he would give orders to if deemed necessary. someone who would join his team. someone he would slowly become more curious about. someone who would bring him feelings that he couldn't describe in words.

his plans had clearly gone astray.

y/n was supposed to be nothing more than a colleague, but somehow fate had much more in store. the young girl began to appear more and more in his life and before he could even process it, she was already apart of his team.

now that the they were spending almost everyday together, along with the rest of his team, levi had the opportunity to try to solve the mystery that was y/n.

there was something that he felt about her that he couldn't put into words. the way she was determined to save humanity and her friends, the way she poured everything she had into everything she did, the way she was strong in every aspect of the word, the way she got along with the rest of the team, the way she laughed, the way she smiled, the way she spoke, the way she moved, all of it. it all encapsulated him.

what is this emotion ? fascination ? curiosity ? these words weren’t completely right, but they safe enough for him to settle on for now.

yes, that's all. the brat just makes me curious because i don't understand her.

at least, that's what he told himself. but the tingles that remained on his skin from the place where she accidentally brushed up against him or the way his stomach felt after his eyes met hers or the way he noticed himself always wanting to be near her or the way he wanted to protect her more than anything in the world, said otherwise.

whatever message he wanted to send probably definitely was not passed on. when y/n accidentally brushed up against him he snapped back "watch it." when she made eye contact with him, it was more her meeting his eyes and him seemingly glaring back. when he took a few steps towards her to be closer, she felt paranoid, wondering if he was determining whether or not he should scold her for something. when she was on missions and he occasionally had to step in and save her tail, she felt like she was slacking.

truthfully in all these situations levi just resorted back to his true nature. he never meant any harm so clearly he wasn’t the best at expressing his feelings. henceforth, the three word phrase was foreign to him.

after all the many challenges that came with trying to understand each other, the couple finally got together. but despite being together, neither had said the 'L word’ yet.

to be honest, y/n hadn’t dwelled on it too much. she had learned the best way to survive mentally was to live in the moment. when the time would come, the time would come, however, the thought that time wasn’t a guarantee gnawed at the back of her brain. she always wondered how levi felt about the matter, but never got around to asking. little did he know he’d once again find out for himself that time wasn’t a guarantee.

just like every other day, y/n awoke to levi placing a kiss on her forehead. he wished nothing more than to let the love of his life sleep late into the morning in their shared bed, safe from the dangers of the world, but there was another mission today in which he needed her by his side.

the plan was to head to the outskirts of wall rose to a forest that was known to be surrounded by titans. hanji convinced erwin to let her try to capture titans in the forest again, as it all but worked on the female titan. erwin agreed, not only because he too believed the survey corps had all the materials necessary to capture titans again, but also because he knew the scouts needed more real time practice in the forest. levi wasn’t happy to hear the commander refer to this as “practice,” since so many lives were guaranteed to be lost in the process, but there was nothing he could do about it.

with everyone’s approval and the preparations complete, they were off. the ride there had been as close to smooth sailing as possible, with erwin successfully rerouting the troops to avoid as many unnecessary collisions with titans as possible and a surprisingly low amount of abnormals in their path. but everyone knew the real problems would be up ahead.

in this area, the titans were mainly surrounding the thick trees in the forest. it wasn’t too far from the forest where they encountered the female titan so the layout of the jungle was fairly similar. a large path ran straight through the trees, leaving the scouts lots of opportunities.

before the forest itself came into view, the hoard otherworldly creatures showed up. the crowd of titans didn’t seem to be too bad, with none surpassing ten meters. a bit of the outer edges of the formation took a hit, but everyone else made it into the woods unscathed.

unlike the last time levi’s squad was in the forest, their objective was not to be the bait. instead, they were to take to the trees and be on clean up duty. it was a little different from their normal clean up duty, as they weren’t doing chores around the castle or cabin—they were eliminating stray titans. the survey corps was only prepared to capture two titans, so any others that entered needed to be exterminated.

they weren’t the only ones with this job, but erwin placed them as the last hoop the titans had to get through before they were captured. any titans that escaped the first few groups were more likely than not going to be challenging, so they needed to be left with the most talented squad.

the eight scouts that made up levi’s squad traveled the path that cut through the forest until they found the four trees in which they were to set up camp. levi and jean were on the first tree, armin and sasha on the one across from them, connie and mikasa on the next, and y/n and eren on the fourth. the formation placed y/n and levi diagonal from each other so they could each defend half of the younger scouts in their squad if necessary, as well as had the team in pairs that weren’t often together for even more practice.

the ground rumbled beneath the group as they looked down to see the first wave of soldiers acting as bait pass through. after some time and a few more waves, including hanji and erwin who were in charge of the traps, everyone passed through and the titans came into sight.

the ground troops had all reported that no abnormals or titans above ten meters made it in so they all relaxed—or relaxed as one can be when they’re facing man-eating giants. levi recognized the last troop passing through and gave his second in command a nod which she returned, letting everyone else know it was show time.

the rumbling of the ground from the horses before was nothing compared to that of the titans. not counting the first two, there were nine titans in all. everyone gave a silent thanks to the squads who had narrowed down the hoard before it arrived to them.

finally, the first two titans ran past the trees levi’s squad was hidden in, chasing the ground troops. with a loud “now !” from levi, the rest of them deployed from their hiding places. thanks to the squad’s impeccable teamwork and countless hours of training in forests closer to home, the remaining seven titans were taken out without a hitch. y/n couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride as she watched her team improve with every mission and it was obvious they all felt the same way. the way they beamed and had to hold back their celebration was as a clear as day.

the team regrouped, with y/n checking the younger members for any life threatening wounds and levi double checking all the titans were taken care of. she had just finished examining sasha when levi came back and announced the next step of today’s plan. everyone was to head forward to meet the other troops and aid in getting the titans back to the walls. although the titans may be secured, there were still infinite possibilities for catastrophes that could happen so they needed all the backup they could get. the young cadets nodded in agreement then followed after levi as he took to the sky, with y/n tailing the rest of the group. if y/n and levi weren’t side by side during missions, this was always the formation everyone fell into. levi led the way, protecting the front of the party, and she acted as the caboose to make sure no one got left behind as well as to protect them from the back.

after a few failed tricks from eren as he tried to show off with his gear and a quick scolding from levi, the rest of the scouts came into view. the mission appeared to be a success. the final two titans were both apprehended, one nailed to the ground and the other bound in the air.

squad levi landed and began to greet everyone but didn’t get very far when hanji’s squeals flooded everyone’s ears.

the scientist was practically bouncing up and down as she came over. “squad levi ! all in one piece, i see. let me show you what we’ve done,” she gushed, ushering all of them towards the titans.

it was no surprise she was so excited. she had been waiting for this day to arrive for ages, but levi still gave a quick “tch,” under his breath out of annoyance which forced y/n to cover her mouth with her palm to stifle a laugh.

the eight, now nine, of them cranned their necks up to see the side of the beast that was hammered into the ground. the sight would’ve been cruel if it were anything other than a titan, but remembering all the pain they’ve brought to each one of them, no one did so much as bat an eye. returning the focus back to hanji, everyone watched as she took a sharp inhale to prepare for her long ramble about how everything worked. lucky for y/n, before hanji could exhale, levi grabbed his partner’s arm and pulled her away.

he pulled her close so he could whisper in her ear, “come on, let’s go find erwin.”

as much as she wanted to argue with him and tell him he was being mean, she really didn’t want to listen to hanji’s spiel that she had heard a million times over. a tiny pang of guilt struck y/n for leaving the other half of the squad behind forced to listen to her, but sometimes everyone has to take one for the team.

she threw a quick wave over her shoulder to the others, then followed levi, who was still holding her arm, as he dragged her through the crowd of other scouts who were just floating around, waiting for orders, until he finally spotted the commander.

the tall man’s eyes fell upon the pair and he drew himself away from whomever he was speaking with to come greet them.

“ah levi, y/n,” erwin began. levi’s expression stayed the same but y/n offered the man a small smile and wave which he returned with a nod. erwin was actually the one who recommended to levi that he should consider y/n to be apart of his squad, so she heavily credited him entirely with starting your relationship with levi (even if levi disagreed every time she told him this).

levi and erwin fell into formal conversation, discussing the remainder of the mission, which left y/n realizing levi hadn’t really saved her from a talk you’ve heard countless times before, but instead brought her into another one.

hanji’s rambling would have been more interesting than this she thought to yourself as she began lazily scanned the small sea of scouts scrambling around, looking for a way to entertain yourself until the two men were done talking. one group in particular caught her eyes.

the soldiers seemed to be much more jittery than everyone else. they frantically looked amongst each other and towards the titan that hanji had just finished showing the rest of levi’s squad, and seemed to be contemplating a solution to an unknown issue.

it was clear something was up.

just as she placed her hand on levi’s shoulder to bring his and erwin’s focus over to the scene, the ground began to shake, which caught their attention for her.

no one had time to react when dust flew up everywhere, obstructing everyone’s views so they couldn’t see where the loud crashes that followed came from. a strong force slammed into them, throwing them who knows how far into the air. the fear of hitting the ground barely had enough time to settle into y/n before everything went dark.

everyone in the vicinity had been sent flying into the air along, but levi was the first one to be up on his feet again. bringing his arms up to shield his eyes, he decided to stay where he was as the dust cleared so he could assess the situation and move on from there.

the scene finally came into view; he gathered that the titan had ripped its arm through the nails that secured it to the floor of the woods, then flailed it around in an attempt to grab people. it made a clean sweep in the area that he was previously standing—all that was left were debris and broken wood planks from the compartments that were attached to the other titan’s traps.

a wave of adrenaline passed through his body as he remembered who was with him. he needed to find not only erwin immediately, but also y/n. he reached down to grab the handles of his controller grip but froze instantly upon seeing what had just come into view as more of the dust cleared.

y/n was sprawled out on the ground, ODM gear tossed a few feet away from her body but more importantly, the titan’s hand was hovering mere meters above her.

his pulse almost quickened twicehold, but it felt as though it heart had stopped in his chest. situations like this presented themselves to levi almost everyday of his life, but this was much different. in those, he was almost two steps ahead. he knew that by now he should be wrapping his arms around y/n and pulling her to safety at breakneck speed, or even better, he should’ve shielded her from harm at the very beginning. but right now he couldn’t do so much as move his finger.

levi was completely inert—his arms felt like they being weighed down by a ball and chain, his legs felt like they had grown roots into the ground that planted in him place. his throat ran dry and his stomach felt like it had just done a flip. the rest of him went numb while shock consumed his body, physically and mentally, rendering him entirely helpless.

images of isabel, farlan, petra, oluo, eld, gunther, and countless others all flashed before him, the same running theme echoed in his mind—he wasn’t able to save them. all he had to do was pull back a single index finger. this would launch one of his anchors into the back of the titan’s neck, sending him flying to slice its nape. but he couldn’t do it. the only thing he knew he had the power to do was watch helplessly as his partner would be eaten alive.

the shouts of others flooded his ears as his senses slowly began to return to him, but it didn’t matter. he couldn’t make out a thing. frankly he wished he could so he could break away from the things that occupied his mind now. shame. guilt. humiliation. fear. regret. he took for granted every moment he had ever spent with y/n. every smile she gave him. every time he embraced her. every kiss. every conversation they shared under the stars while everyone else was fast asleep. every opportunity he had but failed to tell her that he—

before he finished his thought someone finally broke through his trance. erwin was the one who was able to crack the surface and bring him back to life.

the commander was shouting levi’s name, hoping, praying, to wake him up from whatever was going on in his head. levi was still unable feel his body, but he realized he was moving as the ground began to grow smaller. one of erwin’s strong arms hooked around levi’s middle and they were flying away from the chaos below. the commander spared a glance to levi to see the man’s eyes were still trained on y/n.

the feeling returned to levi’s body as he felt the pain of being thrown onto one of the thick tree branches surge through his body. not knowing how else to bring him back from the trance that wasn’t full broken, erwin had tossed off of him levi instead of placing him down gently.

he watched as levi scrambled up and expected him to yell back for throwing him, but the response was much different.

“where is she ??” levi demanded. his eyes may have been on y/n the whole time, but his mind was elsewhere replaying scenes from the past. he had no idea if she had been eaten, or even survived the initial attack. the only think he saw was her body on the ground, unmoving.

“safe,” erwin confirmed. “hanji ran over just in time and got her. but what happened to you ?” no one had ever seen levi freeze up the way he did. others believed it was just fear which made him seem a little more human to them, but erwin knew it was more than that.

throughout the years, erwin watched levi witness the deaths of those closest to him, and even then he was still able to act. but after seeing him go rigid, erwin was more than worried. it was clear levi went into shock, however, shock runs more than skin deep.

this became even more evident to him as levi remained silent the entire way back to the walls. y/n was still unconscious, so one of the open carts was her escort. guilt continued to wash over levi as he wasn’t able to ride in the cart with her to monitor her closely because he had to ride his horse back. regardless, he stayed as close to the cart as possible and stole as many glances her way as he could.

if he had it his way, he would’ve waited outside the infirmary for y/n when they arrived back home, but hanji and erwin practically dragged him to the mess hall to replenish his energy. this may or may not be skipping the part where levi was questioned about what happened, followed by him being chastised for his actions (or lack there of). levi could bare focus even though it was such a serious conversation. his mind was still a hazy mess. as much as hanji and erwin wanted to talk to levi more about the situtation, they knew it was best for the conversation to end there for the day. levi looked so shaken up that he could barely keep himself standing so the last thing he needed was to be yelled at more. the entire corps also made sure to steer clear of the man. he usually had all his emotions hidden but they were on full display now. it still scared the hell out of them.

but the fear alone wasn’t enough to stop them from whispering to themselves. word carried fast about how captain levi froze up and watched one of his squad mates almost die. the ones who only heard about the story instead of witnessing it couldn’t believe what they were hearing. the captain levi did nothing while one of his own almost became titan food ?

hearing the whispers in passing, levi didn’t care that they were talking about him, but he was still affected. their words just made reality sink deeper into him. they weren’t the only ones who were unable to believe what happened. he really just watched helplessly as someone almost died. and it wasn’t just someone, it was his other half.

“hey levi ?” hanji voiced, pulling him out of his head. levi didn’t bother looking up from his food that he had been staring at for the past few minutes to face her. the best he could to was give her a side glance as he peered at her from the corner of his eyes and waited for her to finish.

the glare he was sending her way made her blood run cold, but she took the hint and continued. “are you alright ?” she asked in a small voice.

“does it look like i’m alright ?” he growled back, then went back to eating.

“just wanted to ask,” she added with an awkward laugh then turned to erwin who was on the other side of her. for once in her life she knew not to press any harder, but making levi upset wasn’t her intention. she was genuinely worried about him. hanji gave erwin a what do i do now ? look, hoping for some help, but erwin could only shake his head. he cared about levi just as much as she did, but he knew there was nothing either of them could do or say to make levi feel better. the only thing he needed was to see y/n.

at last, levi finished his dinner and excused himself to go find his partner. as his feet carried him at a quick pace across the stone floors of the many hallways in HQ, fear came back to his already grim mind. there was no word on y/n’s condition so he assumed no progress had been made and she was still unconscious.

needless to say, when he rounded the corner and saw her sitting on the bench right outside the infirmary swiveling her heels and tapping her toes together as if she was bored, shock overcame him once again, this time on a much lower scale. similar to just a few hours ago, he was frozen instantly upon seeing her. it was a much prettier sight this time, but it was still painful to see. the bandage that wrapped around her head peaked out from being any strands of hair that fell in front of her face, other wraps and patches plastered themselves across her arms and legs, and some purple and blue splotches peaked out from behind them. this was only the skin that was exposed. for once in his life levi didn’t want to think about what she looked like when she weren’t wearing any clothes. he made a quick mental note to later place tender kisses on all her bumps and bruises, and took of running towards her.

y/n had been discharged from the infirmary during dinner hours, so the halls has been quite empty as she sat outside alone, falling into boredom. when the first sounds of shoes hitting the ground entered her ears, she got a bit excited, but calmed herself down reminding herself it probably wasn’t him. but when the steps got quicker and louder, she finally let yourself look up to see up to see her partner was the source. there was no point in holding back anyone; her face visibly lit up and a wide smile placed itself on her lips. just like levi, y/n wanted nothing more in the entire world than to see him.

he run turned to a jog then a complete stop as he halted in front of her. despite being so anxious to see one another, neither were really prepared. they just kinda...stared at each other, neither sure of the right words to say. levi decided to take the initiative. he opened his mouth, hoping something, anything, would come out, but his attempt fell flat. words just weren’t enough. instead, he lifted his arms and placed both hands gently on y/n’s shoulders. she caught on quickly, standing up at the same time as he was pulling her into his arms for a tight embrace.

the pair remained silent in each other’s arms until y/n decided to take initiative this time and finally spoke. “is it true ?” she mumbled against his neck, barely loud enough for him to hear.

as much as he had hoped the gossip would stay in the mess hall, levi knew that inevitably word would spread to her. someone must have told her everything that happened, leaving in every little detail about how levi made no moves to save her life, ending up having to be saved by hanji in the end.

based off his silence, y/n knew levi had a lot on his mind so she continued “did you really freeze up?”

he didn’t realize it, but he had tensed up at her words. it absolutely pained him to answer, but he couldn’t imagine the pain she were feeling.

summing up his courage, he began to confirm the worst, but she pulled away before he could get more than a “yes,” out. levi braced himself for the hurt expression that he would be faced with, knowing his heart would break instantly as she realized he truly did failed to protect her, but instead he was met with kind eyes and soft face.

the look on his face had utter disbelief written all over it as her hands went up to cup his face that was now reddening. “are you okay?” y/n asked softly. “im so sorry.”

levi was beyond bewildered. he wanted her to be furious at him. yell at him. pull her soft hands back and strike him as much as she pleased. tell him he failed and that she couldn’t stand the sight of him. he knew he deserved it all and more, but he should’ve known she would never do that. that wasn’t y/n.

he melted into her touch and placing one of his hand over one of hers that remained on his cheek. “i was terrified, y/n.”

y/n finally gave him one of her beautiful smiles and giggled softly. “why were you scared ? i was the one who almost got eaten,” she teased.

y/n’s laughs had quickly subsided after seeing the serious look that had etched itself onto levi’s face. “because you were in danger,” he started.

“i don’t know what id do with myself if i lost you, i...”

“i love you, y/n.”

it was finally y/n’s turn to get a taste of the shock that levi had been experiencing all day. she could’ve sworn her heart skipped a beat at his words, followed by butterfly wings tickling the inside of her tummy, her eyes widening and jaw falling slack. her hands slowly slipped from his face to instead place one of her palms on her chest to make sure her heart was indeed pumping at a regular pace.

levi, on the other hand, was not having a magical experience. y/n’s reaction made him feel as though his feelings weren’t reciprocated despite having been together for so long. he started to get deeper into his head, negative thoughts starting to eat away at him once again, when she finally spoke.

“i love you too, levi,” she breathed out, still too stunned to breathe properly.

levi had had enough of being unable to move for one day. one of his hands grabbed y/n’s waist while the other found its way to the back of her head, as he kissed her roughly, which she eagerly returned. the way he felt her grin against his lips was enough to make all the pain and fear he had experienced that day worth it.

he couldn’t have asked for a better outcome to such a shitty day.

levi had finally learned how to say i love you and he thanked the stars every night following that day that y/n was the one who taught him how.

#attack on titan #aot #attack on titan x reader #aot x reader #shingeki no kyojin #snk #shingeki no kyojin x reader #snk x reader #levi ackerman #levi ackermann #levi ackerman x reader #levi ackermann x reader #levi x reader

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sepublic · 4 years ago

Text

Meta Marcy Wu

Marcy really does have that energy of like. Someone who doesn’t have a whole lot of ‘opinions’ on bigger matters (such as the conflict between Toads and Newts, Sasha and Anne, Maddie and her sisters, etc.) so she just sort of. Awkwardly waits and sits off to the side, kind of biding her moment for when it’s finally over. Letting others take charge so long as she gets her own little space to function in. She’s not against or for anyone in particular, she just needs people to decide for themselves who she should follow, Marcy prefers to be a follower and ONLY that- Her debut has her asserting her own control for herself, but she doesn’t seem to care much else about others, I’m afraid.

Contrast that with Anne, who needs her own control- BUT she also has the Heart, so she cares about others, she’s proactive and has agency despite initially being told to be reactive and not stand up for herself. Even if she can’t stand up for herself, she will stand up for others… And I think she was lowkey influenced by Sasha’s obsessive desire to protect the girls, and that played into Anne being a little bit toxic, but ultimately learning and having that inner fire to take a stance on things based on moral reasons, whereas Sasha seems more concerned for power than the actual social plight of the Toads- So even if Anne isn’t with the rebellion, it’s ultimately something she WOULD fully dedicate herself towards, like when we saw her stand up for the Frogs against Bog and the other Toads.

And like, I have to wonder if Marcy’s more hands-off, simple follower approach is lowkey what contributed to Sasha’s belief in controlling others, because it validated that- But at the same time, we talk about how Sasha might care more for Anne than Marcy, and we see how Sasha is frustrated by Toadie, who is but an echo chamber for her. So maybe while Marcy is convenient to her, she’s just a bit too passive and thus not as ‘fun’ as a friend as Anne, who is also a concern because she has genuine motive to question Sasha not just on the basis of their friendship, but people OUTSIDE of it, which Marcy doesn’t.

Anne being fiercely loyal and protective and sticking up for others, it also could’ve fed back into Sasha’s own tendencies as well. And of course these more proactive, in-your-face girls, always on the frontlines, are going to clash, while Marcy the forgotten follower, the wall-flower, the one in the background focused on more ‘nerdy’ things that are less glamorous, like logistics and whatnot… SHE’s the lynchpin that actually tips the scales- Because she’s the third girl who ‘sides’ with Anne between the initial conflict from Season 1. She’s the one with Andrias, flipping things up when Anne and Sasha are going to fight, contributing to that prophesized endgame.

Marcy is the one, ironically, with the power –albeit as an extension of Andrias really- and so she’s the antagonist who’s clashing with Sasha, who is also power-hungry, but really beginning to learn as well. Marcy is caught up in her own little fantasy land and world, both literally and figuratively, happily enjoying and watching as a witness and bystander, almost detached in a sense to really participate and appreciate it as a very real thing… And being separate and an ‘audience’ member, Marcy is of course forgotten by Sasha and Anne, who play the part of characters; Fitting, because in that one flashback, they were Captain Hook and Peter Pan, while Marcy worked back-stage, literally pulling the strings (well, rope) for Anne!

It’s Marcy who’s obsessed and fascinated with the meta of fandom and fiction, so of course she’s the one who steps back and observes it like media, takes the time to comment on it as if it were all tropes, watching and enjoying while for Sasha and Anne they participate directly without that kind of detached meta awareness, the kind someone like Andrias would have, because for THEM it’s real, there are stakes, power for Sasha and people for Anne! And Marcy is the backstage audience, fourth-wall crewmember, unnoticed by all who forget and ignore her, and she’s used to it. Maybe Marcy even enjoys and prefers it that way, and/or learned to- And it’s too late to pay attention, to see themselves as characters in that wider play and story and plot, unlike Andrias who notices and takes advantage… And may have been writing since who knows HOW early?

If I could get into meta, Marcy playing that quiet, unnoticed support role, doing whatever’s convenient- It reminds me of how the visual basis for your typical Ninja in black garb… It came from plays where performers in black garb would maneuver props, and the audience was supposed to intentionally ignore them, see them as separate from the actual story; But every now and then, one play might have a ‘twist’ where that background actor actually IS a character, and assassinates someone to reveal themselves as the hidden Ninja!

So maybe Marcy is like that… The background crewmember, not calling attention to herself in the acting role- In plain sight but we figure we’re meant to ignore, and so we’re utterly blindsided when she DOES strike! It’s Marcy who appreciates the little technical know-how and details, valuing the role that Frogs and agriculture play, considering Newtopian infrastructure, working back-stage in a Peter Pan play… Appreciating the writing conventions and tropes of her favorite games and fantasies, and so that in a way enables her to ‘game’ the system in a sense, play into it with her own hands, or even set up that game and story in the first place, because she knows how to make one!

She is the drummer while Anne and Sasha play guitar and sing, not as glamorous or recognized amongst a crowd, but just as vital as the rest… She’s a very META kind of person, befitting her choice of METAmorphosis as part of her drummer costume! You don’t pay mind to a caterpillar, but then little do you know, it becomes an even more unnoticeable cocoon… Only to sprout into a brilliant butterfly! But while the BLUE butterfly is associated with Anne and her connections back home through Pearl Paddock, who is representative of familial bond, remembering who you are… Marcy is disconnected, she’s a GREEN butterfly, green like the lilypads of Amphibia, and she wants to stay there!

And the best part, I think? I don’t think Marcy herself is even fully aware of what she’s doing… I doubt she sees herself as some clever manipulator. She’s just doing what she can, having her fun plans and machinations like in New Wartwood, but she’s not ACTUALLY approaching this as some devious mastermind- She’s literally just a kid! She gets caught up in her own things, because she is an autistic mood, and I get that! I resonate with that! And so it’s so easy for Marcy to be blindsided by HERSELF, by her own flaws and borderline antagonistic role in the story, to realize what she’s doing is kind of messed up and trivializing- Because we know that she WANTS to care, but it’s so easy and convenient for her to forget and play into the fantasy… Especially with someone like Sasha, and especially Andrias, to enable her, to provide that safety and support net that MARCY doesn’t complain about or take for granted, unlike that ‘ungrateful’ Anne, as Sasha might’ve one said!

And if Marcy isn’t really self-aware of her own issues or even the full messed-up scope of her actions, to take a look back and critically examine herself the way she might a character or even her own friends; Then that can also make her a victim to her own antics, just as Sasha kept burying herself into a deeper hole. And it’s hard to do the right thing, if you don’t even realize you’re messing up in the first place- Recognizing your fault is kind of one of THE foundations of actual reform, growth, and redemption. I think Marcy needs guidance, and she needs to show more initiative and take a stance not just for herself, but regarding others as well… And that can lead to her choosing between Anne and Andrias.

Andrias, whose name is like Anne’s but more fantastical, who is blue like Anne’s motif… And who looks after her like a good friend, makes things easier and promises they will be! And he’s invested into the fantasy, he doesn’t want to go home and complicate things, get into fights with Sasha, because it’s the person in charge who decides how it is, right? Which is why True Colors continues to concern me… Amidst, you know, the many OTHER issues as well.

#amphibia #amphibia marcy #marcy wu #amphibia sasha #sasha waybright #amphibia anne #anne boonchuy #meta #speculation #character analysis

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earnestly-endlessly · 4 years ago

Note

Hiii could you rec any fics where Erik or Charles or both are vampires and or werewolves?

Thank you so much dear lots of love

I'm so sorry for being so late with this, but in compensation I do have tons of fics that should quench your thirst for some vampire/werewolf cherik. Enjoy!

Vampire

And the Gunslinger Followed – musical_emjay

Summary: Erik Lehnsherr hunts the things that go bump in the night.

He’s done so since he was a child, since the first time his mother put a knife in his hand and told him how to use it, told him why he should.

But ten years alone on the road has caught up to him, left him wrung out and longing for a place to rest, recharge, get his head back on straight. Though nowhere has ever truly felt like home, he heads straight for New York City, a place that’s always had more to offer him by way of warmth and comfort than any other. What he finds when he gets there, however, is several miles south of anything approaching restful. Old acquaintances, old memories, and a mysterious stranger who has him forgetting all his rules — Erik soon realizes there are decisions he needs to make, before circumstances intervene and make them for him. Otherwise, he might not like the result.

An Accident of Circumstance – manic_intent

Summary: Secret Santa, for azryal00, prompts: virginity, stalking or vampire AU. Decided to attempt all, in one fic. As part of a reward for his successes in border skirmishes, Sebastian Shaw allows Erik discretion to create a childe of his own, within reason. Erik rebels.

B-Negative – manic_intent

Summary: Written for the 5 Acts thing on livejournal, for toestastegood's 'Vampire AU' Act. This was originally going to be some sort of True Blood parody, but it somehow became a bit more serious. :/

Bloodbound – ikeracity

Summary: Finding himself strapped for cash at the start of his senior year, Erik decides to become a donor at TypO, a blood bar where vampires come to drink fresh blood from consenting donors, safely and legally. There, he catches the eye of Charles Xavier, vampire, telepath, professor at Columbia, and quite possibly the most alluring person Erik's ever met. Their first meeting sets into motion a bond much deeper than they can understand, one that neither of them had ever expected.

Old Metal (Blood, Memory and Rubber Ducks) – pprfaith

Summary: Erik is a vampire. Sookie, err, Charles is a telepath. Any questions?

Food Allergies – madneto

Summary: A bout of insomnia one fateful night leads Erik to Xavier's, the late night bookstore near Columbia University, whose owner Erik quickly decides is the best thing since... well, since maybe ever. Charles is brilliant, funny, passionate, handsome, and every other good adjective Erik can think of, and even though they've only been on three dates, Erik is convinced this is the start of something perfect.

Then Charles has a bad reaction to the food Erik cooks for them on their fourth date, leaving Erik to wonder if maybe he's completely botched his one chance at true love.

Series

The Price for Eternity – madneto

Summary: Erik and Charles are relaxing in the park when Erik decides to ask Charles a question that has long been on his mind, re: vampires. The answer is unexpected.

Series

The Boy with the Sigil Tattoo – keire_ke

Summary: Buffy AU. The story of a boy and his vampire.

Love and Other Secrets – Microsaur

Summary: Erik is a vampire that would much rather be left alone, Charles is a baronet that can't seem to accept that.

The First One – SassyDuckQueen

Summary: Erik Lehnsherr is a vampire living in a peaceful life in New York City, where he works as a night time security guard at the Pentagram. He's in a relationship with Charles Xavier, a young professor at a private university. However, his life is thrown upside down by the return of his wayward son, Peter, who informs him that an old enemy has resurfaced.

Series

Blood Bound – WaxRhapsodic

Summary: Charles is sick. Again. He decides to do something drastic about it and take a Blood Contract with a Vampire who turns out to be dangerously attractive.

Night Holds No Redemption – isabella

Summary: Vampire Hunters AU

When vampires roam the city at night there are also those who will hunt them down.

Charles Xavier and James “Logan” Howlett are vampire hunters part of the NIB – Night Investigation Bureau, in New York. When Erik, a vampire Charles failed to kill, comes back to haunt him Charles finds he no longer can run from his past and has to face the truth about the monster he created.

Pairing info: Flashbacks are Charles/Erik, present focuses first on the growing relationship between Logan/Charles, then on Charles/Erik.

Endgame will be Charles/Erik.

Night Life – Ook

Summary: he young journalist, or researcher, or whatever he is, is going to get himself in trouble around here. Erik can tell.

A researcher who doesn't know when to stop.

A man who doesn't take no for an answer.

A vampire that doesn't give interviews.

Werewolf

Dancing in the Rain – Pangea, velvetcadence

Summary: Werewolf alpha Erik found a human pup Charles alone in the forest and took him back to his lair. Erik protected and cared for the boy, though he was barely a mature wolf himself.

A few years passed, Charles grew up so pretty, and Erik was afraid he would miss his kind and go back to them, leaving Erik to be alone again - but Charles stayed and chose to be Erik’s mate.

Moon Song – ikeracity

Summary: Werewolf AU. When Charles is captured by hunters, Erik and his pack go after him. It turns out there might be some room for redemption left for both of them after all.

Loyalty and Obedience – Ook

Summary: A human rent boy working the streets gets rescued from a pimp by the Lehnsherr Pack Head and his Second on a recruitment trip. Werewolves, huh?

Who knows where this one's going?

Skin Deep – manic_intent

Summary: Written for the kmeme, Everyone-is-a-werewolf AU. Erik happens upon a seemingly abandoned mansion in Westchester during a full moon and finds an insanely clueless werewolf living in isolation.

In Escrow – manic_intent

Summary: Same 'verse as Skin Deep, between the final part and the epilogue. Charles abruptly realizes that he's unable to shift forms after a full moon. Which can only mean one thing.

Supernatural and the Scientist – Caradee

Summary: Charles Xavier is a upcoming geneticist and wildlife biologist who’s next big thesis reveals a little to much about the hidden werewolf community. Now Erik Lehnsehrr is suppose to figure out who it is feeding Xavier the information and put an end to it.

However, things are not what they appear.

Open Season – Caradee

Summary: Charles is a adorable omega wolf who has no sense for pack dynamics and wanders on his own. Erik is the exhausted Alpha of the pack who is unfortunately smitten with him. Its hunting season, nothing can go wrong. Right?

Only Hope – onaxe

Summary: According to werewolf law, an unwed Omega cannot legally hold custody of a child. When Charles is challenged for custody over his 17 year old sister, Raven, he desperately turns to the only solution available. He marries a complete stranger, Alpha Erik Lehnsherr, who is haunted by a mysterious past.

Note: Unfinished but a fun read.

Tooth and Nail – TurtleTotem

Summary: Erik is no longer part of Charles's pack. It's none of his business who he takes as a mate.

Vampires and Werewolves

For you, Eternity – gerec, lachatblanche

Summary: Erik still remembers the day he lost everything to a pack of werewolves; his family, his village, and the love of his life. Left with nothing but regret and pain everlasting, he turns to Sebastian Shaw - who promises revenge in exchange for loyalty eternal.

For centuries, he leads his clan of vampires in a war against their hated enemy, the same werewolf pack responsible for the slaughter of Erik’s village. But now Logan - the pack’s new leader - wants to make peace with their age old adversaries; an act that neither side particularly cares to pursue.

Adding to this volatile mix is one Charles Xavier, scientist and academic, drawn to the continent by his fascination for the supernatural and the locals’ tales of love, betrayal and never-ending war…

On the Scent – dedkake

Summary: The full moon is nearing and Charles decides to visit his neighbor.

Does not ebb – StarkMad

Summary: prompt: "...I would love a fic with Charles and Erik in an Underworld AU basically with Charles as Selene's character and Erik as Michael Corvin's character

and/ooor nonnie could do an Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and Charles as Sonja's character and Erik as Lucian (feel free and make me cry, dearest nonnie) feel free to do whatever you want as long as the AU still remains identifiable (and just kill me with tons of Chares and Erik drama and lurve and heartache and whatever.

Dear Neighbour Mine – issabella

Summary: Fill for the prompt by Lonelyparts: Charles is a telepathic werewolf living next door to a vampire who favours severe black turtlenecks and metal coffins.

Of course they have to annoy each other first, before dangerous circumstances bring them together.

#cherik #cherik fic recs #fic recs #werewolf AU #vampire art #there are surprisingly more vampire fics out there than werewolf fics #thought it would be the other way round #asks #earnestly answers

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bobohunn · 4 years ago

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Warmth of Winter

Pair : Baekhyun x Reader, Baekhyun x You

Genre : Fluff, Domestic Fluff, Husband!Baekhyun, Daddy!Baekhyun, oneshot

Warnings : none

Word count : 1.9k

Main Masterlist

You slowly rubbed the sleep off your eyes with your knuckles as the muffled chime from below the pillow danced gracefully towards your ears. With a sigh, you reached for your phone right under the bundle of cotton and quickly pressed the power button to dismiss the alarm. How is it morning again when you’ve only been sleeping for what felt like an hour?

It was already several weeks into winter and the mornings got unbearably cold. Waking up and starting your day was tenfold more difficult now than it already is. Especially when the man occupying the other half of your bed, wrapped in a thick duvet, looked so peaceful in his sleep that all you ought to do is cuddle him until it was time for bed again. You know how much he hates being cold, and seeing his body ever so lightly shiver under the pillows made you want to move the sun just a little tiny bit closer to your roof. But that’s quite impossible, so you decided to peel your share of the duvet from your body and placed it on him. The action made you hiss when the cold air slid along the smoothness of your skin, but it was enough to get you as awake as needed. You smiled at the sleeping figure in front of you before you quietly moved around to start your day.

Your bunny slippers were already hugging your feet, ready to go and about the house to do your morning routine. But when you saw your husband shifting in his sleep, almost digging the mattress to the ground in hopes of making himself warmer, you contemplated whether it was a good idea to lay down beside him just for a few minutes or not. You knew that it wasn’t, though. You knew that it wasn’t going to be ‘only a few minutes,’ because the last time you said so, you ended up 15 minutes late for work. However, something about your bed— and that’s your shivering husband, of course— was so enticing that you crawled back like a baby and snuggled close to him. In your defense, he looked like he needed another layer to keep him warm, and you really just needed to protect him from getting cold. But who’d believe you if you said that anyway?

Perhaps, this was one of the very few reasons why you look forward to winter. Though you couldn’t really say you loved the cold season (you curse it almost every time you were anywhere that wasn’t your house), you loved that you could do this, babying the love of your life. It’s not that you hate being the little spoon. Hell, you loved feeling small inside his arms. It’s just that Baekhyun isn’t one to be tended to. He likes taking care of people more than being taken care of, so it’s rare for you to be the big spoon, and the only time you’d be one is when the temperature starts to drop. Baekhyun turns into a complete baby when it’s cold.

You felt him shift from under the layers of sheets, seemingly struggling to get them off of him. You giggled as his expression changed from peaceful to frustrated. You pressed a kiss to his lined forehead, and he mumbled back something you couldn’t understand.

“Morning, love.”

Baekhyun hummed in acknowledgment, to which you chuckled again. You continued to stare at his sleeping figure, fingers playing with his fluffy and disheveled white hair.

He started mumbling again, “Baby, it’s so cold.” You hummed this time and kissed his forehead before turning to grab the remote on the bedside table to adjust the room temperature.

A few moments later, you could hear the faint sound of the very familiar footsteps from the hallway. Afraid that the man’s peaceful and most treasured sleep would be disrupted, you immediately got up from the bed to meet the owner of the footsteps outside the room. You slowly opened the door, peeking out and getting ready for the ‘surprise attacks' — as they call it— that were supposed to earn you the prettiest eye smiles and loveliest giggles life could ever offer. However, the empty hallway greeted you with silence instead.

Confused as to why the twins didn’t show up in front of your door to bless you with kisses and a few high-pitched screams like usual, you took big strides towards the room at the end of the hallway, only to find it empty. Anxiety started to grow in your system, but you tried to calm yourself and called out for their names. “Yuno, Yena. Where are you?”

When they still didn’t answer by the third time, your heart felt like it dropped to your knees. Where are the kids?

However, when you saw two small heads looking out to the window by the fireplace, your heart rose back to your chest. You could see their fluffy cheeks bulging out of their faces, red as their dumbo ears. Careful not to disturb them from what seemed like their early morning self-recollection, you walked to where they were seated and saw for yourself what was so fascinating beyond that window. Seeing the white flakes falling from the sky, you smiled to yourself when you realized what it was. It’s the first snow. No wonder they skipped the ‘surprise attacks’ today.

You waited for the kids to recognize your presence. But then again, when children see something they like, they’ll never take their eyes off it. So you resorted to poking them both at their sides, making them jump out from where they were kneeling on the couch.

“Mommy! Look!” your daughter beamed.

“Wow! What’s that, baby?” you asked. Your question was left unanswered, probably also unheard, as the twins chanted a little ‘wah’ when they saw the neighbors across the street forming and throwing snowballs. They seemed so amazed at the ‘white thing,’ and you were so amused at how they moved in sync with each other that none of you even noticed Baekhyun walking by the living room to the kitchen.

Baekhyun was confused to see all three of you sitting by the window at first. But when he saw the snow covering the backyard through the window by the sink, he immediately caught on and chuckled to himself. It was only when he closed the refrigerator door that you noticed him, and he was already staring at you with a glass of water in his hands.

“You’re awake,” you said as you got up from the couch spreading your arms to welcome your husband into a hug.

Baekhyun happily nestled in your embrace and dragged you to the long couch with him to lie down. You grabbed the fleece blanket on the coffee table and wrapped it around yourselves as you settled yourselves in a way that you could both still see your children. “I was lonely when I woke up,” he jokingly said.

“I didn’t wake you up because you looked like you needed some more sleep. What time did you get to bed last night?” you asked.

“A few minutes after you did, but I had trouble sleeping,” Baekhyun said while he pulled you closer to him. You looked up at him and smiled, “Then you should sleep some more. Why are you already awake?”

“Because I-” he stopped mid-sentence as both of you panicked when Yena suddenly stood up and looked like she was about to fall. Luckily, she was holding on to Yuno, and he was quick to pull her so she wouldn’t fall. You and Baekhyun laughed when you realized you were both holding out your hands as if attempting to save the child.

“Exactly this,” Baekhyun laughed. “I heard you calling out for them earlier. I was going to stand up by the fourth time you’d yell their names, but you didn’t, so I figured you already found them. But then you didn’t come back to the room, and I was worried something happened, so I got up to see for myself.”

You were about to say your apologies to your husband for waking him up, but the twins were looking back at the both of you mischievously. The look in their glistening eyes was telling you that they wanted something. Perhaps, something like going out to play?

“You want to play in the snow, don’t you?” you asked, to which the kids nodded their heads enthusiastically, and their mouths stretched up into cheeky smiles. You chuckled at how far up the edges of their lips rose to their eyes.

Before you could even say anything, they were already running towards you and hopping on the couch, their small feet stomping on your legs. Your daughter plopped down and laid her head against your chest, while your son sat on Baekhyun’s stomach. “Please,” they said in unison, making you giggle once again.

“Do you not want to cuddle with Mommy and Daddy here?” Baekhyun playfully asked to tease them.

The twins sighed in what sounded like defeat. You thought that they must’ve known by now that if their Dad starts speaking this way, it’s going to be a no for them. However, they started tickling you at your sides, not before they nodded their heads at each other as if agreeing to do something.

“Mommy, Daddy, please!”

The sound of your giggles filled the air, and you didn’t miss the way your children’s eyes imitated their father’s sparkling ones.

“Dada’s hair looks like snow!” Yuno said as he grabbed a handful of his father’s hair, which in your opinion, probably hurt. But as the loving father Baekhyun is, he dismissed the feeling and just let his son do whatever he willed.

“Is Daddy’s hair pretty like snow?” you asked your son, reaching for his hand that was playing with your husband’s hair to get them off. His cheeks bounced as he nodded, hands slowly moving to his father’s shoulders for leverage. But your daughter decided to grab more of the poor Daddy’s hair, and so her brother followed again.

“Careful, my little ones. Daddy might be bald by Christmas if you keep pulling my hair out,” Baekhyun giggled with them.

When the two little beans that grew arms and legs finally decided that they needed to recharge for energy, they both slumped their foreheads on your chests. You caressed Yena’s hair alternatively with Yuno, the action lulling them both to sleep.

“Thank heavens, they ran out of energy,” you whispered to Baekhyun’s ear, expecting to hear a witty response from him. However, it seemed that your husband's energy was drained as well. You chuckled lightly at the sight of your little family sleeping like hibernating bears, and even more when you noticed how all three of them look exactly the same when they sleep— lips pouty and ears perky. They even shiver too identically! And they say they want to play in the snow? When they’re nothing far from their father (who hated the cold so much the last time you checked)?

You couldn’t help but smile, genuine love and happiness washing over your body. Honestly, you’d give up anything just to relish this moment forever; you, your husband, and the product of your love that came as a combo of two little bundles of joy huddled together like you were in a capsule, being each other’s make-do heaters.

Winter would definitely get an earful from you sooner or later that day for being ‘so goddamn cold.’ But at that moment, all you wanted to do was be grateful for the different kind of warmth it brings.

#bobohunn writes #baekhyun fluff #baekhyun #exo #byun baekhun #kpop fics #fanfiction #exo fanfiction #baekhyun angst #baekhyun smut #baekhyun fics

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yuraimi-lee-bunny · 4 years ago

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GRAY’S CHARACTER ANALYSIS Part III.5. Graham Calloway: The Walking Enigma.

After a full two weeks of work I managed to finish this part! As I mentioned before, it will be part "3.5", where you will see interesting details about Graham. It will be a long chapter guys, I warn you. Thank you very much for all your support in the previous chapters and I’m glad that you’re liking it and that it has also helped some to understand Graham in some aspects. Nothing more to say:

Here we go!

In the third season there was nothing of Gray, just a scene where it gave us to show that the moment has come: The return of Gray and his importance in the fourth season is now inevitable.

And well, who would have thought that Gray would be the first thing it showed us in the first scene of last season.

I told you, it’s something important. The first scene with which a season begins is sometimes, in some cases, used to show some signs of what the whole season holds, or what a character holds throughout the season. A great example and one that is one of my favorites, but at the same time it’s painful, is from second season of 13 Reasons Why. The first scene that opens the season is where Tyler Down comes out, a character that with his dialogues and the cut to black of the first scene with which he opens the seaso, is basically anticipating EVERYTHING that Tyler would bring in that season. Showing Tyler, a secondary character, and not showing the main characters, is an indication that you should pay attention to that character, that Tyler (and Gray) would be an important character throughout the plot to point out something, which will be important at some point in history (or the most important). Believe me when I analyzed the Tyler scene, I was fascinated by such visual/narrative language, but at the same time I almost cried to understand everything… sorry, let's get on with Gray.

Here, in my opinion, is the same: it show in just one scene EVERYTHING that will happen to Gray this season. I explain:

(Earlier, Congratulations Gray! You were promoted to Lighting Technician!)

He’s in a dark room, illuminated with the light of the work, which is a red light. As we know, Graham, actually has amnesia, he doesn't know anything about who he really is, that's why the allegory with the dark room. The red light represents Carmen, who watches over Graham, he trusts her a lot, so he's "protected", because Carmen will not allow him to remember that he was a VILE agent. For this reason, a dark room and a red light, and he’s calm and happy.

Well, no more.

ACME has arrived, has revealed his full name, has opened a door that illuminates the other side with white light. ACME is the one who will unknowingly cause Gray to know the truth, and with that, a new path for Graham that will lead him to the light.

A path where he will choose which identity will predominate in his life. But before going to light, Graham/Crackle and Gray will have to endure and deal with many obstacles and decisions. He’s the only one who will decide, No ACME, No VILE, No Carmen.

One more thing.

Graham, what is your obsession for wristbans? All I can say is: Graham likes to do his job well.

Chief introduces herself to Graham, and he can't help but know what would happen if he touches Chief's hologram. As I have already said: he wants to know the answers with his own hands.

She asks him a question and Graham, as he’s in the habit and I had previously analyzed it, he gives details that no one asked, but he likes to give. Fun fact: in the original dubbing, Graham says the english name of the Opera "The Thieving Magpie." In the Spanish dub, Graham says “La gazza ladra” saying the original name, even using a slight Italian accent.

I loved this little detail because it adds to that curious Graham/Gray habit of giving details to his answers, and let's remember something: the dubbing is supervised by the crew, so I guess they liked the idea.

Gray asks if they are Interpol or the CIA. Faced with CHIEF's response that they are "Consider us all of the above. Except they don’t know we exist" Gray thinks of a single person. That is somehow cute like him until he gets excited that maybe this is a new chance to see Carmen again. For Chief it’s a new path towards Carmen.

You don't know how much I would have liked to hear all the conversation Graham gave Chief. With those details that he loves to give. But it makes me laugh a bit as even he has a cup of coffee, hinting that the story was going to be long. And once again, showing his love for coffee. How nice of ACME to have given Graham coffee. One more thing to make you laugh more.

His expression, that expression that seems to express "Thank you but... you aren’t Carmen"

Chief's questions confuse Graham because since he already lived what Carmen does from his own experience, he’s sure that Carmen is one of the "good guys". Confusing Chief further. We move on to how Chief believes that Graham is no clue to be closer to the truth behind Carmen, but Chase arrives, and finally finds Gray again, that missing link for Carmen. Gray is still being targeted by ACME.

Chase arrives and thinks that everything will be easy, but again, he won't be able to get anything because Gray doesn't remember being Crackle back then. Gray finally reveals to ACME his "accident at work" that has caused him to have a year-long amnesia. It's funny how Graham responds to Chase that he's an orphan. As he does not like to mention that part of his life. Interesting point is the only thing I will mention.

Graham when mentioning such an accident and the consequences of it, it shows that deep down, he is worried and intrigued in all that year he disappeared from his life. As if he feels that he can't be himself if he doesn't have all the memories of him. From his body language, he shows how something really affects him.Mentioning this, in addition to showing for the first time more clearly that Graham really cares about his amnesia, this data is interesting to Chase, he believes him and that serves to make Graham closer to the truth.

Chase and Chief reveal everything to Gray, that although Graham left the hospital, he never entered, all the details, and Gray doesn’t remember anything. It’s revealed that he is telling the truth, and Chief says one of the best ways to describe Gray.

This phrase, this phrase for me is the best way to describe Gray, and not because of his current state with amnesia, but since the beginning of the series, his actions and feelings are a mystery, his empathy for Carmen is clear, procuring the good of people he appreciates, but also his ambition and being successful, going too far to the point of taking actions of questionable morality. Now, something that has left me thinking a lot, is that he really seems very concerned when he notices that many things don’t make sense, and as I already said and this proves it one more: the truth matters a LOT to him. He cares a LOT about identity, really being himself.

Graham already said it, he's an orphan. Of course, no one but him cares to know the truth, of all those memories that are blank. In himself, he doesn’t know anything about his roots, the phrase "Not that I know of. I’m an orphan" suggests that he really doesn’t know ANYTHING about his parents, he doesn’t even know if he had siblings. Surely he doesn't even know if they died or abandoned him. I may be over-analyzing everything, but I think that's why Graham/Gray cares about being himself, being a person of integrity, and want to be successful: because he only has himself. And he can only trust himself. He wants to show himself that he can achieve many things. But everything is for his own benefit. Something that has caused me a lot of curiosity is that Gray is never seen around people, or that he is seen to be extremely sociable. He gets off work and he's alone, he's at work and he's alone, he's in the cafeteria and he's alone. I don’t know if it’s the factor of the series, I mean the fact of not putting more character in the story and the whole story mobilizes faster. But I want to believe that this also reflects how Gray is lonely, for his own sake, because he just trusts himself. Yes, he has a certain personality of being able to work as a team and interact with them, but that was within VILE, but outside, in the world, it seems that he doesn’t connect, or doesn’t want to connect with the world. Why? I think I have a slight idea:

we had already heard it before

Although it’s a good joke, it’s curious that he asks this kind of thing. He’s afraid of the unknown and that it may harm him. This is just my little theory, but maybe just maybe, Gray doesn't like to be and feel vulnerable. He always looks calm, being out of the unnecessary drama, he recovers quickly to any failure or mistake he makes. But deep down, I've noticed that at the 3 phases: Graham/Gray/Crackle, they don't like being vulnerable, being in the unknown and not knowing what to do, being in danger and being harmed. Physically and emotionally. I think I understand why: the world has already hurt him since he was born, living alone, not knowing what to do and why he came into the world. He doesn’t know his roots, he doesn’t know why he came to the world. What kind of parents he may have had and what kind of "customs" he inherited from them. He only has himself, what he knows is the only thing he has, his memories, his experiences are the only thing he has and he knows what his personality has shaped him, his way. Nobody built his path, nobody guided him, it was him alone. We don’t know if somebody adopted him or if he just wanted to survive as he could. But at least, from what I can see, is that he has always wanted to be alone. Now that he doesn’t have that amnesia, he feels that he has lost himself, because that year of experiences, of memories is important for Graham, because it’s the only thing he has that makes him feel complete in this world where he is alone. I hope I have been clear and haven’t confused you.

His actions and personality come from there, from realizing that he only has himself, that he doesn’t belong to anyone or anything, but still he will give everything to himself, he will not let anyone or anything make him feel bad. He will take advantage of everything he knows and can learn to do, live his entire life completely, be successful, show himself that for him and for him, he will be able to do interesting and great things.

This makes me a little thoughtful and empathetic, because here Graham, seeing all the details that his stay in the hospital doesn’t make sense, that he doesn’t know what happened, and just having himself, as never before, Graham feels lost, he maintains control as much as he can, but little by little he’s overcoming the situation, he feels a little vulnerable and the saddest thing in some way is that there is no one to help him. Apparently there never was. And let's be honest: Chief is proposing the experimental method just because she wants to know about Carmen and the connection she has with Graham, nothing more, it isn’t to fully help Graham. It isn’t by putting ACME as being “not at all empathic” but rather that this reaffirms how alone Graham is in the world. I hope I don't sound exaggerated with all this I have mentioned.

The moment has arrived:

They put the device on Graham, activate it, and memories begin to emerge.

When Chase asked about the train trip 18 months ago, it’s one of the first memories he sees: attacking Carmen with the Crackle Rod. He screams, and I think I know why, because he appreciates Carmen and can't believe he was going to attack her.

This scene in his eyes is VERY important for later, in the next part of the analysis it will be mentioned why. I loved this scene because taking this approach to his eyes invites you to be inside Graham's head and his memories. And at the same time, it will have a reason for being later.

Seeing the scenes of how Graham suffers without understanding anything, seeing VILE, the Faculty, the training, his first mission. Graham, the one back then who cared about being one of the "good guys" was facing memories where he was a "bad guy." The crew seriously did a good job of showing how much he is shocked and suffered when dealing with so many memories that made him confront his morals.

They turn off the device, Chase worries and wants to see how Graham is doing. But, as someone had already mentioned before:

he woke up AND CHOSE VIOLENCE

He goes out. Without a problem he takes down some Acme agents. And he leaves ACME.

The reason for his uncontrolled "bad" side is because Graham believed that he only had amnesia, but as we already knew at the beginning of this season, they also suppressed his stealing side, his "VILE side", the device not only caused a clash of memories , but also one of morals. Crackle left ACME, but on the street it was Graham, remembering only numbers to dial, which was VILE. Crackle did actions that only confused Graham more and more. Crackle was awake but only unconsciously and for lapses.

Crackle dials the number, but Graham is the one who answers. He doesn’t recognize anything that he does, but those memories, that unconscious that is Crackle is the one who responds. This shot to his eyes again, now with a green glow. The visual language they use in the series in general is simply wonderful.

One of my favorite scenes: Graham saving this boy.

Believe me something, this scene, this action is not filler, it wasn’t only to continue the suspense of "Crackle to Graham and vice versa" but it tells you a lot about Gray's true morality, of his experiences in 18 months with empathy are beginning to bear fruit.Including how much Carmen impacted on his life.

I mean this: Gray is supposed to have had his "VILE side" suppressed, the side of him that steals, but only that, the rest that complements Gray's personality is still intact. Now that Crackle is unconsciously awake, it’s only for lapses. Because Graham didn’t understand those memories in VILE, Graham, the one who cared so much about being one of the "good guys", that body identifying himself as Graham who lived 18 months of empathy, had an effect on his cognition.

Remember in part 3 of this review, I asked if everything that was presented to us in past seasons about Graham was a lie? Well, from these first 3 episodes of this season I can confirm that NO, all that moments weren’t a lie. Although Crackle/Gray didn’t voluntarily make the decision to be "good", his body, his cognition responded well and he agreed to do those actions. Crackle didn’t take full control of Graham, he appeared only when he saw the opportunity to steal.

But when doing something for others, Graham appeared.

The Graham/Crackle body was having a "moral" discussion. Graham was holding on to his belief that he was the good guy. Graham is latent like Crackle. If we call it very crudely, the "good" and "bad" side of it are coming out at the same time, one doesn’t predominate more than the other. Very chaotically and unwillingly, because of ACME's experimental apparatus, he was being Gray. Without fully understanding yet that he’s what he really wants to do: be empathetic or ambitious. When actually it can be both, but then we'll get to that part later.

Graham goes to the boy's house. He considers going to boy’s house to return his wallet.

A point that isn’t from me, but from a friend who insists that I put this. I appreciate her very much, so I will: My friend thinks this smile is because Graham when he looks the house, he imagines what it would be like to have a home and a family. I leave it to your own criteria.

When he looks out the window to see if there is someone, it opens for isn’t properly closed. Again, Crackle emerges.

The unconscious never speaks, it only acts. It's interesting to see that whenever Crackle shows up, he never speaks, it just acts, it just steals.

This is one of the most interesting scenes (and at least for me, it hurt me a little bit)

Do you notice how Graham returns when the world has contact with him? When Crackle arises it’s because he sees his ambition, when those VILE memories come out and they’re the ones that impacted him the most, that marked his life. But when the outside world makes an appearance, makes contact with him, Graham appears again. Graham in 18 months of empathy vowed to be good, and his cognition agreed with that, no matter how strong his memory drives were in VILE. Because this is his personality as he has already been mentioned several times: he’s committed to what he wants to achieve, to what is really born to him.

He sees this woman, and remembers the archaeologist. It’s the same as with the boy who was almost going to get run over, this scene isn’t only for the suspense, it’s to show that memories in VILE have marked Crackle back then. Being in VILE, studying there, the crackle rod, the adrenaline of stealing marked him, but the archaeologist's event also and from another way. When he was going to take a life for the first time. In the second part of my analysis I said it, it was obvious that he wasn’t convinced to do it, something inside him didn’t like doing such an act. This confirms it.

Remembering that whole event, how he almost took a life shocks him so much that he fell to the ground. He’s actually suffering from confusion, but also from remembering something so vile that he was about to do.

He answered not only because the woman asked him, he's telling himself too. You can see that by the tone of his voice, the way he's closing his eyes. He wanted to deny that the one he sees in his memories is him. He doesn't want to believe that he was bad.

Well… now Graham is going to jail. Making him a target now of all: ACME, VILE and Carmen.

He’s locked up in jail, just because Iceland has a very low crime rate, he doesn’t want to eat, he looks sad, and not even the police are there to investigate further his answers. Graham claims that he doesn’t know why he wasn’t in that house. The police only answered by mere logic, that if he had other people's belongings, it was theft. They don’t bother to delve further into Graham's answers to at least realize that he suffers from amnesia and incoherent seizures. Again: he feels alone in this world.

... you know? this whole chapter watching Gray so confused and sad made me feel sick. I'm a very empathic person, so everything that was going on Graham really I feel it. And seeing this scene with Gray's photo, I was between laughter and suffering. I couldn't bear to see him more and more confused.

This shot makes me very sentimental but it's great, can we appreciate it for a moment please?

In addition to showing how frustrated Graham is, the visual narrative in this image also explains his situation. He’s alone, he feels that no one can help him, the shadow covers the part of his head, his forehead to be concrete, where are all those memories that he doesn’t understand and he doesn’t want to accept. Where he lies and now is awake unconsciously Crackle. But his body is in the light, he clings to the light and in believing that he is Graham Calloway and he always was. And at that moment, he’s no longer alone, Carmen's shadow emerges from the light, somehow erasing the fence, that separation between the two. Because unconditionally she was always there. She will always be there Carmen for Graham.

He’s amazed to see her but at the same time he feels so relieved. She’s the person he trusts the most and that he knows that she will help him. But the cleaners arrive and give Carmen a tough fight. Graham helps her with whatever he can. After they leave, Carmen doesn't know why but she doesn't waste time trying to get Graham out of the cell. But the Bellum Robot arrives. And now Graham is in VILE’s hands.

Did you realize that these 3 episodes happened in a whole day? Graham basically hasn't slept. The boy goes a long way without sleeping I guess.

I never believed that he would analyze so much in these 3 episodes, I’m still surprised but very happy. I hope you liked it and as I always tell you: if you have any questions or want to comment/add something that was commented on, do so, what better than feedback from everyone. The fourth part will be published soon, I promise. Greetings!

Part. I Introdution

Part. II Empathy vs Ambition

Part. III Amnesia and it’s Future Consequences

Part. III.5 Graham Calloway: The Walking Enigma (HERE)

Part. IV Integrity At a high (and unfair) price

Part. V The final decision and a new beginning

Plus 1. Gray and his strange habit of explaining things

Plus 2. Crossover: Sabrina And Gray: New Beginning

Plus 3. Crossover: Hawk/Eli and Crackle/Gray: Redemption

#carmen sandiego #graham calloway #carmen sandiego 2019 #graham crackle #carmen sandiego netflix #VILE #ACME #chase devineaux #red crackle #eve's analysis

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sooibian · 5 years ago

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The Spy Who Loved Me

gif credits @byunvoyage

Pairing: Spy!Baekhyun x Assassin!Reader ft. Chen, Chanyeol

Description: It’s an obsessive cat and mouse chase

Themes: Dark comedy, angst, heavily inspired by season one of Killing Eve

Warnings: Violence, strong language

Word Count: ~2.8k

A/N: This one-shot comes during a very busy season for me so if you can make time for feedback, I’d be very grateful. Thanks :)

———————————————————————–

It’s the way light escapes their eyes.

Fear. Despair. Hope. Then…nothing.

They hope to be spared. I have a family…what about my children…please…why are you doing this to me…. The utterly foolish ones even offer you money. This imbecility makes the corners of your mouth curl upwards - especially when they’re out of breath from running or begging or whatever it is that gets their heart rate up. Eh. Factor in some cardio before dissolving into a permanent state of slumber, maybe? Poor things always mistake the twitch of your lips for impending clemency…what they don’t know is that it’s always been the breathy ones that peak your excitement.

There’s not a single hit you’ve regretted.

Mostly because you don’t bother with the futility of why. They give you a name and you jet off. To you, it’s really a fun job involving travel, costumes, languages, a hefty allowance, sticking pointy objects in the right places and theatrics. You’re not one to just do your job and slip away quietly. No arterial air embolisms, no unidentifiable fumes or poisons. No boring and discreet. Where’s the fun in that? Flamboyant is your middle name. Every assassination is a heroi-comical poem for you - killing an asthamatic nez with a fatal concoction of perfume or a feeble-hearted fetishist with clamps that turned out to be a wee bit too intense for him.

You’re good at this. No, infact, you’re the best there is, the best there was, the best there ever will be.

“The NIS has deployed a team of four to hunt you down because of the mess you left in Beijing. So you’ll be working with a team now. No more flying solo.” Your handler Chen says nonchalantly.

Shit.

Beijing. “Make it look like a suicide”, had been the directive. The assignment Kasia had been put under witness protection after you’d murdered her mafia boyfriend. She was in a hospital - injured and deranged from the shock of it all, watched over by armed men. Things obviously didn’t go as planned and the security detail bloodbath was, well, collateral damage.

You saunter towards Chen with an intentional swing in your hips, a pout on your lips. You sit a little too close to the astute man, almost purring with seduction, “NIS, you say. Give me a name."

“Byun Baekhyun.” His lips curl into a cat-like smile as he stealthily adds a foot long distance between the both of you.

“Never heard of him”, you say neutrally, gliding closer to his stoic form.

“He was a security officer before this. A nobody. In fact, he was fired right after the Kasia debacle in Beijing. She was his responsibility.” Letting out an exasperated sigh, he gets up on the pretext of fetching a glass of water.

“Why the sudden promotion, then?”

“A change of jobs. He’s heading a team…Operation Jinseong, they call themselves. Apparently, he’s the only one who believed that the murders have all been executed by a woman. If they can get to you, they can get to them. The organization. This conjecture has seemed to have impressed a higher up. After firing him, they swept his computer and found hoards of theories and all the intelligence he could gather about the faceless demon that’s actually…you. An insider thinks he’s fascinated. And a little cuckoo.” Chen’s laughter is throaty and taunting.

He takes a sip of water and places the glass carefully on the counter, eyeing you the entire time. Chen. It’s a nom de plume. He’s a ghost - a shadow of a shadow, if you will. You know nothing about Chen but you know better than to snoop around. He’s always been affable yet distant, but he has this maddening habit of scrutinizing people. The changes in the expression, the dilation of the pupils. The man doesn’t miss a beat. And he stares unapologetically. You wonder what he thinks when he looks at you. You wonder how he feels. Disgusted? Lustful? Terrified?

He wants to know everything that’s behind those vacant eyes. With him, you feel disrobed.

“You’re only as good as your last”, he says finally, in his threateningly soft voice, thrusting a thumb drive into your hand. But you don’t feel threatened. The truth is, you feel nothing at all.

He’s at the door when you exclaim, “You never have sex with me!” Feigning annoyance.

He laughs and states matter -of-factly, “I’m married”, before closing the door behind him.

Like that’s ever stopped a man before.

***

Byun Baekhyun.

You search the thumb drive and a fresh faced man with luminous eyes smiles at you from the screen. His arm is wrapped around a slender, honey-skinned woman with big hair and big teeth. They look like an advertisement for home buyers.

A wave of recognition floods your mind.

He was there.

He was there at the Beijing scene. The beautiful man who helped you with the coffee maker in the hospital. The very same coffee you doused barista Kasia with.

There’s an inexplicable swell in your chest.

You’re no team player.

The undertaking with your ex and her boyfriend didn’t go as planned. Chen should’ve known.

After a disagreement, you instigated her to off him, your shin getting injured in the scuffle. Then you ran her over with the jeep - once, twice. The third time was just to be sure. This commotion affected the escape of the NIS Agent you were after.

The mole that ratted out Baekhyun’s Operation Jinseong.

The murders of your “colleagues” you could manage to explain - you’d tailored them to look like accidents. However, the assignment’s escape was sure to reflect poorly on you.

You’re only as good as your last.

The Agent scurries across a field of dead grass towards the feeder road, putting considerable distance between him and an injured you, where someone sat waiting anxiously in the driver’s seat.

Oh, Baekhyun…

It’s the first time you look into each other’s eyes, the moment stretching between you. It is like standing on the ledge of a skyscraper. With the wind in your hair, the world at your feet but in this space exists trepidation. A fear of falling.

Your gun wielding arm suddenly feels too heavy and your legs threaten to give up on you. Your heart rate escalates as the hot embers of his gaze gloss over the stretch of your skin.

The mole slips into the backseat of Baekhyun’s compact Kia Morning as you continue to take aimless shots at his vitals - eyes still intertwined with Baekhyun’s.

What good was a mole to the NIS?, you wanted to ask. Especially one that looked like a sewer rat.

You were only doing them a favour.

Aiming the gun at Baekhyun, you fire, only to realize he isn’t fearful or panicky. On the contrary, there is a sense of purpose in his eyes as well as something you could only identify as a glimmer. A spark.

Even from a twenty foot distance you can tell Byun Baekhyun is in awe of you.

This…thing…this electricity surges through your veins and you sprint towards your jeep - as fast as your good leg could carry you.

Oops. You didn’t mean to run over her for the fourth time.

***

Reverse. Acceleration. A few well thought out turns and your jeep is hardly a hundred meters behind Baekhyun’s car. You continue to fire and he continues to dart, swerve, sidestep. A good driver.

Suddenly, his car comes to a screeching halt.

He steps out of his vehicle amidst shrill cries of protest from the mole in the backseat and you follow suit.

Weaponless, crouched, he inches towards the gun pointed at him.

“I mean no harm”, despite his scared posture, his voice is confrontational. “Leave the man alone. He has a little girl.”

Oh, Baekhyun…

You smile at him. He smiles back.

A genuine smile. Like the one your father used to give you when he saw you relishing ice-cream as…a little girl.

In a flash, you aim the nozzle at your temple and Baekhyun cries out a loud, pained, “NO!”

Laughing, you lower the gun and fire at his feet. He ducks.

You vanish.

It was exhilarating to use the alias ``Mrs. Byun ” for your next job especially since the man and his giant partner have been on your tail for three months now.

But, maybe, you shouldn’t’ve stolen Baekhyun’s luggage as soon as he landed in Tokyo to investigate the mysterious death of a Chinese colonel. He and his team knew perfectly well whodunnit. But one can’t bring faceless demons to book now, can they?

Who knows how this easily distracted giant of a man is supposed to protect Baekhyun if it should ever come to it. He couldn’t even watch his luggage for a measly five minutes.

***

You watch Baekhyun and the giant from your apartment overlooking the crime scene. He looks frazzled and the giant slightly apologetic. ‘You’ll have your bag back soon, baby’, you whisper, sucking on a bubblegum flavoured lollipop.

Thirty minutes roll by and the investigation seems to be heading nowhere. Bored out of your wits, you slump into your bed and toy with the contents of Baekhyun’s bag - shirts, slacks, underwear, toiletries.

Dull, tedious, and soul-destroyingly unimaginative.

Save for one green scarf.

In a sea of monotones, the scarf stands out. Demanding attention. Fluttering your eyes shut, you slowly bury your face in it - your senses entirely enveloped in his heady scent.

***

“Excuse me, if you don’t mind me asking, where did you get that scarf from?”

Day two in Tokyo. You’ve been following Baekhyun (and, by extension, Chanyeol). Studying him. It was like adopting Chen’s personality. Apart from the occasional loud laughter, his demeanour, you learn, is self-effacing, gracious, and polite. He’s a picky eater who only eats to live and not the other way round. He’s also very observant and intuitive. But not enough to know that he’s being watched.

Also, he’s thinking. Constantly. He’s thinking about you.

“Excuse me?”

Chanyeol asks again - large, deep brown eyes focused on your neck trying to stop you from getting onto the same train as Baekhyun.

Very subtle.

“It’s from my mother’s store. I could give you the address if you like”, smiling, you crane your neck to look into his disturbed eyes as you both pretend not to know each other amidst a swarm of dog-tired people on the platform at six in the evening.

You slip into the crowd but the oaf chooses to follow.

What does he think he’s doing following an assassin through a strange city! Unarmed.

Forty minutes elapse and he continues to chase you through the streets of Tokyo, keeping up with your brisk pace. With your easy charm, you breeze into the club called Camelot and wave Chanyeol goodbye as he’s stopped by the bouncer and sent to the back of the line. His eyes are dark with a murderous rage.

The club is loud, dark…stuffy - the air thick with over-the-counter happiness. Definitely not to your taste but you stay to give Chanyeol a head start. He’s pissed you off and he’ll pay for it later. Not today.

You really didn’t want to upset a tired Baekhyun. At least not until you feel a beefy hand weigh down your shoulder.

“I didn’t want to do this”, you rise on your tippy toes and whisper into his ear before sticking a short blade into the side of his stomach. He’s heaving as you stare into his round, childlike, startled eyes while supporting his stumbling weight and stabbing him repeatedly until he finally collapses.

You leave him to bleed out on the dance floor and on your way out, you grab the arm of a medium-built man, your blood-dipped, glistening lips stretched into a lascivious smile.

“Let’s put you in a costume first”, you say to the unassuming moron, excitably thinking of Baekhyun’s dull shirts.

Grief draws people closer, your grandmother used to say, every time someone died of sickness in that impoverished little village of yours.

Baekhyun’s grieving the oaf who was slowing him down. He’s looking for company. So..he’s snooping.

He’s in your apartment.

The “trusting old lady” - your next door neighbour, who actually works for the same organization as you handed him the key exactly as instructed. You’d been expecting him, this meeting was long overdue. But you wait in the cute little French cafe just around the corner - watching him scout out your apartment through your phone, while devouring a Charlotte Russe cake - dressed pretty in a flouncy pink dress.

He’s careful not to make a squeak. Walking on tippy toes, running his beautifully slender fingers along the drapes, the furniture, the walls as he goes. Your skin tingles all over. Oh, how you wish to be a piece of furniture in the moment. Only Baekhyun could make you want to be something muted and inanimate. Furniture, mattress, drapes.

He saunters slowly to your blackwood Georgian cupboard. The one you use for your wigs, costumes, weapons, and his own green scarf. He wears the scarf around his neck, ruffles the costumes but he’s gentle with the wigs. Stroking and caressing.

From the drawer he picks out a .38 and shoves it in his waistband. Right behind his hip bone.

Oh, Baekhyun…

Pretty boys and their dangerous toys.

He finds himself in the kitchen. The revolver seems to have straightened his spine and suffused his step with a very welcome spring. Mi casa es su casa.

In the fridge he finds exactly what he’s supposed to. No food. Only a dozen bottles of celebratory champagne of the best kind. What comes next from him is a scornful snicker which fills your mouth with a bitter taste. The Charlotte Russe doesn’t look very appetizing anymore. He draws a bottle out of the fridge, studies it and smashes it onto the floor. Then another, then another until all the bottles are reduced to shattered glass dripping in gold strewn across your kitchen floor.

Playtime is over, Baekhyun.

You make a run for your apartment.

***

He’s exhausted.

Breathless, air tousled, shirt crumpled, eyes droopy, beads of sweat lined across his forehead and upper lip - standing clueless, smack-dab in the middle of the mess he’s made - clothes torn off their hangers, furniture overturned. You can’t recognize your upscale Seoul apartment anymore. Careful around the glass, you make your way towards his still frame, withdraw the weapon from his light, jaded grasp.

You take his hand in yours and lead him to your bedroom - which is entirely ransacked just like the rest of your house. Save for the bed.

He lies down on his back and his first words are, “God, I’m tired.”

“Me too”, you say, as you lie facing him, “Are you wearing the cologne I gave you?”

You’d sent him a bottle of cologne along with the bag you had nicked in Tokyo, as a token of appreciation. It was handcrafted to smell like power.

He hums, turning to the side to face you, nestling into the depths of your irises.

“Are you going to kill me?” He asks, eyeing the revolver in your hand.

Your heart falls to pieces at the ache in his voice.

“No”, you say simply, tossing it to the side.

“Really?”

“I promise.”

Relief ripples across his soft, boyish features smoothing the lines of worry as it goes.

“You’re all I think about”, he says, studying your face. And you’re left wondering yet again, about his thoughts. His feelings.

“So you trash my apartment?” You sound as gentle as you can. But if you’re honest, you don’t even have to try that hard.

“I lost my job, my partner, my wife left me, and I even lost my sanity because of you.”

With his dulcet touch, he traces along the edge of your lips.

“Fair enough. I think about you too. I mean, I to you masturbate a lot.” You say as your thumb rubs his cheek lightly.

He lets out a loud, embarrassed giggle that makes him look a decade younger.

“Too much?” You ask, apprehensively.

“No, I just wasn’t expecting that.”

And with that you’re both inching closer to each other, like magnets.

Baekhyun’s soft gaze darkens and simultaneously you feel something sharp poking at your stomach.

“You can’t do it”, you wrap your hand around the blade, almost mocking him. He’s too nice for something this abominable.

“I can”, he whispers, his eyes still nestled in yours, as he plunges the blade deeper, tearing you apart.

He places a chaste, soft kiss on your forehead.

Fear. Despair. Hope.

“Sorry, baby.”

Continuation - My Lovable Curse

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sapphicambitions · 5 years ago

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Okay so I finished watching black sails a few days ago and I’ve spent the last few days reading other metas and posts and interviews about Flint & Silver to gather my thoughts (thots, if you will) and these are the conclusions I have come to:

John Silver and James Flint have the most interesting and well written dynamic ives ever seen between two characters. I am endlessly fascinated by their relationship. Because it’s so unique and complex and I can’t think of any other relationship between two men on screen that even gets close to being on their level, that level of intimacy and their DIALOGUE????? especially in season four????? there is no daylight between us???? i have made myself transparent to you????? you already know me in all the ways that’s relevant???? fuck me up dude!!!!!

All of that being said, I don’t like… ship them. At least not in the conventional way of shipping. I don’t see them as boyfriends or husbands or even as romantically involved. Like I said I LOVE their dynamic and I am fascinated with the complexities of it, and I really and truly think that they loved each other deeply, but to me the idea of them being like in an explicit, canon relationship sort of... cheapens it?

Especially if we’re talking about seasons 1-3 flint & silver. To me, saying that they were romantically involved during that time period sort of misses the point of their build up. Because they didn’t even really like each other then. They were necessary evils in each other’s stories. ESPECIALLY in seasons 1 & 2, they weren’t friends! They were work place acquaintances who needed each other to survive. And remember Silver’s whole season three arc of “I think flint controls the weather”???? Lmaooo the idea that they were romantically involved at that time, to me, almost does a disservice to their characters and the journey that they took to get to where they were in the fourth season.

Because I don’t think that they truly started to even be friends until that night around the fire. When Silver asked in who’s name they were fighting the war and Flint told the truth about his past. When Flint made himself transparent and vulnerable to Silver, and they openly discussed their partnership. When they came to a mutual understanding of each other, when they felt the possibility of the future together, that is when they really and truly emotionally connected and became more than work place acquaintances, became even more than just casual friends.

But I still don’t think that they were like, together together in season four.

Do I think there were extremely high levels of homoeroticism? also-fucking-lutely. But I don’t think they were romantically involved. For many reasons.

I think that the last two episodes of the series do not work if they did not love each other. The last two episodes are not effective if there is not something deeper there, if there isn’t something to lose when they fall apart. Like when Billy and Silver fall apart? I was like aww they were friends. :( and that’s it. When Silver and Flint fell apart? I sobbed my fucking eyes out. Would I have been as destroyed by Silver’s betrayal if I didn’t truly believe that these two men had a deep and profound relationship, that they needed each other and completed each other? Lmao no! No I wouldn’t have. If Flint didn’t love Silver, he wouldn’t have taught him sword fighting, he wouldn’t have shot Dooley, he wouldn’t have looked so deeply crushed when Silver raised the gun. Because the look on his face? When that happens? That is heartbreak, pure and simple.

BUT. I ALSO think that the last two episodes of the series do not work if that love is explicit and defined. I do not think it works if Silver is fully aware of that love. Because I don’t think he is. I think he has found himself closer and closer to Flint, committing himself to Flint, becoming the other half of Flint, and….. doesn’t quite realize how homoerotic it is lmao. Because he has Madi! And Silver has never really had someone to be close to before, so I honestly don’t believe that Silver was aware how how Homo(TM) the whole thing was with Flint, at least not consciously, at least not out loud. And I say this because there is a very important moment in the finale that doesn’t work if their relationship is defined and official or romantic in any way.

It’s when Flint says “This will all have been for nothing. We will have been for nothing. Defined by their histories. Distorted to fit into their narrative. Until all that is left of us are the monsters in the stories they tell their children,” That is his last card to play. That, to me, is the THESIS of the series, that moment is what they have been building up to for four seasons, that is Flint’s driving force as a person. And Silver says: “I don’t care,”

That moment is reliant on Silver not understanding the queer implications behind what Flint said. That moment is reliant on Silver being a man who has never experienced the life ruining homophobia that Flint has experienced. That moment is reliant on Silver genuinely not caring, it is reliant on the complete disconnect from Flint in that moment, and if the two of them had been in a defined relationship at the moment, I wouldn’t have bought it. And it is heartbreaking and tragic because Silver DOESN’T get it. He doesn’t! He does not know what it means to fear how the world will see you for who you fundamentally are, fear how mothers will tell their children about you, fear how your story will be told, and I do not buy that moment if Silver is aware of his own queerness. Maybe other characters in other stories, I might, but Silver, self serving and self saving Silver, to not care? He has to genuinely NOT care.

I’ve mentioned before in other posts that watching Silver and Flint’s story play out is a lot like watching Romeo and Juliet, that you know that their story will end in tragedy, but you watch it unfold anyway. But there’s another reason I think they parallel the star crossed lovers. And I think the moral of Romeo & Juliet (it’s my favorite play step up and fight me) is not that the young lovers were stupid and reckless, but the moral is that they might have lived if not for the outside forces trying to drive them apart. Romeo and Juliet is about how the toxic and warring world in which they lived wasn’t sustainable for their love, that they were driven to their deaths by parents who didn’t realize the harm they were inflicting upon their children.

I digress but the POINT being that it is outside forces that drove the two of them apart. (Get Wreked, Billy) The toxic and warring world in which they lived wasn’t sustainable for their partnership. You can see it best in 4x09 when the flashbacks of the two of them alone on the beach are funny and tender and vulnerable and open between the two of them, and present day where Silver’s trying to get Flint a little bit KILLED and you can see how much things have changed between them since that day on the beach.

How might have things changed in another direction if they hadn’t been driven apart? Because like I said earlier, Silver and Flint’s relationship was a JOURNEY, it didn’t happen overnight. And I can’t help but feel like they were only at the beginning of their relationship when they fell apart and that is another tragedy, the what if? of it all. How might their relationship have changed and gotten even deeper if they hadn’t been pushed apart? What hadn’t been explored between them, what was still left unsaid when Silver raised his gun at Flint? So that’s ANOTHER reason I don’t think they were like ~together~ because there is tragedy is losing something you don’t have, that you might have had. Losing something that you don’t know what it could have become and that breaks my heart because it feels like they had only JUST begun and then they were ending in the most heartbreaking and tragic way.

Also to be honest, the main reason that I love Them is because I’m a slut for tragedy, and knowing that something is going to have a sad ending but rooting for them anyway. Romeo and Juliet, the Hunchback of Notre Dame musical, Hadestown, the Song of Achilles, They Both Die at The End, even rewatching Brokeback Mountain, you get it. Tell me that they aren’t going to make it in the end and then let me watch them fall in love anyway. Let me watch them grow to love each other knowing that they’re going to end in tragedy. I should be sobbing on the floor by the end of it, I WANT to be sobbing on the floor by the end of it. That’s my shit. It is literally my favorite type of story. fuck me UP

So those are my Thots (TM) about Flint & Silver. They have one of the most well written relationships I’ve ever seen on screen and I am endlessly fascinated by them. I don’t like romantically ship them because I think it’s too complicated to reduce their relationship to “they’re dating“ when it is their journey from reluctant work place acquaintances to “It’s hard to know where one began and the other ended” that is so incredible. But I do think there is a deep and profound love between them and the finale doesn’t WORK unless they love each other, but it also has to be somewhat unspoken for it to work, too. Because I don’t think Silver was aware of his own queerness and I think he has to actively not understand the queerness of Flint’s fight in order to do what he does otherwise I wouldn’t buy it. And I think that they were only at the beginning of their partnership, and I wonder where it could have gone if they hadn’t been ripped apart. Theirs is a tragedy of losing someone you love and losing something that isn’t easily defined, losing something that could have been. And their tragedy does not work if they didn’t have something to lose.

#lesbianlaynie #laynie's thots #silverflint #black sails #larose watches black sails #bs meta #black sails meta #john silver #james flint #long john silver #captain flint #laynie's essays #flintsilver #for alex to read

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thesquirrelqueer · 4 years ago

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What Is and What Should Never Be

AKA for some reason my professor let me write about supernatural for class so here's that if anyone is interested

How does a show about two brothers who hunt monsters turn into a 4th wall shattering queer love story? It all starts with the show’s creator, Eric Kripke, and the intense amount of meta that was built into Supernatural. Kripke’s original vision for the show was to create a series for “manly” men, who wanted to watch a show about red-blooded Americans doing red-blooded American things, like drinking beer and being gunslingers. However, with “death of the author” and a lot of tiny accidents along the way, it turned into a 15 year-long fever dream involving angels, demons, and characters fighting against their own creator.

Kripke has always been interested in horror, the book The House With a Clock in Its Walls igniting his passion for the genre when he was a kid. Growing up in Toledo, Ohio, he would create amateur horror movies with his friends. This love of filmmaking and a fascination with urban legends eventually led him to create the show Supernatural. Kripke only thought the series would run for a maximum of five seasons. It ran for fifteen.

As the series progressed, Kripke would often receive messages from people from his youth, asking him why he wrote such twisted stories. Even his own sister would call him once a month saying, “What the hell is wrong with you?”, to which Kripke laughs at. Many people assume that his stories stem from some sort of traumatic experience, but in the end he is just naturally a really messed up guy. Kripke abandoned Supernatural after its 5th season, but by then, the seeds for the meta-narrative had already been sprouting. He has worked on multiple shows since then, such as Timeless, Revolution, and more recently, The Boys, in which Kripke’s perverted imagination really gets to have fun.

Kripke’s baby, Supernatural, is the child born because their parent’s birth control doesn’t work. Most of it was accidental. For the first three seasons, Kripke’s vision was to create a show that centered around the Winchester brothers, Sam and Dean, as they encountered various ghosts and monsters while driving across the midwest in their father’s ‘67 Chevy Impala. However, near the end of the third season, a writer’s strike caused the show to drive off course, shortening the season from 22 episodes to only 16. With the season finale involving Dean being killed by hellhounds and sent to hell, Kripke needed a way to quickly save Dean. Thus angels were introduced to the show, after Kripke had said they never would. This is where the meta-narrative begins.

In the episode “The Monster At The End of This Book”, Supernatural introduces the idea that Sam, Dean, and their new angel friend Castiel, are all characters in a book series that exists within the world of Supernatural. The writer of the Supernatural book series, Chuck Shurley, AKA G-d, becomes a stand-in for the writers and creators of the show, specifically Kripke himself. This same episode introduces the idea that characters cannot stray from the path on which they are written, yet Dean and Castiel are able to do just that. This establishes that Dean and Castiel have free will within the story, though this ability presents unique challenges. This is the first and certainly not the last shattered fourth wall the show presents. Many of these fourth wall breaks revolved around Dean and Castiel’s relationship, making it seem as if the two men were in love with each other but couldn’t be together because the writers/Chuck wouldn’t allow it.

It is at this point that Kripke’s characters slip through his fingers. Dean Winchester was never meant to be queer. However, through years and years of queerbaiting, queercoding, and accidents, Kripke’s manly womanzier became the love interest for a gay angel. However, as fans struggled to find closure on the relationship and were forced to suffer through 12 years of queerbaiting, Supernatural itself turned into a monster that would not die, much like the ones in the show. Part of the reason why the show’s fanbase refused to die, even after the series’ disaster of a finale, was that it had ingrained the idea of “death of the author'' into so many aspects of the show.

“Death of the author”, the concept that when a piece is published, the author no longer controls how that work is interpreted, is one of the core elements of Supernatural. Within the show itself, there are multiple deaths of the authors, including Eric Kripke himself being killed off in the episode “The French Mistake”. This literal death of the author is also present when Chuck, the stand-in for the writers, gets killed off. The series even goes as far as to have an interaction between Dean and a fan of the in-show book series where he tells her “ I have my version, and you have yours”. Supernatural is supposed to be up for interpretation, like any other form of art.

When Kripke created Supernatural, he definitely never expected that its fans would run with it the way that they did. He also probably didn’t expect for his show to have such an active online fanbase of mostly queer women, who interpreted the show through a queers lens. Fans have taken his story and turned it into their own. To fans of the show, it has become so fourth wall breaking that the characters feel more real than the writer.

#supernatural #spn #spn meta #eric kripke #essay #thesquirrelqueer art #ig #destiel #deancas #castiel #dean winchester #sam winchester #shut up dani #writing #creativecaviar

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eleanorfenyxwrites · 4 years ago

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After Each Midnight Begins A New Day

[Extra #5 - @threephasebird requested that the next extra be some Jin Sibs and Xuanli’s horde of children so here it is! This is (mostly) set post-fic, just as 3zun are on their way to Jinlintai to visit at the end of the last chapter]

[Masterpost]

A quick brief on the children’s names and ages:

Jin Ling (金凌 - rise above) - First son, 20

Jin Fei (金飞 - to fly) - Second son, 17

Jin Yu (金雨 - rain) and Jin Yan (金焰 - fire) - First and Second daughters, 14

Jin Zhuang (金庄 - solemn) - Third son, 12

Jin Lu (金露 - dew) - Third daughter, 7

Jin Ye (金烨 - breathtaking/blaze of fire) - Fourth daughter, 3

As a young boy, Jin Zixuan had often wondered when he would get a sibling. Everyone else had one, it seemed. The Lan Heir had a little brother. The Nie Heir did too. The Jiang Heir got two siblings which seemed like too many, and even those awful Wen boys had each other. He had asked his mother (when he was still young enough to be innocent of the politics of such matters) when he was going to get a didi or meimei of his own, but Madam Jin had just patted his hair and tapped the tip of his nose with her knuckle. It was too gentle of a touch to ever hurt whenever she did that, of course, but he always wrinkled his nose anyway to make her laugh.

Not long after that conversation, he hadn’t gotten a sibling but he had gotten a Mianmian.

She’s technically his shimei, of course, but that hardly matters to him. What does matter is that Luo Qingyang is nothing like the siblings he had imagined for himself when he had asked for one. For starters, she’s older than him by a month, which she makes sure to smugly remind him of at every opportunity. She’s really really polite to adults but annoyingly bossy to him when they get left alone to play. She’s reckless too, and more often than not Jin Zixuan just ends up pouting and dragging his feet as he follows along behind her wherever she wants to run, using his presence at her side as an excuse to sneak into every family-only part of Jinlintai that she can.

By the time they’re 10, though, he loves her fiercely as the sister he can understand by now that he’s never going to get to have. His parents hardly ever see each other, after all, and while he still isn’t totally sure how siblings are made he’s definitely sure that parents have to see each other more often than a few awkward meals a week for it to happen. It’s alright though, he has Mianmian to keep him company and make fun of him whenever he says something dumb (or yell at his cousins when they try to make fun of him for the same).

As they grow, she’s at his side for every important event in his life, as he is for hers. Every birthday, every New Year’s, every important training milestone they get to share. She’s even at his side for the meeting when they’re 14 where it’s announced that he is engaged to Jiang Yanli of the Yunmeng Jiang. Mianmian laughs for so long at that one once they’re alone that his own crushing panic recedes enough for him to punch her in the shoulder and tell her to knock it off, which of course does as little good as ever.

(To this day he still laughs when he remembers the look on her face when she’d heard he was going to get married one day - the shock followed by quickly-repressed snickers throughout the rest of the meeting that had been mercifully, tactfully ignored by the adults in attendance.)

Soon after they turn 16, they’re both there at the main hall the day that a boy who looks to be close to his own age presents himself at Jinlintai to ask for discipleship, claiming blood ties to...to Jin Guangshan as his reason for coming to Lanling all the way from Yunping, rather than going to the Jiang. Jin Zixan is helpless to do anything but watch on in wide-eyed shock as his father kicks the boy down all those stairs, Mianmian’s shocked gasp at his elbow echoing his own as everyone else in the vicinity watches on impassively. They watch together in fascinated horror from their hiding spot behind a large statue to the side of the stairs as the boy somehow manages to pick himself up off the ground at the bottom and bow to Jin Guangshan at the top of the tower with flawless form, the blood on his forehead and the stiffness in his chest as he bows visible even from where they are.

“Oh no,” Mianmian says softly under her breath when he turns to leave. “Do you think he’ll be alright?”

“Maybe...Hopefully,” he replies, numbly, still reeling from the idea that he might have...a brother? A half-brother? Certainly if his mother had given birth to the boy he wouldn’t have been living in Yunping, he would have been there in Lanling with the rest of the family. Besides, there’s no way Madam Jin had been pregnant with..twins (judging by their apparently similar ages) and he hadn’t known it, or no one had mentioned it. Either way - this boy thinks he’s Jin Zixuan’s brother, and his father has just kicked him down the stairs for it. In front of everybody. It’s..jarring, to say the least.

It isn’t long after the boy’s dejected departure from Jinlintai that Jin Zixuan is forced to confront his own feelings about the rumors of his father’s...exploits. Not that he hadn’t heard snippets of it before, snide comments muttered behind hands and under breaths, but they always seemed..unimportant. Just idle gossip, and Madam Jin has never been anything but perfectly (if a bit coldly) civil to Jin Guangshan in the rare times they’re in the same room. It had always seemed best to follow her example and ignore it, but now...well now there’s the boy who had come to them with an honest request, a valid one, and had been kicked down the tower for it, just for being physical proof of the rumors that had always circulated. He can’t ignore it any longer.

Jin Zixuan doesn’t know what to do about it, of course, and he eventually has to acknowledge that there’s nothing he can do, but that still doesn’t keep him from thinking about it until even Mianmian grows tired of his fretting over it all.

Despite his agonizing over the subject, when he sees the boy again in Cloud Recesses two years later as a retainer with the young Nie-gongzi, Jin Zixuan doesn’t even recognize him at first. He personally feels it’s justified considering the circumstances of the only time he had ever seen him (besides the fact that Jiang Yanli - perpetually trailed by her obnoxious brothers - is proving far more of a distraction than he had anticipated), but Mianmian still cuffs him on the ear for it once they’re in private.

“What are you going to say to him?” she demands at the end of her lecture about it, arms crossed over her chest and that mulish look on her face that he had learned to fear a long time ago.

“Wh-what would I even say to him?” he retorts quickly, horrified at the thorny social situation this presents. He isn’t even good at the normal ones, what is he supposed to say to his supposed half-brother who is living, breathing proof of an extramarital affair, and who has been resoundly refused entry into Jinlintai in such a horrible, public fashion? A half-brother who is, apparently, now a member of the Nie Sect and has gained enough of Nie-Zongzhu’s favor to be sent to Cloud Recesses during the lecture season to look after Nie Huaisang, who everyone knows Nie Mingjue doesn’t trust with just anybody…

Where to even begin?!

(Jin Zixuan also laughs about that now, how scared he had been of his brother and how unimpressed Mianmian had been with all of his arguments on his own behalf. He has never once in his life been good at arguing with her, after all.)

In the end, he’s lucky enough a couple of weeks into their studies to have an opportunity to pull Meng Yao aside and stammer through the apology he had rehearsed over the last few days with Mianmian’s help. He apologizes as profusely as he can manage for his father’s behavior towards him, as well as extends a tentative request that they get to know each other better as half-brothers even if Jin Guangshan won’t like it. None of it is polite or graceful, in fact he knows that some of it is inadvertently uncouth bordering on offensive, but Meng Yao still accepts all of it with wide-eyed surprise and, when Jin Zixuan finally stumbles to a verbal halt, with a small, affectionate smile on his handsome face.

----

He finds Mo Xuanyu next.

Word had reached him by letter one day from a woman in a small village who had finally worked up the courage to attempt to appeal to Jin Guangshan on their son’s behalf, only for her to find out from her sister, the Madam of the local main family, that Jin Guangshan is several years dead. She had appealed to him instead, of course, as the boy’s brother and Jin Zixuan had taken Jiang Yanli to Mo Manor with him so they could learn the truth for themselves.

Mo Xuanyu is...wary of meeting him, which Jin Zixuan doesn’t fault him for for a second. In fact he had expected it, which is partially why he had brought Jiang Yanli along (besides the fact that he also just enjoys traveling with his wife).

He meets with Second Madam Mo and her son in as neutral of a space as he can find - and alone, to begin with. It’s clear within minutes of observing the boy that he’s a Jin even before Second Madam Mo outlines the events that had given her her son. Jin Zixuan does his best to reassure her that Mo Xuanyu will be welcome as a visitor in Jinlintai should he wish to come, that he will be legitimized if he wants to be, and that he will be allowed to train with the other disciples as well whether he wants to be legitimized or not.

He doesn’t do a very good job of explaining it, unfortunately (nor does he think he managed a very good job of inspiring any sort of confidence in him as a leader, which is unfortunately a frequent occurrence without Jiang Yanli or Mianmian with him to help him talk). As is usually the case after such instances, he finds himself pleading with Jiang Yanli that evening for her help. The pair of them visit the Second Madam Mo and her son in their home on the Mo estate the following day, and Jiang Yanli charms them both so thoroughly that Mo Xuanyu agrees to pack his things and come home with them two days later, with his mother’s full support.

It quickly becomes clear once they arrive in Jinlintai and Mo Xuanyu settles into his cultivation training with some of the younger children that while he is a Jin in name (sort of) and looks, he is infinitely.. weirder than any other Jin that Jin Zixuan has ever met.

By now he and Meng Yao have both put in the work to have formed something of a decent - if still slightly stilted - relationship, and so he’s become well aware even in their relatively limited interactions that his brother works hard to be an unfailingly polite and graceful sort of gentleman. And of course he still thinks of Mianmian like a sister even now that he has made her his Second; and while her behavior is much more brash than his own or Meng Yao’s she still knows the rules of society and chooses to follow them whenever necessary. Besides, she’s a Luo, not a Jin, despite being raised pretty much exclusively in Jinlintai. She gets a free pass.

Mo Xuanyu had been cheerful enough during the trip to Jinlintai with Jin Zixuan and Jiang Yanli but also on his best behavior, and Jin Zixuan supposes (a bit too late) that being surprised by what has followed is his own fault for assuming that the boy’s nervousness and uncertainty during that trip with two strangers - powerful strangers - was a good representation of his permanent personality.

Long story short - Mo Xuanyu comes to Jinlintai and raises absolute hell.

Jiang Yanli adores him.

Mo Xuanyu clings to her like a burr in response, soaking up her indulgence and the unfailingly kind older-sister energy that she exudes at all times like he’s been desperate for it, for the gentle love of a woman as incredible as Jiang Yanli. And not that Jin Zixuan had ever planned on going back on his promise to legitimize the boy and maintain his offer of a place for him in Jinlintai, but now he truly can’t even begin to consider it after seeing how excited Mo Xuanyu is to find siblings, nieces and nephews, and friends there.

Jin Zixuan legitimizes his youngest brother in an official ceremony conducted by himself and Meng Yao after the first year of Mo Xuanyu’s cultivation training, once his golden core has formed and he is able to begin his true discipleship alongside the younger students at similar levels of cultivation - Jin Ling and his peers, in fact.

And Mo Xuanyu just...stays. His mother had traveled to Lanling to visit him a few times early on when he could take breaks from his training, but after she passes away Mo Xuanyu declares in the midst of his grief that without his mother there’s nothing and no one in Mo Manor to draw him back, and he becomes a permanent fixture of life in the tower - perpetual wild child Mo Xuanyu, with his insistence on wearing black and red clothing (which he swears has nothing to do with Wei Wuxian but he fools absolutely no one), his absolutely wildly dramatic personality, his equally dramatic makeup, his loud laughter.

He proves himself very quickly to be excellent for irritating the Sect elders whenever necessary, and Jin Zixuan privately enjoys watching the stuffy old men try to figure out how to handle his brother’s...unique brand of flamboyance. Of course he’s usually just as flummoxed as they are, the difference is that he’s very fond of it and they are definitely not.

These days, Mo Xuanyu’s position in Jinlintai is more secure than ever. He’s a source of fun and lightheartedness at family gatherings, he’s an attentive presence during the children’s lessons and he plays with them whenever they would like during their leisure time. He’s a wonderful brother and uncle, in his own way, and a cheerful presence wherever he goes.

He also makes for a good litmus test, of sorts. Everyone who deals with the Jin Sect regularly knows of him by now, and Jin Zixuan has gotten into the habit of making sure to keep a careful eye on anyone who dares to step into his home and speak unduly harshly about his youngest sibling. He learned early on to be wary of how that sort of rigid attitude may negatively impact policies they plan to propose or favors they need to ask. He’s also not above deploying Mo Xuanyu himself to handle them in the most obscenely awkward ways he can devise - and those are many and varied. Jin Zixuan himself had stopped getting embarrassed by it a long time ago out of a sense of self-preservation, but others are not so fortunate.

And that had been enough.

Two surprise brothers plus a Mianmian (not to mention his six brothers-in-law plus his and Jiang Yanli’s four children with their fifth on the way at the time) had been more family than he had ever dared to dream of, let alone knew what to do with now that he had it.

But then, not long after Mo Xuanyu’s declaration at 16 that he will be remaining in Jinlintai for the rest of his life if at all possible, Jin Zixuan and Meng Yao take a short trip together to Laoling Qin to discuss a bit of trade business.

Qin Cangye had very politely requested that any discussions they needed to have with him be held in his own home as his wife was too ill to travel, and with Mianmian to run things in his stead in Lanling for a few days (and as many nurses as Jiang Yanli could ever need to help with the children for the short-term) he had been more than willing to travel to accommodate. He had also been perfectly happy to conduct the business they needed to with nothing that threatened to distract him - right up until their second full evening in the Qin home when Meng Yao had approached him in his room after dinner, unusually serious even for him, and told Jin Zixuan that he needed to listen to something important Madam Qin wanted to tell them.

He had listened to her and her handmaid, and he had believed them, and he had been unsurprised to find himself thinking quite uncharitably of his father following his promise to Madam Qin that he would do everything in his power to make it right, as much as he could.

They return to Jinlintai the day after the next, once their business is concluded. He’s relieved when nothing needs his immediate attention as it means he’s free to retreat into his and Jiang Yanli’s quarters so he can tell her everything that’s weighing on his mind.

“No more surprise siblings from now on,” he sighs into the comfort of Jiang Yanli chest when he’s finished outlining what has happened and his plans to prepare a new suite of rooms in the family wing of the tower. For Qin Su. His sister.

Jiang Yanli just laughs her tinkling laugh and kisses him, her hands gentle as she combs his hair back from his face with her fingertips. “You’ve got more siblings now than any of the rest of us,” she teases with a mischievous smile down at him that is a bit too reminiscent of, weirdly, both Wei Wuxian and Mo Xuanyu for comfort. “Two brothers, a sister, and of course we must keep Mianmian in her spot on the list. If you would like to count brothers-in-law as well you’ve also got A-Xian, A-Cheng, Huaisang, Wangji, Xichen, and Mingjue...”

He groans and hides his face properly in the soft silk of her robes even as she laughs again over his head.

“Young boys who ask their mothers for more siblings should be careful what they ask for, shouldn’t they?” Another kiss, this time to his cheek, and he accepts it with a sigh. He certainly can’t deny that his misguided childhood jealousy has certainly been made null. He has a much bigger family than he could have ever imagined.

It’s nice to feel that, finally, Jinlintai is full to bursting with people who genuinely care about him, and who he is allowed to care about in return.

----

Most of that happened long enough ago, though, that these days Jin Zixuan actually has some trouble bringing the memories back to the surface at first demand (though he knows that he’ll never truly forget the ways he had come to know - and subsequently legitimize - all three of his biological siblings).

“A-Xuan?” Jiang Yanli calls now from the doorway of his personal office. Her voice is as soft as always, but it’s tinged with his favorite variety of amusement - the kind caused by the mischief of any member of their (enormous) family. He looks up to find her holding a letter from Gusu judging by the distinctive blue, one eyebrow raised and a smile on her lips. “Were you aware that A-Yu has apparently been begging A-Yao to pay us a visit for over a month?”

“No I wasn’t, but I’m not surprised,” he replies with a sigh and a shake of his head. He loves Mo Xuanyu, of course he does, but he will readily admit that the ever-unbridled chaos of his youngest brother still makes him wonder how they’re related even now over a decade into their relationship. “Can I assume that A-Yao and our brothers-in-law have caved to his demands?” he adds with a gesture towards the letter. Jiang Yanli tucks a gentle laugh into the embroidered cuff of her sleeve.

“They have indeed, A-Yu will be so pleased. They’ve asked to spend a while here though - longer than their last few visits have been at least but A-Yao didn’t specify precisely how long they’d like. I’m going to tell them that anything they want is perfectly fine, unless you have a reason not to accept?”

“No, there’s nothing I can think of. Did they say why they want to stay so long? Is everything alright?”

“They didn’t say, but I think they’re fine. A-Yao only says here that they need a change of scenery for a while and A-Chen suggested they travel. I’ll go ahead and send our acceptance, then?”

Jin Zixuan nods and returns to the report he’s reading. After so many years together, though, he knows enough about his wife not to be surprised when she steps further into the room to put a hand on his shoulder and lean down to press her forehead against his temple for a long, quiet moment. He lets his eyes drift shut as he takes a deep breath in of the familiar scent of the lotus-scented oil she wears in her hair and the hint of incense still clinging to her skin from her morning meditation to help strengthen her core.

“I’ll be playing with the children in the garden when you’re finished if you’d like to come find us,” she murmurs against his cheek and punctuates it with a kiss, offering him precisely what he needs after a long morning of dealing with Sect business - both with the affectionate gesture and with the promise of getting to enjoy spending time with her and their children.

He doesn’t mind being Sect Leader of course, and in fact the job is much easier these days than he had ever expected it to be when he had been a young teenager observing the workings of it under his father’s...less than dedicated hand. But he still privately thinks sometimes that he’s much more cut out for corralling his and Jiang Yanli’s children than he is the Jin Sect.

“Make sure Ling-er practices his sword forms, either against a training dummy or the twins if they want to play with him.”

Jiang Yanli’s quiet chuckle against his cheek is one of his favorite sounds in the world.

“You already know they’d love to team up and see if they can finally win against him. I’ll fetch their practice swords in case they want to use them. You’ll join us, won’t you?”

“Of course,” he reassures, turning his head to look up at her and meet her smile with one of his own. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

----

“All I’m saying Li-jie,” Mo Xuanyu posits loudly from the ground where he’s currently buried under a small mountain of gold robes, flailing limbs, and shrieks of laughter, “Is that if you’ve already got seven you might as well go for an even ten, wouldn’t that be satisfying?!”

“A-Yu,” Qin Su admonishes from a bench nearby, not even bothering to look up from her embroidery. “If you think the children need more playfellows I’m sure we could find you a wonderful husband to adopt your own children with.”

“Absolutely not! Can you imagine me as a father? Disastrous. But if you’re offering to play matchmaker I might actually take you up on that.”

“No matchmaking, you two,” Jin Zixuan sighs as he enters the private family garden and joins Jiang Yanli where she’s sitting at the edge of her lotus pond trailing her fingertips through the water and watching the chaos that is their family unfold around her with a beatific smile on her lips. “Please, I’m begging you, our family is already confusing enough and you’ve both promised me you have no intentions of marrying. Since when do you even want to get married, A-Yu?”

“Listen to me very carefully, A-Xuan - ” he starts with a meaningful waggle of his darkened brows, “I look at what A-Yao has, if you know what I mean, and then I look at what I have, and I just think there’s definitely some room for..improvement in my situation, that’s all.”

Jin Zixuan lifts his chin a bit to give his responding eye-roll the best effect he can while Jiang Yanli and Qin Su both giggle into their sleeves and Jin Ling makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat that carries all the way across the garden.

“Okay first of all, don’t talk about Uncle Jue and Uncle Chen like that, that’s disgusting.”

“Well they’re not my uncles, kid, I can talk about them however I want.”

“Second of all - hey! Quit calling me ‘kid’, we’re the same generation!”

“Enough, you two,” Zixuan sighs to head off the too-familiar argument that Mo Xuanyu is clearly working himself up for with one of his signature borderline-manic grins that makes most Sect Leaders shrink away in fear. “Lu-er, Xiao-Ye let your Uncle Yu get up off the ground, please.” It takes a moment for their two youngest daughters to untangle themselves from where they’ve tackled Mo Xuanyu to the ground but once they’re free they come running to him instead to clamber into his lap, little Jin Ye throwing her arms around his neck and snuggling into his chest immediately as Jin Lu tucks herself into his side under his free arm to start playing with his fingers.

Jin Zixuan sighs again as Mo Xuanyu makes a little show out of rolling to his feet and readjusting his hair and clothes, dabbing at his makeup to make sure nothing has smudged in the tussle. He dusts himself off one more time with a definitive pat before winking and turning his crooked grin on Jin Ling. Their eldest son is waiting for Jin Yu and Jin Yan to get their breath back from their latest bout against him - the twins leaning their weights on their wooden practice swords and clutching their sides - which means that he has no excuse not to listen to Mo Xuanyu’s teasing. (Jin Zhuang, he notices, is sitting on the other side of their sparring circle in a patch of shade cast by a tree and the side of the closest building - well away from the antics of his siblings - to alternate between watching the sparring and practicing his painting on a portable little desk balanced on his knees.)

“Listen to your wise old uncle, Xiao-Ling,” Mo Xuanyu teases, recalling Jin Zixuan’s attention to him and Jin Ling. “You’ll understand when you get to be my age just how nice it might be to have a big strong husband or two to look after you!”

“We’re classmates!!” Jin Ling insists again, beginning to sound desperate as his face goes bright red - though whether it’s out of embarrassment from the teasing about husbands or irritation at being needled about his age is unclear. Jin Zixuan suspects it’s a bit of both.

“A-Yu come help me finish unpacking from my trip before you send our nephew into qi-deviation. I’ll teach you a new huadian to wear as repayment,” Qin Su calls as she stands, graceful as ever. She tucks her embroidery into her sleeve and holds her arm out for Mo Xuanyu to take; he can never resist dramatic gestures and true to form his entire face lights up with mischievous delight, the expression exaggerated by the dark lines of kohl around his eyes, his painted lips, and his rouged cheeks. He bounds over to her to take her proffered arm with a comically genteel air, sweeping her gallantly from the courtyard towards her suite of rooms with such over-the-top fawning that they can hear her sweet laughter bouncing off of the nearby buildings even after they’ve turned the corner out of sight of the garden.

“Dad - ,” Jin Ling pouts, eyebrows drawn down.

“He’ll tire of the joke soon enough, A-Ling,” Jiang Yanli soothes with poorly-concealed mirth before Jin Zixuan can reply similarly. “There are worse things than having an uncle who enjoys a bit of teasing every now and then. Show your father your new sword forms now that you’re warmed up, you’ve been doing so well.”

Jin Zixuan settles his youngest daughters more comfortably in his arms as the twins return to their ready stances against their oldest brother, identical steely glints of focus in their eyes as they resume their sparring. Jin Zhuang brings his painting desk out of the shade to settle in with him and Jiang Yanli now that they’ve created a peaceful center for the family to orient themselves around, and Jin Zixuan feels his chest grow warm with affection as he relaxes into the soothing patterns of quality time with his children.

There are, he thinks, much worse ways to spend an afternoon.

----

Most people, Jin Zixuan thinks, would likely be surprised to find that as wild as their family is, dinners together are frequently calm affairs. Tonight is slightly more raucous than usual as Jin Fei has just returned from the first night hunt he’s led by himself, but it’s still much calmer than any outside observer would have reason to expect from them.

Jin Fei has finished giving his report - with none of the extra boasting that his older brother would pepper into the story were it his to tell - when Jiang Yanli clears her throat delicately for attention, which all of the children dutifully give her. (Well, except for little Jin Ye, who’s busy clambering into Mo Xuanyu’s lap so that she can smile sweetly up at him to demand he feed her the rest of her dinner).

“We received a letter yesterday from your uncles in Cloud Recesses,” she begins with a soft smile, “and you all owe your Uncle Yu a thank you for asking Uncle Yao to come and visit - they have accepted his invitation and will arrive within the week.”

There’s a general excited commotion as all the children start talking at once - beginning with their thanks to Mo Xuanyu as instructed and then shouting to and over each other as they begin arguing over who’s going to get to spend the most time with them.

“WHAT?!” Mo Xuanyu practically screeches, much to Jin Ye’s displeasure if her pout and hands over her ears are anything to go by. “I’ve been bugging him for weeks and he writes to you to accept?! The nerve! The gall!”

“A-Yu,” Jiang Yanli giggles while Jin Zixuan glares at his youngest brother for daring to be offended by anything involving Jiang Yanli.

“Ah sorry Li-jie, sorry. But Su-jie, back me up! He should have replied to me!”

“Li-jie is Madam Jin,” Qin Su replies implacably with a soft smile at Jiang Yanli. “It is proper for him to address a request to visit us to her before you, and A-Yao always follows proper etiquette.”

“Betrayal,” he accuses with a jab of his chopsticks in her direction that’s firm enough to make the ornaments in his hair jingle. “Betrayal by my own jiejie, I don’t believe this. Xiao-Ye, can you believe your aunts?” He directs the last to the toddler in his lap who’s reaching out for one of his dumplings with a bare hand - he immediately pinches it between his chopsticks to hold it in front of her mouth for her so she can munch on little nibbles of it. “Xiao-Ye is the only person in this family who loves and respects me, I’m stealing her and running away with her to escape your cruelty.”

“That’s not true, Uncle Yu,” Jin Yan pipes up around her next bite, which she quickly swallows when Jin Zixuan gives her a look. “Uncle Xian thinks you’re alright sometimes too,” she teases with that wicked grin of hers and Jin Zixuan has to duck his head to hide a smile at the wounded noise Mo Xuanyu offers by way of reply before he settles in to grumble to himself while he feeds Jin Ye like the little princess she already is.

“Father?” Jin Zhuang says softly from where he has come to stand beside him. Jin Zixuan leans over a bit, away from the table, to make it easier for their third son to step close enough to speak as quietly as he likes. “May I show Uncle Chen my paintings?”

“I think he would like that, Zhuang-er, that’s a good idea,” Jin Zixuan replies in an undertone with a nod. “If you ask him to, he may even paint with you. Have you finished your dinner?” Jin Zhuang nods and steps closer to his side as there’s a sudden burst of laughter from Jin Yu and Jin Yan at whatever Jin Ling has just said. “Would you like to go somewhere quiet until it’s calmer in here?” Another nod from Jin Zhuang which Jin Zixuan returns with one of his own. “Alright, that’s fine. I’ll send Aunt Su to come and fetch you when your siblings and Uncle Yu have settled again, okay? Don’t go far.”

Jin Zhuang offers him a quick bump of his head against his before he retreats, slipping out of one of the side doors to go wait in the quiet of the hallway until things are less overwhelming. Jin Zixuan turns back to the rest of his family who are still discussing what they’d like to do now that they know they’ll have fresh entertainment.

“Do you think Uncle Jue will spar with all four of us at once? We could probably take him out, don’t you think A-Ling?”

“You two couldn’t even beat me and Uncle Jue is like, twice my age!”

“Size, too,” Jin Fei drawls.

“Well we can’t all be Nies, and you’re still shorter than me!” Jin Ling huffs with a punch to his second brother’s shoulder.

“Shut up you two, stop arguing for just five minutes, you’re so annoying. Yanyan is right - four of us together against one, we could do it!”

“You want to fight Uncle Jue?!” Jin Lu pipes up in horror. “Why?!!”

“It’s alright A-Lu, don’t be upset. It’s the same reason the four of us train with our swords together, or like when we practice with dad sometimes,” Jin Fei is quick to reassure while Jin Ling is busy sticking his tongue out at the twins. “It’s fun for us and it’s good training, we don’t want to actually hurt Uncle Jue.”

“He’ll kick your bratty little butts anyway, and I’ll bet he does it without even breaking a sweat,” Mo Xuanyu asserts as he wipes Jin Ye’s face clean with a bit of his sleeve. “There you go sweetheart, all done. Go sit with your mom so Uncle Yu can finish eating.” Jin Ye stands up obediently to come around the table, clamber into Jiang Yanli’s extended arms to settle in the cradle of her lap, and promptly close her eyes.

“He would not!” Jin Ling argues instantly, of course.

“Would so. He’s been training with a saber - bigger than a sword, remember - since he was younger than you and I were when we first touched our swords, Lingling. And A-Fei is right, he’s got height, weight, and bulk on his side. He’ll kick your butts.”

“Well I want to try anyway,” Jin Yu reasserts as Jin Yan nods along beside her. “If nothing else we can turn it into a game to see just how quickly he can beat us, if it turns out we really can’t beat him.”

“Oh that’s a good idea. A-Zhuang could keep score, right? Hey. Where’d he go?” Jin Ling looks around sharply, searching for his third brother.

“You were all yelling so he left,” Jin Yan supplies, talking with her mouth full again.

“Oh. Oops.”

“You can apologize when he comes back,” Qin Su offers before looking at Jiang Yanli. “Li-jie, we should arrange to have tea with just A-Yao at least a few times while they’re here. He needs to catch us up on his gossip and we need to tell him ours.”

“I’m sure he’ll accept, it’s been far too long since the three of us have sat down to talk together,” Jiang Yanli replies, and as if by magic the atmosphere settles again as the children respond automatically to the gentle steadiness of their mother and aunt. “I believe Zhuang-er will be able to come back in now,” Jiang Yanli adds with a pointed look at the children that warns them to keep their calm for the rest of the meal for their brother’s sake.

They all nod and return to eating and chatting at a more reasonable volume as Qin Su rises to poke her head out into the corridor. She returns immediately with Jin Zhuang at her side, his hand in hers until he releases it to return to his seat between the twins.

“A-Zhuang,” Jin Fei says once he’s seated across from him. “We’re sorry for being too loud. If we come up with a game to play with Uncle Jue can you keep score for us? You’re the best at watching and keeping track of what happens while we spar. A-Lu can call out whatever you need to say to us while we play.”

Jin Zhuang takes a long moment to consider this in silence, as is his habit, before he nods once firmly and picks up his teacup to take a slow sip while his older brothers and sisters grin first at him then at each other.

“This is going to be so fun,” Jin Lu gushes with a dreamy little sigh into her soup that makes all of her older siblings laugh, even Jin Zhuang with his silent chuckle hidden behind his hand.

Jin Zixuan looks around the table at their family - loving, loud, wild, and theirs, and, not for the first time nor the last, wonders just how in the world he got so lucky.

----

By some small miracle, he and Jiang Yanli manage to gather all the children and get them looking presentable enough in time to greet their uncles when they arrive several days later. He looks for some sign as they approach that something is secretly wrong to have prompted the visit, but they seem alright at first glance. Of course any closer examination that could possibly tell him otherwise is abruptly made completely impossible when they’re promptly swarmed by all of the children save for Jin Ling and Jin Fei, both of whom are too old to run to them and cling around waists and knees to better clamor for gifts and stories with the rest of their siblings.

Jin Zixuan can only shake his head with fond dismay as he watches Jin Ye immediately try to cling to Meng Yao in between his husbands while Jin Zhuang drifts over to stop next to Lan Xichen so that he can stay away from the main hubbub and still slip one hand into his uncle’s with amusing gravity. Jin Lu studies the three of them for a moment before she decides to hug Lan Xichen first as he’s the easiest target, her tiny arms wrapping tightly around his legs as she clings. Nie Mingjue, of course, is immediately swamped by the twins who flank him to start talking about something with broad gestures - he sees Jin Yan make a stabbing motion after a moment and Jin Zixuan realizes they’re likely talking about their newest obsession - knives. A father’s dream.

“Out of my way brats, those are my brothers!” Mo Xuanyu suddenly shouts as he comes streaking out from the nearest building, practically a blur of black and red aimed straight at Meng Yao who has lifted little Jin Ye up in front of himself in his arms to better listen to her intently as she babbles to him.

“A-Yu!” Jin Zixuan chastises tiredly with a sigh even as Nie Mingjue sticks an arm out to catch Mo Xuanyu in midair right at the last moment before he can barrel into any of the children or Meng Yao, who, to his credit, hasn’t even twitched (though Jin Zixuan is absolutely sure that he knew Mo Xuanyu had been running straight for him). He always manages to forget how strong Nie Mingjue is until he sees an example like that; he hadn’t even jolted when Mo Xuanyu’s full weight had collided with his arm, and while Jin Zixuan won’t ever claim to be attracted to any of his brothers-in-law, he’s also not blind to the virtues of men. He can at least admit that he doesn’t fault Mo Xuanyu for his desire to find someone like that for himself.

“Mo Xuanyu,” Nie Mingjue greets, as gruff as ever with his brows drawn low over his eyes and his expression stony. He stares just long enough to make Mo Xuanyu laugh a bit nervously before he drops him back on his feet to reach down and pick up Jin Lu, who has released Lan Xichen in favor of tugging on Nie Mingjue’s belt and holding her arms up to him in silent request. She settles happily on his hip like she belongs there as he resumes his conversation with the twins, her head instantly landing on his shoulder and one hand curling around the collar of his robes as she snuggles in.

As always, watching his brother and brothers-in-law interact with the children does something funny in his chest, and just as he’s thinking of reaching down to take Jiang Yanli’s hand next to his to try to do something with that feeling, she slips it comfortably into the crook of his elbow as she lays her head on his shoulder in silent understanding and agreement.

There will be a formal banquet to welcome them later, of course. But for now the only people around are the members of the family themselves and those who have been living and working in Jinlintai long enough to have seen the rather informal comings and goings of every member of the extended family. There’s nothing official about this greeting, just loved ones reuniting. Happy. Together.

Jin Zixuan glances over to Jin Ling at his left when his son nudges him with an elbow only to find him smirking over at him. His son doesn’t even have to look up at him to do it anymore, and Jin Zixuan still can’t quite pinpoint when that happened.

“Tearing up, dad?” Jin Ling jokes, jerking his chin up in a proud gesture that Jin Zixuan will deny having ever been the example for him to learn from until the day he dies.

“You say that like he doesn’t cry every time any of our uncles come to visit,” Jin Fei sighs from the other side of Jiang Yanli. His posture is relaxed enough - he’s got his arms crossed loosely behind himself and his head tipped back as if studying the clouds and his tone is light and easy. The laid-back attitude is only marred by the fact that there’s clearly a teasing smirk dancing on his lips. “You didn’t cry for me when I got back from my night hunt the other evening. Should I be jealous, dad?”

“Boys,” Jiang Yanli cuts in to chastise with all the affection she can muster - which is, of course, quite a lot. “Your father enjoys having everyone home, that’s all. Be good and go say hello to your uncles, I’m sure they’ve missed you.”

They snicker but step away without any further argument, closing ranks immediately to walk across the courtyard shoulder-to-shoulder so they can put their heads together to laugh about something - Jin Zixuan, most likely.

“They look alright, don’t you think?” Jiang Yanli murmurs.

“I do. I’ll ask A-Yao to be sure when I can see him in private, but I think you were right - there doesn’t seem to be anything urgent.”

“A relaxed family visit, then,” she sighs happily, clearly smiling as she nuzzles her cheek a little more firmly against his shoulder and he drops a kiss to the top of her head before she straightens back up again. “It’ll be so lovely to have them here.”

“I’ve missed them,” he admits for her ears alone and Jiang Yanli squeezes the crook of his elbow in silent understanding.

#The untamed fanfic #Xuanli #Jin Zixuan #Jiang Yanli #Mo Xuanyu #Qin Su #3zun #right at the end #if anyone sees any issues with the names for all these children please don't hesitate to tell me I'm totally fine with changing #anything that should have been different to be more accurate #y'all would not believe the amount of age math I've done for all of this please don't look at any of it too closely #also if anyone wants my MANY headcanons in a bullet-list format let me know and I'll post some #there are Many of them with so many fun oc's lol #also if anything about the children or anything is unclear don't hesitate to ask for clarification!#oh headcanons can be about mianmian too even tho I didn't give her any real screentime in this (sorry!)

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dragonturtle2 · 4 years ago

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Charting Penny's course, on the eve of the V8 finale.

I just realized that one of the lengthiest essays I ever posted online was never copied or cross posted over here to Tumblr. A huge mistake on my part. For one, as a big fan of transhumanism, I got a kind of enjoyment mapping out the distinctions Penny Poledina’s series-wide arc, even with the flaws. Two, I’m actually kind of proud of the predictions I made at the end. Not because I was correct about one of them; I remarked how I’d LIKE Rooster Teeth to do something, not that they’d actually take the shot. But some of the stuff I thought of was fun, and I do feel a bit of validation for having my thoughts line up with the actual writers; especially in lieu of how heated other people’s reactions were to something sorrowful and unexpected.

Tonight I had been responding to a critique I'd found earlier on Tumblr. They had remarked that Penny's conflict in Volumes 2, 7 and 8 were just recycling the question of whether Penny was a real girl. That doing so was just boring as heck, when the question has been answered firmly with Penny becoming the Winter Maiden. I thought the question of “what makes a person a person, and not just a simulated pattern of behaviors with the instinct to survive?” was broad enough to get a few arcs’ worth of visitation. But I thought just responding with that one lengthy sentence could come off as belittling sarcasm. So tried to offer up an my actual interpretation and clear opinion. I got this monstrosity.

Volume 1 has Penny reaching out to make friends, V2 is finally admitting her robot nature to someone and vocalizing her fears about being a real girl. Volume 3 dangles the upcoming conflict of her wanting to exercise independent action, step away from the national military organization that bankrolled and housed her, and go to Beacon with her friends. But that got cut short.

Volume 7 picks up the thread of Penny’s independent actions. Not just with the ability to disagree with or full-on disobey orders, but her own value system and initiative. Not only is she asking Winter about how to make decisions in life, she is also silently (and not-so-silently) judging whether Winter is morally right, or even truly happy with her own choices. When she takes Freya’s hand, she asks something that no one has probably said to Freya in awhile: “Are you OK?”

Volume 8 is focused on the things being taken from her. Her previous family-unit-facsimile of James, Winter and the Ace Ops have labeled her a traitor and are now hunting her. Being targeted as the Maiden makes her distance herself from her friends, so they aren’t further harmed . In doing that, she also leaves behind her previous dedication, protecting Mantle, to launch Amity Tower and assist in the bigger picture of warning the entire planet. Then in the pursuit of that goal she damages herself, pushes her body to it’s limit, and says goodbye to her father.

Volume 8 might seem to backpedal, and spend much of the season emphasizing how inhuman Penny is. That’s the point. After Freya essentially canonizes Penny as human, with her ‘blessing,’ Penny’s new identity (to herself and the audience) is arrested in the most traumatic ways possible. Her body is peeled back and cut open. Her schematics are passed around and assessed by characters and factions more than ever. The hacking is the Atlas military complex literally claiming ownership over her, exploiting the body and code they created alongside Pietro. (In contrast with the earlier consensual control and teamwork with Pietro, which even then she hardly enjoyed). How much pain can you inflict on a person until they devolve, or abandon rational thought? Little wonder Penny ends up begging the team to end her own life. She’s now taken Winter’s role from Volume 7, her self-esteem having sunken even lower. “My life doesn’t matter!“

When that ghastly moment was (temporarily) resolved with a quick revelation and Jaune’s Semblance, it was a moment of mixed feelings for me in an episode I otherwise loved. But I really came around to it afterword. They have to head to Vault for a permanent fix pretty much immediately, so it doesn’t feel like the writers used Jaune to kick the can down the road until they felt like tackling it. A very direct benefit is that by pausing Penny’s affliction, Penny gains the ability to actually have a conversation with people, to have scenes beyond just desperately wrestling her. It also spared us the repeated dialogue of “I must go to the Vault. I don’t want to! I must - I don’t! - I MUST- I DON’T!” Seriously, that routine was wearing thin.

Whether any fans predicted Jaune’s Semblance being able to help or not, I’m pleased when characters are able to quickly conceive applications of in-universe fictional powers. This is such a refreshing improvement over how CRWBY previously couldn’t bring Ruby to even ASK about the Silver Eyes that put her in a coma.

There were missteps along the way. Ruby really should have reacted more to her friend coming back to life; RT leaning on the Fourth Wall doesn’t fully remove the sting. ("It seems we will have to wait!”) We also never see any of our protagonists outside of Ruby even react to the revelation of a robotic life form. When they meet Penny again at V7′s start, apparently ALL of them, even Oscar, were so acquainted with Penny’s story that none of them had any questions for her the entire Volume. There was no sense of betrayed trust, or trauma from watching one friend be ripped apart by another. These are disappointments, but not deal breakers. Now, I want to talk about how post-Ambrosius Penny may fit in with the rest of the story. Maybe it’s stupid of me to try to get this out by 4 in the morning the day the finale drops, but I’m on a role, and I want to get my ideas out in the open before they’re tainted by hindsight. Otherwise I won’t feel like even finishing this.

I’m not going to launch into a tangent with the metaphysical mechanics on whether Penny’s new body would have ‘logically’ been conjured or not. (For the record I think it works). I just want to talk about the message the show is conveying, and what they could do with it. My base assumption is that Cinder is going to get the Winter Maiden power. It would be great way to coincide with her (GASP) actual character development this volume. But more importantly, if she doesn’t succeed in her goal, and get an upgrade to compete with our leveled-up protagonists, I can’t see how she can be an interesting or threatening villain going forward. A few ways this can end for Penny:

Pietro could give up the last bit of his life to bring her back. He’d probably need to get assistance from Abrosius, since he’s lacking in equipment; he’s a brilliant scientist, so explaining it certainly wouldn’t be an obstacle. Maybe Penny would be back to being a synthetic, maybe she remains organic. Either way, it’s a compromise with having a functional villain, while keeping around a fandom darling. Personally, I think RT needs to evoke the spirit of Volume 3, and make people cry.

Actually killing Penny would be bold and stand-out. By taking away Penny’s function of a core that can be salvaged (as explained at the start of Volume 7), and having her body get incinerated just like Pyrrha, RT can fully signal “This character is dead, and can’t be resurrected.” The heart break would be brilliant, with Penny getting to know the joys of an organic body just to be immediately ripped away from life. This would beautifully parallel with General Ironwood. James clamped down on human emotion because he thought it would give him the strength to stand against the darkness. Penny’s friends made her MORE human in a loving act of rescue, but now have to watch as she dies like any other human. Both characters would be cautionary tales regarding the Atlas Arc’s question of Trust. To leave yourself open.

Alrighty, now that I’ve gotten to feel like an intellectual by making some proclamations of doom, I want to throw out a tinfoil hat theory that actually combines the two previous versions. What’s fascinated me for years, and the show hasn’t re-visited, is the nature of Cinder’s parasite. Can Cinder talk to it? Will it begin gaining sentience? What’s relevant to Penny is what exactly this thing DOES. When it comes to it’s soul-power-absorbing function, we’ve never actually seen it’s full extent. The process with Amber was interrupted, with half the power just zipping over to Cinder after Amber expired. With Raven and Penny’s power, Cinder’s arm only got a little taste of them both, since both of their captures were unsuccessful. What if Cinder’s parasite can absorb more than raw power? Pinnochio is eventually swallowed by a monstrous beast. We were all sure it would be The Whale. But what if it’s Cinder?

I’ll be watching the finale in about 5 hours. The idea that I could be correct about something that takes everyone else off guard (Penny’s death) has an electric feeling, and I totally understand why people can get hung up on the stories they compose in their head. But I don’t want to start thinking any of MY ideas HAVE to come true for me to get joy from whatever happens to Penny or Volume 8. Regardless, reviewing character arcs that preceded wherever we are in the present is always worthwhile.

#reddit #RWBY #rwby volume 8 prediction #penny polendina #pietro polendina #cinder fall #james ironwood #Rooster Teeth

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