#the fun/terrible part of fanfiction is that the editing stage never ends

[tranakin-skywalker]

hey look i added a shit ton to Cytokinesis ch 1

The sky is a cheery blue. It shouldn’t be, not with the thick haze of artillery smoke crawling over the pock-marked landscape, the earth torn and churned up as if by the hand of some indifferent god, mud coagulating where rainwaters have gathered, sucking down machinery and man alike.

Like the earth itself is hungry for them.

This is the first that the rain’s stopped since they landed on this deathtrap of a world. Not that it changes much, the gray haze blanketing over the horizon limiting visibility to almost nothing, the sunlight that peaks through reflecting off in a blinding glare. It would almost be better if it were raining, might at least wash some of the blood and sweat and mud off. It’s hard enough to move with muck caked under armor and between the gears of the scant few walkers they have left.

Makes running for your life all that more impossible.

Blaster fire and artillery shells rain down, blowing the unfortunate soldiers who couldn’t move out of the way fast enough to pieces, pelting the ones who can in a rain of mud, rocks, and gore. The air is filled with the sound of screaming.

It’s everything Anakin can do to keep his feet under him, his lightsaber up and deflecting bolts back the way they came on instinct more than conscious thought. The ground ripples underneath him, black mud slippery beneath the tread of his boots, the rubber grips on the soles doing nothing against the viscous sludge. He nearly falls, a blaster bolt whizzing over his head and scorching sweat plastered hairs, charring the skin of his temple with the heat of it. Just a small burn. It could have been so much worse. If he hadn’t slipped his head would be nothing but red pulpy carnage soaking into the mud.

Sometimes he thinks he has the Force itself at his back, pulling strings to keep him alive. Sometimes he thinks he just has the best luck in the galaxy, or maybe the worst.

It’s hard to tell the difference.

If luck or the Force or whatever else were really on his side, he doesn’t think he'd be in this situation at all, stumbling knee deep through mud and crawling over the bodies of his men he’d lead to their deaths, the horizon lighting up red and orange like some Corillian hell. 

They’re stuck on yet another backwater planet fighting tooth and nail to survive. He thinks this one’s called Abraxis or Arubix or something to that effect, but Anakin is going on his third day with no sleep and he doesn’t have much faith his brain remembers much other than keep moving and deflect that bolt and don’t die. The details of this campaign were lost to him sometime between when a Separatist fleet blew one of his venators to cosmic dust three weeks ago and the sixteen hour long firefight that followed it. (He’s so tired…)

Not that it matters much what this world is called- past maybe that he'd like to at least remember the name of the place he’s going to die on. Or maybe it’s better- leaving it nameless. Could be any of those prior battlefields he’d only survived by the skin of his teeth. It’s just like the dozens of words they’d been on before, hunkered down in the mud, hidden flush behind rubble of some razed city that looks just like the last. The same sky, the same screams, the same frantic move-fight-survive that gets him through every battle.

(He’s not sure they’re going to get through this one. There had always been that dead certainty that they would pull through, that he’d see the end of this fight but every passing hour as the bodies pile up and they give more and more ground with nowhere to retreat to, Anakin is more and more certain that this will be his last fight.)

Just another firefight. One after another after another to the point they all blur together and become nothing but one long slog. It’s been hours since the shooting began. Days since the engagement started. Weeks since they became trapped on this little nothing world. 

After endless weeks of fight-kill-fight he stopped being able to tell the attacks apart. Just hours of killing and dying interspersed with weak moments of peace and sleepless nights. And hasn’t that just been this entire war so far? The backdrop changes, the rest doesn’t. Every battle is the same down at its hollow picked-apart bones. Carcasses, all of it.

Bright plasma flashes as laser fire flies too close for comfort, downing bodies right and left of him and he can’t think about that right now. Can’t afford to pause for the dead- not when it’s the living that makes priority. The earth shaking beneath his boots as explosions rock the ground, plumes of fire and the smell of burning flesh that makes him want to retch just as much as it makes his stomach cramp with hunger because they’ve been running low on supplies for weeks now as the siege drags on and his men need the food more than he does and at the end of it roasting human smells no different from any other kind of meat.

It’s enough to make him miss the smell of rot instead. Give it a few days. Soon they’ll all be choking on the stench of it, that thick miasma of sweet-rot that only wet, bloated bodies can give. Strange to think that it used to horrify him, when the war was still fresh and new and he was still blind to how bad things could get. Now it’s expected, routine. People would die and their bodies would fester and rot if you couldn’t bury or burn them fast enough. At least the carrier eaters the smell lured in sometimes gave them something to pick out of their teeth.

Just another day in the meat grinder that was this endless bloody stupid war. 

He’s surrounded by the sounds of dying men. They scream. Not like people assume they do, not like they do on a holo. A real dying scream is short and it’s strangled, like the screamer didn’t mean to make the sound but couldn’t help it. It’s an ugly sound.

Those, at least, he can drown out. The screams and the ear shattering boom of detonations. Close his ears to turn deaf to them. He’s been hearing people scream as they died since he was a child. It’s familiar by this point. Background noise.

It’s the other sounds that are harder to ignore. The weak wet gasps of those too far gone to make any other noise. The pleas for help. The begging to make it stop. The furious mumble of names, of brothers, of numbers, because for some of them that is all they have. 

He can’t afford to freeze on a battlefield, not when one moment of stillness can mean death. But he can’t help it. Not when he can feel the life flicker out with every dying man like an itch beneath his skin. It hurts, feeling them die. Not just knowing that they died, knowing that he could have been better, could have done more. It physically hurts, the echo of wounds, fire burning him and melting plastoid into bubbling molten slag, burning him alive, shrapnel spearing through his body and ripping his stomach open, spilling out hot steaming intestines that sit wet in the dirt, a head split open with a lucky shot, plasma cauterizing the wound but skull fragments and bits of soft pink brain tissue still smoking where they touch open air.

Anakin’s always been able to feel people dying, ever since he was small. He thinks he was never meant for war, if this is what it feels like to him. Or maybe he’s perfect for it.

He remembers when it was louder, remembers when he was nine years old and he begged the Jedi to just rip the Force right out of him because it was all so loud it hurt. He’s not sure if he’s just grown used to it over the years, or if the pain was so great it eventually just killed the nerve from feeling anything at all. Sometimes that happened, a wound left so long it was hardly a wound at all.

Usually it was with slaves who’s backs were whipped so deep there was nothing left to feel the pain, but he’d seen the same on soldiers too, in the three long years he’d been fighting this war. 

He’d find it strange that sometimes he can’t tell the difference between the horrors of battle and the horrors of his childhood, if he had any room left to wonder. But Anakin had long ago come to realize his life was just a series of waking nightmares interspersed with brief moments of peace. What did it matter what shape the horror took? Sometimes he thinks he’s been at war since the moment he was born. He can’t imagine his life without it.

He was once told the only thing he was good for was destruction. Cutting through the droid army as easy as breathing, he thinks they were probably right. There’s carnage left behind in his footfalls and not much else, broken droids and the corpses of clones, a long winding trail of violence and at the end of it he thinks he’ll be the only thing left standing. The one thing left in this rosefield of bodies and maybe then he’ll finally be allowed to just lie down and let the mud smother him.

Until then, he has to keep going, keep moving, always forward, rending and tearing and breaking with every step.

He’s good at fixing things, always has been, but he’s even better at tearing them apart. Good thing then, that what the Jedi needed was a weapon of mass destruction. 

The droids part before him in piles of molten metal and crumpled shards, clearing out a path for his men to follow behind. Clear the way, thin the herd, give them every advantage he can to make sure they live. They won’t, not all of them (they never do, no matter how hard he tries), but he will give them every chance and he will feel every life snuff out when he fails. The least he can do is share the pain when he feels those bright lights vanish into the Force.

He wishes Ashoka were still here. It used to be easier, when she was still around. Used to hurt a little less.

More soldiers survived when there were two Jedi, not one, but the fact he couldn’t hold up the slack was just proof of another failure. He’d been doing that a lot, lately. Failing.

They were stacking up, slowly, weighing on him. Have been for years now, he thinks, but the crushing weight has only grown in the last few months, the war unraveling along with the last ties of his sanity. This latest one stings. (Should have been better-)

He is just so fucking tired.

Not just physically (though the nightmares do a good job of ensuring that, too. The constant battles, the sleepless nights. He can’t remember the last time he got enough sleep). He is tired down to his soul. 

He thinks of the clay dome houses back on Tatooine, thinks of how they would wear down, bit by bit. How howling sandstorms would tear at them. Every day, the wind stealing more of them away, until eventually there would be nothing but loose sand. Sometimes he thinks he’s one of those little clay buildings, the galaxy slowly wearing on him until there’s finally nothing left. (And what does it say about him, that even all these years later, he looks back on that place and still thinks home?)

A blaster bolt shoots by too close to his face and Anakin decides he needs to stop thinking about Tatooine and start focusing on making it out of this mess alive. He wouldn’t mind dying. Not really, but he’s not going to leave his men without a general and he’s not going to leave his wife a widow. Not even if sometimes he thinks they would all be better off without him.

His saber spins, an extension of his body, and it’s easy to fall into the old familiar pattern of cut, slash, destroy. Molten slag lies around him and Anakin takes it as a sign of a job well done.

They’re winning, bit by bit, and it’s something they so desperately need.

The battle’s been stretching out for hours now and the battalion has enough men left that they can cycle them out and keep the lines fresh (for now, for now, but how much longer? He feels them dying), but there is only one Jedi and he is needed at the front. Even the indomitable Skywalker begins to tire after a while, but he’ll see this through and done before he finally lets himself collapse. He’s always been the first to enter the fray and the last to leave it. He knows he’s good enough to survive the slaughter and he knows he’s not valuable enough to stand by the side and let these men die for him. He’d rather they not die at all, but none of them have the option of not being here. Not really.

So Anakin does what he does best and he kills things before they can kill the people he cares about and the whole time all he can think is that he’s glad it’s droids and not people because droids don’t scream as they die. They give him far fewer nightmares.

The trouble with droids, though, is that they just keep coming and coming and coming. This is why the war just won’t fucking end, Anakin thinks. When you can just build yourself another army, there’s no need to ever stop.

He tries not to think about how the Republic is doing the exact same thing with the clones, but it gets harder and harder to ignore when each new batch of shinies that comes to replace the dead is younger than the last.

An explosion rocks the earth, red tongues of fire licking at the blue haze of sky above, and in the distance Anakin sees one of the Sep tanks blow. He wonders which of his soldiers managed that, if they survived or if this was a suicide run. He hopes they made it, but that’s all he can do, hope. 

The destruction of the tank is enough to open a gap in the Sepratist’s defenses, just enough to get their walkers in closer and start firing on the lines of clankers without getting blown to hell in turn. Anakin doesn’t even have to order the advancement, they’ve been at this song and dance long enough to know what needs to be done. Any chance you’re given, you take it. It was the first lesson he learned in this war.

They’d been boxed in and losing ground, but one after another canonfire lights up against the blanket of smoke choking the ground and Anakin is blinded by the white-hot bloom of exploding metal that is the droid tanks combusting, one, two, three, four, in quick succession as the 501st push their advantage for all it’s worth.

They’ve been given a sliver of a chance and they will take it, every inch given them they will take and push and with nothing but bullheaded stubbornness they will refuse to give in and die. It’s what makes the 501st the 501st.

An AT-TE erupts into flame somewhere behind him, heat licking down Anakin’s back as he crouches low to dodge flying shrapnel. They’d managed to whittle down the enemy tanks to a handful, but a handful can still do catastrophic damage. It’s enough though, it will have to be.

Without the heavy cover of cannon shells screaming down and cleaving acres of desolation where they land, it’s easy to push forward and tear into the battle droids on the ground. B-1s are easy things to kill, even a fresh minted soldier could take one out without much trouble and there’s no shinies left on the ground, not anymore. The new blood have all either lived long enough to earnt their mettle, armor scuffed and charred and blood stained, or they’re dead and left miles behind in the mud. 

There’s a saying in the GAR, that one way or another there’s never any shinies left after a battle.

Just another thing Anakin tries not to think about.

He moves with the soldiers around him, blocking streaks of red with his blade, that familiar blue glow always moving, spinning and spinning and spinning and he never thought he’d be grateful for Dooku but at least the mech hand doesn’t get carpal-tunnel. The rest of his body isn’t so lucky to be made out of metal and wires though. He’s tired, he’s so fucking tired, but he can’t stop. Not yet. Not until they’re either off this world or they’re all dead.

They break through the line, eventually, finally, tides of battle slowly shifting and Anakin is too tired to remember what the plan had been for after, if they’d even had one (maybe not, the attack had come out of nowhere. They always did), all he knows is that he has to keep moving, keep his blade swinging and he’ll probably make it through this in one piece. Survive this, and you might actually get to go home.

(Not Tatooine home, where his mother’s bones lie beneath the sand beside sins he’d rather let himself forget. Not the Temple either. He’s never really been able to think of that as home, even when he was able to delude himself into thinking he belonged there. Home is his wife, now. As long as he’s with her, he’ll be happy, he thinks. All he wants to do is go back to her and let her hold him in her arms until he stops feeling like he’s going to shake apart, until he feels like he’s a person he can recognize again instead of this stranger wearing his skin. She’s the only thing that makes sense anymore. He misses her so much it hurts.)

He fights.

It’s all instinct, falling back on well honed muscle memory and the reflexes the Force gives him. He’s not even really aware anymore, just fighting, fighting, all the battles eventually get like this if they last long enough. It’s less his own conscious action and more the Force moving through him, directing his body for him. Keeping him alive, just for one moment longer.

Even the pain of his dying soldiers raking like claws down his psyche can’t quite pierce the haze that’s taken over his brain. Just another step forward, another step after that, keep that blade up and that guard closed or you’ll take a bolt to the chest. Don’t go dying now Skywalker, not when there’s still use for you.

Anakin feels as close as he ever had to invincible in these moments, caught somewhere between exhausted and exhilarated.

And then, sudden as an explosion and just as devastating, his entire world ends and begins again. He feels it, down to his molecular structure, in every atom and weave of his existence, this earth-shattering change. The shock of it sends him to his knees, saber sputtering out as it falls from his hand.

He hears his soldiers scream around him, calling out “the General’s down!” and circling around him in a protective formation but Anakin doesn’t have enough of a mind to spare on that. Every sense, every bit of his awareness is laser targeted to this change inside him.

His hand, the flesh one, goes on instinct to press against his stomach. It hasn’t changed. Of course it hasn’t, still flat and taut and hard muscle, but everything else is already impossible so he half thought maybe-

“General, General, where are you hurt?” asks a trooper who kneels in front of him, but Anakin’s having a hard time focusing on his voice. He’s having a hard time focusing on anything, really. The screams and explosions and blaster fire wobbles like sounds underwater, faded and distant and there is only him, only him and the force and-

This is impossible.

“You need to show me, General Skywalker.” The trooper peels Anakin’s hand away from his stomach but there’s nothing to see. Not yet. There won’t be for another few months at least.

“M’not hurt,” Anakin mumbles, brain still stuck on the fact that he, that he-

The trooper grunts and angles his body over Anakin’s protectively as a shell explodes much too close for comfort. “We need to get you out of here sir,” he says, voice edging toward frantic, even if all of his men are too well trained to really let it show. The Force, though, doesn’t care for training. Neither does the life-and-death fervor of battle. Anakin can taste the trooper’s fear in his mouth like the blood of a split lip. It’s bitter.

The trooper wraps a strong hand around Anakin’s prosthetic and pulls him back to his feet. Anakin lets him. As soon as his boots are solid beneath him again Anakin finds himself hunching forward, hand once again finding a protective place over his abdomen. It’s not even a conscious action, using the bulk of his body and the defense his armored shoulders offer to protect his belly. It’s something instinctive. Maternal, or paternal, whatever. He’ll figure out the linguistics of it when he’s not being fired on. (It’s not like he’s ever had the luxury of wondering if it would make more sense to call himself mother or father, even back before he’d been able to get his outside to look the way his brain told him it should. He’d been a slave first and then a Jedi, it’s not like children were ever an option to him, so this is, this is-)

He’s got enough awareness left in him to call his saber back to himself and Anakin stumbles after the trooper toward the relative shelter of the shadow of one of their tanks.

It’ll protect them from the droid’s fire, at least.

He’s in shock, Anakin knows in some distant part of himself. And he needs to knock himself out of it and get back into the fight or else he’s going to get himself killed, but he can’t. He can’t shake himself out of this startled haze because in one monumental moment there had been nothing and then the force had boiled around him like a thunderhead and when it had broken, he suddenly was no longer alone in his body.

He knows it’s not a person yet. He’s familiar enough with biology to understand that. It’s cells, just a couple of cells collecting together and slowly starting to grow. Doesn’t even have a force signature of its own yet but already he can feel it. It’s only minutes old. If he were to take it out of his body the entirety of it would fit on a pin head but he can sense where it is, sense it growing, feel in his bones and his marrow where it had not existed before and where it is now.

Anakin wonders, hysterically, if this is what had happened to his mother.

Well, his mother wouldn’t have been in the middle of a fire-fight when she fell pregnant with him. 

He’s not sure if he’s terrified or if he’s elated or maybe it’s just the sleep deprivation talking. I’m gonna be a dad, he thinks to himself, bracing against the side of a tank as it fires volley after volley. A Seppie bomb lands far too close and the explosion sets Anakin’s ears ringing and covers him in the spray of dirt and debris. If I live that long, he amends.

The saber is lit in his hand a moment later and Anakin throws himself back into the fray, because now he has to survive this, has to make it out of this shitstorm intact, because it’s not just him he’s protecting.

The whole time he’s thinking, how the fuck am I going to explain this to Padmé?

[goddesspharo]

For the Fanfiction Writing Asks: 35, 36, 40, 46, 56, and 75. A lot, but you’re a fave and I’m so curious!

[fic writing asks!]

Thanks for asking!

35. What's your favorite fic you've posted?

Definitely can't fake what you can't break up with, which I will finish soon. (I think I'm so slow about writing-not writing the last chapter because there's a part of me that doesn't want it to end because it has been so much fun to write! It's been a ton of fun to take a very trope-y soapy concept (drunk married in Vegas, continued marriage For Reasons) and spin it out into all the things. It's also ridiculously long so this year when NaNoWriMo rolls around and I say that I can't do it because I can't possibly meet that type of word count in a month, it'll be a bold-faced lie.

36. What fic are you proudest of?

Probably not every conversation is a new grenade, a post-The Batman fic that was, up until then, the longest fic I'd ever written at like 16k (I wish I could keep things that short these days!) after like a five year gap of not writing any fic. There would be a point during the writing process in the past when I'd just get tired of writing a thing and finish it while leaving a bunch of things I wanted to incorporate on the cutting room floor, but I really saw this one through. I'd only watched The Batman once (maybe twice?) before sitting down to write this - it was pretty early into the theatrical release so WB hadn't kicked it onto Max yet - so I'm particularly pleased with how on point the voices were. I also love nearly every iteration of Bruce/Selina and therefore don't write them as much (it's the old Austenian "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more") because I cannot be objective about how they should just be together, why won't you just let them be together, DC so probably the biggest accomplishment of all is that I even wrote this. It was also just a blast to do and gave me an excuse to bust out the 90s grunge playlist at the very beginning and then just listen to so much BANKS that I could not stop for weeks afterwards.

40. What is your favorite world that you've created for a fic?

The Bear as a band AU in put in in a zip-lock bag. Interestingly, a very natural stretch to transplant people from a chaotic kitchen setting to a chaotic, dysfunctional band setting. Mikey as a Kurt Cobain figure practically writes itself. Years of Behind the Music made this possible! I loved the experience of writing that fic and I loved that world! Everyone could be quietly devastated without burning down the kitchen (no promises about the Lollapalooza stage though).

46. If you could only write one type of AU for the rest of your life, what would it be?

I was going to say Enemies-to-Lovers, hands down, but that's not an AU, I guess. It would be boring to write one type of AU forever, but if I had to choose I'd go with the tried and true spy AU. (...she says as she still has her current spy!AU remains in WIP hell.) As Sydney Bristow has taught us, Spy!Barbie can be anything so you could theoretically have an AU within your one AU and game the system. Also spies are the best! All popped collars and dead drops and so much guilt about the things they've done and the people they've let down. God, we need Alias back and by that I mean put the original show on streaming with the original music since every replacement track they used because they couldn't get licensing for streaming is terrible.

56. Are there any fics that you would change or rewrite if given the chance?

That is one spiral I refuse to go down! Once it's out there, it is what it is. I've never wanted to go back and change any fics in a big way (I have gone back and fixed a grammatical error here and there that escaped notice during the editing process) because I wouldn't post it if I wasn't happy with it at the time. There are fics that I wish I had maybe finished before posting (ah, TGM!spy!AU, why are you so elusive?) because now they are albatrosses that I want to finish, know exactly how to finish, and yet can't finish.

75. Is there a particular fic that readers gravitated towards that you didn't expect?

I never know how anything will be received so I don't even try to guess. I operate on a "don't time the market" philosophy except about fic - it is beyond my control so why perseverate over it? I guess I was surprised by how much traction deflect and absorb got. I don't know why, but I think we were all riding the high of a new Jurassic Park movie after like fifteen years (longer if you ignore Jurassic Park III) and had yet to experience "The Worst Chris" burnout (ugh, he really is the worst though) when Jurassic World came out. It was definitely my big dumb blockbuster that summer! In 2015, it wasn't automatically guaranteed that everything would get a handful of shitty sequels so you could live in the space of just enjoying a movie for what it was without thinking about how they were going to mess it up by stretching it out past the expiration date.

[jcisthebestfightme]

BJYX Food Blog

Ahhhhhh I love food so much!!!! hahahaha So I decided to record down all the times food show how much they love each other. This is mostly just for me. Since this is a “food blog”, instead of “evidence” which you can find elsewhere in other people’s analysis posts, I will instead include yummy photos of food. Will continue to update this list. 

Disclaimer: All fanfiction. 

1) Pancake - I talked about this in detail here. In summary, dd is bragging about how “homey” he is that he can make pancake. The recipe uses butter, something only people that bake in China will have. Gg likes to bake cookies (even sugar-free one, haha gg is more detail-orientated and health conscious than me) and bread. Apparently gg also loves cheese and dd mentioned that his pancake has cheese.

2) Love on the Rocks or Love’s Water - This supper famous drink in China’s Starbucks is actually black currant juice + raspberry juice + black tea. You can make it easily at home (it’s not available in U.S. Starbucks). Because of BJYX, you can order it as “Love’s Water” directly at Starbucks in Chinese (Yes, Starbucks knows about them.) Why is it call Love’s Water? It’s red, the color of love while also sweet and sour. Also, it’s actually gg’s favorite drink at Starbucks. You can often seen him drinking it during the filming of the Untamed. What about dd? It’s been mention by gg that dd only drinks water. However, during Untamed filming, dd can also be seen drinking Love’s Water from Starbucks. Does love change a person’s preference in drinks?

3) Green tea - We’ve all seen the BTS where they share green tea from the same bottle, twice. However, what’s even more interesting is that dd kept the preference of drinking green tea even after filming. Fans have caught dd drinking green tea during ttxs taping and there are pictures of bottle of green tea in his van. He’s also mention liking green tea with dls on ttxs.

4) Hot pot

a. Soup - Gg used to say because he’s from Chongqing, he likes spicy hotpot. However, after 2018, he mentioned that he now like twin-sided pot (half spicy, half not). Is he sharing a pot with someone who doesn’t eat spicy food that much? In clips from early 2018, we see dd not being able to handle spicy food. However, in 2020, we see him ordering a completely spicy soup base (him being the only one out of the 4 people to do so). What changed for both of them?

b. Sauce - In Chongqing where gg is from, you eat hotpot with a spicy oil sauce. Gg used to say that was what he preferred. However, in an interview, he picked sesame sauce over the spicy oil sauce. He also mentions that he loves the sauce with sweet garlic. If you go back to old video of dd, he has always love sesame sauce with garlic. He also mentioned in ttysj earlier this year that he loves hot pot with sesame sauce with sweet garlic. However, in j5, we see him eating his hot pot with spicy oil sauce. What happened? Are they trying to become each other?

Edit - dd was asked recently why he changed from his sesame sauce to spicy oil sauce and he said “I learned it from a friend I met from filming.” And he said it’s because it makes the hot pot less spicy, and most important, the flavor suits him.

c. Dried yamakurage - Ngl, I’ve never heard of this vegetable before today. Many people from different parts of China was in the same boat. Google search told me that it’s a vegetable they like to add in hot pot in Chongqing. Dd mentioned in ttxs that he likes this vegetable. In j5, you can also find this vegetable on the table.

d. “Treasure in the palm” - What is that? Ya, I had no idea either until dd ordered it for his hotpot. (Many other Chinese audience on WB also has never heard of it.) Apparently it’s the ligament in the middle of a chicken’s claw. I did some Google research and it seems like it’s mostly eaten bbq style or stir fry. So I searched “掌中宝” + hotpot and got the result that it’s eaten in hotpot in....drumroll....Chongqing! (Yes, where gg is from.) So ya......

e. Cow stomach - Another thing dd ordered. This time, this is something dd has always like to eat and has said it since 2017. However, it’s gg that mentioned in an interview that he also like to eat this for his hot pot now. Previously, when asked what his favorite hot pot meat is, he said “beef.” Maybe he just suddenly change his mood?

I just found these amazing videos from this Youtube Channel about Szechuan (around the area gg is from) hotpot so check them out for more information.

5) Zongzi - Where gg is from (southern China), we’re use to eating savory Zongzi with meat, peanuts, eggs, etc inside. But where dd is from (northern China), they think zongzi should be sweet with red bean, etc.. During an interview when ask to pick between sweet vs savory zongzi, gg immediately picked savory. However, dd wavered and then picked savory at the end. 

6) Eggplant - Gg said that he eats anything except eggplant because he once threw up when he was younger eating eggplant and it left a trauma on him. Unfortunately for him, the prepared food during CQL had a lot of eggplant because it was in season where they were filming. The actor of LXC during a livestream also mentioned that gg doesn’t like to eat eggplant. Then he followed up by saying that dd loves to eat eggplant. But if you watch ttxs, none of the host ever mentions dd likes eggplant (they constantly mention that he loves cilantro, durian, snail rice noodles, etc.). Also in an episode when there was eggplant, dd didn’t actively try to eat some. So maybe during their filming time, someone doesn’t like to eat eggplant and gave theirs to another person, causing LXC’s confusion?

From my own opinion, I think gg is the type of person that values food a lot. You can see him craving certain food and be very picky about the type of food he likes to eat. He also knows how to cook well so his standard for good food is high. I think dd is the type of person that likes food but isn’t super picky of the type of food he eats, as long as it’s good, he’s happy. So he’s more likely to just enjoy the same food that gg likes because that will make both of them happy. I don’t think either of them purposefully change their food preference for each other but more that your food habit changes naturally when you spend a lot time with another person. 

7. Cough Drop

When watching Street Dancing, there was a clip of all the team leaders sitting down watching and dd pulled out a “candy.” The leader next to him asked him if he was eating candy and he pulled out a pack and shared it with others. He even reached over to make sure he shared his candy with everyone. It was such a cute moment and looked like elementary school children sharing snacks. It’s cute and that’s it, right?

Nope, bxg have to live up to the title of “Detective Conan/Sherlock Holmes”. People start digging through old pictures and found one where they saw the same brand “candy”, which was actually cough drops in gg’s back from several years back. The version dd was eating was a “peach flavor version” meant for children. What was interesting is that he ate the peach version himself but shared a different version with others. This was confirm by the company that made the cough drops. (CPN) It’s possible that he’s savoring the peach ones for himself because gg gave them to him specially.

So gg and dd have the same cough drop. That’s it, right? Nope, more Detective Conan popped out and found several videos of fan-meeting in Thailand when gg was eating a cough drop and dd was coughing. Then gg asked some assistant for the cough drop, yes the same exact brand, and then handed them to dd. You can also see dd have something in this mouth before he went on stage. This tells us that gg has definitely given dd this cough drop before.

But are we sure that the supply of cough drop dd has is from gg? Probably, because of what happen in XGDS. During XGDS, dd was eating a cough drop. Normally, other friends, like the people in street dancing will see that and say, “oh you’re eating a candy?” But when gg saw, he asked “does your throat hurt?” This means that gg knew that dd was eating a cough drop immediately. How would he know that? Unless he’s the one who gave it to him. (This story has more logic and evidence than papers I’ve read in Cell/Nature/Science.)

Fun fact - some fan bought it and said it taste terrible LOL It taste too sweet on the outside and taste like medicine on the inside (which it is technically herbal medicine.) So don’t recommend trying it.

[terrible-tentacle-theatre]

The Bestiary Revamped: Bobbit Worm

Disclaimer: While this article is founded in scientific fact, it contains hyberbole and conscious exaggerations for the sake of comedy. Do not take my ramblings at face value. You can find the sources at the end of the article and tools for scientific fact-checking under the “Learn more” link on my blog.

The old article can be read here.

(Note: While writing this article, I was listening to the Final Fantasy IV boss battle theme.)

(Okay, so. Anyway.)

Of all the phyla of animal life, you’d be hard-pressed to find any that is more prominent in the public conscious as the epitome of harmless, pathetic, and ultimately boring animals than annelids.

I mean, what else, would you call a taxon that’s most famous member looks like this?

Wow. Fascinating.

Let’s be honest: earthworms aren’t the most exciting animals, to put it mildly.  It’s truly difficult to imagine any more generic a creature than a tube of pasty and easily smearable flesh writhing on wet pavement after a light rain.

However, you might want to be careful when talking trash about earthworms and their fellow annelids. These pathetic all-organic homegrown noodles are essential to the circle of matter, and if they get fed up with your disrespectful shit they can just up and ditch the whole detritivorous routine, leaving you, and you personally, to literally eat dirt in their place. Be respectful to earthworms because they deal with all of the shit you don’t want to deal with, both metaphorically and in a literal sense.

But if that isn’t enough to convince you that you shouldn’t diss earthworms (in which case you’re probably an asshole to begin with), consider the following: if they can’t take more of your racist bull, they can tell on you to their big strong cousin. And pray to whatever transcendent being(s) you believe in that doesn’t happen. You do not want that to go down.

Why?

Simple.

Turns out, the ranks of the annelids apparently include the fucking Sarlacc.

*unholy screaming*

Meet the bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois), the newest resident of your recurring nightmares. Who knew that the cousin of the lowly earthworm is a vicious mashup of one of those bendy rainbow pencils and Shai-Hulud that also happens to eat happy thoughts for breakfast? Standing at a maximum length of roughly three goddamn meters, this lethal length of rope will shear anything with the balls and/or the stupidity to approach it in half and look fabulous with its iridescent cuticle the whole time. That is no exaggeration, as you will soon come to see.

This terrible killer rainbow was discovered in 1788 by a German naturalist called Peter Simon Pallas. Imagine hopping on a boat in the late 18th century, in a time when most people still believed in the existence of a good and loving God, and finding this. Imagine his reaction.

Actually, you don’t have to, because we have his portrait and you can see his empty-eyed stare shining through. “Scarred for life” doesn’t even begin covering this bullshit.

Seriously, look into his eyes. Dude’s dead inside.

Sweet lord have mercy. This guy is the real reason why you don’t talk shit about annelids. You can boast about being  “the most intelligent creature on Earth”  and “the crown of creation” and blah blah blah. Fat load of good it’s gonna do ya against a 10-feet-long rainbow death worm with spring-loaded jagged mandibles quite literally the size of your middle fingers.

Crown this.

And guess what - that worm is fucking pissed at you. You talked trash about its phylum and now you’ll get what’s coming to you. Next time you’ll think twice before you try talking down on annelids.

To better put in perspective why you should soil your pants in fear at this prospect, let’s review the bobbit worm’s life and times, as well as its lovely feeding habits.

Oh boy!

This will be fun.

So, the bobbit worm basically comes to be from the worm jizz and eggs floating around in the ocean. (Keep that in mind next time you go for a nice refreshing swim on the ocean beach.) The fertilized eggs hatch into microscopic little specks called trochophore larvae, which then drift around in the oceanic currents as plankton like a bunch of lazy shits. Fairly humble beginnings for what will soon become the beast that is the bobbit worm. It’s a bit like how Darth Vader used to be a slave on a backwater desert planet as a kid.

Note: this isn’t a bobbit worm trochophore, but that of another polychaete worm (Pomatoceros lamarckii), used here for demonstration. Anyway, they’re difficult to tell apart but one hatches into a harmless tube-building worm and the other a ravenous ten-feet-long predator with a pair of garden shears for a face. Polychaete larvae are like Kinder eggs, Russian roulette edition.

After growing out of its larval stage, a whole lot of completely uninteresting shit happens (mostly the gaining of additional segments), ending with a small mature worm that embeds itself into the seabed in a sufficiently warm and sunny part of the ocean.

What follows next is something right out of Return of the Jedi. What, you thought I was kidding about the Sarlacc?

The bobbit worm spends all day laying low in the seabed, waiting silently, with only the tip of its head sticking out of the sediment. Said head comes equipped with five chemoreceptory tendrils, allowing the worm to “taste” the water around itself. This comes in handy, seeing as it is completely fucking blind and the thought of growing eyes never even crossed it’s mind (which is actually fairly complex for an annelid). It’s like one of those blind sword masters from wuxia movies, except it’s a terrifying giant worm instead.

Aaaaaanyway! If the worm senses anything that “smells” edible, it correctly deduces that it is, in fact, edible. Which logically means that something was stupid enough to approach it without hightailing it out there. Therefore, it becomes a one-worm Darwin Award Committee and does this.

Steppin’ on the beach, do do do doOOOAAAAAARGH

You know, the longer this article gets, the less it feels like this is biology and the more it feels like I’m writing some sort of weird Dune fanfiction.

I feel like I should note that the bobbit worm’s definition of “edible” is amazingly flexible. This fucker will eat anything that comes close to it’s terrifying maw. Crabs, shrimp, fish, worms - anything with or without a pulse is at risk of suddenly being snatched by a horrifying giant worm and swallowed alive to be digested into slurry. If you’re lucky, though, it will miss and only ends up cutting you in half with the sheer force of its strike, completely by accident. Sweet dreams.

Speaking of its digestion, there is absolutely nothing that it cannot break down. It has zero problems wolfing down entire animals twice its width, and one incident involving a bobbit worm sneaking into an aquarium had it shred wire traps furnished with fishing hooks to pieces, then swallowing the hooks and digesting them, followed by eating its way through 20 pounds of fishing wire. I’m pretty sure the next thing to be broken down in its gut will be human civilization. 

And if there’s nothing around to eat, the bobbit worm still firmly refuses to die. It will sustain itself just fine on detritus, algae and tiny little silica-shelled plankton called diatoms who are easily some of the prettiest things in the ocean.

It eats pure aesthetic and turns it into rainbow cuticle and mandibles that can shred any fish to ribbons. The bobbit worm is truly the pastel goth of the ocean.

They also have a nasty habit of occasionally burrowing into rocks when young, and ending up in aquariums in secret. There, being the insidious little assholes that they are, they bury themselves into the sediment and secretly start to munch upon the dumbass utopian fish society inside the aquarium, growing from angry shoelace to technicolor abomination in the process. Often it takes years to notice the bobbit worm hanging out in your aquarium, which is a pretty big feat. Imagine if you had to stay concealed in an glass-walled aquarium for years... while being three to ten feet long and covered in garish rainbow color. This guy could effortlessly drive Naruto out of the colorful ninja business. Enjoy your paranoia next time you buy live rocks for your aquarium.

In D&D, the bobbit worm multiclasses as assassin and barbarian.

Now I hope you understand that being a fish is akin to cosmic horror. Any moment you might be cruelly snatched out of existence by a being that is outside your generally accepted reality (the water) and also happens to be shit-your-pants terrifying and even have tentacles to round out the Lovecraft aesthetic. And they are covered in bristles that cause permanent numbness, just by the way. Just in case they weren’t horrifying enough, Mama Nature’s got you covered.

Oh, and one last thing: they are found in all three oceans.

So anyway, how’s planning that seaside vacation going? Have fun!

Sources:

Encyclopedia of Life (EoL)

Echinoblog

Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI)

Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS)

SCHULZE, Anja. The Bobbit worm dilemma: a case for DNA (Reply to Salazar-Vallejo et al. 2011. Giant Eunicid Polychaetes (Annelida) in shallow tropical and temperate seas. Rev. Biol. Trop. 59-4: 1463-1474)

The Daily Mail

[atamascolily]

An incomplete review of the Star Wars EU/Legends canon

I never thought I would say this, but I'm actually very thankful there will never be another Star Wars EU/Legends book in the old - now non-canon - universe. I've been revisiting those books recently as part of my recent Star Wars kick, and let me tell you, I stopped reading them just at the right time - when Vector Prime came out and they killed Chewie off. It's all downhill from there.

Anyway, the Legends universe is a hot mess, but for me, the five Thrawn Books by Timothy Zahn - Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command, Specter of the Past, and Vision of the Future - are amazing and totally canon in my heart for pretty much everything. Everything else is pretty much "meh" except for a few books that evoke some late '90s nostalgia (because really this blog is all about late '90s nostalgia).

So in my head, Luke and Mara Jade are happily married, and so are Han and Leia; their three children, Jacen, Jaina and Anakin, are all happy-go-lucky teenagers who can use the Force with their besties - Tenel Ka of the Hapes Cluster, Chewie's nephew Lowbaccha, and Tahiri Veila - and getting kidnapped/saving the galaxy every few months. The New Republic is alive and going strong on Coruscant (which never gets invaded by aliens from outside the galaxy), Luke runs the Jedi Academy on Yavin IV; the remnants of the Empire are scattered and disorganized and sue for peace with the New Republic and Captain Pelleaon finally gets the retirement he deserves. It's really great.

But let's face it, I read just about all of the books published prior to 1999 because I was a Star Wars geek and that's just what you did in the late '90s. (They were New York Times best-sellers so I know I wasn't the only one.) In general, I love the art on the books because it looks just like movie posters for films that were never made and that's exactly what I wanted.

Random thoughts on said EU/Legends canon cut below, for length:

-Ben Kenobi's last appearance to Luke in the Legends AU: "You're not the last of the old Jedi... but the first of the new." (TAKE THAT, DISNEY EPISODE 8!) -Awesome things from the Thrawn books: Mara Jade - check. Talon Karrde - check. Art as a major form of military strategy - check. Secret commando ninjas - check. Leia's title as "Lady Vader" - check. Borsk Fey'lya -check. Camaas Document macguffin-thingy- check. Ysalamiri - lizards that block the Force - check. Vornskrs - Force-sensitive predators - check. Insane Jedi master- check. Lots of clones - check. Lawful Evil Imperials - check. Mara fulfilling her orders to the Emperor in the most badass way possible in The Last Command - check, PLEASE. -Jacen, Jaina and Anakin Solo forEVER! -Also, Coruscant and New Republic forever!! -Shadows of the Empire: WTF, Xizor/Leia sex pollen (okay, pheromones) seduction scene???; Dash Rendar is a Han Solo expy, you're not fooling anyone.   -Truce at Bakura: wow, Ssi-ruuvi are full of Fridge Horror, powering their tech with human life force; maybe the Imperials aren't so bad after all; Luke and Gaeriel have no chemistry and also her entire religion is against the Jedi on principle, and she's not interested in changing it for you, Luke, sorry; of course Dev dies after his redemption arc; watching the force-ghost of Anakin Skywalker try to talk to Leia is amazing, because Leia is so not interested in his shit. -The Courtship of Princess Leia: I love the Hapes cluster, but man Han buying a planet in a card game and kidnapping Leia with the Hapan Gun of Command (pretty much what it sounds like) is NOT OKAY; Teneniel Djo is awesome and so is Dathomir in general. Isolder is okay once he gets over Leia, which takes most of the book. Also on the cover on one edition, Leia looks like Sarah from Labyrinth during that dream sequence with Jareth - what? On the other, she's wearing her Endor outfit, as are Han and Luke and there's a Rancor there, too for no good reason that I can recall.   -Jedi Academy Trilogy: Yay getting to see the Kessel spice mines; I'm not so into the Sun Crusher and the Maw Installation, but Qwi Xux and Wedge Antilles are adoreable together, poor Admiral Daala and Imperial sexism (yet another reason Tarkin is an asshole); yay for a Jedi Academy on Yavin IV; Kyp Durron seriously needs to chill, Luke's in a coma for a lot of the series, Exar Kun is not as clever as he thinks himself. -I, Jedi: I'm supposed to like you, Corran Horn, and I'm just not interested and your narrative voice is kinda annoying.... Just sayin'. -The Crystal Star: super weird and trippy, Han and Leia's kids are kidnapped by "The Empire Reborn", which is as dark and terrible as it sounds, Crystal Star explodes, do not read. -The Black Fleet Crisis: super dark and trippy, especially the Yevethan culture; reveal that Luke's mother was one of the Fallanassi - pacifist Jedi who hid when the Empire was formed - only it turns out to be a huge macguffin, which is too bad. -Children of the Jedi: EVEN TRIPPIER AND DARKER THAN THE CRYSTAL STAR, HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE; Luke gets a love interest who's a Force ghost trapped in a ship's computer; sacrifice, body-swapping, creepy song motifs. -Darksaber: Hutts try to build a Death Star, what can possibly go wrong? Luke's new Jedi girlfriend can't live without her force powers when she loses them, so she leaves him. -Planet of Twilight: Luke goes chasing off after Callista and they don't get back together, so that's good. Also dark and trippy.   -The New Rebellion: SUPER DARK AND TRIPPY, LOTS OF MASS MURDER, NOT A FAN. Thank goodness for Mara Jade and Talon Karrde showing up with ysalamiri to turn the force off so Leia can shoot the Evil Dark Jedi behind it all with a blaster. I can't believe I read this. -Ambush at Corellia/Assault on Selonia/Showndown at Centerpoint: also weird and trippy. Han has an evil identical cousin. Luke has to go back and ask Gaeriel for help (she's married now and it's awkward). Lando tries to marry for money and after some awkwardness ends up with Tendra Risant, who is awesome. Lots of things blow up. Kids save the day at the last minute. -I only read one of the Junior Jedi Knights series, Lyric's World, about young Anakin Solo and his friend Tahiri, taking some time off from their Jedi studies to help a friend metamorphose into a new life stage, and I remember it being really charming, despite the inevitable intelligent secret animal sidekick. I later learned that Anakin and Tahiri were kinda an item and then it went horribly wrong in New Jedi Order so I'm glad I didn't read that. -Young Jedi Knights: yay young adult Star Wars novels from the '90s; I  stopped reading after Diversity Alliance, but these were fun - especially Tenel Ka, who was a badass, and I quietly shipped her and Jacen (and then that ALSO ended badly in later books - why can't we have nice things?) Especially good in my memory: Shadow Academy (trying not to get corrupted to the dark side at an academy for Dark Jedi), Lightsabers (Tenel Ka has to deal with losing a hand during a training accident); Diversity Alliance (aliens get pissed off at human dominion in the New Republic government but decide that killing the humans off is the only way to achieve justice).

We're not going to even go into all the stuff that happens post-Vector Prime, because it is truly awful. Go look it up if you're curious.

I did read a few stand-alone books this week, though:

-The later Zahn novels lack the spark and vigor I remember from the Thrawn books. Scoundrels couldn't keep my interest. Allegiance and Choices of One feel very weird to me because Luke and Mara manage to work together without actually meeting each other. Survivor's Quest ought to have been good except somehow Luke and Mara encountering the Outbound Flight expedition was BORING and it shouldn't have been. It's not clear if reading the follow-up novel set during the Old Republic era - titled Outbound Flight - will help with this. -Also, I dislike the retconning so that Mara and Luke make references to Naboo and the Trade Federation, which they didn't do in earlier books, and also Thrawn's major motivation for everything is getting the galaxy ready for the impending invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong in New Jedi Order, which I just - really don't like, especially since NJO was pretty awful. -Also, there are an awful lot of Jedi healing trances in Survivor's Quest, which are only tolerable because the code word that Luke and Mara use to snap each other out of it is "I love you". D'aww. -Also, perhaps this is just me reading too much fanfic, but would it hurt to have at least an allusion to the fact that Luke and Mara have sex on occasion - in addition to snuggling and having Force mind-meld sessions? I'm not asking for porn, mind you, but just anything beyond platonic Force buddies would have been good. -Kenobi, by  John Jackson Miller was another, relatively recent Legends book that ought to have been good. I mean, it's Obi-wan Kenobi hanging out on Tatooine, dealing with Tusken Raiders and moisture farmers - I eat that sort of fanfiction up - but although there were some good bits, it just really didn't work for me. -Those handy timelines in the front - listing every single book and how it fits into the convoluted chronology - is really helpful, though! The only thing that would make it better would be to add authors and dates. But that is what the Internet is for, I guess.

Conclusions and Follow-Up Questions to Research:

-Wow, the '90s were an interesting time. -Bantam Spectra line of EU novels: mostly good, some weirdness. Del Rey line: ARGHHHHH. -Wow, there are a lot more Star Wars books out there then I remember. -Wow, Mara Jade is awesome. -I have a lot of strong opinions on the subject. -Since they stopped putting out Legends novels as of April 2014, I never have to care about keeping up with canon or anything I don't like about this universe ever again. -Has fanfiction spoiled me for the "real" thing? Or is it just a failure of the published works to address the topics I'm REALLY interested in? -Is the Disney EU canon any better? (My guess, given how I feel overall about the direction of the recent movies: probably not for me, but maybe worth checking out.)