#the milwaukee monster
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jeffrey-lionheart · 25 days ago
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“I thought that dreams belonged to other men. ‘Cause each time I got close, they’d fall apart again.”
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weirdwisconsin · 1 year ago
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Milwaukee's National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum has unveiled a new collection of cryptid bobbleheads featuring Bigfoot, Mothman, the Loch Ness Monster and more cryptozoological oddities.
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goalhofer · 7 months ago
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Top 10 AHL playoff goal leaders: week 9 (end of season)
10: Fedor Svechkov, Milwaukee (6) 9: Pierrick Dubé, Hershey (7) 8: Josh Dunne, Cleveland (7) 7: Ivan Miroshnichenko, Hershey (7) 6: Ryan Winterton, Coachella Valley (7) 5: Hendrix Lapierre, Hershey (7) 4: Max McCormick, Coachella Valley (8) 3: John Hayden, Coachella Valley (9) 2: Zachary L'Heureux, Milwaukee (10) 1: Ethen Frank, Hershey (10)
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jeffrey-lionheart · 1 month ago
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The way this could apply to Jeff & Richard too…
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so…
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jeffrey-lionheart · 27 days ago
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Am I crazy or do Fiona Gallagher and Evan Peters’s Jeffrey Dahmer have the same accent?
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paulshishkoffjr · 11 days ago
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It is a final in Milwaukee. Jet Greaves stopped 33 of 34 SOG. As @monstershockey defeated @mkeadmirals, 4-1. #AHL #CLEvsMIL
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mkecountyteenbookaward · 11 months ago
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Man Made Monsters
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Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers
Man Made Monsters is a collection of interlinked short horror stories grounded in history and Cherokee tradition. Though the story collection’s pieces can be read individually, author Andrea L. Rogers rewards readers who follow the Wilson family’s thread of terror from 1839 to 2039 with the richness of a fully fleshed-out world. Accompanying the stories are Jeff Edwards’ illustrations which tie Cherokee imagery to the text. Readers of supernatural horror will find inventive twists on classic monsters. Readers who prefer their horror in the true-crime vein will enjoy Rogers’ relentless mirroring of supernatural horrors with human horrors throughout history. In Man Made Monsters’ final stories, set in 2029 and 2039, fans of speculative and sci-fi thrillers will relish original projections of our future world. In short, no matter your typical genre, you’ll find Rogers’ collection to be a page-turner worthy of recommending to fellow story lovers.
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orangameelectronics · 11 months ago
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Bluetooth Speaker Portable LED Digital Display Alarm Clock Bt Speaker FM Radio
I am beyond excited to share with you a game-changing gadget that has taken my music experience to a whole new level - the Bluetooth Speaker Portable LED Digital Display Alarm Clock Bt Speaker FM Radio! 
With its sleek design and compact size, this little powerhouse has become an indispensable part of my daily routine. Whether I'm jamming to my favorite tunes or waking up to the sound of my favorite radio station, this speaker clock has got my back! 
The LED digital display is a sight to behold! It not only shows the time in bold, easy-to-read numbers, but it also illuminates my room with a vibrant array of colors. It's like having a mini disco party in my bedroom!
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klrasmussenauthor · 2 years ago
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Review: The Comfort of Monsters
⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. The Comfort of Monsters by Willa C. RichardsA missing sister. A sexually deviant boyfriend. A flaky brother. And a man that is all wrong for her sister. Peg was surrounded by questionable men. And since the disappearance of her sister, Dee, Peg has been struggling with the following questions: Why did she let Leif slap her around like that? Were she and Dee doomed from…
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goalhofer · 3 days ago
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Top 10 AHL PIM leaders: week 13
10: Tye Felhaber, Colorado (65) 9: Ian McKinnon, Coachella Valley (66) 8: Riley McKay, Henderson (66) 7: Xavier Simoneau-Malette, Laval (68) 6: Brennan Saulnier, Hershey (69) 5: Garrett Wilson, Lehigh Valley (69) 4: Max McCue, Cleveland (72) 3: Florian Xhekaj, Laval (74) 2: Kyle Marino, Milwaukee (81) 1: Jeff Truchon-Viel, Providence (85)
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jeffrey-lionheart · 23 days ago
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The baby daddy is definitely Jeff, but the real question is, what’s Richard gonna name it?
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this is gonna be fire just wait
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lady-dulcinea · 6 months ago
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"At least God's mercy is better than that of these monsters, and the precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleep — as a man. Good-bye, all! Mina!"
Mina & Jonathan's relationship
from the Milwaukee Ballet's production of Michael Pink's Dracula Nicole Teague-Howell as Mina Murray Randy Crespo as Jonathan Harker
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doctorbitchcrxft · 6 months ago
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Nightshifter | Supernatural Series Rewrite | Dean Winchester x Fem!Reader
Pairing: Dean Winchester x Fem!Reader (Eventual ;) )
Warnings: canon violence, canon gore, hostage situation
Word Count: 5149
Mobile Supernatural Series Rewrite Masterlist
Supernatural Series Rewrite Masterlist
Supernatural Series Rewrite Playlist
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You eyed Dean angrily as he flirted with the attractive woman in front of him dressed as an FBI agent. You knew he was teasing you, and it was pissing you off. You had long since finished your interrogation of the store’s manager. Helena had apparently been a patron of the store for years. Then, one day, she went crazy; the police caught her clearing out the jewelry store’s cases and the safe before shooting someone in the face and killing herself in her bathtub after the crime. You had a sneaking suspicion you were dealing with a shapeshifter; a monster that you were quite over dealing with.
Dean approached you, triumphantly waving the piece of paper with the phone number he’d gotten from the woman he was interviewing.
You snatched it out of his hands. 
“Aw, you jealous?” he teased, leaning into you.
You deadpanned, “Keep it professional, Agent Hetfield, wouldn’t want the bureau to hear about this, right?” You ripped the paper up and shoved its tatters into your blazer pocket.
He deflated slightly, but still smirked at you. “I’m gonna make you crack, sweetheart, just wait.”
“Mm-hmm,” you hummed, turning away from him and heading out to the Impala. Admittedly, you were strutting a little bit to tease him.
Sam met you at the car, and the three of you drove to the home of the man whose police statement had been a mix of sci-fi nerd gibberish and the only eye-witness account of the incident.
As you approached the small house, Sam began talking about another piece of the case. “Uh, Milwaukee National Trust. It was hit about a month ago.”
Dean raised a brow. “Same M.O. as the jewelry store?”
“Yep, inside job, longtime employee, the never-in-a-million-years type. Dude robs the bank, then goes home and supposedly commits suicide.”
“The guy, Resnick, he was the security guard on duty?” Dean questioned.
Sam nodded. “Yeah. He was actually beaten unconscious by the teller who heisted the place.”
“Jesus,” you grimaced.
“Yeah,” Sam nodded. He knocked on the screen door. “Mr. Resnick?” A bright flood light turned on, momentarily blinding you.
You raised a hand in front of your eyes. “Holy—”
Sam was apparently unfazed. “FBI, Mr. Resnick.”
Through the screen door, a chubby, nerdy-looking man in his late twenties approached. “Let me see the badge.”
You slapped your badge against the screen next to Sam’s and Dean’s. 
Mr. Resnick, whose first name was Ronald, squinted at them carefully. “I already gave my statement to the police.”
Dean chuckled. “Yeah, listen, Ronald, um… just some things about your statement we wanted to get some clarification on.”
“You read it?” He seemed surprised. “You come to listen to what I've got to say?”
“Well, that’s why we’re here,” Dean said.
“Well, come on in.” He opened the door and led you through a narrow hallway to a room cluttered with conspiracy theory paraphernalia.
“None of the cops ever called me back. Not after I told them what was really going on. Uh, they all thought I was crazy,” he rushed out. You were beginning to think the same. “First off, Juan Morales never robbed the Milwaukee National Trust, okay? That, I guarantee. See, me and Juan were friends. He used to come back to the bank on my night shifts, and we'd play cards.”
“So you let him into the bank that night, after hours,” Sam noted.
“The thing I let into the bank…” Ronald trailed off, “wasn't Juan. I mean, it had his face, but it wasn't his face. Uh, every detail was perfect, but too perfect, you know, like if a dollmaker made it, like I was talking to a big Juan-doll.”
You nearly choked on a laugh. “A Juan-doll?”
“Look, this wasn't the only time this happened, okay?” He scrambled through papers on his messy desk and handed you a folder. “There was this jewelry store, too. And the cops, a-and you guys, you just won't see it!” You flipped through the folder; it almost looked like a hunter’s profile of the case. You were half impressed. “Both crimes were pulled by the same thing,” Ronald finished. 
Sam pressed, saying, “What's that, Mr. Resnick?”
He picked up a copy of a magazine labeled “Fortean Times” and held it out to you. The headline read, “Birth of the Cybermen.”
‘Jesus Christ,’ you thought, suppressing a grimace.
“Chinese 've been working on 'em for years,” the man explained. “And the Russians before that. Part men, part machine. Like the Terminator. But the kind that can change itself, make itself look like other people.”
Dean smirked. “Like the one from T2.”
“Exactly! See, so not just a robot, more of a- a- a- a— Mandroid," he said finally, a bizarre twinkle in his eye.
“A Mandroid,” you deadpanned. “And what makes you so sure about this, Ronald?”
He held up a finger at you, smiling a little wildly. Your eyes flicked to Dean’s in concern, and he just wiggled his eyebrows at you. 
The man returned a moment later holding a VHS tape labeled “M.N.T. Camera 4— Juan.” He inserted it into a player, saying, “See, I made copies of all the security tapes. I knew once the cops got them they'd be buried. Here.” He fast-forwarded a bit in the tape. “Now watch. Watch. Watch him, watch, watch! See, look! Th- th- there it is!” He paused it on a clip of the man with a silver in his eyes. “You see? He's got the laser eyes.”
You gave Sam a knowing look that he returned.
“Cops said it was some kind of reflected light. Some kind of ‘camera flare’. Okay? Ain't no damn camera flare. They say I'm a post-trauma case. So what? Bank goes and fires me, it don't matter!” You eyed Ronald uncomfortably as he continued to pace around and rant. “The Mandroid is— is still out there. The law won't hunt this thing down— I'll do it myself.
"You see, this thing, it- it- it kills the real person, makes it look like a suicide, then it sorta, like, morphs into that person. Cases the job for a while until it knows the take is fat, and then it finds its opening. Now, these robberies, they're, they're grouped together.” He pointed at the map on the wall. “So I figure the Mandroid is holed up somewhere in the middle, underground, maybe. I dunno, maybe that's where it recharges its, uh, Mandroid batteries.”
Dean nodded, seeming impressed. You just looked between Ronald and Dean in confusion. 
“Okay. I want you to listen very carefully. Because I'm about to tell you the god's honest truth about all of this,” Sam began.
Your head whipped to him, confused as to where he was going with this.
“There's no such thing as Mandroids. There's nothing evil or inhuman going on out there. Just people. Nothing else, you understand?”
You kept a straight face, but were startled. 
“The laser eyes,” Ronald tried desperately.
“Just a camera flare, Mr. Resnick. See, I know you don't want to believe this. But your friend Juan robbed the bank, and that's it,” Sam mollified.
Ronald immediately became angry. “Get out of my house! Now!”
***
You and the brothers found another tacky, cheap motel to stay in for the time being. You lounged on Dean’s bed in a pair of comfortable sweatpants and an oversized band t-shirt. 
Dean paced around the room, chuckling. “Man, that has got to be the kicker, straight up. I mean, you tell that poor son of a bitch that— what did you say, remand the tapes that he copied? Classified evidence of an ongoing investigation?” He laughed harder. “That's messed up.”
Sam sat on the foot of the bed and inserted the tape into the television’s player. “What are you, pissed at me or something?”
Dean shook his head. “Nah, I just think it's a little creepy how good of a Fed you are. I mean, come on, we could have at least thrown the guy a bone. He did some pretty good legwork here.”
“Mandroid?” you deadpanned.
“Except for the Mandroid part,” Dean added. “I liked him. He's not that different from you or me. People think we're crazy.”
“He’s not a hunter, though, Dean,” you challenged. “He ran into something real and let his conspiracy-theory-brain-rot get the best of him.”
“Better to stay in the dark, and stay alive,” Sam finished.
Dean shrugged, “Yeah, I guess.” He put a paper down on the map on the table and began marking it with a red pen. 
You shuffled forward to Sam and hit the pause button on the remote just as the man’s eyes flashed at the camera.
“Shapeshifter. Just like back in St. Louis. Same retinal reaction to video,” Sam informed.
“Eyes flare at the camera. I hate those fuckin’ things,” Dean grunted.
“You think we don’t?” you scoffed.
“Yeah, well, one didn't turn into you and frame you for murder.”
You shrugged. “Well, look, if this shifter's anything like the one we killed in Missouri—”
“Then Ronald was right. Alright, they like to layer up underground, preferably the sewer. And all the robberies have been connected so far, right?”
Sam nodded.
“With the, uh, sewer main layout. There's one more bank lined up on that same sewer main,” Dean continued.
“Awesome,” you grumbled.
***
Later that evening, you and the brothers headed to the bank Dean referenced, the City Bank of Milwaukee, to see if the shapeshifter would be hitting that one next. You posed as Sam and Dean’s boss, and the two boys wore security camera technician outfits. 
The guard of the bank informed you as you walked along, “Well, we haven't had any flags go up on our system yet.”
You shook your head. “No, sir, this is a glitch in the overall grid. I just need to cover all my bases and make sure the branch monitors are okay.”
“Well, better to be safe than sorry, I guess,” the guard shrugged.
“That’s the plan,” you nodded.
He opened the door to an observation room flooded with monitors for you, saying, “Alrighty. You guys need anything else?”
“Nope,” you replied. “We’ll be in and out before you know it. Just a routine check.”
“Okie-dokie,” he said, leaving the room.
Dean chuckled. “I like him. He says ‘Okie-dokie.’ “
“What if he's the shifter?” worried Sam.
“Well, then we follow him home, put a silver bullet through his chestplate,” the older brother replied simply.
You sat down in one of the desk chairs to watch the screens. You kicked your high-heeled feet up on the desk in front of you, leaning back in your seat. “Anybody got popcorn?” you yawned, preparing for the hours of work ahead of you.
***
You and the Winchester boys were beginning to go cross-eyed after searching for the monster for so long.
“Well, it looks like Mr. Okie-Dokie is… okie-dokie,” Dean commented upon seeing his eyes appear normal in the camera screens.
“Maybe we jumped the gun on this, guys,” sighed Sam. “I mean, we don't even know it's here.”
Something caught your eye. “Wait a minute.” A middle-aged man turned toward the camera, and his eyes flared. “Got him.”
“Hello, freak,” Dean growled.
Sam immediately jumped up, as did you, but Dean lingered behind. “Guys, wait!”
“What?” you and Sam spun around.
You then saw Ronald scurrying up to the door of the bank with a chain and a padlock, chaining it shut.
Dean scoffed. “Hello, Ronald.”
You immediately began running down the hall, ignoring the protesting of the soles of your feet as your heels clacked against the floor. As you approached the main lobby of the bank, you heard Ronald screaming for everyone to get on the ground. And then, gunshots.
“Fuck!” you cursed.
“And you said we shouldn't bring guns,” Dean scolded Sam, nearly bumping into someone fleeing past him.
“I didn't know this was gonna happen, Dean,” Sam replied.
“Just let me do the talking,” the older brother commanded. “I don't think he likes you very much, Agent Johnson.”
You saw Ronald standing in front of a group of people huddled together on the floor. “Now, there's only one way in or out of here, and I chained it up. So nobody's leaving, do you understand?”
Your eyes flicked to Dean concernedly as he stepped forward. “Hey, buddy. Calm down. Just calm down—”
Ronald wheeled around. “What the— You! Get on the floor, now.”
Dean began to crouch to the floor, as did you and Sam. “Okay, we're doing that. Just don't shoot anybody, especially us.”
“I knew it. As soon as you two left. You ain't FBI. Who are you? Who are you working for, huh? The men in black? You working for the Mandroid?”
“We’re not working for the Mandroid!” Sam exclaimed.
Ronald shakily aimed his gun at Sam. “You, shut up! I ain't talking to you. I don't like you.”
“Fair enough,” the brunet mumbled.
“Get on 'em. Frisk them down, make sure they got no weapons on them. Go!” Ronald commanded one of the hostages.
“Oh, hell, no, you’re not fucking touching me,” you struggled against the man as he tried to feel you up. 
“(Y/N), (Y/N), stop, stop,” Sam pleaded.
You shoved the man off yourself. Your struggle was strategic, though, as it kept him from finding the knives you had planted on yourself; one in your sleeve and one alongside your thigh.
The man moved over to Dean and found a knife stashed in his boot.
“Now what have we here?” Ronald’s question was meant to sound intimidating, but his wavering voice gave him away.
Sam shot Dean a look.
“I'm not just gonna walk in here naked!” Dean hissed back.
“Get back there,” Ronald ordered. You did so, following his pointing of the gun to the group of people behind him. He dropped Dean’s knife in the deposit box, and Dean winced.
“We know you don't want to hurt anybody,” he said. “That's exactly what's gonna happen if you keep waving that cannon around, and why don't you let these people go?”
“No!” Ronald shrieked. “I already told you. If nobody's gonna stop this thing, then I've got to do it myself.”
“Hey, we believe you! That's why we're here,” Dean replied.
“You don't believe me. Nobody believes me! How could they?” he cried.
“Come here,” Dean said.
Ronald scoffed. “What? No.”
“You're holding the gun, boss; you're calling the shots. I just want to tell you something. Come here.”
Ronald approached cautiously and leaned into Dean. You assumed he was telling him who the shifter was.
“Why do you think we've got these getups, huh? We've been monitoring the cameras in the back. We saw the bank manager. We saw his eyes,” Dean whispered.
The shorter man’s eyes widened. “His laser eyes?”
“Yes.” Dean seemed to realize what he’d said. “No. No! No, look, we're running out of time, okay? We've got to find him before he changes into someone else.”
“Like I'm gonna listen to you. You're a damn liar,” Ronald grumbled.
Dean stood cautiously, hands out.
“Dean, no!” you said.
“I'll shoot you! Get down!” Ronald ordered, pointing his rifle at Dean.
“Take me. Okay? Take me with you; take me as a hostage. But we've gotta act fast , because the longer we just sit here, the more time he has to change.” Dean paused. “Look at me, man. I believe you. You're not crazy. There really is something inside this bank.”
Ronald finally nodded. “Alright, you come with me. But everyone else gets in the vault!”
You stood on shaky legs as the people around you gasped and cried. You helped Sam herd everyone into the vault, and Dean tried to calm everyone down when Ronald ordered him to shut the door.
“It's okay, everyone. Just stay cool.” He threw a lingering glance to you before locking the vault completely.
A young redhead stared after Dean. “Who is that man?” she asked breathlessly.
“He's my brother,” Sam replied; you could hear the worry in his voice.
“He is so brave,” she practically moaned.
You rolled your eyes and crossed your arms.
The redhead went silent for a few minutes, and you took some time to thoroughly think your situation over. ‘Cops are gonna be all over this place by now. Dean’s been accused of murder, and the three of us have already been arrested once. Dean’s on the FBI’s radar. Surely, after our escape on the danashulps case, the feds are on us again. Now, we’re smack dab in the middle of a full-on hostage situation. And who are they likely to blame? Us!’ Your anxiety was beginning to get away with you as your thoughts began to swirl in your head. You were then acutely aware of how hot the room was, and unbuttoned the top two buttons of your shirt to keep some circulation moving. 
The woman next to you who seemed infatuated with Dean introduced herself to you.
“ ‘Scuse me, sorry. Uh, hi, I’m Sherry,” she said. “You’re, uh, with those guys, too, right?”
You nodded. 
“You known them a while?”
You nodded again.
She grinned. “Oh, gosh. What’s it like being around him?”
You snorted. “ ‘Him’ who?”
“That guy! The one who saved our lives!” she beamed. “What’s he like?”
“To tell you the truth, he’s a pain in my ass most of the time,” you giggled, arms crossed over your chest. 
“Oh, really?” She deflated a bit before her floaty, trancelike inflection in her voice came back. “He just… He seems so wonderful to be around. I mean, staring down that gun. And, you know, the way— he played right into that psycho's crazy head, telling him what he wanted to hear, I mean—” She trailed off, turning her attention back to you. “He's like, a real hero or, or something.” She tucked a hair behind her ear as she continued to gush.
You nodded again, feeling weirded out. 
“Sorry, I just,” she sing-songed, “I’ve never met anyone like him.” She paused, seeming to consider her next question carefully. “You ever… done anything with him?”
You nearly choked at her statement, uncomfortable with the objectification of Dean. “What?”
“Y’know,” she drawled, “How good is he in the—”
You were grateful to hear the vault door unlocking, revealing Dean holding a handgun.
“Oh my god, you saved us! You saved us!” Sherry cheered.
“Actually, I just found a few more. Come on, everybody, let's go. Let's go.” Dean ushered the guard from earlier and a few other people inside the vault.
“What are you doing?” Sherry questioned.
“Sam, (Y/N), look, uh, Ronald and I need to talk to you,” Dean said.
You shot Sam a confused look, and Dean shut the vault door behind him, shrugging apologetically.
“It's shed its skin again,” Dean explained. “We don't know when— it could be in the halls, it could be in the vault.”
“Great,” you sighed. “Y’know, Dean, you are wanted by the police.”
He nodded.
Sam seemed to catch onto where you were headed with this. “So even if we do find this damn thing, how the hell are we gonna get out of here?”
“Well, one problem at a time,” the older brother replied. “Alright, I'm gonna do a sweep of the whole place; see if we can find any stragglers. Once we get everyone together we've got to play a little game of find-the-freak, so… here.” He handed Sam a silver letter opener. “Found another one of these for you. (Y/N), I know you have weapons on you. Best use ‘em.”
You grinned at how well he knew you. You slipped your silver-bladed knife out of your sleeve.
Dean turned to Sam. “Now, stay here, make sure Ronald doesn't hurt anybody, okay? Help him manage the situation.” He turned to you. “C’mon.”
Sam’s voice began rising in outrage. “Help him manage? Are you insane?”
You turned your head to Ronald who seemed shaken, attention caught by Sam’s voice.
“Look, I know this isn't going the way we wanted—”
Dean was cut off by his brother nearly shouting, “Understatement!”
“But if we invite the cops in right now, Ronald gets arrested, we get arrested, the shifter gets away, probably never find it again, okay?” Dean finished.
Ronald peered out of the window in plain view of whoever was down below. You snapped, “Ronald! Out of the light!”
Sam scoffed at his brother, “Seriously?!”
Dean sighed. “Yeah, Ron's game plan was a bad plan, I mean, it was a bit of a crazy plan, but right now, crazy's the only game in town, okay?”
Dean slapped Sam on the shoulder and grabbed your hand, bringing you along with him. ‘If only Sherry could see us now,’ you thought bitterly.
Dean looked over his shoulder at you. “What’s that face about?” he questioned.
“Nothin’,” you replied, still grinning in self-satisfaction, scanning the hallway ahead for anyone or anything.
He just hummed at you, turning his head forward again.
“I hate this case,” you whispered after a few minutes of tense walking.
“Yeah, me too,” he replied, still scanning the ceiling. He seemed to notice something, and you followed his gaze upward. A panel in the ceiling had been left askew. You eyed Dean curiously and took the gun from him, pointing it at the panel while Dean dislodged it with a coat rack from nearby. Suddenly, a naked body fell to the floor. Dean turned the body over with the end of the rack.
“Wait, Dean, wasn’t that?—”
“Yeah, I just let that guy in the vault.”
***
You and Dean hurried as inconspicuously as possible to inform Sam of what had just happened. Sam told you that man had been trying to get the front door unlocked and helping Mr. Okie-Dokie who may have been going into cardiac arrest when you and Dean found the body. 
You turned to Ronald and his cocked rifle. “You know what, Ronald? He's right, we've got to get this man outside. Come on. I've got you.”
The shifter tried to help, too. “Yeah, yeah, let me help you.”
“Oh, we got him, it's, it's cool. Thanks,” you replied. You helped the guard out of the way, and Sam took the man’s other side.
“Thank you. Thank you,” the guard told you between labored breaths.
“Sure,” you smiled politely.
You could hear Dean talking to the shifter and a sudden crash behind you. You turned with the guard still on your shoulders at Ronald yelling, “Stop! Come back here!” You noticed a red laser pointed on his back, and your breath caught.
“Get down! Now!” you screamed, but you were too late. 
The bullet from the sniper rifle hit Ronald squarely in the chest. You watched in horror as he fell to his knees before hitting the floor dead.
You took in a sharp breath at the sight, forcing yourself to keep your composure for the sake of everyone else in the room with you.
It was bedlam at that minute. All of the hostages began running out of the vault toward the door. You put Mr. Okie-Dokie on the ground next to you and just kept him talking until something could be done to help him. You weren’t quite sure what Sam or Dean were doing, but you made it your priority to keep this man from going into cardiac arrest.
Dean suddenly came over to you, holding a rifle.
“Dean, what are you doing?” you questioned.
“(Y/N), trust me on this—” he pleaded before helping the guard stand.
“Dean! I can help him, don’t bring him outside—”
“I’m not taking that chance, (Y/N). C’mon,” he told the guard. “I gotcha.” He held the man out in front of him and pushed him out the front door with the rifle at the guard’s back. You stayed out of the light, back pressed against the pillar next to the heavy door. 
“No, don't shoot! Don't shoot! Please!” you heard the guard yell.
Dean commanded, “Don't even think about it! I said get back! Now!” He paused a moment before you heard his voice again. “Okay, go, go!” The older Winchester slipped back inside, shutting the door and latching it.
“We are so fucked,” he mumbled to you, helping you up from the floor. 
“Fuck, why?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “There’s about, I don’t know, eight thousand cops out there. Helicopters and search lights and everything. We are fucked, (Y/N).”
You dropped your head back, groaning, “Great.”
Dean’s phone rang, and you assumed it was Sam. “Yeah?” he answered. “What?... God, it's like playing the shell game. It could be anybody. Again… Alright, you search every inch of this place, we’re gonna go round everybody up.” He hung up the phone.
“I think this is the most stressed I’ve been on a job,” you said as you and Dean began searching for the hostages. 
“Yeah? Even more so than the demons in New York?”
“Oh, definitely. That was just a sad one; not super stressful,” you replied. You noticed a herd of people toward the end of the hall. You gripped the handle of your knife, knowing the shifter would likely be in the mix of all the hostages. 
You and Dean rounded them up; Dean pointing the rifle he picked up from Ronald at the group. You guided them back to the vault.
“And I thought you were one of the good guys,” Sherry, who held up the back of the group, told Dean, who was trailing behind her.
“What's your name?” he asked.
“Why would you care?” she scoffed.
“My name's Dean,” he said. Your heart melted a bit at his gentleness with her.
She hesitated but still answered. “I'm Sherry.”
“Hi, Sherry. Everything's gonna be alright. This will all be over soon, okay?” He assured her, shutting the vault door and spinning the lock shut. The landline of the bank rang and you picked it up. You didn’t say anything when you answered the phone.
“This is Special Agent Victor Henriksen,” a commanding voice stated through the phone. “Is this Dean? Sam?”
You didn’t respond once more.
Dean mouthed to you, “Who is that?”
You shook your head, holding up a finger to gesture for him to wait.
“Oh, or is it that pretty girl? Our very own criminal Jane Doe. Some people have been calling her Ghost since no one can seem to find any record of her existence.”
Your breath hitched in your throat, but you still didn’t say anything.
“Well, whether you’ve got the Bonnie to your Clydes with you or not, it’s my job to bring you boys in. Alive's a bonus, but not necessary. I want you Winchesters out here, unarmed, or we come in.”
You still didn’t say anything.
“I know you’re still there,” he said, almost taunting. “I know everything about you two. I've been looking for you for weeks now. I know about the murder in St. Louis; I know about the Houdini act you pulled in Baltimore. I know about the desecrations and the thefts. I know about your dad.” 
Dean was trying to get close to the phone, but you kept pushing him away because you knew he’d explode at the mention of his father.
“Ex-marine, raised his kids on the road,” the agent continued, “cheap motels, backwood cabins. Real paramilitary survivalist type. I just can't get a handle on what type of whacko he was. White supremacist, Timmy McVeigh, to-may-to, to-mah-to. You have one hour to make a decision, or we come through those doors fully automatic.” With that, he hung up the phone.
You slammed the phone down, cursing in frustration.
“What? Who was that?” Dean asked.
“The fucking FBI agent who’s been tailing us since Missouri,” you replied, beginning to pace anxiously. “He knows everything about you guys, man. Even about your dad. That’s why I didn’t let you talk to him; I knew you would’ve ripped his head off.”
“Damn right,” the man growled. “They have a positive ID on you yet?” 
“No, actually,” you said. “Ironically, some of the feds labeled me ‘Ghost’ cause they can’t find anything on me. Which makes me even more nervous. Anyway, we’ve got an hour till they come in here and pump us full of lead,” you informed him.
“Fuck,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair.
Moments later, Sam appeared at the entrance of the vault room.
“Hey. We've got a bit of a problem outside,” Dean said.
Sam snorted. “We got a problem in here.”
“What?” you questioned.
Sam hushed his voice. “The girl that was gushing over Dean in the vault? It’s her,” he told you. 
“Who, Sherry?” you questioned.
He nodded. “Just found her body.”
Barely needing to flick a glance at the boys, you unlocked the vault.
“Sherry? We're gonna let you go,” Dean called as the door swung open.
“What? Why me?” she questioned.
“Uh, as a show of good faith to the feds, come on,” he replied.
The woman hesitated. “Uh... I think I'd— I'd rather stay here, with the others.”
Dean approached her intimidatingly. “I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist.”
You clutched your blade at your side. After a tense moment, she approached you. Sam and Dean pushed her back to the hallway.
“I thought you were letting me go,” the woman you thought was the shifter said.
Dean shoved her forward, holding her head and forcing her to look at the body of Sherry Sam had brought back with him. She began screaming hysterically.
“Is that community theater, or are you just naturally that good?” Dean gruffly questioned.
“This is the last time you become anybody. Ever,” Sam added.
“No! Oh god!” she cried. She fainted almost immediately.
You stared at the two Sherrys in disbelief. One of the bodies was dressed, the other, half-naked. ‘Poor lady,’ you thought. You took off your blazer and laid it over the woman’s body, trying to spare her dignity. 
“Wait, why did it do that?” you questioned. You leaned over the undressed body of Sherry covered only by your blazer and put your finger on her neck, trying to find a pulse. The body immediately jolted up, grabbing you by the throat. You struggled, stabbing at it frantically. You got a lick in at its upper arm with the knife before it kneed you in the chin and bolted.
You coughed when it released your throat, clutching at your neck and coughing.
“(Y/N)!” Dean cried.
“Dean, no, I’m fine! Follow it!”
He nodded, taking your knife from your outstretched hand and running after it. You kicked off your heels and took another moment before standing and going to follow Dean. Sam had taken off somewhere with the real Sherry. 
You didn’t know what else to do besides stay with the vault and Dean’s discarded handgun, prowling in front of it with the gun at the ready. 
***
You had no idea how long it had been. You just continued to pace in front of the vault, tension overtaking your body and anxiety keeping your eyes flickering across the room rapidly. You suddenly heard approaching footsteps and dove on the ground behind a desk— unsure if it was Dean, Sam, the shifter, a cop— and were panicked at the sight of S.W.A.T. sniper rifle lasers and flashlights on the wall in front of you. Your breath quickened as the footsteps continued approaching you. Then, a masked man ducked under the desk in front of you.
You shrieked.
“Here’s Johnny!” he yelped.
“Dean! Fuck you!” You shoved his shoulder harshly when you recognized his face. He and Sam were donned in S.W.A.T. outfits that they had definitely taken off some poor bastards hidden in a broom closet somewhere. 
“C’mon, we gotta get outta here, now,” Dean told you. You grabbed your heels and followed the boys out of the building and to the Impala. Dean and Sam had their stolen guns at the ready as you sprinted up to the third floor of the parking garage. 
The three of you sat in the Impala, completely breathless, as you grappled with the reality of your situation.
“We are so fucked,” Dean murmured.
You and Sam nodded minutely.
You looked out of the window at the rising morning sun. Exhausted, you let the rumble of the Impala soothe you into a restless sleep as Dean drove you away from the bank. 
Series Rewrite Taglist: @polireader @brightlilith @atcamillanorrman @jrizzelle @insomnia-bookworm @procrastination20 @mrs-liebgott @djs8891 @tiggytaylor @staple-your-mouth @jesstherebel @rach5ive @strawberrykiwisdogog @bruhidkjustwannaread @mxltifxnd0m @sunshine-on-marz @big-ol-boat @mgchaser @capncrankle @chervbs @simpingdeadcharacters @nesnejwritings @stillhere197 @tearsforhan @take-it-on-the-run @iloveyou2mia @maxinehufflepuffprincess @ohgeehowdigethere @seninjakitey @berarenado @s0urw00lf @princessleahorgana @quarterhorse19 @isla-finke-blog @silverdoragon @karacaroldanvers @gayandfairycore @examishbookwyrm @star-yawnznn @real-sharena-h @fandomloverrr @metalmonki @onlyangel-444 @yu-winchester @benniwiththefanni @daisychaingirl @immagods @missmieux @yoongi-holland @littledebbieinabigworld
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paulshishkoffjr · 11 days ago
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2nd Intermission in Milwaukee. Goals by Grimaldi (CLE, 7:03) and Wiessblatt (MIL, 18:16) have made this game a 2-1 lead for @monstershockey. #AHL #CLEvsMIL
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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 9 months ago
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Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final
The first three posts in this series are here.
Undertale was a slightly postmodern children's fantasy movie produced by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in the '80s. Noah Hathaway played the protagonist, Frisk, who went on a long quest to escape from a magical prison inside Mt. Ebott; Frisk's father had thrown them into the mountain, known to be full of monsters, in an attempt to kill them. However, it's suggested that as a human, Frisk is inherently more of a protagonist than a monster can be, and has a vague sort of magical power over them. Toriel's death, which Frisk accidentally causes early in the movie, is commonly listed as a Peak Sad Childhood Moment.
George Orwell wrote The Writing In The Web, a political fable about a cult started by a well-meaning spider. E. B. White wrote Snowball's Farm, a whimsical children's tale about a farm whose animals decide to take over.
Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.
Short story collections and anthologies often keep the same title, author, and spirit, it's just the stories that are swapped out. For example, classic episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone include A Wonderful Life, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Miracle On 34th Street, and The Sixth Sense. 1983's The Twilight Zone Movie includes segments based on classic episodes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by John Landis and given anti-war themes), Cocoon, The Poltergeist, and In Search of the Twelve Monkeys (the original starred a young William Shatner). Candle Cove is an episode of Black Mirror.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a 1999 Ben Stiller comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes who theme themselves after public domain characters because they cannot afford licensing fees. The film was well-reviewed, but a box office bomb. It was actually the first film to use Smash Mouth's One Week - the One Week music video is actually cross promotion with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and it would remain the film most associated with the song until Dreamworks' Happily N'Ever After hit theaters two years later.
The Amazing Digital Circus was a virtual pet game and toy line that struck when the iron was hot on that niche, before being bought out by Hasbro and rebooted a few times in different forms and mediums. Lauren Faust created a long-running television cartoon of it that was a huge smash hit with fandom culture despite the show's clearly very young target audience. The property's canon is all very light kiddie fare; the scariest thing about The Amazing Digital Circus is that for a brief and touchy stretch of time in the early 2000s, it was owned by the Peoples Temple, which was seriously considering turning it into a recruiting platform.
Your cringe unpublished works that you gave up on were almost certainly swapped around with other people's cringe unpublished works that they gave up on. There's lots of upwards and downwards mobility to the scramble, but not usually that much. Exceptions are very rare - like a beggar suddenly being made king, or a god being reincarnated into an ant - but they do occasionally happen. For example, what you know as the land of Oz exists only in the head of a young Milwaukee stoner, who suddenly came up with the idea for an epic graphic novel one day in the 2010s while sitting on the bus, and spent a couple of years absolutely convinced she would eventually make it. (She cannot draw.) Conversely, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy series, Enormia, which has been adapted and reimagined many times, most notably as audiences' introduction to color film, exists in your world only as a different Milwaukee stoner's overly elaborate backstory for his jerkoff sessions. This kind of thing is much more the exception than the rule, and even such exceptions are almost always much smaller in scope - an obscure stillborn project getting swapped around with an obscure out-of-print novel, or an obscure direct-to-video z-movie.
The True Detectives forum and its many schismatic spinoffs, all of which are devoted to discussing mystery fiction, host literally thousands of Wind fanfics. Many of the writers - perhaps most of them - have never actually read Wind, just other fanfiction of it; next to none of the fics are worth reading. Most Wind fics reuse the original protagonist, Rorschach, but treat him as a generically relatable blank slate. The most common fic format by far is the "altdunnit", a form of what-if scenario in which the mystery that sets off Wind's plot is different in some way.
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Rorschach is held by a substantial portion of the fandom to be an egg (a trans woman who has not realized it yet). Wildbow has never endorsed this interpretation, and it doesn't seem to be much on his radar. In recent years, the trans Rorschach portion of the fandom has grown; they don't tend to look especially kindly on Warn, much of which Wildbow wrote as a response to fans (like those on the True Detectives forum) he felt had been too inclined to take Rorschach's side in Wind. Flame wars over Warn's content were constant throughout its serial publication, and made it easily the rockiest experience of Wildbow's writing career.
Some noteworthy and relevant podcasts include Jonathan Sims' The Dresden Files, the Ranged Touch Network's Scott Pilgrim Made The World, Doof Media's Winding Down (later Warning Down), and the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone (an actual play podcast which has currently had three major campaigns, two anthology series, and various one-shots). Film Reroll is still an actual play podcast that runs the basic setups of movies (and occasionally other media) as short tabletop campaigns; occasionally, their version of a movie will be much closer to ours than it is to the version of the movie in their own universe.
Xenobuddy was an early childhood public access show, originally created for the BBC in the late 1990s but later aired internationally. The title character is a small alien puppet who lives on a futuristic spaceship staffed by children (who speak a vague conlang akin to a dollar store Esperanto). At the end of every episode, it gets lost and is found, usually by (harmlessly) bursting out of one of the children. It was very popular with its target audience and much loathed by parents. Edgy ironic fanart depicting the titular Xenobuddy as some kind of dangerous parasite abounds.
Static is a supernatural slasher franchise created by Wes Craven, with the first film, also simply titled Static, released in 1984. The movies concern a group of gibbering neotenous ogre-fae who wake up in the modern day after a long sleep, incorporate televisions into their bodies, and start eating people by sucking them into hellish pocket dimensions. The Screen-Guts collectively are probably in the top five antagonists most people think of when they think of slasher horror.
Toby Fox's ROSEQUARTZ is especially known for its meta take on video game morality systems. The game has a mission-based structure; throughout it, the player is encouraged to take on a pacifist playstyle, championed by the player character's late mother, the title character. However, the Crystal Gems give the player enough autonomy that you are entirely able to take a much more violent tack; doing so has a rippling effect on the game's writing in countless immersively-integrated ways. If the player goes out of their way to be as murderous as possible - the so-called "genocide route" - the differences from the main route grow much more extreme, and rather than gaining allies, you start to lose them, as the Crystal Gems realize what you're doing and one by one turn against you. If you manage to shatter Garnet - it's the hardest and most iconic fight in the game, Megalovania is playing, her Future Vision gets used for all it's worth - then you use your knife to slash at the cosmos, erasing Earth, Homeworld, and everything else. This, Toby Fox is saying, is apparently all you want out of a video game - another toy to break.
Warner Bros still did Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes, it's just that the Looney Tunes in question were Mickey Mouse and friends. They also still did a second one with LeBron James, which was, by God, somehow worse. They put Ms. Frizzle in it.
Walt Disney made his squeaky clean reputation on the back of adaptations of things like Rudyard Kipling's adventure novel The Call of Cthulhu, P. L. Travers' Thomas the Tank Engine, and Erich Kästner's feel-good coming-of-age kidnapping tale about the power of perseverance, Lolita, originally done with Hayley Mills and later remade with Lindsay Lohan.
Nabokov's extremely controversial literary classic that has defined the idea of the unreliable narrator is Father's Trap, from the perspective of a man who plots to obtain custody of both of his daughters for nefarious purposes. Most publishers ignored Nabokov's instructions not to depict the twins, Lisa and Lottie, on the cover. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne have directed mediocre film adaptations, and songwriting team Lerner and Loewe did a musical that was a legendary flop.
The Japanese fashion movement is Gothic Pollyanna, after an otherwise-forgotten series of penny dreadfuls about a cute, cheery, rules-minded young girl who is, despite appearances, an insane criminal. Minor character Bonesaw in Alan Moore's Worm Turns also clearly hearkens back to the Pollyanna stock character.
The DEA was a prime-time soap opera about the ongoing "war on drugs"; it ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. Its plot focused on federal agents working at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and especially partners Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez and their families. It is mostly remembered today for its downer ending (in which the treachery of late-show villain Walter White, or "Heisenberg", gets the leads killed, and he escapes from justice), and for its far-more-acclaimed spinoff series Better Call Saul, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, functioning as a prequel, midquel, and sequel to The DEA.
Between The DEA and Better Call Saul, Kelsey Grammer played crooked lawyer Saul Goodman for twenty consecutive years of primetime TV, first as featured comic relief and later as a leading man. (He also guest-starred on the mostly-forgotten Mall Cop, establishing that it, too, was set in the world of The DEA and Better Call Saul.) Better Call Saul won more than a dozen Primetime Emmys. Peri Gilpin received several of these for her performance as Kim Wexler.
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St. Elsewhere was a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the late 1990s; it was highly acclaimed and successful, and established Shyamalan in the public eye as a skilled auteur with an affinity for twist endings. The film's final scene reveals that its main setting, St. Eligius Hospital, exists entirely within the imagination of an autistic boy, Tommy Westphall, as he gazes into a snowglobe. The so-called "Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis", which posits that this same twist applies to most of fiction due to a network of crossovers, was invented by a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly postdating the film's release, in which an amnesiac Charles McGill (from Better Call Saul) wakes up in St. Eligius, attended to by a cast of characters who are more concerned with their own nonexistence.
After rising to prominence as a writer, storyboarder, and composer for Pendleton Ward's Science Time (where she established the Summer/Jessica relationship that would come to define later seasons), Rebecca Sugar got to make her own cartoon, Henry Ichor. Set in a recently post-apocalyptic but strangely cheerful world, Henry Ichor concerns a young teenage boy who is conscripted as a mech pilot due to his rare and innate ability to link to the powerful Evangelion mecha. (His preferred Evangelion is eventually revealed to be a form of his late mother, the reason he can do this in the first place.) Henry turns out to be a vital asset in protecting humanity from the monstrous "Angels" that frequently threaten it, and is surprisingly emotionally mature for his age. However, the adults around him (especially his father, Gennady) frequently push him too far, especially considering his generally noncombative and pacifistic nature. There is much interpersonal drama and much singing about it, with a very vocally trained cast. After several seasons of slow buildup, the show was forced to suddenly rush to its ending in only a few (infamous) episodes after an arc where Henry had a romance with an Angel in male human form. Henry Ichor The Movie and an ensuing miniseries, End Of Henry Ichor, helped bring the show to a more thematically satisfying conclusion.
Although he has played a creative or consultant role in many animated projects, Alex Hirsch is best known for the one he was actually the showrunner for, Disney Channel's smash hit Sunnydale. Focusing on a small California town constantly plagued by supernatural threats, Sunnydale generally followed a simple monster-of-the-week format, but kept audiences on the hook with teases at a deeper underlying mystery. The show almost didn't get a season two, as Hirsch found working with Disney very tiring, but he was eventually persuaded; season two ran through the rest of Hirsch's ideas at a faster pace, and concluded the show with the leads graduating from Sunnydale High.
For a brief historical moment, Daron Nefcy's show, Ender vs. the Space Bug Army, looked like it would become the successor to Sunnydale, keeping Disney Television Animation prestigious after Sunnydale ended. However, though Ender drew in a big crowd, and lasted almost twice as long as Sunnydale, it was not ultimately as well-received. EvtSBA is a children's space opera, wearing its Starship Troopers (Joss Whedon) inspiration on its sleeve, but also clearly copying some (superficial) notes from Philip Pullman. Set in a future where mankind has come into violent conflict with bug-like aliens, the show follows unbearably smug boy supergenius Ender as he is sent to military school to prepare for interstellar warfare. The show has an extremely cutesy and hyperactive tone; typical filler episodes include the one (generally taken as meta about fandom drama) in which Ender's siblings' futuristic internet arguments prove instrumental to the survival of the human race. Later seasons get a bit more serious, but focus heavily on shipping. The show is infamous for its ending, in which Ender, for his final exam, destroys the Formics' home planet and releases a psychic signal that eradicates the Formic race. Although the show explicitly notes that this includes many individual Formics who we have previously known as sympathetic characters, it is nonetheless played as a happy ending in which a hostile colonial power is defeated. Ender has ended the war; he has beaten the Space Bug Army.
"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."
Orson Scott Card is an extremely prolific author of speculative fiction. Although it isn't as close to his heart as the Steel Gear series, in which he got to flex his military sci-fi muscles and allegorically retell stories from his faith, he is undoubtedly best known for Ishtar's Curse. Initially a short story and later expanded into a full novel, the plot concerns young Princess Ishtar, or Star, heir to the heathen fairy kingdom of Meugh-Neigh. (In later novels, she changes her name to Bethlehem Diaz, or Beth.) Spoiled and destructive but magically talented, Star is sent to twentieth century Earth so she can develop the wits and the strength of character to be a viable wartime leader for her people - or at least so she can be kept out of the way. After several years of personal growth and magical misadventures with companions she met on Earth, a more grounded Star devises a spell to erase the magic that makes up the bodies of most of her throne's enemies. This plan works, and merges Meugh-Neigh into the Earth as a small and ordinary European country. However, though her subjects are eager to celebrate her for this, Star is devastated when she realizes that she has killed trillions of innocent spirits, and, seeking to atone, she takes on the title of Speaker for the Dead (also the title of the book's first sequel). Although it's frequently ranked highly in lists of fantasy novels of the twentieth century, Ishtar's Curse has received some harsh criticism, with the standard line being that Star is an idealized fantasy of a repentant Hitler figure, and that the text presents excessive justifications for her actions. The story has also been called a reactionary response to Wilde's The Little Mermaid. After more than twenty years, a film adaptation of Ishtar's Curse was released in 2009, starring Dakota Fanning, to mixed reviews. The box office took a further hit due to a boycott campaign, after Card's views on homosexuality (and, relatedly, his membership in the LDS Church) became widely known. In the end, it lost the studio a lot of money.
Hideaki Anno is best known for the classic smash hit anime he made for Studio Gainax, Einstein Goliath Nestorian, a psychologically intense deconstruction of martial arts shonen like Yoshiyuki Tomino's Dragon Ball. Einstein Goliath Nestorian concerns a mystery man known only as Saitama, who finds that he has become dissatisfied with life and alienated from the world after only three years of training have enabled him to easily surpass any physical challenge. The original series is known for its sudden, surreal, and clearly budget-driven ending, although this was quickly alleviated with a similarly surreal but more definitive finale movie. Although many Western anime fans often think of Einstein Goliath Nestorian as pretentious and ultra niche, it was actually a huge mainstream hit in Japan, with a colossal franchise of adaptations, merch, and spinoffs (notably including a series of Retrain films, which began as extremely close shot-for-shot remakes of the original series but wound up spiraling into a very different updated timeline).
Previously most noteworthy for his 2003 visual novel Oreimo, Gen Urobuchi was tapped by Shaft for their extremely successful and acclaimed anime Ohayou Hana!, hailed as a deceptively dark deconstruction of the teen idol genre. The plot concerns a girl, Saionji Mayuri, who leads a double life, being of little note at school, out of costume, but spending much of her time as #1 idol Hana. Her mental stability begins to deteriorate as she realizes that the adults in her life - especially her father, himself a former idol - have groomed her to serve as a drugged and hypnotized propaganda mouthpiece for a shadowy conspiracy. She winds up in the worst of both worlds as her ensuing breakdown, and her handlers' response to it, destroys both of her lives and brings ruin to those she cares about. In addition to the popularity of the actual anime, many of its songs became decontextualized J-Pop hits. The idol anime genre would then receive a glut of edgy lesser imitators, like Love Live: School Idol Project, Cheetah Girls, and magical girl fusion Symphogear. Although the original Ohayou Hana! was a self-contained twelve-episode story, it received a sequel movie shortly thereafter, Ohayou Hana! Rebel!, which ended on a cliffhanger that has still not been resolved over a decade later. The upcoming Ohayou Hana! MK Ultra! is expected to get things back on track. An abridged series originating on 4chan, focusing on cropped screencaps from Ohayou Hana!, called the title character "Miss Ohio", producing the memetic tagline "being Ohio is suffering".
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Zack Snyder first came up with the idea for Madoka around 2000, a long time before he'd actually get to make it; he put the project on hold in 2006 to make his adaptation of Worm Turns. He developed the idea with his wife Deborah and a cowriter, Steve Shibuya. Inspired by the Disney Princess phenomenon, as well as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Cure (one of the few anime that had already become a hit in the States), Snyder wanted to tell a coherent story about fights between magical girls who could make anything happen, who could make any fantastical world or visual appear. In Snyder's film, we follow Madoka Kaname, a teenager attending a Catholic school in Los Angeles. Madoka and her friends are approached by a strange young woman who goes only by "Mommy", and her animal companion (a CGI-ed up squirrel-cat thing), QB. They offer to make the teens into "magical girls", granting them one wish each in exchange for a life devoted to spiritual warfare. (Another mysterious new girl, Lilly, urges them not to take the deal in the strongest possible terms.) This turns out to be a scam; QB is pitting the magical girls against one another for his own reasons, and in the end, every magical girl and her wish gets corrupted. Despite much of the film's plot being a horrific bloodbath - the MPAA demanded a lot of cuts to get it down to a PG-13 rating - there is a happy ending; Madoka finally makes her own wish and uses it to topple QB's whole system. Madoka isn't often discussed nowadays but it was a major discourse bomb when it came out in 2010, alternately being called misogynistic Orientalist trash and a subversive feminist masterpiece. Snyder, for his part, often notes that QB is intended as an allegory for exploitative forces within the entertainment industry that treat young women as disposable resources with an expiration date; this is already clear to anyone who's watched the film, which is not exactly subtle in its symbolism. He also explains that the film sexualizes the girls in an effort to shame the audience, to get people to understand that they are objectifying the characters in the same way that QB does. The soundtrack's got a really cool ethereal cover of Nine Inch Nails' King Nothing on it, which is probably the most remembered part of the film today.
Selena Gomez became a star by playing Violet Parr on Disney Channel's superhero sitcom The Incredibles. While the show was initially a very throwaway villain-of-the-week affair whose leads had to keep their powers hidden from the public and their caped escapades secret from the government for self-explanatory comes-with-the-genre reasons, it would eventually unfold that the show was set in something of an X-Men-style dystopia where superheroism had been outlawed and supers oppressed by the government as a potential societal fifth column.
Brad Bird directed one of Pixar's most celebrated films, Wizards of Waverly Place; it was Pixar's first film with a predominantly human cast. Disney was hungry for a fantasy property after losing a bidding war for the Luz Noceda rights. It had strong populist anti-eugenic themes, with an elaborate wizarding hierarchy of antagonists who seek to remove the Russo family's magic as part of an effort to curb wizard overpopulation. The sequel came more than a decade later, and wasn't nearly as good.
In addition to Worm Turns, Alan Moore is notable for the heavily metafictional comic Pagemaster, about a boy, Richard, who finds a magical library that contains all stories that have ever been or could ever be told; he becomes lost and imperiled in assorted pieces of historically noteworthy literature (initially ones in the public domain, though later volumes would start using legally safe serial-numbers-filed-off versions of modern stories). The 2003 film, in which Sean Connery played the librarian in one of his last film roles, is widely regarded as a terrible, deeply-toned-down adaptation that didn't grasp the tone or themes of the original story at all; it only covered the first half of the first volume, in which Richard meets "genre spirits" who wish to sort all stories into rigid categories. In a later volume, Pagemaster Millennium, an aged Richard Tyler, who has since taken on the mantle of librarian himself, meets a teenage girl, heavily implied to be Luz Noceda, who has also become lost in the library. She has become corrupted by an eldritch book, or "Necronomicon", written by "the Wrong Author", heavily implied to be the devil (and/or Hugo Astley, an Aleister Crowley caricature from W. Somerset Maugham's The Winged Bull). Flushed with demonic power and enraged by what she's become, a monstrous Luz tears through the library in a blaze of hellfire, seeking to destroy all of literature and the world. It is only through the intervention of the Fat Controller - heavily implied to be God - that Luz is defeated; he mercifully erases her by hitting her with a train, and laments what she became.
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orangameelectronics · 1 year ago
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