#the mythic battle is gonna fucking suck

[theyuseifan]

at last, t4 poison strike

[obsidiancreates]

Lily Livers And Bleeding Hearts

"It's been a while."

It had been longer than a while, in fact. Stede's pretty sure the only reason he hasn't bled out is the sword plugging him up. He almost doesn't want to have it removed by this point, lest the act spill his blood and innards all over the deck.

It wouldn't be so bad, really, if he wasn't stuck to the mast.

That was the real kicker. He couldn't even sit down with the blade stuck in him (or laying down would probably be better, for not getting him further sliced up by jostling the blade). Buttons offer of the rum was a long time ago now, and he hadn't even had enough to dull the pain in the first place, nor keep him very warm. His turtle neck is lovely and woolen, but not exactly made for nautical nighttimes.

Well, someone will probably think of getting him down by the next nighttime, at least. They need their bedtime stories to sleep, after all. How long did it take for those hostages to get crispy while tied to the mast, again? Stede has plenty of time before that happens to him. Right?

He can wait it out. Maybe this will finally be enough. Maybe if he just sucks it up and waits, the blade possibly going through his liver (he should probably check his anatomy book to make sure that's the right organ to be worrying about) will cut out the lilies in it. No more lily-livered rich boy, maybe. Maybe if he waits, by the time they remember him he'll have a liver of steel or silver instead. Which one is the blade made out of?

His arm stings, and he moves his head to look at it. Ah, right. Izzy got a strike there, too. Oh, that doesn't look good. It's already got something yellowish seeping out. His immune system is as shitty as everything else about him, isn't it? So much for becoming less lily-livered. At least he'll die of a successful battle, this time. Better than dying by falling for an, in hindsight, painfully obvious ruse.

He should have let them know where his family lives. Maybe if his father knew he died of his wounds after winning a duel against a vicious pirate, he'd finally be proud of Stede in some way. It'll have taken roughly fifty years, but better late than never, right? Maybe his mother won't lament anymore about why she had to go through the perils of childbirth just to produce him.

But is it really a victory if he still dies in the end? No, then it's just a lose-lose. Izzy is banished, Stede will be dead, and Ed will alone. Oh, that hurts worse than the blade and the infection. Poor Ed, all alone. Sure, the rest of the crew will probably be there for him, but they all still see Blackbeard more than Ed. They still see the man who's dad was killed by a mythical beast, not a man who's dad was killed by a broken boy trying to protect his mother.

Why does Ed say he's not a good person for doing that? If his dad was terrible enough to make Ed take such drastic measures, surely he should feel proud of himself. Right? Then again, Stede's father had never said a kind word to him, or anyone, ever, and he would still be upset if he died. Sort of. To a degree.

"Maybe bad dads just hurt in all the ways." Oh, did those words come out of his mouth this time?

He hears someone shout to the side, and then someone is roughly jerking his face up. Oh, that's Fang. "H'mllo F'ng." Oh, that wasn't the sounds he wanted his voice to make.

"Oh, shit!" Fang drops his face. "Ivan! He's still on the fucking mast!"

"What?! Boss is gonna go mental!"

"Help me get him off before he finds out! Sorry mate, fuck, we thought your crew would've taken care of this!"

"Bu' that's worry 'bou me," Stede slurs out again, feeling an intense heat shoot up his arm when Fang touches it. "People don' do that."

"Well Boss does," Fang says, grabbing a cloth from Ivan and gripping the sword handle. "How does Izzy usually do this?"

"Fuck if I know mate."

"Blackbeard keeps from bleeding out somehow!"

"Why don't you ask me?"

Fang and Ivan freeze, and Stede lofts his head and smiles brightly. "Ed! You don' worry abou' me, right? Not a-a th'ng. No-one... no-one worries about lily-livers an'... an' Baby Bonnets..."

"Fuck are you on about, mate?" Ed says, pushing past Ivan. "Shit, you've really been stuck here all night? What the fuck was I doing to not notice?"

"Trying to keep Izzy from killing everyone else," Ivan says.

"Fuckin' could've sent anyone to do that," Ed mutters. "Okay, on three, you pull it out Fang. Got it? Alright Stede, remember, relax your muscles, we're gonna do it quick this time mate. One... two... three!"

The sword is pulled through with a swift squelch, must faster than Stede had removed the sword from Ed. Stede collapses and Fang catches him while Ed and Iven both apply pressure to Stede's wounds.

"M' arm's... warm," Stede says. All of him is now, actually. "Can't... not be! Lily-livered... lily... blooded. Blood can't clot right... delicate blood, like me... stupid lilies..."

"Aw, fuck." Ed tears the sleve away from Stede's arm. "Fuckin' infection too? Get the fuckin' cook-doctor guy, man, this is fuckin-"

"Are you gonna tell them off?" Ivan asks as Stede is handed over to him and Fang goes to grab Roach.

"I'll let Stede do that, it's his crew. You'll tell them off, right?"

"Mus've been reason," Stede's head lolls uselessly when he tries to look at Ed. "Li' whe' th'y mutiny... di'n'... scold! No' constru'tive..."

"Mutiny? They actually planned a fuckin' mutiny?"

"No' pirat' 'nough..."

"This is- okay, let's get him to his cabin sonI can clean that up, it's fuckin' oozing everywhere already. Doesn't Izzy know how to clean his fuckin' blade?"

Stede blacks out for a while after that. But he doesn't mind. When he almost comes back to consciousness through the hours of Nothing, he thinks he hears Ed humming shanties and feels a cold cloth dabbing his arm and torso.

It helps his healing much more than the rum, he thinks.

(Another months-old fic finally released)

[sometimesrosy]

Rosy that's fantastic news for your book!! I'm really happy for you. And just seeing "bellarke consum their love and even have grandkids" makes my heart full. Bob and Eliza said tthey were disappointed that 1/the charaters couldn't have kids in the end and that 2/ there was no hope. I totally agree with their interpretation of the end. Some people said the ending was super cool, and inkeeping with the whole show, and somehow hopeful. HOW WAS IT HOPEFUL?? the human race gets wiped out...

People said the ending was “super cool?” How?

Wait. I need to wrap my head around that. What are they looking at that seems super cool?

I actually don’t have a problem of the concept of transcendence that they worked on all season, nor Cadogan, the fake-spiritual, love-your-fellow-man-but-also-sacrifice-them-because-they-mean-nothing cult leader who favored his daughter, used his son, tossed his exwife into the apocalypse and killed Becca because she had power and knowledge beyond him.

Like, that could have been super cool if they’d kept him the villain, the antagonist, but instead they made him the protagonist who was, somehow, right about transcendence as if it wasn’t just another fucking doomsday cult that wanted humanity to end. I mean, it WAS just another fucking doomsday cult that wanted humanity to end, and the aliens vacuumed up humanity and allowed for no dissent. Here, have your perfect happy transcendence...but your body dies, the world ends, and humanity is gone. That is EXACTLY what ALIE did, and she was a villain. Perhaps a well meaning villain, but a terrifying villain.

How did the SAME story, get switched around to being some sort of victory for the state of humanity? How did the end of humanity, no chance to continue on, because they removed their ability to have children and carry on?

Why couldn’t they just fucking stay on The Ring if that was going to happen. At least they could have a small community up there.  But no. Without the info that our heroes brought, they wouldn’t have reached transcendence. 

That wasn’t transcendence. It was judgement day. Transcendence means you have worked your way to a higher state, and yes, it might be condescending and elitist, but you at least worked for it. And it wasn’t really a judgement day because they just took everybody, despite the fact that those idiots were fighting for no fucking reason. It was a PUNISHMENT day for Clarke, one of the only people who was actually TRYING to be better and do better. 

What was cool? The way the aliens brought back the people they cared for? Yes, that was cool. It wasn’t them of course, but some people would be impressed by the alien dressed up in the costume of their fav. I could see that being considered super cool. But honestly... that’s a story line that would have worked better in season 3 and in fact DID work remarkably well in season 3 when Lxa showed up in the COL. And it was ACTUALLY her, not some facsimile.

Was it cool to take away the agency of the hero of the story who we’ve been following for 7 years? Was it cool to erase the personality and motivation of our dual protagonist? Ok. So lets say you didn’t love Clarke or Bellamy. Octavia’s character was erased and she didn’t have a thing to do until the final battle, and then she got a romance that frankly made me uncomfortable but that’s taste. Echo was erased and she didn’t have a thing to do until the final battle. Raven was also erase although she got to be the one to convince the aliens that they weren’t totally awful beings. That was cool, but it seemed like a patch put on top of a story that had failed. The story being about how Clarke saves humanity, and Bellamy saves Clarke, which has been THE STORY FOR SIX YEARS. We spent six years building up a team with these two heroes who have been through so much shit and made the CHOICE to be the good guys, and in the end, Bellamy gives his power over to a charismatic obsessive leader (also happened in season 3 with Pike who was a great character and FAR better than Cadogan and actual sympathetic awful villain who thought he was saving his people while doing evil.) And Clarke actually becomes THE BAD GUY, who loses her sense of reason and commits violence due to loving too much-- a really tired, misogynistic storyline. Give women power and they go crazy. The hysterical woman. THIS DOES NOT FIT WITH CLARKE GRIFFIN. Also, we saw her go through that trauma of fear for her daughter, and she DID NOT GO CRAZY. Ruthless, yes. And then she worked through what she had done and recognized she was wrong and promised not to do that again. I honestly don’t know why she did it again.  Even if Bellamy betrayed her again, it didn’t make sense that she couldn’t work through it.

They had to keep the two characters apart in order have that ending happen. Why? Because Clarke acts as the center to Bellamy and Bellamy acts as the Center to Clarke. This season is the story of the FAILURE of the duo protagonists of the show. They separated them and broke them individually, and this meant they were unable to save the universe. 

Is it cool to make a show about heroes and then destroy them in the last season? But frame that destruction and the end of humanity as a VICTORY and positive ending? Maybe if you hate those characters and humanity and think there’s no hope for us anyway, so lets just burn it down.

Oh wait. I’m trying to figure out what’s SUPER COOL about that ending.

The purple sparkly aliens. Ok. How is that cool? That there’s actually an omnipotent alien out there that has the ability to just snap a whole race of people out of existence or into their big ole stew pot of consciousness.

1. Why? 2. How? 3. Where did that power come from? 4. Who are they? 5. What do they get out of erasing races and basically eating them?

Okay, putting aside the questions about how these omnipotent gods aliens came to be... is it possible they can be see as “super cool?” Let me go through.

1. Omnipotent aliens going through the universe, deciding when life forms were “ready” to be judged and then either wiping them out totally, or wiping them out totally but accepting their consciousnesses into their massive consciousness where they don’t want any “bad” lifeforms, which makes them now a higher lifeform but not at all what they once were. 

Cool/Not Cool. I dunno. Kind of seems like some sort of puritanical god who willy nilly decides if people are worthy of heaven. Will He, Nil He. That’s what that means. If we’re gonna get aliens at the last minute, I want aliens. I want to know who they are and what’s up with them. THAT’S the story. Those alien guys. Instead, the story was about the flotsam and jetsam at the end of humanity, either getting swept up into the god-form in the sky or being pounded to bits on the rocks. The heroes of our story have no say in what happens. They’re toast either way. Oh you mean we can be erased into nothing or erased into your hive mind? The only way this is cool is if you like nihilism. Which, yeah, some people do. NONE of their struggle over the past six years meant a damn thing. None of it. Their beliefs, their sacrifices, their mistakes, their heroism. It al reduces down to whether those sparkly purple aliens like them or not. That’s some bullshit. 

Not cool. 

2. Cadogan. Cult leader from the first apocalypse who conned the bulk of his followers and left them shady shelters that let them die. Kept the good stuff for his “best” followers. Paternalistic, obsessive, ruthless, megalomaniac framing his leadership and personality as “Love for Humanity,” while discarding every human who he deemed unworthy. Including his own family. Actually. Pretty cool.  AS A VILLAIN. Ending up at his cult colony in space hundreds of years later with thousands of years of development in time dilation. Cool. They’re creepy but make some bit of sense. Ok. Waking him up and then making him this fucking GURU who preaches love for humanity but sacrifices 99.9% of humanity all so that he can reach his mythical transcendence which is really the eradication of all humanity.... well, that’s actually cool. AS A VILLAIN. But somehow in the last season, Cadogan turned out to be the one who was right all along, and the story seemed to accept HIS concept that transcendence was the best thing that could happen to them, because humanity sucks and they always fight so they should be erase by paternalistic omnipotent gods. CADOGAN’S choices were the ones that were enacted. Bellamy gave his will to Cadogan and made CADOGAN’S choices, not his own. Never before in all the seasons did Bellamy “need it all to make sense.” He fucking KNEW it made no sense and he didn’t want to make those choices any more. And he did it to be a better person and make better choices and keep his family safe. The excuse they used for our hero to side with Cadogan did not fit. CADOGAN became the protagonist in the second half of the season. CADOGAN made all the choices that furthered the story. Our heroes were reduced to either brainwashed followers or ineffective, hysterical messes, our really not wanting anything to do with anyone’s salvation and just interested in their love life. It left Raven, Echo and Octavia to scramble around in the end and try to convince the purple sparkly gods not to erase them out of existence, just erase them and swallow them. :/ Cadogan as protagonist bringing humanity to “transcendence.”, Our supposed heroes as useless flotsam and jetsam floating around on the wreck of humanity whose choices and actions make no goddamn difference.

NOT COOL.

3. Character Storylines

Clarke’s storyline. NOT COOL. Bellamy’s storyline. NOT COOL. Octavia’s storyline. S.A COOL. S.B NOT COOL. Raven’s storyline. COOL. Echo’s storyline. S.A COOL. S.B NOT COOL. Murphy’s storyline. SUPER COOL. Emori’s storyline. SUPER COOL. Indra’s storyline.  COOL. Hope’s storyline. S.A COOL S.B NOT COOL. Jordan’s storyline. NOT COOL.  Diyoza’s storyline. COOL Gabriel’s storyline. COOL. Madi’s storyline. NOT COOL The grounders. Fucking morons. You really shouldn’t make a whole culture’s choices based around being absolutely too stupid to be allowed to live. EVEN when you get past xenophobia and learn about who they are and why they do things. NOT COOL. The culty people. Cool set up and world building. The society was dumb and had too many plot holes. MIDDLING SHEIDHEDA. NOT COOL. pointless plot device just used to make everyone forget everything they learned from 6 seasons. CADOGAN. COOL AS A VILLAIN. But he was the protagonist. So the ruination of the entire show and universe they created. NOT COOL.

SEASON A COOL OVERALL.  SEASON B NOT COOL. TOTAL SEASON NOT COOL

I think if people think the ending was supercool, they’ve never heard of a deus ex machina, and how that’s a BAD ending that is really just a cheat because you can’t figure out a way to get out of the story mess you made. 

I really hate post apocalyptic fiction that ends with no hope for humanity. JR kept telling us there was hope. I mean narratively, not in interviews, although he did that too, and in the last half season, he switched it around so they wouldn’t have hope, not even just our heroes, but all humanity. It was a bait and switch I did not appreciate. And I’m not talking about ships, I’m talking about the essential genre of the show. 

PS. thanks. I love my book and I hope someone picks it up so you all can read it. It also has elements of Han/Leia and another couple, Brashen/Althea from the Live Ship Traders book by Robin Hobb. They are, however, less traumatized than the characters in The 100. 

[smilingperformer]

Discussing the good and bad of Pokémon Journeys: Part “Goh”

Oh boi... this part is gonna be a doozy. Because I have a lot to talk about Goh, or as I tend to call him, Gou.

TLDR; I like Gou as a character but I very, very much have issues with the way he's currently written in the show. And that frustrates me deeply as I'd love to feel more positively about him. More under the cut, with Journeys abverted as JN.

Where do I even begin... Maybe by how I first became a fan of Gou's character, by after some time started to go back to neutral ground.

Like, ever since the very first episode, we've got a very clear picture of what kind of character Gou is: a bookworm, loves Pokémon, loves to show his knowledge and isn't exactly good at making friends. His only friend before Satoshi (and before learning about Tokio/Horace's reasonings for not showing up to their meeting place) was Chloe/Koharu, and we still don't know how the two met. Thou my guess is that their childhood friendship bonded over their parents meeting during some job or by Koharu feeling the need to be Gou's friend. Who knows, it's something I want to learn about. But that's besides the point, cough.

But like, from the very first episode on, it became clear that this show wants to focus on Gou, and telling his journey on becoming a Pokémon Trainer who wants to catch all of the Pokémon in the World, in order to get closer to catching Mew, the mythical Pokémon who's said to contain DNA of all existing Pokémon. He had a very strong introduction arc, with showing his dynamic with Koharu, having him meet Satoshi on top of Lugia, first getting to know Satoshi (and Rockets) and then catching his first partner Pokémon in Hibunny. However, as time went on and episodes started piling up, I started feeling like something about him was... off.

I feel like the first time I had an issue with the writing involving him was in JN006, where he went on his first catching spree. Where he kept catching Pokémon with ease. Small struggle at the start when trying to work together his dynamic with Hibunny, but the rest of the ep felt way too easy. Then again, Gou IS flat out Pokémon GO promotion. No one can deny that. His purpose is to promote GO's capture mechanic. It is the most successful Pokémon Mobile game of all time.

Anyway, the easy captures piled up on and on til JN010 when he finally had to use dozens of pokeballs to catch one. single. Dewgong. I loved this so much. It made me feel more at ease with his goal mechanic and I felt like I'd be fine with him from there on out. And I was. Til I started having new issues with him. All thanks to Satoshi's new goal in PWC finally having been established.

As time went on, it became clearer and clearer, that Gou was more focused on when it came to his goal progression, development in character level, and in what kind of quality his episodes would be.

Everyone knows how much I love JN032. Everyone does. It's one of my absolute fav episodes in the series. However, it also kinda is what first prompted me starting my worry that hasn't gone away since then: That Gou feels more like the protagonist than Satoshi does in this series, and not really an equal dual protag he was advertised to be.

Before the pitchforks are getting aimed at me, hear me out. I know, that based on some statistics, the focus is equal, with sliiiightly more inclinded towards Gou. However, that's where the issue is: Gou has, so far for me, had way better focus and way better episodes in this series, than Satoshi has, while also getting progress on his goal on other character's focus episodes. When Satoshi's episodes have been about PWC and training his Pokémon, Gou's had the kind of episodes that are more character exploring, developing him, evolving him in some way. And it, frustrates me. Because despite my better judgement, it gives me this feeling that Gou is stealing Satoshi's thunder, even when some type of statistics would suggest otherwise. It gives me this feeling that Gou is here to write Satoshi out. I do not like that I feel this way, I don't know how to get rid of this feeling and I hate it here.

Again, I like Gou's character, he's sweet, well developed, and I do enjoy seeing him in his own episodes. But I have come to noticed, than whenever he gets goal progression in an episode that's supposed to focus on Koharu or Satoshi, I feel so.... angry? And I've never, ever felt like this while watching other characters progress. And I know it's irrational.

Like, his main partner's already fully evolved, his secondary partner Sobble is already evolving soon despite only having one focus episode for itself before it, and he's caught all three of the Galar starters now, with some of his other not-that-important Pokémon making appearances every now and then with possible evolution showcases. And it's all done so fast. Same issue was with Satoshi's poketeam evolving in fast arcs, but I forgot to mention about it? But then again, I am somewhat fine with it as I get the writing style is to focus on one 'mon and then move on to another. Which is not to my taste completely but I digress. ANYWAY, back to Gou.

After seeing discussions and joining in on some on tumblr and twitter and elsewhere, it does appear that Gou's development speed and progression speed is incredibly fast. Like, seriously fast. He's caught a lot of Pokémon by now, and the show's already shown about 50% percent of all existing Pokémon in a bit over a year. About 30% being caught by Gou. (Statistics borrowed from EntityMays' Living Dex trackers, links in posts will disrupt showing in tag search so, google EntityMays's Living Dex, and you'll find the statistics there).

This is also very apparent when you think about how fast Gou suddenly became a good battler, when at the beginning he sucked. A lot. I get Satoshi could be a great example on learning how to battle with good strategy in mind, but we barely saw Gou struggle. We Satoshi struggle in OS, so I would have prefered more struggling by Gou. His first battle against a legendary ended up in Zapdos almost getting caught and uuuuuggh, while it's a pretty good episode it really should have been at later point, same with Suicune episode. Thou with the latter I have WAY more issues than just the placement but, I'm not gonna rant about that today.

And what should I say about his dynamics with other characters... They're good, I am a huge fan of how the dynamic between Koharu and Gou works, as their childhood friend dynamic is shown so, so well, and you can just tell the two have mutual respect as Gou gives Koharu the space she needed when she wasn't into Pokémon for a while, and when she then became partners with Eevee, Gou was so so SO darn supportive just, AGH. Love how these two work.

And everyone knows I fell for Gou x Tokio dynamic straight away. Like they had a friendship built up right away when they first met as little kids and Tokio missing out on their promised meeting due to being sick and not having any means of contacting him yes still considered Gou his friend after these years when Gou considered him a traitor of trust and Gou then forgives him for it and just aaaaaahhh-. KRHM. Excuse me.

Then there's Gou and Satoshi's dynamic and I already said in my post about Satoshi how I feel intimidated by the fans of their shipping and how it makes me feel.... kinda sad about not being able to like their dynamic for what it is. I LOVE it a ton. I have said it a countless times, they're a broTP to me. They're dynamic was very enjoyable for me to watch, and even Gou was. But like, on TOP of these issues I mentioned before this part, I also have another issue with Gou: his fanbase, or the crazier part of it.

Often times I feel like I'm unable to enjoy Gou's character without being reminded of the fans who constantly think of him as shipping fuel, or think he's flawless and anyone disagreering is in some form a negative trait filled human being, etc etc etc. In a way, I feel like I'd enjoy Gou and his dynamic with Satoshi way, way more, if I had never learned about this side of the fandom. Let people like their dynamic the way they want. Be it romantic or platonic. Neither is wrong, but pushing one side to push their own headcanon to other people's head is just, bad act. Having this feeling in me has actually made me wonder, whether I would have liked other characters I am such a huge fan of, if I had been watching their shows during their airing times (for example Serena).

Now what would I have done differently with Gou? Firstly, slow the fuck down. I would have prefered to see Hibunny way more. I would have prefered to have one Galar Starter, namely Grookey, go to Satoshi, as it would help me feel less like Gou's stealing his thunder. I would have prefered if Gou and Satoshi's goals were established around same time. I would have very much liked it, if Gou wouldn't be catching Pokémon each episode.

Now what COULD help me like him better from what we have by now? Well. Slow it down. Have him interact with Koharu more. Give him a rival to further make him shine on his own instead of seemingly relying on Satoshi to shine through. Hell, maybe make Tokio his friendly rival. And on top of that, please let him not catch Pokémon almost every single episode. I'd love an episode where he captures some Pokémon that prefers to be free, and he then would let it go. I think that would make his character be good on his own, and make me feel better about him once again.

Cough. I think I've got my point clear. As said, I like Gou, but very much dislike the way he's written in such fast pacing and in a way that, despite statistics stating otherwise, making him feel like he's the sole protag and not sharing spotlight as dual protag. And I hope to god I can get rid of this feeling as the series goes on. Because right now, I don't have high hopes :(

If you've read this far, thank you for reading, and I am so, so sorry this became a long long rant about the issues I have with Gou, but I hope I managed to bring out what I like about him as well. Hopefully next time's gonna be a more positive post, as I'll try writing about my full on feelings about the handling of Koharu, or as dub audience knows her, Chloe.

Once again, thanks for reading, have a good evening or morning or whatever time it is by the time you've read this, and I hope you'll have a fantastic time ♥ And as a reminder, these are just my opinions, and if you disagree, you are totally valid.

Til next time! This was Smiling Performer aka Aleira, signing out!

[asterekmess]

Somebody tickled my salty-bone (in a good way. I love you. thank you.) and now I wanna vent about the absolute shitshow that is Stiles and Scott’s friendship.

Forewarning, I have a v faulty memory and I like to ramble. So. Obligatory Read More.

hoo boy. Now look, I am a salty little sea witch. I don’t like Scott. I love me some Stiles. Listen, I want to acknowledge here that Stiles isn’t perfect. He’s not the best friend that could ever friend, especially not at the beginning of the show. Yeah, he says stuff that riles Scott up. And yeah, he chucks lacrosse balls at Scott bc he’s pissed off at him. And he gets him beat up by blaming him for keying a car. These are objectively shitty things.

Now on to Scott. I’m starting at the beginning, because some brit chick told me once it’s a good place to start. It’s an anti-scott favorite to point out Star Wars. But I wanna talk about the history of Stiles and Scott’s friendship in general. We’re not explicitly told how long they’ve been friends. It’s implied “for ages” but there’s a lot of evidence that points to them not knowing each other until later (my preference is the 5th grade, just after Stiles’ mom died).

Stiles had a boa once, apparently. But Scott doesn’t know this. Stiles was apparently friends with Heather since they were in diapers but Scott doesn’t know her. Stiles has panic attacks and apparently a social anxiety disorder, but Scott has no clue about it.

Stiles doesn’t actually share many, if any, passions/interests with Scott besides Lacrosse. We know Stiles can skate, but Scott has never done it before Ice Pick episode. We know Stiles has other friends like Heather, but they’ve somehow never been introduced to Scott. Stiles plays videogames “Online gaming community that battles mythical creatures” but Scott has no clue what he’s talking about. Stiles has a favorite movie series that Scott has never watched. Scott, if I’m honest, got totally shafted by the show. He has no interests. We see a little dartboard on his wall in his room. We see posters. But he doesn’t do ANYTHING except play lacrosse and go to work at the vet. Then he gets a motorbike, which I guess....is supposed to count as a personality trait? We know jack-shit about Scott’s hobbies, even though he’s the main character. And what we do know is in Negatives. We know he has a shit vocabulary. We know he doesn’t like to read. (at least...before his “better Scott McCall program”) We know he doesn’t bowl. We know he sucks at literally all school related things. We know he has literally no other friends besides Stiles, until he becomes a werewolf.

But to me, what stands out is how...unobliging Scott is about their friendship?

It’s established that Scott usually runs around with Stiles when he’s got an idea, yeah. Two bros being dumbasses. Got it. But Stiles clearly has this whole mentality/joke view of them that’s Batman & Robin “I don’t wanna be Robin all the time” but Scott just sort of...shuts him down? “No one’s batman and robin any of the time”

I acknowledge that it’s a sort of tense situation...kind of? He’s sneaking into an empty bus lot to go sniff at the crime scene. He’s not really in danger here? But his tone of voice is so dismissive? Like he’s completely confused that Stiles would ever think that. But if they’ve been friends for ages, why would he only just now be finding out about it? And why would he dismiss it if they’re that close?

Then, of course, there’s Star Wars. Like...fine, whatever, Scott doesn’t like Star Wars. Except that it’s not that he doesn’t like it. It’s that he refuses to watch it. He knows nothing about Stiles’ favorite movie? He gets frustrated when Stiles makes Star Wars jokes because he doesn’t get them. But even KiRA is willing to watch it, and he just laughs about it.

Jackson and Lydia were supposed to be garbage to each other, but she still watched lacrosse videos with him and he watched The Notebook however many times Lydia wanted. If the couple we’re supposed to think is shitty is more kind to each other than Scott is to Stiles, what am I supposed to take away from that?

There’s also the part where he never just...believes Stiles? Not unless it’s in his favor. Sure, it sounds crazy that Stiles tells him he’s a werewolf and he’s gonna go crazy on a full moon. But Scott watched his bite completely disappear. He knows the shit he did on the field was bizarre and physically impossible for him. He doesn’t need his inhaler anymore. He heard Allison talking from Outside the School. There’s so much evidence to back Stiles up here, it’s ridiculous. And Scott still won’t believe him. Stiles tells Scott he thinks Matt’s the killer. Scott asks him why, Stiles doesn’t have an answer, and Scott immediately shuts him down. He tells Scott that it isn’t Lydia, and Scott argues with him, citing a test that he later admits he thinks is bullshit! Stiles tells Scott that virgins are being sacrificed and he’s scared he’ll be next, Scott laughs at him. Stiles tells Scott he thinks he was the one who wrote that shit on the board, the one who planted the bomb. Scott refuses to listen to him. He warns him about Theo, gets completely blown off. And Stiles is almost never wrong. But Scott continues to ignore him and refuses to believe him. Meanwhile Stiles believes Scott about Derek being dangerous. He believes Scott about Derek being the one in the bus. About how Peter is going after Allison (He must be going after Allison, the national archery finalist who’s always surrounded by hunters. Surely she’s “vulnerable.” It’s not like there’s someone way more vulnerable following Scott around, someone that Peter might force into helping him find Derek? HMMM?) Think about it, when does Stiles ever doubt Scott?

How he outright ignores Stiles just constantly? Even after he loses his temper with Stiles in the room in episode 1, he still goes to the Fucking Party. Even after Stiles tells him he can’t be in lacrosse anymore because it’s too dangerous, he ‘tries’ to quit and when he’s told that if he won’t play one game, he’s off first line, he outright ignores Stiles and fights with him until Stiles backs off and lets him play, where he proceeds to do EXACTLY what Stiles and Derek thought he would, and loses control. If ALlison hadn’t been there. People would have died. A kid from the other team saw Scott’s wolf eyes. He exposed himself! Then there’s the parts where he just pretends Stiles doesn’t exist. When he goes to hang out with Allison, and Stiles can’t get him on the phone, and when he finally answers he admits “did you get my texts?” “Yeah, all nine million of them” that he was literally just refusing to text Stiles back while he sat in the car with Allison and did nothing else. He won’t tell Stiles where he’s going, and he turns his phone off once they get to the woods. He also turns his phone off while Stiles is trying to take care of Derek, who IS POISONED and Bleeding and SHOT. Instead of trying to do anything he willfully ignores it and makes out with Allison, then wanders the house with Allison, then eats dinner with the family. He could’ve pulled the ‘i need to use the restroom’ ANY FUCKING TIME. He could’ve explained in a text at ANY TIME what he was doing and why it was taking so long. he just refused. When Stiles calls at the pool, Scott has no reason to hang up. Yeah, the phone made noise while it was ringing but after he hung up on Stiles he continued to just sit there with Allison and whisper to each other. He could’ve fucking talked on the phone! There was NOthing stopping him!

Then there’s how much danger he’s happy to put Stiles in? Like, he still hated Derek and thought he was a dangerous thug, while ignoring Stiles’ messages and leaving him alone with Derek. They knew Jackson was dangerous and had attacked Stiles before, and he left Stiles alone in the van with him?? Jackson wouldn’t need to break out of the vehicle, just the cuffs and Stiles would be dead. But for some reason Scott goes to school? LIke yeah I get it. He might fail his classes. But Stiles gave up first line just to check if Scott’s mom was the Alpha. Why couldn’t allison have watched Jackson with an arrow pointed at his head? She was better equipped than Stiles and in no danger of failing classes.

Look, I know I’m only talking about the first couple seasons but I have a rlly bad memory and I haven’t seen s3a or s3b in a long ass time. (gonna have to watch ‘em later tho while I work on the rewrite)

There’s probably more I’m missing. I’m just so damn cranky and sad. I’ll probably add more eventually when I get mad enough abt it.

[cultgambles]

Nature’s Alfredo Sauce

I saw @wtffanfiction ‘s post on weird words to describe genitals...

and my friend dared me to write something with 100 of the words haha. there’s 108 in here i think.

i dont even know.

Word Count: 1317

It was 10:30 at night, the angel lay in her bed without a care in the world. Well, she did have one care: the human that she called with such sweet words earlier that day had not shown up at the time they agreed upon. They were supposed to be boinking about now. A little bit of horizontal monster mash, one could say. 30 minutes past ten, she was quite bored. There was nothing interesting on TV to sate her being, and nothing worth listening to or reading. She couldn’t even muster up any dirty thoughts to swipe at her tainted jewel.

Ugh.

Until...a knock at her door.

Begrudgingly, she got up, using her wings to carry her the short distance to the door. Lazy. Peeking through the peephole, she saw her human standing there, a bouquet of yellow and red roses gripped tightly in his hands. She opened the door slowly, and he gave a sheepish smile.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, “the dinner party ran super late.”

“It’s fine. As long as you do what you intended to do before.”

“I do!” he beamed, suddenly his pocket rocket becoming throbbing manliness tenting in the cotton prison of his pants. “I brought it just for you, my lance of love, for my love!”

“Ohhhh!” She crooned, her velvet underground becoming moist as he advanced toward her. Her pleasure pearl throbbed with need, as their mouths were on each other in an instant, tongues battling for dominance. He kicked the door behind him, scooping his angel into his arms and carrying her towards the bedroom. Her legs gripped his hips, and she could feel his coke bottle cock poking her hershey highway. He THREW her on the bed, shoving his shirt off, marveling at the way her eyes drank up his well defined chest. She crawled towards him on all fours, pressing her slender fingers around his MIGHTY MAN NOODLE, feeling its rigidness stiffen even more, massaging the orbs. “Do you like when I touch your organ? Your fuck stem, organic crotch gun, diego the explorer--”

“I know you’re trying to hit 100 words but that’s a little overkill,” the man frowned. “You can just say sperminator and go.”

“It’s hard, just like your engorged staff. It’s gotten so big and thicc I don’t know if it will fit in my haynannernanners at all…” She opened her mouth, licking the veins along the underside of his doggy lipstick. 

“Oh that feels so good on my pulsing manmeat. This bulging soldier boy is gonna wreck your triangular area so gud beby.”

“I can’t wait,” she moaned, the DNA rifle still in her mouth, sending pleasures of vibration to the man’s brain. She swirled the tip of the holy wand, and the man groaned, digging his fingers in her long long hair. After a few more languid licks and sucks, his horrible wet mushroom was SQUIZRTING SOME BABY BATTER RIGHT INTO HER MOUTH.

“Urg,” he moaned. 

“Aaaa,” she moaned back, milking the last few drops from his peenie weenie. His fuckfluid was very salty, like he had a bad diet. As soon as she popped off of him, iT (God’s pinky finger) WAS ROCK HARD AGAIN. She couldnt wait to get that cherry assassin deep in her damp canal of lust. 

“Lay back,” the man said gruffly, kneeling to his knees. His tongue found purchase on her love nubbin, his fish pole fingers making their way to her weeping folds.

“Ur so wet for me beby...just for me and my giant sausage,” he groaned into her love pocket. 

“Yes! Only for u, my man with the love tool! I never met anyone with a better male organism than u.”

“Really? You mean that? No one’s got a better you-know-what than me?”

“I mean it b. Hurry up now, my letter o be gettin dry over here,” the angel rolled her eyes. 

“Oh yeah,” he said, returning to the attack on her valve. Suddenly, he detached from her clam cavern, his man-carrot spewing thick, hot princely milk all over the bed. “Your slit of ecstasy tastes so good.”

Damn, she thought to herself, I wasn’t even close. If his mauve avenger didn’t do the job, she would play with her kitty later after he fell asleep.

He snaked up to her, pressing hot fingers to her love pillows, pinching the rosebuds. “Was that good?”

“Yes,” she lied.

“Now it’s time for my pink stiff flobberworm. In your jewelry box.” (His crimson bird was hard for like the 3rd time). 

“Yeah, I think my vagoo would love that.”

The man sat up, pulling the angel above his lap, over the one-eyed snake so her mayonnaise drain was directly in place to slide in easily. She sank down on the mayonnaise cannon, filling her up deliciously. 

“Oh, babe, your communism stick is in my chamber of secrets so deep and good.” The angel readjusted herself, bracing her hands against his shoulders as she started to move her hips up and down his beef bazooka. His burrito, in fact, was so big she couldn’t even fit all of him in her moist core. COo.

She gave a sudden moan as the hungry dragon hit that sweet sweet geronimo spot deep inside her. 

“Oh, ur tube flute game is so much better than your mouth frickle frackle. Yesssss daddy just like that,” she whined at the end. “SO good in my pleasure casino.”

“Baby, u feel so good on my kryptonian meat.” he gripped her anal fortress with such vigor, it was sure to leave small crecrents. He took a mythical berry in his mouth, teeth grazing the sensitive spot of her fun bags as his hips rose up to meet hers. He POUNDED into her at inhuman speeds, the angel groaning with every pump of his muatra. 

He liked watching his dark spire go in and out from her forbidden fruit, the way his crown jewels slapped her poop cavern harshly every time.

“Do you like your formerly caged viper meeting my downstairs mouth?!” she purred.

“Yeah looks great. Feels great. Must be mine.” (why did i think of p!atd emperor's new clothes??)

Soon, but not soon enough, the angel felt a tight knot in her belly. 

The tell tale signs of an orgasm (surprised they didn't have another word for it). It hit her like a tonne of bricks as she threw her head back in ecstasy, her chest balls bouncing from the force. Each in a different direction, just like anime girl tiddies. She was wrecked.

The man felt her penis trap tighten as her walls squeezed his hairy wolf dingaling. A few more thrusts of his hips had his hardened arousal squirt his liquid love deep in her man muncher, quickly turning it into a cave with honey.

They both moaned wantonly, so loudly that the neighbors were probably also getting off from their wonderful time of bumbin uglies.

He pulled out of her cum dumpster, his love muscle flopping against his belly, still leaking spaff a bit. 

The angel flopped over next to him, feeling warm pale liquid seep out of her egg chamber onto the bed.

“Your midnight meat train never ceases to amaze me. Like why is it so big and so good?”

“Good genes I guess,” he laughed, “but your woman-tomato is givin me a run for my money.”

“That was fun, you can come use your mighty sword of eros in my cock garage again.”

“Can I use my sugar quill in your fart factory next time?” He asked, batting his eyelashes. 

“Sure, why not. Only if I get to peg your man pussy too. So it’s even.”

She laughed, pressing rumblr spheres (and subsequently naked body) on his person, hugging him close. Of course, his thingy became restless manmeat ready for action in 5 seconds flat.

“Another round of belly magic?”

[cassatine]

well that’s done. yesterday’s drunken game of thrones ramblings under cut. i had a lot of feels actually. 

book talk and where-was-the-magical-plot and problematique aspects aside -- it’s pacing and execution i have issues with. that and internal consistency; like i wouldn’t mind the whole distances-are-meaningless aspect if it’d been assumed from the first season, but it wasn’t so it’s just annoying. 

and everything could have gone better with more development. eve, just stretching seasons 7 & 8 to ten episodes would have been enough with better writing, but as it is season 7 already really felt like we were hitting fast forward(who am i kidding it started before that, and this season is even worse -- and this is another thing that would have worked if it’d been like that from the start, but it wasn’t. the show’s just sprinting to the end with barely any groundwork laid out, all to preserve The Twists

theon dying was pretty standard as far as redemption arcs go really -- tbh i expected more deaths during the battle for the dawn like jorah mormont dying was Sad but not that surprising i thought he was done for as soon as he relinquished longclaw because there wasn’t really anything left for him to do beyond die gloriously after that -- and lyanna mormont was lovely and all but she was like a tertiary character not even secondary and too cool to live perfect for an impactful but meaningless as far as plot goes kinda death -- and dolorous edd he was like jorah mormont a hanger-on, worst he was jon’s friend, and jon and dany’s friend must either die or leave (oh tormund) or break (oh grey worm) because they are too much too big too mythical they must be lonely they can’t share their burdens so edd dies and jorah dies and tormund leaves and grey worm breaks and there’s only the starks, hard as winter, and they care not for dragons and oh this could be so very heartbreaking, love and family and duty and destiny.  

jon not killing the night king and arya doing it instead could have done with more foreshadowing but it’s not like he wasn’t instrumental to the resistance against teh undead, and i can’t get behind all the but-what-about-his-lineage talk; as far as i’m concerned the whole point is it matters shit all, jon snow wouldn't care he wasn’t the one to kill the night king u guys, just let him disappear north of the wall let him be with ghost let him take a long long nap and heal, and don’t put his ass on the IT, if we gonna have fire and blood then burn the ugly chair along with king’s landing and the last tyrant, burn the corrupted old world let the new one be born from the ashes. daenery’s last child is the revolution and the terror all wrapped in one. the streets ran red with blood, only one more bloody birthing bed, one more dead mother.

missandei -- well for better but mostly for worst the essosi characters were never destined to be more than the background of dany’s arc and/or canon fodder and that sucks but there it is, missandei too was expendable, and too close to daenerys, too much of a tie to humanity. she had to go so dany could lose it because missandei was an anchor missandei was love missandei remembered when no one in westeros does, in westeros dany’s the daughter of the mad king not the breaker of chains, even though she sacrificed so much, she only led her people and her children to death in a strange strange land that doesn’t want her and how that must hurt how that must burn. missandei died so dany could lose it, so that everything would have turned to ashes in her mouth already, so that it would be oh so much easier to burn down.

everything jonerys is greek tragedy level bar the execution, or maybe it’s really emulating aristophanes idk, i mean let it be fear i almost have goosebumps. almost, cause i get it’s all about shock effect nowadays but daenerys’ fall could have done with a lot more character development (among a fuckload of other things). neither the scourging of the shire/war heroes too damaged to enjoy the fruits of their labor or the ‘hero too far gone’ motifs are anything new, and after all daenerys suffered, going all fire and blood is fucking understandable. but people can argue all they want about how it was foreshadowed, it still wasn’t developed. in season seven she went from breaking the wheel to mah birthright but it just. happened. and so did her fall, and any amount of ominous music and villainous framing doesn’t make up for actual character development gdi. it all deserved a lot more time. varys’ loss of faith in her deserved more time too, i mean dude was fine serving under aerys and *now* he gets the poison out? why varys why. his rejection of dany’s is westeros’ rejection of her, but it’s westeros’ refusal to let go of the game of thrones too. varys had to burn, because varys is the old world, for all his Good Ruler shtick he’s all about the game -- he is the game, the player who can’t stop playing. and so he burns.

and tyrion, well tyrion’s like jon really, torn between family and duty and what he wants, the human heart in conflict and all that jazz. and the tables have turned, once he was the one in a dungeon and jaime helped him flee and now he wants to return the favour (it’s like poetry it rhymes). he even wants to save his sister the things we do for love, and tyrion’s ready to do what his golden, kingslayer of a brother did too, put thousands of innocents before his own life, before his ruler, and this is the stuff of tragedy. he wants to believe in his leviathan, the last leviathan, but he’s also got to face one of the oldest questions in the world. the one about ends and means.  

jaime -- well jaime shoulda stayed with brienne, chillin’ in winterfell, but the show never really committed to him letting go of cersei, it’s just weird it all came down to a ceiling, but if i close my eyes and look sideways i can see it, for all her flaws he loves cersei and brienne, brienne’s everything he doesn’t deserve and she’s life, and jaime lannister has had a death wish for a while now. he saw redemption and he gave it the finger, and that’s a very jaime thing to do.

and cersei basically won the pr battle. unfuckinbelievable. she should have gone laughing about it. sandor got to kill ungregor with fire because fuck you, that’s why. euron i have nothing good to say about, i’m trying there’s just nothing he’s too much of a downgrade from the books and that’s the tea.

and arya -- arya deathkiller, arya dawnbringer, arya was everything this season. not today she said to death, and not today she said to vengeance, and that -- arya turning her back on vengeance could have been such a strong moment. one beautiful, shiny statement in the midst of so much bleakness. not today syrio forel told her long ago, and not today sandor tells her now, and this is it, she’s come full circle after clawing her way out of the dark, she’s arya stark and she’s going home. let me dream. only nymeria’s missing (let them find each other again).

tl;dr. the bones were good enough, but the execution was bleh, which is nothing new. also, some a+ dragon fire in ep 5. the pyromaniac in me appreciated. 

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Nildungsroman

by Dan H

Saturday, 27 September 2008

Dan finally identifies something that has been bugging him.~

I've always had a problem with Modern Fantasy. Not in the sense of "published within the last five years" (although there is also that) but in the sense of "set in the real world, only with magic and shit, which most people don't know about". Possibly that's Urban Fantasy.

This whole thing struck me while I was reading Cassandra Cla(i)re's City of Bones, which funnily enough seems to have a lot of traits in common with a certain other modern fantasy series that the author may or may not have heard of, and which I may or may not have said a few things about in the past, so these comments are slightly biased towards those two august tales, but I'll also be talking about other elements of the Geek Canon, including Buffy, Tolkein and Star Wars.

As ever, contains spoilers.

The Hero's Journey: Ur Doin It Rong

For what it's worth, I'm not actually a big fan of Joseph Campbell. I think the observation that lots of different myths have lots of things in common rates somewhere between "dog bites man" and "Bishop of Rome Espouses Nicene Creed" on the duh-o-meter. On the other hand, the Hero With A Thousand Faces One Of Which Is Luke Skywalker does nicely identify a basic structure which can, at the very least, make sure that a mythically-slanted story doesn't suck donkey balls.

Very broadly, the Hero's Journey has three stages: the departure, the initiation, and the return. The hero starts out as Joe Ordinary (or possibly as Joe Destiny), then goes off into the Crazy World of Magic Shit, then comes back a better and more complete man. Along the way he has to get eaten by a whale and meet a goddess, but that's basically the deal (any inaccuracies can be attributed to my not actually having read The Hero With A Thousand Faces and thus getting most of my information from Wikipedia).

Star Wars, as you probably already know, was based very, very, very (very, very, very) closely on the classic Campbellian journey (right down to including the trash compactor scene pretty much entirely to tick the "hero goes underground and bad shit happens" box). Early season Buffy actually holds fairly closely to the model as well, both in terms of its overall arc (at least in seasons 1-5) and the structure of individual episodes. An episode of Buffy usually opens with our heroine facing a Typical Teenage Problem, then getting drawn into a supernatural event which allowed her, at the end, to resolve her Real Life problem as well as lay the smackdown on some vampires. As I've argued before on Ferretbrain, I think Buffy lost its way around the point it stopped bringing everything back to the real world.

And that, in a roundabout way, is what I think is wrong with Modern Fantasy. If you blinked you might have missed it, so I'll say it again more explicitly. A lot of Modern Fantasy seems to be at least loosely based on the Hero's Journey, and while it does the departure and the initiation really well, it seems to write the whole "return" bit off as a waste of time. Modern heroes leave their home and family, descend into the underworld, and bloody well stay there.

Now I admit, part of this is going to be structure. In a TV series about fighting vampires (for example), you'll always get to the point where you can't view "going out to fight some vampires" as anything but routine, and you can only escalate so far before you have to play the "real life is the greatest battle" card or the "fighting the very essence evil itself" card (neither of which worked). On the other hand, part of it seems to be an issue with people actually missing the point of the Hero's Journey. I'm going to talk about both these phenomena, because I like to hear myself talk.

Sunnydalization: Myth Invades Reality

If, like me, you wasted your entire undergraduacy watching Buffy videos, and can quote pretty much the entire seven series end to end, including the "grr-arg" bits with the mutant enemy logo, you'll probably remember the bit in Prophecy Girl where Willow finds two dead bodies in the student lounge in Sunnydale High and, despite having seen at least a corpse a week for the past series, gets totally freaked out. When challenged about it, she says:

"I'm not okay. I knew those guys. I go to that room every day. And when I walked in there, it... it wasn't our world anymore. They made it theirs.

And at that point, Buffy changed subtly but irrevocably. Prior to that scene, Sunnydale was the real world, and the Hellmouth was the place where the monsters were. Every week, Buffy would battle the legions of hell, and every week she would come out and go to class and we would see exactly what she was fighting to protect. We'd see Jonathan and Cordelia and Harmony and the rest, all going on with their totally normal lives, totally unaware that little Miss Summers had been saving their collective assi.

After that moment, though, it all changed. Things got bigger and scarier, and the Demons didn't go back into their box. Buffy may have defeated the Master at the end of Season 1, but she failed to defeat the Hellmouth, and as the seasons progressed the line between the "reality" of Sunnydale and the Underworld of the Hellmouth became more and more blurred. In season three we are told that the mayor "built this town for demons to feed on" and by the end of season seven the two are so inextricably linked that the final closing of the Hellmouth actually destroys the town.

As I said above, I ultimately think this is an inevitable effect in a long running series. The first time a vampire attacks somebody on school grounds it's scary. The twelfth you just start to wonder why the school is still open. The Sunnydale body count became something of a running joke ("if we train hard, keep focus, and don't have so many mysterious deaths, Sunnydale is gonna rule") but while it was funny it also began to undermine the point of the show. What started out as a nice little town threatened by a supernatural enemy became itself a seat of magical corruption. By the end of series seven there is literally nobody normal left in Sunnydale, they've all evacuated because of the effects of the Hellmouth (even the more sympathetic demons get out of town).

What this means is that, by the end of the series, Buffy has literally nothing left worth fighting for, except possibly Joss Whedon's ropey feminist doctrine. The later series of Buffy fall flat because, as Sunnydale itself becomes a place of evil, the Slayer loses all contact with the real world.

Mugglism: The Family Romance

Ultimately, though, I can forgive Buffy for its structural flaws. What I have more trouble with is the peculiar tendency in a lot of Modern/Urban Fantasy to treat the Fantasy World as just flat-out better than reality.

The chronic offender in this case is, of course, the Wizarding World of the Harry Potter series. Harry is rescued from the dull, dreary (and psychotically abusive) Dursleys, the "biggest load of Muggles" Hagrid has ever seen. He is then taken away into the wonderful Wizarding world where everything is fabulous and magical. He then discovers that he is a figure of the utmost importance in said world, and people either treat him with awe or loathing, both of which he finds equally affirming, while the infallibly wise guardian of his new world assures him that he really is all that and a bag of chips. Meanwhile the author informs us in interviews that everything in the Wizarding world is indeed superior to everything in the real world.

Oh, and just to forestall the inevitable "but the Wizarding world is really dangerous" apologia, there are two things to say about that. Firstly, until Rowling writes a scene that actually reminds me of the Holocaust, instead of just vaguely alluding to people making Nazi salutes, real life has Rowling licked when it comes to being dark, man. Secondly, horrors of actual, non-school-based wars aside, "like the real world but nastier" is yet another way of saying "like the real world but better". I'm going to hark right back to my third ever Ferretbrain article here and say that one of the things that really impressed me about Pan's Labyrinth was the fact that the really scary thing in it was not the Faun, or the Labyrinth, or the dude with the eyes in his hands, but the brutal mass-murdering fascist.

Anyway, where was I. Oh yes. The "fantasy is better than reality" style of Urban Fantasy usually winds up being a version of the (Freudian, and therefore almost certainly no longer reputable) idea of the Family Romance. The belief, common in young children, that their parents aren't their real parents, and they're actually something different and special. Of course most of us then grow up and realise that our parents are pretty okay people, and that being a Magical Princess probably wouldn't be that great, and actually there's some pretty radical stuff in the real world which we could be getting on with (like writing for webzines or playing World of Warcraft).

A mythical journey in which the Hero leaves the real world and then never comes back is always going to seem, to me (and therefore to anybody who matters), to be fundamentally juvenile. 

Pan's Labyrinth would have been completely meaningless if Ofelia did not ultimately end up confronting Vidal (albeit hopelessly), and the Lord of the Rings loses a lot of its impact if the Hobbits don't go back to the shire. Harry Potter may save the Wizarding World, but muggles like me have no reason to care about that. Stories like the Potter series work absolutely fine, as long as you're still labouring under the illusions that you're a beautiful unique snowflake, and the only people that matter are you and the few others you're willing to accept as equally special. The moment you - not to put too fine a point on it - grow the fuck up, and realise that everybody else (yes even the teachers at your school, yes even your parents, yes even the kids who are mean to you) are real people with their own lives and ideals, you have to let go of the belief that your secret world is the most important one.

I've not yet finished City of Bones, much less the whole "Mortal Instruments" series, but it's shaping up to go the same way as potter: a long story about somebody totally failing to grow up.

In Conclusion: Why Americans Damned Well Should Be Afraid of Dragons

Roleplayers in the audience will probably know that White Wolf Game Studio used to publish, as part of their risibly-entitled World of Darkness line a game called Changeling the Dreaming. It was a game about, like, the loss of innocence and the death of dreams, man. Players took on the role of Changelings, fairy spirits in human bodies, who were slowly losing their beautiful-unique-snowflakeness under the crushing "Banality" of the modern world.

As games went, it was alright, it fetishised childhood in a slightly iffy way, but otherwise was decent Guns and Wizards Urban Fantasy fare. What bugged me about it, though, was the way it essentially divided everything in the world into "Banal" (soul destroying and imagination crushing) and "Glamorous" (drawing on the power of the Dreaming, the wellspring of human imagination). In particular, what bugged me about it was that it assumed that "imagination" was associated purely with the trappings of medieval fantasy. An artist who paints grim cityscapes and urban decay is Banal, an artist who paints forests full of dancing elves is Glamorous. 

Who Wants to be a Millionaire is Banal wish-fulfillment tapping into people's desire to get something for nothing. The hundred or so fairy stories about farmer's sons who get fantastically rich because of a stroke of good fortune are totally inspiring and bring out the best in humanity.

In her article Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons? Ursula le Guin observes (perhaps correctly) that the Fantasy genre is looked down upon in America, and that this is perhaps indicative of a society too obsessed with industry, productivity and profit, and distrustful of the imagination. Fiction in general, and fantasy in particular, encourages the reader to stop thinking about how they can best make a million bucks before they're forty and start thinking about any one of the million other things they could be doing. As Le Guin puts it:

"Fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial... They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom."

Of course the important thing to remember about this particular essay is that Le Guin is using "dragons" and "fantasy" as a shorthand for "fiction in general", and you could the mistrust of Fantasy in the twentieth century with the mistrust of the novel in the nineteenth. A lot of fantasy readers (and, by extension, some fantasy writers) go further. Like Changeling they come to view "elves and dragons and shit" as being synonymous with imagination, and to view imagination as the only virtue required in humanity, instead of as part of a healthy, well rounded personality.

Sensible proponents of Fantasy argue that it is perfectly okay to like dragons and wizards, and that the presence of fantasy elements does not make a story frivolous. Less sensible proponents of fantasy seem to want to argue that it is perfectly okay to like nothing except dragons and wizards, and that fantasy elements make a story more meaningful by their mere inclusion. This is particularly common in fandom and geekdom, where people are massively more inclined to focus on the details of a particular setting (elves, vampires, wizards) than on the actual contents of the narrative (destruction of rural England, coming-of-age in small town America, why suicide is totally heroic).

Obviously, I don't want a return to the nineteenth century, I don't want a world where nobody reads fiction, or where it isn't considered perfectly okay to pick up the odd bit of Laurel K Hamilton if you feel like something light and pulpy, but I am deeply concerned about a Fantasy genre that is coming to view fantasy as an end in itself. That's fine if you're aspiring to nothing more than light holiday reading, but a lot of fantasy (even, or perhaps I should say especially children's fantasy) takes itself very seriously, and it's ludicrous to try to deal with "real" issues in something that's totally divorced from the real world. You can't show us the reality of war in a world where everybody acts like an overgrown five-year-old and people only die when the author is trying to make a point.

Fantasy is not factual, and because it is not factual it must remain true, and the truth is that the real world matters, and that real people are amazing, and a Hero who doesn't return is no hero at all.

Themes: 

J.K. Rowling, Books, TV & Movies, Sci-fi / Fantasy, Whedonverse

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Arthur B

 at 15:31 on 2008-09-27I'm reminded a little, in fact, of Terry Gilliam's 

Tideland

, which kind-of repudiates the fantasy-as-an-end-in-itself stance he took in some of his earlier films: in that one you have plenty of people who use fantasy as a means of escaping from the world around them, with the result that their lives are completely stagnant and horrible, and you've got the protagonist who uses fantasy to endure the world around her whilst still progressing through it, so she comes out the other end more-or-less unscathed and with a potential adoptive mum to boot.

You've glossed over an aspect of the Hero's Journey a little, which is that when the Hero returns to the everyday world he isn't just a fuller and more complete man, he actually enriches the everyday world by the fact that he's gone on this journey in the first place. 

Lord of the Rings

 is an exceptionally good example of this; not only are the Hobbits better people for having gone to fight Sauron, but when they get back they solve the Shire's problems and then (for the most part) become its primary movers and shakers for the next generation. Arguably, part of the problem with the way Buffy developed was that whilst Buffy's own real life problems were often solved by her adventures, she didn't so much enrich the community by her adventures so much as prolong the death throes of the status quo: things gradually get worse, and worse, and worse in Sunnydale until it all goes to shit. Harry Potter's magical studies not only have no beneficial effects for his community in the mundane world, he's actually legally prevented from letting that happen.

I think the problem with Hero's Journey type narratives in fantasy set in the modern day is that "it's the modern day, but with vampires" seems far too close to the real world, if you see what I mean. Back in the day it was sufficient for the hero to walk a long long long way away and people could accept that "oh, OK, way over there is the land of magic and adventure". The problem with the likes of Buffy and Potter is that the land of magic and adventure is 

right on their doorstep

, and this actually makes the return to the real world slightly problematic; because the vampires and werewolves and death eaters are in such close proximity (physically and in terms of always getting in each other's face), you'd expect the hero to be concerned about them all the time. The reason 

Narnia

 does the Hero's Journey so well is precisely because Narnia is a mythic otherworld which it's non-trivial to get to, and I would argue that that's a requirement for any mythic otherworld in a Hero's Journey-based story: if you can get to the Hellmouth by walking down the street then that's not so much a Hero's Journey as a Hero's Morning Jog.

I suspect the answer is to use a different myth for modern-day fantasy. 

Supernatural

 seems to get a lot of mileage (no pun intended) out of the old Lone Ranger/Fugitive "Eternal Wanderer" story (which has the advantage that it's a lot easier to adapt to television, because you can spin it out for as long as you damn well like, whereas the Hero's Journey pretty much demands an end point).

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Andy G

 at 20:52 on 2008-10-05Great article! That really put the finger on something that had been bugging me, except actually I hadn't realised it had been bugging me until I read the article. I was just wondering how you think Star Wars would fit into the pattern of the Hero's return, as you'd given that as an example of one closely written to the pattern, but it doesn't seem as clear-cut an example as the LotR or others where the magical world/magical powers are left behind?

Possibly a stupid question as you have clearly read a lot of stuff ABOUT fantasy (where on earth do you find it? I mean I do like to read fantasy, but I can barely ever find anything interesting written about it - except on Ferretbrain, of course) but have you read On Fairy Stories by Tolkien? It covers a lot of the themes from above, and it's one of my favourite essays with some really well-made points.

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Arthur B

 at 21:15 on 2008-10-05As far as I can tell, the supposed precise mapping of 

Star Wars

 to the Hero's Journey is a bit ropey, and came about mainly because John Campbell was all "Hey, 

Star Wars

 fits the Hero's Journey perfectly" and George Lucas said "Oh... really? I mean, yes. Yes it does."

So working out where all the various bits and pieces fit in is sometimes tricky, but I think the Hero's Return is very much there, although it's pretty much described in a single scene - it's the bit at the end where they're all getting their medals and all the rebel forces cheer them. Having ventured into the depths of the Death Star's chasm and faced the dark lord, Luke emerges victorious and the community (said community being the rebellion) is enriched for it. That's all you really need for the Hero's Return - tenuous, I know, but so's the entire Hero's Journey idea to begin with.

(The end of Return of the Jedi is interesting in this light, actually - the community is having a big party, but Luke isn't really part of it - he's off at the edge, burning his father's body and communing with ghosts, his experiences finally alienating him from his community because he's endured so many things that have no parallel in the common experience of the war - hundreds of people can claim they were involved in the attack on Death Star II, for example, but only Luke actually saw Darth Vader's true face.)

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Dan H

 at 16:29 on 2008-10-06

Possibly a stupid question as you have clearly read a lot of stuff ABOUT fantasy (where on earth do you find it? I mean I do like to read fantasy, but I can barely ever find anything interesting written about it - except on Ferretbrain, of course) but have you read On Fairy Stories by Tolkien? It covers a lot of the themes from above, and it's one of my favourite essays with some really well-made points.

I've not read it actually (I'm far less well read than I pretend to be, I just shout my opinions loudly and hope people assume I've done some research).

As for Star Wars, the "real world" if you want to call it that in the SW saga is (IMO) the Rebellion, the big deal is that while Luke goes off and learns from Jedi Masters and confronts Darth Vader, it's the regular guys in the guns-and-bombs shooting war that he comes back to. Our Esteemed Editor also points out that Luke's return to Han and Leia is a quite literal return to family at the end of the series.

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Sister Magpie

 at 20:38 on 2008-10-30Great article! I've been catching up and had just read your review where you asked why someone would have to add fantasy to New York City to find a sense of wonder--quoting that paragraph that's a beautiful image strangely undermined by the addition of werewolves, fairies, vampires and mermaids. (Central Park, Chinatown, the Hudson River are all far more interesting.)

I've always liked "our world, but with magic" in terms of books starting in our world rather than a totally different secondary world, but I totally agree with this--because as you say, setting something in our world and adding magic doesn't have to mean that our world is the world that sucks or can't hold it's own. A sense of home is always present in LOTR and that makes the Shire stand up as just as wonderful as any magical place.

It reminds me of the book Hatchet that I had to read a couple years ago for a thing I was doing on YA books. I have only ever read that book, but there are several in the series. It's not fantasy, it's about a boy who survives a plane crash and must survive alone in the Canadian wilderness. But in the end he's rescued and there's other books, some of which follow a "what if?" scenario where he never leaves the woods. What struck me about the synopses of the later books was that the main character pretty much wound up going off to live in the forest. He didn't like civilization any more and preferred his solitary life. 

The idea seemed to be that the author enjoyed the more "real" life experience of fighting for your survival, hunting your own food etc. But I thought it made the whole series a failure by not realizing that the point of a Vision Quest is to find out how you can help your community. Deciding to be a hermit--a fine choice in other contexts--is here just selfish and avoiding the responsibilities of being an adult in the community.

It's just important to make the distinction between this really being a flaw in Urban fantasy and it being just something urban fantasists can use it for.

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Dan H

 at 15:25 on 2008-11-17Hiya, sorry it took me so long to reply (this just in, doing NaNo is 

hard

). Thought I'd clarify one particular point:

It's just important to make the distinction between this really being a flaw in Urban fantasy and it being just something urban fantasists can use it for.

Oh absolutely. By "a flaw in Urban Fantasy" I basically meant it in the specific, subjective sense (as in "this is something I consider to be a flaw in the works of urban fantasy which I have personally read") not a fundamental weakness of the genre.

I find it particularly infuriating since so much Urban Fantasy is either targeted at children or "young adults" and if there's one thing that young adults *don't* need to be told, it's that being an adult is for losers.

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Sonia Mitchell

 at 01:52 on 2009-06-25Once again I know this is old, but I hadn't read any Campbell when you wrote this. I'm rehashing now I've read enough of 

Hero With a Thousand Faces

 to comment. Not all of it, I have to add (psychology texts bore me) but a fair amount (I'm also cribbing the exact terms from 

here

 because it's been a few months since I touched the book).

And while I agree with the points you make, Dan, I don't think HWATF backs them up. It's not a check-list of ingredients for a story, but a variety of factors of which some (not all) can be found in a given hero's journey. Refusing to return 

is

 a valid stage of the journey, even if it makes for an unsatisfying narrative. I agree that it marks Harry out as an immature hero, just as I think it does Achilles and the Sandman and the Pevensies (who never intended to return home in TLTW&TW). For most of us there does come that point where we stop thinking Dorothy's mad for wanting to go back to Kansas (we grow the fuck up, as you so rightly say), but nevertheless according to Campbell heroes who don't return are still heroes. 

Suicide 

can

 be 'totally heroic' in the classical model Campbell's following, which isn't using heroes as role models. Working in the chivalric model, which I think maybe you are, naturally it isn't. And Harry Potter seems to strongly invite one to take the chivalric viewpoint, right up to telling us how 'gallant' Harry is for protecting a(n extremely competent) woman with an unforgivable curse. If nothing else, the cosmetic details (suits of armour, portraits of damsels, Arthurian treasures and constant references to Merlin) are knightly not classical, and invite one to take a certain perspective (there might be an article in this, actually...). 

As far as I can tell, the supposed precise mapping of Star Wars to the Hero's Journey is a bit ropey, and came about mainly because John Campbell was all "Hey, Star Wars fits the Hero's Journey perfectly" and George Lucas said "Oh... really? I mean, yes. Yes it does."

Which I'd say is the right way to do things - treating. HWATF as a tool for analysis rather than an instruction manual on how to write fiction. I think consciously ticking off the elements of the hero's journey would make for a rather boring (not to mention contradictory) story, since the natural temptation would be to take them far too literally. I'll take tenuous any day :-)

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

 at 16:20 on 2009-09-10Great article and it immediately reminded me of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar trapesty, which is a bit narnian in its basic plot, has some slight elements of urban fantasy and I thin generally is a surprisingly awesome take on what seems on the surfce to be an awfully cliched fantasy world. Commenting on heroic suicides, I think this one has one brilliantly haunting example and a few others might qualify as well.

But really made me recollec this is the development of Dave, who is kind of an average guy compared to the rest of the cast and doesn't get any cool pwers or even the girl or anything. But in a very awesome ending, without any sense of needless fanfare, you know that he'll return back to the real world and things will be okay.

I won't explain more because I'd hate to spoil it for any one and I guess it would be a bit tedious.

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Show / Hide Comments -- More in September 2008

[shamelessnerd]

I just want to say the following headcanon thing LEGITIMATELY was inspired by this thing I saw on a random Google search I don’t even know how it was there, Google is watching me. I typed it all out in a caffeine-fueled frenzy. If you know who made this pic/headcanon thing, let me know so I can give credit. This is the offender:

OKAY SO I NEED TO ADD TO THIS THING ABOUT HOW JASON WAS DIANA'S FAVORITE ROBIN. I NEED TO ADD TO THIS, AND IT'S GONNA BE REALLY FAN-DORK-TASTIC AND IT'S FINE, EVERYTHING IS FINE.

We need to examine this more. Brace yourself for the headcanon feels train. Choo choo, bitches.

I don't think Jason just adored and was respectful to her, no no, he fucking worshiped her. When every Robin has met the others of the Trinity it's always said something about them. When Jason met Superman, he was appropriately awed and flustered, you know, as boys do. It's Superman for shits sake, he's like a myth. How do you talk to a mythical freakin' god?

But Diana? Now she's a bit different. Sure, she flies, she's fast, she's got super strength and sword skills no one can touch, but she doesn't shoot lasers from her eyes or sneeze and make a tornado. She talks to kids, she treats them with respect, as equals. Jason likes that. He grew up fast. He hates being talked down to.

But this really didn't start with Diana being his favorite just because she doesn't ruffle his hair and ask if his studies are going well. No, this goes back to long before he was a Robin. When he was just a little kid with an abusive father and a mother that loved him but couldn't fight back.

Jason has always been a tootin' masculine character. Look at him, he's got all the traits, up and down. Bad boy look, check. Guns, check. Fast cars, check. Street rat punk, check. He's the tallest out of the Robins, and so much goddamn muscle he's got fifteen pounds on Bruce. (Suck it, old man.) There's memes about his thighs ffs. But on the same token he's always related to and sympathizes more with women than any other Robin. Why would that be?

Because his mother loved him. Really, deeply, adoringly loved him, even if he was adopted. She probably always wanted kids and a family but she just chose the wrong man to do it with. Things probably weren't always so bad, they never are when you start out but it got worse steadily, it snuck up on her and by the time Jason was five, she was a convenient punching bag whenever Willis Todd had a bad day at work.

It didn't take long before every day was a bad day at work.

So Jason grew up in a place that started out as pretty nice, they were poor as hell but he never lacked for love from his mom. She made games for him so he wasn't afraid. Charity clothes weren't shameful, they were adventuring gear and he could be anything he wanted, even a wizard or a ninja. She didn't eat her portion of dinner because a spell had been put on her and the only way to break it is if he ate everything instead, and then defeat the dragon guarding her and give her a kiss before bedtime. Then she would eat. When they couldn't pay the utility bills, the candles were the only light they had and they were adventurers exploring ancient caves and had to be very careful to sneak around and find the magic stones she'd hidden everywhere.

Catherine Todd loved her little boy and always sacrificed whatever she could to make sure he wasn't afraid at night. While he slept, she'd cry very quietly.

But no amount of pretend and stories could really hide the fear in her eyes when his father came home. Jason had to hide under the table his arm the around a street mutt, Sparky, and a phone clutched to his chest while his mom tried to hold back her screams as the leather belt, then the fists and the boots came down on her again and again.

His mother ALWAYS took the beatings from him. When Jason was getting a little older and taller and starting to outgrow his clothes faster than they could steal or trade from the charity banks, he started looking like a target. But she never allowed his father to beat him, she wouldn't have it. She made a deal, she'd take the beatings and he wouldn't touch Jason dammit, not him, not her little boy.

Afterwards, when his scumbag father sat down in front of the TV with a beer and some food while his wife cried on the floor, Jason would crawl out of his hiding place and put band-aids on the cuts and bruises. Then she'd hold him in her arms, sobbing, and tell him it's okay, she loves him and she'd never let anything bad happen to him.

But things always got worse for Jason. He loathed his father, he felt furious he couldn't fight back but he knew if he did, his mother's sacrifice would be for nothing. He learned to control his rage early, he had to. But that doesn't mean it didn't burn.

The look of defeat and apathy in her eyes is what hurt him most. He wished she wouldn't just lay down and take it all the time. He wanted her to get up. Fight back. He'd have these dreams where his mom beat down her husband and told him if he ever touched her or her son again, she'd kill him. But he always woke up.

Catherine Todd was Jason's first real hero. Even when she started taking heroin to get through the day, to not feel hunger and not feel pain.

And then there's Wonder Woman. Princess of Themyscira. Amazon Warrior. She was the best fighter in the world and she fought with a grace like poetry and a savagery like vengeance. She was amazing. A woman that was strong enough to throw monsters through walls. Monsters just like his father. He wanted his mom to be more like Wonder Woman.

He wanted Wonder Woman to be his mom.

Now lets fast forward a bit. When his father abandoned them, Jason became the man of the house and his mother was so deep into addiction she could barely function. She'd lost so much weight over the years, pushing her food onto his plate. She'd always cared for and protected him, now he could finally return the favor. He was an 11-year old with a baseball bat and zero tolerance for any assholes that wanted to hurt his mom. She couldn't fight anymore but he could. Any drug dealer stopping by learned that the hard way.

But he couldn't protect her forever. The will had been beaten out of her for over a decade. While he was out stealing food, she overdosed. The pain had been too much. He failed her.

Fast forward again. He's Robin now, he's learned to survive on his own before now, he's not shy about sticking up for himself because dammit, he's not going to sit on the sidelines ever again. That was a helpless feeling he never could get away from. He meets Wonder Woman for the first time and he's just struck dumb. Alfred and Bruce are amused, because this Robin has never held back what's on his mind or given any ground. But after he gets over the awe of meeting his childhood idol (nevermind the fact that he's still technically a kid) he can't stop talking to Diana. He chatters eagerly to her.

Soon it's clear he's something of a fanboy. He asks how she threw this punch from this battle and how she disarmed that villain in that fight. She's more than happy to show him. Then he asks other things, like if she can be such a great fighter, other women can too, right? What if the best way to defeat crime is by preventing it? Like giving women and other common targets of criminals the ability to defend themselves. Couldn't women and children's shelters offer training and classes for free? She loves the idea and promises to see what she can do.

Jason probably writes letters to Diana whenever he can and she responds when she has time. It's not often because they're both so busy, but it's a slow sort of pen-pal thing they have going on. She's easier to talk to than Bruce and learns more about his family from before.

Even though he loved his mom, he also resented her. She let herself become a victim and he'll never quite forgive her for that. He's bitter about it, the idea of 'What if she'd fought back?' always in the back of his head. He'll never know and it's her fault and he misses her but he misses what they might have had. One day he accidentally lets this slip in one of his letters and Diana sends him two pages back, all of it laying out that a mother's love thinks nothing of sacrifice and it's okay for him to be angry but he shouldn't let it taint the good memories he has. He was loved right up until the end. Instead of being angry, be inspired. It wasn't fair, to her or to him, but he can still make his mother proud by making sure no one else has to go through what he did.

How would she know his mother is proud of him? Because Diana is proud of him. Very proud. And she knows what mothers want for their children.

Had she not been off-planet at the time, Diana would've noticed the lack of his letters when he started feeling displaced and needed family to connect to. When he found out he was adopted. When he left to go search for his real mother -- maybe a mother more like Wonder Woman.

When Jason died and Diana found out several weeks later, she was furious with Bruce. Absolutely. Livid. She refused to work with him or speak to him for a month. It was a major cramp in their relationship, as friends and as colleagues. 

She did go home and cry in her mother's arms because he was such a fine boy, dammit. Man's World was cruel and savage and did the worst things to the most innocent people and it turned them into beasts. It broke their hearts and twisted their minds. But not Jason. He came out stronger and more determined than ever to be better. Yes, he was lost and hurt and didn't know where to direct his righteous anger but he was learning so fast and she was so proud of him for it. Crime wasn't a vague thing to him, he grew up in it, lived in it, and he knew exactly why it should be put down. Just like she knew the stakes of war and why it must be fought. He was a warrior. And he died because he was still a kid that wanted a mother who loved him.

She blames herself a little because if she'd been there more for him, given him the mom he really really wanted, he might still be alive. She neglected him, just like everyone else and she will never forgive herself for that.

When Jason came back as the Red Hood, she'd only heard vague rumors from Gotham. It was years before she found out who it was and that's only because Dick was struggling with a guilty conscience for putting 'Jason' into Arkham Asylum. When this 'Red Hood' turned out to be the young Robin who had her action figure and always ran to say hello to her, she gave Dick a look that could kill a chimera. For the first time, he realized why Bruce could fear her so much.

She sat down and started to write a letter to Jason but didn't know where to start.

It hasn't happened yet. She's often run ragged with all her duties, and she hasn't figured out how to tell Bruce she wants to see Jason for reasons too many and complicated to put into words without seeming rude to the other fine boys he's mentored.

But when she does finally meet her favorite Robin she'll hug him and not let go for a long time. Then they'll spend the whole night talking about everything, and for tonight, crime and missions and duty can wait. She'll tell him about the countless women that have fended off their abusers because of the ideas he came up with so many years ago. And he'll be confused at first because doesn't she know he's insane? A killer? A psychopath? Well, she's killed too and she knows why he's doing what he's doing. There are as many battlefields as there are battles, in the mind, in the streets, in the long history of a life. She knows that this is his battle. She's proud of him for fighting what he believes in because that's what he's always done. His methods may not be her own but that's okay. Life has given him the tools and insight to do what he does and she must respect that. War is never pretty.

For a while, Jason is so damn unbalanced by all this, he can't really speak because there's a knot in his throat.

Then she drops another bomb on him by apologizing. For not being there for him, for not realizing that he needed more than a pen pal and for neglecting to tell him all these things before it was too late. There's tears in her eyes and he starts to panic a little.

The next day, she gets a letter from Jason.

So there. There you have it you ugly heathens, feels headcanon train! I think this is why Diana has Jason as her favorite Robin and why he has always looked up to her. I think the fandom somehow recognizes the neat and fitting parallels here. Maybe not ever put down in words like this (or if it has been, I haven't found it yet) but definitely there in the back of the brain. You don't see fanart with Jason wearing a Wonder Woman shirt, or pajamas, or coffee mug for no reason. It's not just because it's funny that the bad boy punk of the BatFamily is a huge Wonder Woman fan. It's because she means something to him that the other Robins never needed in their lives like he did. She was a role model early in his life and still is today. 

Jason likes Wonder Woman because she's overcome and proven herself in a world stacked against her. Women can't fight? Wrong. Women can't be strong? So wrong. Women can't hold important positions in government? She's an ambassador. Women must be sexual, they must defer to their male compatriots, if they do fight they're butch and can't be feminine and beautiful, and if they don't fight they have to stand back and sit in the kitchen.... You might wanna shut up now.

Wonder Woman has defied every single unwritten rule the world tried to put on her and she's broken every single barrier that her 'superiors' have put in front of her. She gives society's expectations an amused little smirk before she breaks them in half. She doesn't let anyone define her. She does what is needed and she doesn't apologize for it. She's a rebel like that. She's powerful but feminine, she's a warrior but also motherly, she fights for peace, but she will fucking kill to protect her loved ones.

Diana's story and Jason's story are so much alike and that is why these two have this unspoken, undefined bond. They know the gritty realities, they know that ideals won’t stop hunger and abuse and exploitation, they know fire sometimes can only be fought with fire. I think the fandom understands that, even vaguely. They recognize she would naturally be his #1 role model. And it would genuinely put me on cloud 9 if DC recognized that too and decided, 'Know what? Let's go for it. Let's make this happen.'

'Let's make this impossible and bizarre idea seem wonderfully human.'

Isn't that what comics are really about?

[empty-dream]

Me watching Fate/Apocrypha ep 9

Darnic this is the 9th episode we don’t need any grail exposition anymore

Use Nazi to rob a mythical object. Sounds rad.

Does Nazi even believe in occult things in the first place?

I mean, is there even a nazi magus? They must be a colossal asshole.

Wow Zouken bleeding and writhing amongst penis worms. A very nice and precious scene.

Woow who is that mysterious person staring between fire who nonchalantly stands behind the church statue- Ha as if the foreshadowing isn’t enough already.

Darnic’s motto: Backstab everybody until nobody’s left to backstab but me

Holy grail? More like “Einzbern ideal naked bodies”

Darnic gets hammy.

BERSERKER!! SMASH!!! *swings mace down*

Shirou: “Will you come to my side?” Fran: Nah my otaku master is way better than someone with Yu-Gi-Oh-inspired hairstyle

Shakespeare: *enters dramatically* Ohoho Don’t fight me I can’t fight lol *exits dramatically*

Shirou, no means fucking no.

Shakespeare should be a narrator for every battle scenes in fate universe I’d watch that

Shirou stop dramatically unsheathing your katana this ain’t Bleach

Wow wow leaping like a squirrel

LOOK AT THAT SMUG SMILE no wonder Semiramis falls hard for him

Such lightning much wow

Jeanne no the priest ain’t on the fortress you’re going the wrong way!

Seriously if I were to ever go into battle, all I’m gonna do is fighting while whining like Astolfo

Bring a trumpet to a magic battle THAT SOUNDS SO LOUD AND ANNOYING IT OBLITERATES ENEMIES

He looks so proud of himself he’s so cute

The continuation of Bitchface Karna vs Uncle Drac

Karna apologizes for thinking Spartacus betrayed red faction. Karna understands Spartacus just goes back into his original rebel self. Karna is a fucking angel.

Karna-Atalanta teamwork is my new favorite thing

Atalanta the smug nee-san

NO ATALANTA THAT’S ACTUALLY A BAD MOVE AGAINST SPARTACUS

Wow the animation of Phoebus Catastrophe is amazing

Atalanta: I love the smell of Trifas in the morning. Except it’s night.

Achilles: “Sensei” Chiron: “Rider of Red” Me: Ouch.

It just goes to show that Chiron is indeed very mature and Achilles for all his feats is still youthful SNIFF

Meanwhile, Sieg casually ‘robs’ his former house amidst the war. And inserts existential crisis to his friends.

Not that it could ever be called his house tho

And yeah can’t deny existential crisis is also a thing to do when living

I just love everybody just jumps into conclusion that Semiramis is Caster of Red while she herself is Assassin of Red and the real Caster of Red is an useless drama king

Semiramis: Oho I just know a little bit of magecraft-THAT TURNS OUT TO BE GOD-TIER

Well she must use some magic to hold her dress on her boobs.

Astolfo is so full of magical items in store he might as well be Fate/Apocrypha equivalent of Doraemon.

I have a lot of questions regarding the spike on Semiramis’s hands. Can it be undone? Is it sharp? How does it even work? If she wants to hold Shirou is it on the way? Real god tier magecraft indeed.

Falling in front of the moon, Astolfo-style

They have so many blankets inside the castle huh

Astolfo be like “I’M A DAMN RIDER THERE IS NO WAY I’M GONNA BE HIT BY A DAMN CAR”

Somebody draw Mordred driving a tank into battlefield it’s hilarious

So Kairi’s role is pretty much drop Mordred to the battlefield, much like how a dad would drop his kid to the school. A+ parenting.

Astolfo knowing full well he is fucked but still summoning his lance anyway is such a courageous thing

Semiramis: Oh so this saint ain’t running Naruto style 24/7

OK somebody in A-1 MUST have a fetish for tying up Jeanne in chains SHOW YOURSEEELFFFF

I believe this is just an excuse to focus on her boobs eehhhhh???? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Caules you should meet the other Kotomine boy, he is a fucking superhuman.

Ah, the fun music!! Imma dance

First Folio should be called Dick Move

I don’t know anything about the actual Frankenstein literature, and not much about typemoon version of Victor Frankenstein, but to beat her just because she’s emotionless is a shit thing to do

Well to be fair she turns out having lots of emotions

I like their approach to show Fran’s thought with written words. Fitting for a Berserker with high intelligent.

Did I say dick move? Yeah dick fucking move.

FRAN OH MY GOD :’’’’((((((( I wanna hug her :((((

Look at mom Caules, immediately uses one command seal just to calm her down

He doesn’t blame her. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t regret using such a precious command seal. He even praises her. THIS IS HOW A MASTER SHOULD BE!!

Wow Mordred using Clarent while still in her civilian outfit. So cool.

MORDRED YOU ARE THE LAST PERSON WHO SHOULD SAY THAT you led a war that ended up destroying a whole kingdom because you believed that you were qualified as king, that your father sucked and on top of that you just wanted so badly to be recognized by your father. IF SIEGFRIED IS AN IDIOT THEN SO ARE YOU.

HOLY CRAP ASTOLFO GETS MAD

ASTOLFO I LOVE YOU THANK YOU FOR DEFENDING SIEGFRIED AND CALLING MORDRED DELIQUENT

Semiramis watching Jeanne: “Seriously why my master pays too much attention on this girl”

DISAPPEAR, HOLY MAIDEN OR WHATEVER is my new favorite trash talk.

Wow did she just full on nuke Jeanne hell hath no fury indeed

Semiramis: “How’s that, bitch?” Jeanne: “Ha, nice try, bitch.” Semiramis: “This bitch..!”

So the girlfriend tries to nuke Jeanne with ancient flying fortress and now the boyfriend tries to nuke Jeanne with servant bomb. Truly a match in heaven.

Darnic gets hammy, again.

Sieg: “YO BOI LET ME SHOW YOU I’M THE REAL PROTAGONIST HERE!!!“

I think they try hard to make awesome action scenes in this episode. Choreography is great. But in exchange, faces go ‘nyooomm’ a lot

So Jeanne suddenly stops doing naruto run and the main battle music isn’t played in this episode did someone from A-1 read my snarky comments last week???

NEXT: maybe some drama bomb will be dropped…

[grandpagreymane]

Legion - the good, the bad, the “what the flying fuck were you thinking, Blizzard?”

Let’s kick this off with the good since I’m a pessimist at heart and I like to set things up before I knock them down.

The return of class quests - these were great in my opinion. It was nice to have more long-term goals to work towards this time, and the unique questlines for each class helps make playing alts slightly more bearable since you’re getting a different experience each time.

World Quests - huge improvement over dailies in my opinion, even if it’s ultimately a smaller change. Now you can at least choose which zone you wanna do your dailies in and if you don’t care for them you can just do the four you need for your cache and that’s it. Mixing in PVP quests into the mix is also a nice way to try and get some more world PVP action out there, even if it ultimately didn’t work out that way.

Mythic Plus - Mythic+ was SUCH a good fucking idea. It’s nice to have a smaller group alternative to raiding for gear and the different affixes are actually challenging and require you to change how you play and build your character. Granted, some of the affixes are ball-busters, but that’s the point.

Individual challenge modes - I’ve been loving the challenge modes this expansion. It’s so nice to have an encounter that’s built with your spec in mind and is a test of your mechanics and skill as a player, with a (mostly) cool cosmetic reward tied into it so if you suck you don’t feel like you’re missing too much.

Actual regular content  releases - Everyone who played WoD knows how shitty the content drought was. Thankfully Legion isn’t WoD and we’re actually getting new dungeons, raids and events pretty often. We haven’t had an entire content patch devoted to a fucking selfie camera so far.

The return of Karazhan - The new dungeon revamp of Kara was a neat idea. I liked it more as the “mega dungeon” it was when they debuted it before Blizzard split it into two halves, but it’s still a great dungeon to run and it’s a new twist on an old raid. And now you have TWO Attumen mounts to chase.

All of the little Easter Eggs laid around the game - The amount of care and detail they put into hiding some of these is astonishing. Things like the hidden artifact appearances (especially the Ashbringer one - they literally took every old Ashbringer rumor from vanilla and threw them into one questline), the Kosumoth hidden quest with the orbs, returning to Gnomeregan to fight a 5-man raid boss, and so many more. I’m so glad that they actually put their heart into this expansion and it really shows.

And now the bad, and boy is it bad.

Artifacts - Right off the bat, artifacts were a big mixed bag. Up until 7.2 the grind was absolutely insane and drove a lot of players away from the expansion, especially the altoholics. Artifact knowledge and power punished rolling alts, punished people who wanted to change specs, and even punished people for staying with the same spec because you were never more than one nerf away from all that AP you threw into those swords meaning fuck all. They’ve managed to iron out most of the issues regarding the artifact grind now, but that’s a full year later.

Legendaries - RNG legendaries are already a mistake. RNG legendaries that are core to making your spec work and flow smoothly are an even bigger mistake. RNG legendaries that have effects that were literally ripped out of your talent tree from the previous expansion is just insulting. Ultimately Legion legendaries don’t even feel legendary - I got most of mine from world quest cache boxes and that shit feels like a participation trophy. I didn’t earn it, you just gave it to me, and now I have BiS gear forever. Or worse, you got Sephuz’s Secret, in which case you’re probably considering re-rolling. Like, the fact that BAD LEGENDARIES EXIST is baffling to me.

Number inflation - Sweet fucking lord, I do over a million DPS now. I have six million health as a DPS class. Bosses have billions of health. I’m getting artifact power boosts in the billions. I pop an Execute crit and the damn game’s considering making the numbers continue in a second row the crit is so huge. It’s really not that big a deal all things considered, but once numbers reach a certain threshold they kind of lose all meaning for the observer, and I think WoW’s passed that point a long time ago. I can’t wait for the stat and ilevel squish in Battle for Azeroth.

Pruning and class balance - Did we seriously need another fucking pruning? I didn’t think we had any spells LEFT to prune but Blizzard surprised me yet again. Some classes are down to four-button rotations and it’s fucking stupid. Also their idea of “class fantasy” is a joke and their efforts to make each spec more unique made a lot of them feel more generic and samey. Warriors don’t even have stances anymore for fuck’s sake - tell me how that makes the class more unique? Or DKs with their presences? Why does Shaman have a blue rage bar now instead of mana? Artifacts also played into this since it shoehorned your spec into using only one kind of weapon. Did you like two-handed frost? Too bad, you dual wield now. Did you like single-minded fury? Too bad, two-handers. Give me back my fucking Gladiator Stance, god dammit.

Time gating - Absolutely FUCK time gating. Don’t make me wait literal days to finish your stupid questline due to order hall mission table bullshit. Don’t make me do only one Suramar quest a week before waiting for the next one. If someone is able to play the game all day let them. Don’t sit here and tell people “no you’ve had enough fun for today”, because if you tell them this enough they’ll leave and go to a game that won’t tell them that. I don’t even no-life this game but I see no reason to hinder the people that do. Players shouldn’t be punished for wanting to play your game.

Order Halls and Mission Tables - Please for the love of God, never ever do these again. Nothing takes people out of the game more than sending someone ELSE to do the adventuring for them. This is a fucking MMO, not FarmVille. I don’t want to micro-manage an entire village’s worth of idiots and tell them what to do all day and I wouldn’t if you didn’t make this shit mandatory to finish the class and new content questlines. And then you have the audacity to time gate it so I have to wait days at a time for missions to clear so I can do another one of the FIVE I HAVE LEFT TO DO.

There’s so much more I could have done for both good and bad things about Legion, but this shit’s approaching thesis paper length so I’m just gonna cut it off here. In short, I think that for every one step forward they took with Legion, they took two steps back. The things they added in that make the game more fun get almost immediately offset by the things that either make your playing experience a pain in the ass or just outright tell you you’re not allowed to keep going on the thing you were having fun with. Ultimately Legion is a good expansion that is seriously being held back from being one of the best by this sort of shit and I really do hope they learn from their mistakes here and make Battle for Azeroth a truly great expansion. PS - Suramar and Pathfinder were great, fuck casuals.

[iamartemisday]

To all fans of Lokiday

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few months, weighing the pros and cons and wondering how you would all feel about this.  It was a difficult decision to come to, but I think now is the right time to do a full rewrite of Lokiday.

Below is the new first chapter as I have redone it.  You may notice some significant differences between the original and the new version.  I would like to know your opinion either in a reblog or an ask.  

I understand some of you might not like these changes, but I think if you keep an open mind, you will see why I concluded that it was in the story’s best interest to improve on it in this way.

Thank you, and I hope you all enjoy the brand new Lokiday:

Day 65: Jane Foster

Jane gets a paper cut.

She pauses turning the page of her magazine, and brings her index finger level with her eyes. A neat trail of red blood slides down the pad. She presses her thumb against it.

The wound stings.

She presses harder.

As Shakespeare once said, there's no better start to a story than masochism.

Okay, he probably didn't say that. Would've been fitting if he did, though. Did you guys know he once had a character off herself by swallowing fire? That's almost as cool as when I ran that guy over with the Zamboni.

In case that obvious film reference didn't give it away, this is Deadpool! Here to offer my insightful and witty remarks about this lovely fanfic that is still incomplete despite having begun in 2012.  Because what kind of lazy ass bitch does that? 

Anyway, lso, as I'm sure you've already figured out, this is an April Fool's joke and she's not actually going to rewrite this fic. Just wanted to clear that up in case some of you are nerds who totally fell for it.

If so, hahahaha! You're the butt of the joke. Ha.

When she's done, her fingers stick together, and she meets slight resistance separating them. Her thumb is stained with blood. She flexes the joints experimentally, lips puckered. Jane kisses the air and sucks in a breath. Then, she's on her feet and off the tall lab chair.

Suspense! I love suspense. I need some popcorn. And a chimichanga.

(OBLIGATORY CHIMICHANGA REFERENCE QUOTA: FILLED)

All around her are half finished equations and equipment strewn around haphazardly. The walls are covered in pictures of various constellations she learned about in elementary school. Those not on the wall stick to her shoes when she steps on them. She hasn't cleaned up her lab in a long time. There's no point in trying anymore.

She reaches the sink and runs cool water over her entire hand. She entertains the idea of rubbing soap into the wound. That would hurt like hell.

Oh yeah baby, you do that. Ooooh yeeeeah! You dirty girl.

Jane doesn't do this, but she does marvel at how far gone she already is for the millionth time in what feels like days.

Feels like, because it really should have been days.

It's not, though.

It's just one.

Just one, single, solitary day that's gone by.

Mmphf! Mmphf! Mmphf-mmphf mmpfh.

TRANSLATION: That's some damn good popcorn. Tastes like chicken if chicken was popcorn.

(OBLIGATORY OBSCURE REFERENCE NO ONE WILL GET QUOTA: FILLED)

Mmphf!

TRANSLATION: I'm on a roll!

Jane snorts and walks back to her seat. She swipes the magazine off the table, throwing it at the opposite wall. She doesn't care, she can't read the damn thing anyway.

SHIELD had been so accommodating when sending her off into thinly veiled hiding. They set her up with colleagues that spoke fluent English, and were fairly close to her in age so they'd have plenty to talk about. Her bed had nicer linens than a five star hotel, and the equipment she'd been given to work with had reduced her to an excited child at Disneyland the first time she saw it.

And yet they still couldn't get her one measly magazine in English. How typical.

That reminds me of this one time when I was hunting down this guy in one of those back alley dive bars, and I caught him, and I was like 'Where the fuck is Francis?' And he was like, 'something something not English but probably in the area of please don't kill me Deadpool something.' So I was a bit perturbed and then he tried to run away. I was like, 'fuck no, compadre!' And then I shot him in the dick. Like right in the dick. Wasn't even on purpose. Just a lucky shot I guess.

So yeah, kindred spirits me and Jane right here.

The useless ream of paper hits the floor with a satisfying 'flop', and then Jane feels an icy chill run through her. She shivers, more at the temperature drop than low, ominous chuckle that follows.

Oh oh! I know! I know exactly who it is!

It's Hawkeye!

"That's not polite."

Jane closes her eyes. She doesn't want to look in that mirror on the opposite wall and have to stare at his smarmy face right now. Maybe if she keeps quiet, he'll go away and never come back. Or maybe he'll just talk more.

Wait no, not Hawkeye. No one would ever not be happy to see him. Have you seen his biceps? So dreamy…

"Someone's going to have to pick it up."

"No one comes in here but me," she says. "Even if they did, what do I care?"

Yeah, Loki, what do you take her for? A neat freak? She's a scientist. Scientists and neat freaks go together like fish and cheese. Like Al and workable eyeballs. Like Francis and life.

He tsks. If Jane were two feet taller and a million times stronger, she'd punch his face all the way in and then maybe rip his tongue out for good measure. Let's see him tsk at her then!

Fuck me, that's hot! Hey, what if we made a few tweaks to this story? Like making it a Deadpool/Jane fic? I'm down with that!

Just need to think of a ship name…

"Now, now, Jane Foster, you don't wear apathy well."

I can think of something better for her to wear! It starts with an 'L' and rhymes with 'schmeather bustier!'

She turns around. She was going to eventually, so she might as well get it over with. His bright green eyes stare down at her, a small smile gracing his features. His stance is calm, collected and arrogant. In short, everything Jane expected of him.

Loki was a lot of things, but never a disappointment. Not to her.

Eat your heart out, Ironman! No performance issues here as confirmed by a reliable source!

Now fully facing him, Jane notices he's in full battle garb. He even has that crazy helmet on. Maybe he's going to fight again, or maybe he's got another trick for her up his sleeve. She'd put neither above him. At least now she has a comeback.

"And you don't wear those antlers well, but it's never stopped you."

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP!

Burn.

His smile vanishes, and Jane smirks, feeling accomplished. Full blown laughter builds, but she doesn't let it out yet. He exhales through his nose, fingers curling into a ball. A long time ago, this used to terrify her. Now, she just wants to laugh harder.

So what about GunScience? That a good ship name.

Hmm… seems a little plain to me. I'll keep working on it. Back to the story!

She doesn't feel like alienating him further, though, not this time. He hasn't been around for three 'days' and she doesn't care to be apart from him. That just means she has to face the fact that she actually wants him around. It's a feeling equivalent to getting repeatedly kicked in the gut and winded.

Pfft, I could handle him. If you saw what I did to that doucherocket Smith, you'd know.

Hint: It involved narrow appendages being forced in places narrow appendages should not be forced in.

With that in mind, let's make Deadpool/Loki a thing too! Much easier to come up with a ship name.

I give you… FrostMerc! Huh? Huh?

…

Well fine, be that way. I'm not sharing any of my popcorn with you guys now.

Jane moves away from him, walking briskly to the mini-refrigerator in the corner where her endless supply of bottled water is kept. She pulls out two, opens one and tosses the other over her shoulder. She knows he'll catch it.

"So," she says conversationally, as if this super powered mythical figure and potential world conqueror who once almost destroyed her hometown was just another girlfriend of hers. "What's on the agenda for today? You're all dressed up and ready to go. You must have something big planned."

He doesn't answer.

"Gonna cause some destruction?"

He still doesn't answer.

"You know, burn down all the buildings, slaughter all the innocents, kick all the puppies, anything?"

Nothing.

He's still mad that he got burnt to a crisp with that antler's comment.

He got destroyed. Pulverized. Demolished beyond all recognition. The metaphorical narrow appendage is all the way up his-

And now Jane is getting fed up, not to mention confused (definitely not concerned). He's usually way more talkative than this.

Didn't they sew his mouth shut in one of the myths? I think they totally did that once. What a disgusting, reprehensible, unforgivable thing to fucking sew a man's fucking mouth shut.

Amirite? *cough*FuckyouFoxneverforget*cough*

She faces him. His eyes are on her, but his mind is elsewhere. He sees something Jane cannot, something invisible and directly in front of her from the looks of it. She really hates when he gets like that, when he closes off completely and never explains himself. He seems to go back and forth between treating Jane like a person, and like she's just a bug he can squash under his foot. Jane's not exactly in the mood for that today.

When they're still in mid-character development and not sure if they want to be a douchey Not-British Brit, or a dude from that Jane Austen book Not-British Brit.

Just fanfic things.

"Don't tell me you're doing this for me," she says mockingly. If there's one way to get to Loki… "Because I'll be honest with you, you look much better without that helmet on. It's very unflattering."

Oh. My. God. Becky. Like that girl in her plaid and jeans knows anything about fashion.

She blinks her eyes, and he's right in front of her. Jane stares at his armored chest nonchalantly. She wonders when he'll realize the novelty of that trick wore off 'days' ago.

"Do not test me," he growls.

Wait, I got it! AssassinScientist!

…nah, too long. People would just abbreviate it or some shit.  I’m not here for that.

Jane tries to ignore the speeding up of her heartbeat and the building heat in her stomach. Of course he has to use that voice when threatening her. Of course he knows exactly what that husky tone of his does to her every single time. And, of course, this whole miserable situation has turned her into a borderline suicidal masochist who just has to keep pushing him.

Accept it, Jane. Accept… and ye shall be free!

And living the dream of millions of fangirls. That too.

"Just admit that you're as bored as I am," she says. "You probably thought about going after your brother and the Avengers today, but then you realized there's no point. There's no point in anything unless we can find a way out of this."

His frown deepens with every word out of her mouth. His eyebrows knit together in a scowl, and his hands ball into fists. Jane could swear his eyes flash red for a second. It excites her about as much as it used to terrify her, and that's a whole other batch of implications she absolutely must avoid dwelling on. She kind of needs what little sanity she has left, thank you very much.

Sanity? Girl, take it from an expert. Sanity is overrated.

Why, if I was sane, I wouldn't be the ultra hot star of the highest grossing R rated film of all time, now would I?

I didn’t think so.

Jane's already seen his Jotunn form twice, which is two more times than Loki would have liked. He still won't explain why he hates his heritage so much. Jane's asked him more times than she can count, and all she gets is silence, or commands to be silent, or screaming and cursing before he disappears to God only knows where for several 'days' at a time. The most she's ever gotten out of him is that the Frost Giants are savage monsters who would rip the flesh from her bones if she gets too close.

They sound fluffy!

She doesn't really get it. He's not all that scary with blue skin and red eyes and no other noticeable changes in appearance. Hell, the blue people in Avatar were creepier looking. If Jane were to fear Loki for anything, it would be the fact that he's a psychotic mass murderer bent on world domination who could tear her head off with his bare hands if he wanted to. That knowledge, like so many other things, had lost its edge a long time ago. Even when he bares down on her like this, so much bigger than her, eyes speaking of dark intent, Jane can't bring herself to fear him.

Yeah, CGI Smurf mutants really start to lose their effect in the face of all that.

Then again, that might be why they keep making those stupid Smurf movies. You see what desensitization does to you? Now studio hacks think people want more of those despicable balls of malformed play-doh on our screens. This is a national crisis! Wake up America!

(PLEASE NOTE: Neither Deadpool nor the author has ever seen a Smurf movie.)

Hey hey! Don't give it away!

She could still fear what emotions he did bring out in her, though.

"You should watch your tongue around me, Mortal," he says with that voice again. Why always that voice? "You might not like the consequences if you don't."

The underlying threat is palpable. There are so many different ways he could carry it out, too. Jane won't pretend not to know what they are. They spill incoherently into her mind all at once. She knows who Loki is and what he is and what he can do. He's been nothing if not eager to show her in the previous 'days.'

I smell a sex scene!

Jane smiles innocently, he hates that. She runs a hand across his shoulder and down his chest, he likes that.

Must get more popcorn.

She pulls herself closer to him, their faces inches apart. She supports her body with one hand on the table. It doesn't slide away from her as it should. Trust Loki to prepare for this. She doesn't see them leaving this room anytime soon.

Mmphf!

(Translation: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date…)

"Really?" She blows in his ear. He loves that. "Because I think you're all talk."

Happy Groundhog Day!

He seizes her by the arms, pulls her down roughly, and then his lips are on hers, hard and unforgiving. A moan is caught in Jane's throat, she doubts he'll relinquish her mouth long enough for her to let it out. His large hands are everywhere at once. One minute, he's fondling her breast through her shirt, the next he's running them up and down her legs, coming so close to her core that Jane feels she'll come apart at the seams if he doesn't touch her soon.

He does know how to tease.

Hey, ladies out there. You know what I like? What I really really like? *wiggles eyebrows*

Puppies! Puppies are adorable, aren't they?

His tongue forces it's way in. There is no fight for dominance this time, because it's clear who is in control and that he intends to keep it that way. Jane's own hands move across the metal of his armor. That damnable armor he just had to wear today. His casual (in the loosest possible sense) clothes are much easier to remove. He usually steps in with that fancy magic of his pretty quickly. In fact, he should have by now. Is this what he meant by 'consequences?'

Loki snakes an arm around her thin waist, hoisting her up and on the table. As soon as Jane's back makes contact, she is hit by a blast of ice cold from below. It doesn't take a scientist to figure out that somewhere in the millisecond it took him to do all this, he also magicked her clothes off. Jane rolls her eyes and thinks of commenting on this, but then his tongue is in her mouth and coherent thought is but a distant dream.

Kittens are also cute. With their little paws and their ears and the traces of demonic evil lurking below the surface.

He gets up on top of her, never once breaking the kiss. She brings her hands up to his warming face and runs her fingers through his thick hair, down the back of his neck, to the collar of his undershirt and dammit all, why is he still dressed?

He smirks against her lips.

"Frustrated, my dear?"

But you know, bunnies have got to top them all in cuteness factor. I cried for days the first time I saw Fatal Attraction.

Jane wants to slap him so badly right now. Instead, she kisses him harder. He groans in response and raises her up a little so her chest is arched into his. He wrenches his lips away and Jane cries out in protest. She stops complaining when he moves down to her neck, and then her breast. As his tongue swirls around her nipple, Jane struggles to come back to herself.

Have I killed the mood yet?

(Yeah, probably)

Awesome! My work here is done! Farewell, my friends- Wait, what? What do you mean the chapter's not over yet?

There is a digital clock on the wall marking the time as ten after four in the afternoon. This gives them plenty of time to go about their routine. To make stiff conversation, to try once again to find out what's happened to them and how to stop it, to descend into yet another pointless argument about nothing, to threaten and be threatened with death and injury and a bunch of other nasty things, to fuck each other senseless in bed and on tables and on the floor and in the shower and against the wall and on top of the bathroom sink and in the mess room and in her direct superior's office (boy, was that ever memorable).

Then the next 'day' comes along and, like everything else around them, the cycle repeats anew.

No changes.

No changes.

Okay this time, I know I've got it! Assassin didn't work, scientist didn't work, but you know what does work?

Deadpane!

Get it? Because it sounds like deadpain, and when I'm out there killing all the monsters and murderers and Francis's of the world, I know I haven't done my job right if there isn't lots of pain!

So now that this hypothetical Me/Jane ship has a proper name, let's get back to the story!

*cough*seriouslythoughshippersgetonthat*cough**cough* Boy, do I have a nasty case of the sniffles today!

Jane sometimes wonders what her friends and family would think if they could see her now, naked with her legs spread underneath a psychopathic Norse God.

They'd be like, fuck yeah, you lucky bitch! Score!

Least I would. Have you seen that tight Hiddleass of Loki's? Almost as nice as Wolverine's.

Like Logan gets a 97 out of 100 while Loki is easily a 96.8. 

Her mother wouldn't like it.

Erik wouldn't like it.

Darcy… would congratulate her on getting laid.

See? Someone gets it.

Jane can't help giggling. Loki, who has been trailing open mouthed kisses up her neck, bites down hard and makes her gasp. She fists his hair as he licks a hot line back up to her mouth. He re-claims it, pulling her head up slightly with one hand while the other continues to travel.

Her arms are around his waist, and he is still fully dressed.

Bastard.

Yeah, bastard. Strip already!

His lips are relentless, his tongue even more so. She feels deft fingers between her legs, and shamelessly moans into his mouth when they stroke her. She writhes beneath him, knowing that's exactly what he wants.

Loki always gets what he wants from her.

After sixty five days of working for it, you would hope.

'Remember Jane,' she tells herself when he strokes her again, and then finally, with a wave of his hand, is as naked as she is. 'Three benefits to dealing with Loki Laufeyson. Remember them!'

I can think of way more than just three, but we only have half a page left.

Benefit number 1: He is, so far, the only other person in the world who knows what's going on.

Except for the reader. Times like this fourth wall breaking would come in handy. Why is it so out of style among fictional characters? I don't understand the world.

She feels the muscles in his back, lean, but rock solid. He's shifted positions, so that his erection is pressed firmly against her.

Benefit number 2: As the only other person who knows what's going on, and as a powerful sorcerer with a genius level intellect, he's also the only other person in the world who can help find a way out of this.

It's funny because when this was written, I'm pretty sure not even the writer knew a way out, didja?

(Fuck off, Deadpool)

Hey now, this was your idea for me to do this.

He removes his lips from hers again, and Jane immediately attacks his neck, returning the favor with a bite of her own. Loki growls in response, and Jane knows he's going to make her pay for that.

She looks forward to it.

Benefit number 3…

*leans forward in anticipation of incredible revelation*

He steadies her hips with his hand, and uses magic to keep the rest of her restrained. Jane finds she can still work her mouth, though, when he thrusts into her and the friction and sheer pleasure of it all makes her scream.

…He's spectacular in bed.

Six out of ten at best. I am not speaking from experience, it's merely because I am obliged to count myself, and I am an outlier whose sexual prowess would make Zeus feel like an awkward virgin.

Sorry, that's just a fact. I don't make the rules.

And with that, I have completed this little venture of mine. Stay tuned next April Fool's Day, when I review the last chapter of Lokiday!

…HA! April Fool's! We all know Artemis is never going to finish anythi-mmm mm. Mmm?! MMMM! MMMMMM!

(And then Deadpool could no longer speak because he suddenly transformed into the first movie version who got his mouth sewn shut!)

MMMMMMMMMMMM!

(Happy April Fool's Day!)