#they literally make you watch the same scene three separate times while moving the camera slightly to retcon a new character in

[lilshitwayne]

i am obsessed with the plot of fast & furious 10 being "everything that happened in 5, but move the camera 10 cm to the right" and then it ends and its like "everything that happened, but move the camera again please"

[falcor-thee-luck-dragon]

Interviews - Henry Cavill x wife/actress reader

Summary: You and Henry have been married for a couple years now, and when you’re both part of the Witcher cast, fun interviews are to be had.

Warning: nothing but a good time, btw I’ve never written anything like this so I hope it’s good enough that I might feel motivated to write more

-Readers Witcher character is loosely based off my Geralt fic from here (just a little self promotion), but in this case you play a full vampire in this Witcher universe

The days have been long and grueling, filming hours upon hours of stunts and regular acting had taken its toll. Not to mention the countless times in hair and make up paired with costume changes and traveling to film on certain locations.

To say being apart of Netflix’s The Witcher was full of tiring days and some accidental bruises would be a huge understatement. But none of that mattered, nor did you bother to complain when through the thick and thin of it all did you have Henry with you along the way. And your favorite big slobbery bear, Kal whenever he was allowed on set.

Fortunately for you in the beginning of all the craziness, the casting and writers had wanted you specifically for the part of Y/C/N in the new series before Henry even auditioned for the role of Geralt, that was soon given to him after you accepted your fresh role of vampiric heroine.

It was ironically strange in a good way, you had watched your dork of a husband play the Witcher: Wild Hunt a few times before, eventually learning of what Geralt of Rivia was, who Y/C/N was in the story, who Yennefer and Ciri were, Tris and even Jaskier.

Who would have thought that you’d finally get to snag a role side by side with Henry in quite literally one of the most fantastic shows you’ve ever heard of. You didn’t even need to see the show yet to know how well it was most likely to be reviewed. Being a key character in the grand storyline was enough to convince you of how amazing it would most certainly turn out in the finished product.

And after all was said and done, you couldn’t believe how well loved and popular the show truly became in the following months after shooting and its eventual release onto Netflix. The after parties and cast celebrations truly made you blessedly grateful for pulling through to the vary end.

Then again you had your mans Henry by your side every step of the way. He was your rock and you were most definitely his. You know life on set would have been far less entertaining and dreadfully long if not for the lovely company of your dear Witcher, Henry. And so far after the fact, you and a good portion of the cast have been placed in random interviews for the majority of the day.

Reason being, The Witcher has at long last finally premiered and as per usual the people and media live for those cast interviews that always reveal some interesting events. So far this morning you’ve done some interviews with Anya that have gone perfectly fine since the two of you seem to click so well.

Also it helps ease the anxiety of your fellow newer cast mates to the world of continuous interviews with an experienced veteran actor like yourself, who’s gone round the ring more times then you can count. Though you can’t help but wonder how Henry’s doing, considering you’ve been separated since the sessions began at 10am, you’ve had lunch and now it’s about 1 in the afternoon with more hours to go.

Luckily for you, you’ve just been informed of another interview with the man of the hour himself. Saying your goodbyes and well wishes to your fellow cast mates, you stand and follow the guide into the advised place. Aka some really nice hotel room that’s been done up real nice for efficient interviewing, complete with the Witcher insignia on a large background poster and three chairs that happen to look rather comfy.

The camera and sound people nod in acknowledgment as you walk in, you nod back no doubt making their day with your friendliness and adorable smile that quite literally lights up a room. Soon you spot the bubbly yet nervous interviewee who instantly welcomes you into her space like you’re an old friend.

You sit, a bit confused as to where your partner happens to be at the moment, the interviewer, Lauren makes small talk before a door opens and her big bright doe eyes go wide in nervous excitement. A telling smile upon her face as she shifts in her chair before looking back to you again with a happy grin.

Henry says a quick hello to the behind the scenes crew before waving to Lauren, you smirk while watching him get comfortable next to you, “Well, well, well. Get lost on your way up, you know they have guides for a reason.” You tease as he chuckles at your humorous jab, relieved to see you again after a couple hours apart.

“Traffic.” He quips with a shrug.

“Uh huh.” You mutter with a shake of your head before drawing your attention back to Laura, “Can’t take him anywhere I swear, he does this all the time.”

She laughs as Henry pretends to gasp at your teasing, you chuckle along with them before she finally collects herself, “Well, welcome back to London. It’s fantastic to have you both in town once again, and your big beautiful faces all over Leicester Square.”

You both laugh, “Right.” Says Henry, “I guess we do look pretty cool.”

“Hell yeah, I mean where else can I see myself with a giant sword on a building? And anyways look at this beautiful mug,” You say gently squeezing Henry’s cheeks in your hand, “he’s literally killing it out there.” They laugh as you give Hen another playful squeeze before letting go and setting your arm against the chairs cushioned armrest. 

“Alight let’s start.” She says enthusiastically before glancing down at her cards then back up to you and Henry. Then into one of the two the cameras, “Hi I’m Lauren from Entertainment Weekly and today we’re here with the two stars of Netflix’s The Witcher.” She says enthusiastically while giving a nod to you two, indicating that the camera is now focused on you both, “Henry Cavill and Y/N Cavill.”

You both smile in acknowledgment as Henry gives a slight nod, “How you doing?”

“I’m great,” She beams, “So, I’ll get right into it, what do you like most about the story? What really drew you into the script that made you say, yes this is going to be awesome?”

Slapping a hand against Henry’s muscular leg, you hum, “I’ll let Hen take this one he’s a real expert on the linguistics of the whole show.”

“Thanks Y/N/N.” Replies Henry, bemused that you’re making him take the first question.

You nod to him knowingly with a smirk, “Of course.” Knowing how much he loves to talk about the show and also because you’d rather have him use his energy to talk about it then do that yourself. Priorities, right, though in your defense it’s been a long day.

“Well I absolutely love the games and the books themselves are phenomenal works of literature.” He explains, his face glowing with that usual glimmer of excitement in his eyes, “The story and the world of the Witcher is just so rich and full of potential that when I signed on for the show, I immediately knew it would be amazing, no doubt.”

You lean into the arm of you chair, “And of course I was there so that’s always a bonus.”

“That too.” He smiles adorably, “That too of course.”

Lauren smiles, “Great. So, what was it like working together, how was it having your characters interact with one another?”

You smile, setting a hand against Henry’s forearm, “This guy right here.” You deadpan before waving him off dramatically, “So annoying, my god he whined all the time and he was such a drama queen dear lord so ugh....” You start cackling before you can even finish the sentence causing Henry to loose it as well and with that the interviewer.

Shaking your head you rest your hand against his shoulder, “I joke, he was a gem to work with as usual...I mean I feel incredibly blessed to be able to act alongside my husband for months and months every single day. It’s a rarity in this line of work and I’m grateful to have shared this experience...and I guess more so this whole adventure with him as well.”

The interviewer aww’s as Henry tilts his head to lean into your hand that’s still resting atop his shoulder before pulling away just as quickly, the intimate sentiment not going unnoticed by you or Lauren who looks to be enjoying your loving yet calm energy with one another. “That’s so sweet, what about you Henry?”

“Oh yes absolutely,” Agrees Henry to your recent statement, “not only did I have her by my side through it all but the dynamic of our characters interacting together was so fun to shoot. I think the audience will really be able to see their relationship grow on screen into something strong and beautiful like in the books.”

Slow clapping you give him a curt nod of approval, “Well said.”

Lauren smirks, “Seems like it. Well, I was able to catch the premier yesterday and I gotta say...it was fantastic! I couldn’t believe how diffident the two of you looked from how you are now.” She gushes enthusiastically.

The corners of Henry’s lips curl into a proud smile for the fellow crew of the Witcher’s, “Oh that’s great then, honestly we gotta give all the props to the costume and makeup team, they’re so talented and know how to make us look like real badasses.” He adds.

You nod in agreement before grinning at a positive memory of your first interaction with Henry as Geralt, “Oh for sure, I remember during the early stages of production when our characters met each other for the first time, before this we came to set together but went separate ways to shoot our own stuff in the meantime so I never got a real look at him.” You recall with a bright smile as Henry watches your every move, beaming just the same.

“It was so funny, I was in the tent with Freya Allen, the wonderful girl who plays Ciri, and then suddenly her eyes got all big and nervous and I was like, that’s not me right? Something weird didn’t just happen with my costume? And then I turned around to find this man, wig on, face a mess, and his eyes looked so fearsome and different...it was a bit startling.” You say with a chuckle, “I clearly wasn’t expecting to see Geralt right then and there. He just looked so unlike Henry.”

“Yeah, I was almost hurt.” Laughs Henry, “She had to like squint and make sure it was me.”

Rolling your eyes, you shrug, “He had some real creepy looking colored contacts, yunno?”

Henry fake scoffs, “You’re one to talk, I mean when I first say her, Y/N’s eyes were red and she had fake blood spattered all over her face and shirt. Oh, and not to mention those fangs they put on your teeth...we probably traumatized poor Freya that day.”

“Oh shit you’re right!” You exclaim with a snort of concealed laughter, “God I completely forgot about how I looked...now since I think about it, I did that a lot too. I would just walk up to people and be completely oblivious as to what kind of nightmare I looked like, honestly I might have scared one of our producers a couple of times.” You add with a half nervous laugh, it’s true, you did scare some of the crew unintentionally. Most of the time.

Lauren lightly chuckles, “That sounds like you were quite the sight to see then.” She says before glancing back down at her notes, “Alright I have’ta ask, is there anything that you two took home with you from set?”

“Besides Henry every night,” He holds back a laugh while covering his mouth as you nonchalantly continue, “Uh, yes actually I got to take home Y/C/N’s wolf ring that I loved so much and just thought was the coolist thing ever and....uh, I might have stolen some socks too.”

“So that’s why after filming the amount of socks of yours I had to fold increased?” Wonders Henry with a surprised snort of realization.

Turning your head to give him a “no shit” kinda look, you look back at Lauren, pointing your thumb at Henry, “Master sleuth right here, but hey, he folds my laundry.”

“Aw that’s great.” Adds Lauren with a smile before turning her attention to Henry, “What about you Henry? Take anything from set?”

“More then Y/N did actually...”

“He just about took the whole makeup trailer most nights, I swear.”

Henry chuckles, “That. Is true.” He agrees with a nod, “Interesting enough, at home I’ve got Geralt’s armor hung up in our living room and a multitude of other nicknacks that I’ve collected during filming.” He adds, glancing over to you, “So uh, yeah, we were fairly lucky to be able to snag what we could.”

Lauren smiles, absentmindedly shuffling her cards, “That’s awesome to have such special memorabilia, you guys really are fortunate.” She adds before reading off from another card, “Alright you two, care to play a game called guess the image? Witcher style.”

Your face perks up at this, you’re a sucker for interview games and Henry knows it, “Are you reading my mind or something, I have been waiting all day for someone to ask about playing a game.” You gush rather enthusiastically. 

He smiles at your adorableness and how excited you’ve just become, Lauren grins, happy that her suggestion has been so well received, “Okay so how it works is, I’ll show you an image on my iPad and then you have to guess who or what I’m showing you.”

“Oh, cool I’ve heard of this,” You reply, turning to Henry with a smirk, “Loser has to clean Kal’s yard poop for a week.”

Rolling his gorgeous blue eyes he chuckles, “You’re on.”

“Alright, the stakes are high, you two ready?” Beams Lauren, holding her iPad to her chest as she awaits an answer.

“Yes, I’m ready to kick his ass.” You quip, leaning an arm against your chair while Henry does about the same, though he does his best to contain his laughter.

“Okay, first image.” She holds up the device to show some sort of weird golden thing, it’s shiny and hard, worst part is that you’re not entirely sure what the hell it could be.

Sensing your confusion Henry nudges your shoulder, though you ignore it before he smartly answers, “Oh, is that...Renfri’s brooch?” Little shit knows exactly what that is, of course he does.

Lauren claps, “Correct.” Zooming out of the image to show the full picture of the golden brooch, “Right on, that’s one point for Mr. Cavill.”

You scoff playfully, “Beginners luck.” While Henry side eyes you with a humorous grin upon his plush lips, he nudges your arm, “I’m going to really enjoy not cleaning up Kal’s grass turds for awhile.” He mutters lightheartedly, though you know deep down he’s being serious, no way is he going to win this, you think. You won’t have it, hopefully the next few pictures aren’t as difficult, Kal duty is not fun by any means.

“Shut up.” You grumble with a dismissive wave of your hand, though just teasing of course.

“Okay next image.” This time the blurred photo looks much more familiar, soon it clicks as to what the obscured blurriness actually is, yes!

“Got it! Anya’s er I guess Yennefer’s dress from the fight at Sodden.” Lauren giggles, zooming the image out to reveal Yennefer in her tasseled blue and purple dress from the battle at Sodden Hill. “I’m amazing I know.” You boast at Henry with a casual little bow in your seat.

“It’s the second question.” He deadpans, eyes crinkling in amusement as you shake your head at him.

“Pffff get outta here.” You mutter back, gently pushing his arm off of your chairs armrest and setting yours in its place while he gives you a fake shocked expression.

In turn you can’t help the smile that tugs at the corner of your lips, so instead of saying some sassy remark that would no doubt get a reaction out of him, you turn your attention back over to Lauren who’s looking over her notes again.

“Fantastic,” She says, glancing back up at you and Henry, “you’re both tied with one point each. Alright, anyone know what this is?” She asks showing something red and fuzzy, a bit of dirty skin showing from one corner but with The Witcher this bloody image could literally be anything.

The both of you squint, puzzled as to what this could be, “Y/N you got any ideas.” Wonders Henry, brows furrowed as his face contorts into deep concentrated thought.

Raising a brow, you hum, “If I knew I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Fair point.” He chuckles.

Lauren smiles, “Any guesses?”

 After a few concentrated moments, Henry shrugs in defeat,  “I’m stumped.” He admits as you study the image harder, mind racing to put the pieces together as to what the hell you’re looking at.

“No, I think I might know this....erm is it...me?” You wonder, voice raising in question, hoping to be correct about this or face the teasing of Henry.

Lauren quickly zooms out of the obscured image, “It is!” She says excitedly, revealing the picture of you from your characters debut in episode 2 where you save a girl from a werewolf, your mouth is covered in blood and so is most of your costumes chest area and left arm from the struggle. Not to mention the make-up teams fun 20 minutes of throwing fake sticky blood all over you to get the right look for the taxing scene.

You grimace a bit, “Oh god that was quite the day on set,” You recall with a half smile, “I was doing stunts all day covered in that red syrupy dye, I think it took a week to get out of my skin.”

Henry suddenly snorts with laughter, “Right! That reminds me, I thought Kal had gotten cut or something, it was just Y/N who had hugged him not realizing she still had some fake blood on her arm.”

“Jeez that’s right, I felt so bad, but I couldn’t stop laughing once we realized it was just me.”

Lauren grins, excited to hear some hidden information about little things that happens behind the scenes, “Oh wow that must have been a sight, alright Henry, Y/N’s taken the lead with a two to one score.” She says as you playfully nudge his strong shoulder. “Second to last image, what is this?”

Without missing a single beat Henry replies, “Jaskier.”

Squinting at the image you lean closer to the iPad, “How the hell do you see Jaskier?”

Smiling the interviewer zooms out to reveal the bards full outfit from the banquet scene, though he’s in the background of a fight between Geralt and some Cintran knights. “Right on!” She exclaims as you lean back into your seat dumbfounded, shoulder flush against Henry’s as he clutches your arm and squeezes it affectionately.

Ignoring his silent show of victory you shrug, “And they say he’s just another pretty face,” Earning a laugh from Lauren and some of the crew as you smirk at the camera, face them shifting to apologetic, “also I’m so sorry Joey you beautiful bastard apparently I’m blind. Uh, we don’t have to dwell on it, Lauren whatcha got?”

“You guys are both tied with two points each, last chance to win.” She replies before glancing down at her iPad, “Alright, what is this?” She asks, her iPad showing that of fuzzy bright colors, with a small corner smear of dull white that clearly wouldn’t make much sense to the untrained eye.

Smirking you glance at a puzzled Henry before sitting up in your seat, feeling rather good about yourself, “Would that happen to be, Hen in Stregobor’s illusion?” You answer with, though sounding a bit as a question considering you aren’t entirely confident as to what image this is.

Lauren’s brows raise in surprise, “Henry, looks like we have a winner. Y/N you are correct.” She beams, enlarging the image to reveal Geralt’s side profile as he talks to the old wizard while the background stays colorful and shrouded in various arrays of sunlight..

Shaking your fist victoriously in the air you give a couple enthusiastic whoop whoops while Henry simply takes it like a champ, “Have fun cleaning up Karl’s monster turds, cause this lucky lady doesn’t have to.” You boast as Henry and the crew laugh.

“Well that was something,” Beams Lauren, “I’m so glad to have chatted for a bit about your guys’ amazing new series, and maybe ended a relationship in the process.” She says jokingly as both you and Henry chuckle.

Patting his thigh affectionately, you smirk, “He’s a tough old bear, but yeah, it was awesome having you talk to us.”

“Yes, take care now.” Adds Henry while the interviewer Lauren stands, saying her goodbyes as she goes to exit the room.

The camera crew take a small break to adjust things and whatnot as you and Henry wait patiently for the next interviewer. He turns, an adorable smile pulling at his lips while you pretend to ignore his fiery gaze. “Well that went pretty well, minus the fact that I’m on Kal poop duty for a week...but uh...” He leans in close to you now, “I missed you all morning.”

Breaking out into a smile you raise a brow, “Boring without me huh?”

“Always.”

You casually shrug, “I figured as much. Don’t worry, we have a hotel all to ourselves tonight.” Your brows wiggle suggestively causing your blue eyed lover to shake his head with amusement.

“Say it louder next time.” He jokes.

Side eyeing the oblivious crew you begin to speak a couple octaves louder, “Henry I can’t wait to fu..” Suddenly his hand presses against your mouth before you’re able to call any attention to yourself. He gives you a warning look before slowly pulling his hand from your mouth.

You grin mischievously, “I wasn’t gonna say that...”

“Sure Y/N,” He mutters in your ear as a new interviewer walks into the room and finds their chair, “and I’m wasn’t going to make you scream tonight.”

Your brows raise in surprise and admittedly slight arousal at his choice of wording in this room of all places. Eyeing him up, face still showing surprise, you finally break out into a satisfied smirk. “You know what? I think you should consider changing your offer.”

He thinks deeply for a moment, though you know he’s only pretending to get you riled up, “Hrmm...maybe, possibly, should I? Should we? You are my co-star after all, that wouldn’t be very professional now would it Y/N?” He states with a shit eating grin, all done while the crew and interviewer get ready, minding their business and completely unaware to yourself and Henry’s teasing.

Scoffing playfully you lightly swat his arm, “We are way past being professional.”

He chuckles, looking from you to the rest of the room, “Oh, they have no idea.”

[jeontaehui]

TAEHEE WITH WAYV

kun kunhee

taehee’s true aegyo only shows when she talks to kun.

she would call him ‘kun gege‘ or ‘kunnie kun kun’ when she’s feeling it lol

taehee Loves kun’s cooking !!! every time the neos would separate into groups during an activity that involved cooking, she’d beg to be in the same group as him.

(nct world ep. 8) “oppa, your food is to die for.”

kun looks at taehee very fondly, like how a dad would watch his child. 

he thinks taehee can be a bit out of hand sometimes, but 98% of the time they’re together, kun looks like he’d spoil taehee without her having to ask him. 

(180403 vlive) “kun-ge,” taehee skips in her steps as kun turns his head to acknowledge her, “hmm?” “if ten oppa asked you to cut me in half, would you?” she asks him expectantly, and without missing a beat, he replies, “no”. triumphantly, taehee turns to the back to stick out her tongue at ten, “see, you’re the only person—“ “i don’t want to have two of you around,” kun cuts her off with a playful smirk, which turns to a laugh as soon as taehee lets out a gasp. she continued to ramble about how she trusted him, how she felt betrayed. “i’m just kidding,” kun says as he put his arm around taehee’s shoulders, pulling her close before ruffling her hair. 

although they’re not a very popular duo or not seen together quite often, taehee absolutely missed kun and his playfulness (and maybe his cooking too).

iconic moment (uncut take #1 | 2020 yearparty behind scene #2) “hello,” they respectfully greeted, with taehee clinging to kun’s side. “i’m here with taehee,” kun starts, “and even if we aren’t in a scene together, we’re hanging out.”

“i missed kun oppa,” taehee pouts, “kun gege.” this immediately made kun smile, it was clear how kun adored taehee like she was his own child. “really?” and taehee nods in response. “it’s been like, what, two years? since i’ve last seen you. moments with you are like, a breath of fresh air,” kun softly laughs at the comparison as he shakes his head at her dramatics. “you’re just making stuff up, aren’t you?”

“i’m not! i swear!”

“are you sure it’s not my cooking that you missed?”

“well... maybe that too.”

song happier by marshmellow ft. bastille

ten tnt / tenhee

taehee likes to think of ten as her twin, but then he would always shoot down the idea. 

(n’-75) “we’re like twins, right?” taehee tells ten before throwing a chip into her mouth. “yeah, but you’re the annoying one and everyone likes me.”

their videos on nct’s dance channel are literally Divine !!!!!! nctzens especially went wild when taehee performed with ten on ‘hit the stage’.

the dirty jokes ..... don’t even get me started. ten would make one remark and it immediately becomes dirty when he makes eye contact with taehee (ft. mark sometimes). if taehee was about to break out laughing, she’d go “UGH I HATE YOU!”

but even if they’re like this with each other, ten and taehee care about each other a whole lot :(

(nct world ep. 3) taehee strained her wrist while attempting to do jump over the vault. though she was able to balance herself quickly, she looked as if she were about to fall; at this split second, ten took a worried step forward, afraid that she’d slip to the ground. later, when taehee comes back with a wrist guard around her hand, ten takes a concerned look at her and asks if she was okay.

taehee also caught a cold while they were preparing for ‘90’s love’ and ten kept insisting he’d make her something to help her feel better.

ten would never admit it but taehee is his baby, anything or anyone that’s bothering her will have to go through him first >:(

iconic moment (jcc ep. 25) “ten, i don’t think it’s supposed to work that way,” taehee giggles at him as he stood a foot away from her while mixing his self-made cookie dough. “no, you wait for it. it’s gonna work,” ten insists while pointing the wooden spoon menacingly at taehee, but this just made the girl smile wider.

she secretly slides the jar of white sugar towards her and scoops up a spoonful, before moving carefully towards ten. “i don’t even think you added sugar,” she mumbles, but his body moves to block her and she bumps into his back with another step. “HEY!” she laughs at how protective ten was getting over his cookie dough, and his stirring becoming more and more aggressive as she tries to put sugar in it, “i’m going to place some so it has a taste!”

ten protests that he already did a while ago while taehee maneuvered her way around him laughing. ten knew what she was trying to do and so he bumped his hip against hers to stop her from getting any nearer. “this is going to spill! ten, stop!,” taehee tries to hold in her giggles, ten was being too cute. “and you’re going to clean it up when it does,” he bites back.

taehee resumes to finding ways to get sugar into the mix while ten resists, causing a very entertained mark to fill the studio with laughter. after a few minutes of trying, taehee sighs and puts back the sugar in the jar, "wow, i never knew baking could be so tiring.”

turns out, ten’s cookies didn’t come out that well and taehee’s expression said it all. “i told you so.”

song positions by ariana grande 

winwin winhee

when winwin was promoting with wayv, he and taehee would send each other messages asking about their days or if they had plans for anything. since both units were busy, they really never do this and it’s only rare that they message each other, let alone call each other.

that’s why taehee was very happy when she saw winwin again for resonance :(

if taehee was chill about her love for winwin before, now she’d just poke his cheeks every once in a while.

(uncut take #1 | 2020 yearparty behind scene #1) taehee watches from the side as three or four members corner winwin to gush over him, making her give a disapproving shake of the head to the camera. “everyone, winwin hyungie is like a baby,” she nods. “babies won’t like it if you bother them too much, so you have to be subtle with your affection.” taehee gives a playful smirk to the camera, “that’s why winwin hyungie likes me.”

winwin, on the other hand, thinks that taehee changed very much the last time he saw her. from being childish and innocent, she became matured and confident. this is how winwin felt time really flew.

(uncut take #1 | 2020 yearparty behind scene #1) “winwin gege~,” taehee whines, seeing how it would roll off her tongue. “did i say that right? ‘winwin gege’?,” she looks to see that winwin already had a fond smile on his face. “you are so cute,” he pouts, “jeon taehee, you are really too cute.”

iconic moment (201106 twitter blueroom live) “winwin hyung, who is your favorite member here in 90’s love?,” haechan asks from his left. and as everyone appeals to him, including mark who touches his ear out of affection, he already had one person in mind. “jeon taehee.”

song left to right by marteen

lucas luhee

a very very very very chaotic duo.

if you watch compilation videos of the funniest moments from empathy era, the iconic clip of lucas and taehee saying something else instead of ‘yadom’ (nasal spray) would always be included. they had to cut out that part from the live later, and members had to tell them what ‘야동’ actually meant in the next live.

taehee would try to teach lucas some korean before, but then that’s just her talking in korean with an english accent.

(180712 vlive) “why are you so tall?,” taehee raises her eyebrow at him. “why are you so short?,” lucas laughs.

taehee threw a pick-up line at mark during that same live, and lucas asked her why wasn’t she like that to him too. “lucas, don’t laugh but,” taehee tells him, “even if you’re as tall as a tree, i’ll still see you as a big baby. i’m not lying.”

and so jungwoo and taehee’s snacking tradition was actually jungwoo, taehee, and lucas’ snacking tradition.

for taehee, it’s so satisfying to watch lucas eat especially if he’s enjoying it so much. lucas actually admitted that the food that taehee carried in her bag would eventually go to his stomach. it became a habit for taehee to carry some in her bag even if lucas wasn’t promoting with her anymore.

iconic moment (uncut take #14 | ‘resonance’ mv behind the scene) “yo lucas,” taehee greets as she was pulled into a friendly bro hug. when she pulls away, she quicklt takes a look at lucas’ gorgeous features and steps back, “woah, you’re seriously so handsome.” lucas turns shy at her compliment and rubs the back of his neck, “you too.”

taehee raises her eyebrows in amusement, smirking as she says, “i’m handsome too?” lucas thinks for a moment before nodding yes, “you can be handsome too.”

“okay czennies, meet two very handsome people. hello!”

song rather be by clean bandit (ft. jess glynne)

xiaojun xiaohee

out of all the ‘99 boys, she’d want to get to know xiaojun more the most. 

they’re not awkward with each other, they’re just shy to approach each other and start a conversation. 

(sun & moon ep. 2) “taehee-ssi told me the other day she really liked xiaojun hyung’s voice out of the blue,” the said girl eyes haechan carefully, suddenly feeling nervous at what he’s going to pull. “i told her she should tell you herself, why is she telling me? she said she was shy,” when he had said this, a chorus of ‘ohh’s’ came from the rest of the bunch, except for taehee. she had a threatening smile on her face directed at the one and only lee haechan, so he decides to prod her further, “taehee-ssi, perhaps you’d like a guesting on awsaz?”

unknowingly though, xiaojun soon becomes one of the causes of taehee’s smiles or laughter whenever they’re filming together. 

(nct world ep. 2) “taehee, fighting!,” he cheers as taehee stepped forward to arm wrestle. the latter quickly turns around to give him a salute as she winks.

(201120 vlive) “xiaojun comes home and he talks about taehee too,” kun shares, “they hang out a lot.” doyoung snickers, “he fell for her too? taehee tells us how funny you guys are in your dorms, but she only ever talked about xiaojun.”

so yes ,,, they are very shy around each other but as far as we know !!! they’re really good friends who want to be closer to each other.

iconic moment (uncut take #14 | ‘resonance’ mv behind the scene) “you guys have pets in your dorm, right?,” taehee asks him as she leaned back, her arms supporting her from behind. “yes, we have three. the dog is bella and we have two cats named leon and louis,” taehee’s eyes widened, though she admits she feels jealous to have their pets around.

“i would keep my dog with me but they won’t let me.”

“oh really? what’s the name?”

“her name is 뚱이, and she’s a lhasa apso.”

“ahh,” xiaojun nods, “does she pee on your carpet?”

taehee throws her head back slightly as she laughs at the question, bringing a hand to her mouth to hide her growing smile. “do your pets pee on your carpet?” xiaojun shrugs, “well, sometimes,” he nods off disappointingly, causing taehee to giggle. “but we love them,” xiaojun sighs, and his eyes see taehee’s wide smile as she agrees with him. “that’s right, we love them.”

song i really like you by carly rae jepsen 

hendery deryhee

taehee finds hendery SO funny, i swear.

like he can literally just smile and nod she’d bust her lungs out from laughing

nctzens found it cute when taehee and hendery monitored each other while they were shooting for the ‘misfit’ track vid.

(misfit track video behind the scene) “ooo hendery is good. he looks cool.”

taehee watched the awsaz episode of winwin and jisung ,,, firstly because of those two.

but then hendery and haechan were so funny too she may have shed a tear from laughing.

a fan asked in those video call fansigns if taehee has watched any of wayv’s videos and she laughed, saying that she watched the one where they acted as disney princesses.

“hendery is so funny, really,” she smiled. “I CAN SHOW YOU THE WORLD!!!!”

they became really close during resonance era and talk about games, their pets, and already have some inside jokes between the two of them.

like a member would just say ‘cabbage’ and we already have the two of them smiling to each other from across the room !!! or they’d make eye contact when looking at the mirror and taehee would just bust out laughing.

iconic moment (201106 twitter blueroom live) “you’re really, really, really, really handsome,” yuta starts with utmost sincerity, “hendery.” the latter brings a hand to his face, his face warming up at the compliment as he sighs contently. this comical reaction causes taehee to burst into a fit of laughter, one you could hear off-cam.

later, when it was time for the ‘90’s love’ unit to take charge of the live, taehee giggles out of the blue, trying to keep her laughs in. “why?,” mark asks as he glances at her. “i’m sorry i just,” she pauses. surely, she was thinking about the funny things hendery pulled when they were doing the live before them. “i just keep thinking about how funny hendery was. i’m sorry, i’ll just eat my fries,” she says the last part quickly, throwing a french fry in her mouth as she bites back a smile.

song love story by taylor swift (disco lines ft. cassidi remix)

yangyang yanghee

taehee finds yangyang SO cute, precious, and tiny.

whenever yangyang is speaking, we’d see taehee in the corner of the frame smiling. 

she’s all over the yangyang vocalist agenda !!!!!!

(uncut #16 | ‘90’s love’ recording behind) “this is yangyang’s voice, isn’t it?,” taehee beams as she hears the younger’s voice through her headphones. “i really like his voice.”

yangyang’s such a smiley baby around taehee, partially because she told him he was very cute when he smiles.

fans find it so endearing when taehee calls yangyang “yangyangie” as if she’s talking to a baby :(

(201022 weibo live) “taehee noona and i play games when she comes here,” yangyang tells renjun. “and then she’ll hangout with the pets later,” he and renjun laugh at this. typical taehee.

taehee would buy drinks from the vending machine for sungchan since he’s the maknae in ‘90’s love’ but !!!! she makes a special exception for yangyang.

just a little bit more and he’s up taehee’s baby list ^ ^

iconic moment (uncut take #8 | ‘90′s love’ mv behind) “today is yangyang’s birthday!,” taehee chirps as she held the camera, making sure she and yangyang were both in the frame. “you’re like, 21 now, right?,” yangyang nods, “how are you feeling today?”

“i feel happy right now since you guys like prepared a cake and stuff and sang ‘happy birthday’ to me awhile ago,” taehee smiles at this. “so i’ll continue to work hard with you guys as we wrap up filming,” yangyang finishes as he beams at her, the latter mirroring his expression. 

“you’re so cute, you know that, right?,” taehee coos as she focuses the camera to yangyang (who smiles shyly at the compliment), before placing herself back in frame. “i only got to play games with yangyang a few times because chenle invited me, but now that we’re all spending time together, i think yangyang’s a very cute dongsaeng.” at this, they both giggle and taehee raises her fist for a fist bump. “i know,” yangyang says as he bumps his fist against hers, taehee laughing at this cute ball of sunshine. 

song timber by pitbull (ft. ke$ha) 

[letterboxd]

Love Thy Neighbor.

With her nineteenth-century American romance, The World to Come—starring Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby—screening now, director Mona Fastvold talks to Ella Kemp about the need to create images, striving for ASMR storytelling, and just how much we owe Terrence Malick.

“We’ve seen a lot of movies during this time period in America about what the husbands were out doing… but they had wives who are at home, living their completely separate lives. What were they up to?” —Mona Fastvold

In the American Northeast in the nineteenth century, life for farmers’ wives is physical, lonely, subject to both the extremes of weather and their husbands’ moods. When Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) become neighbors in The World To Come, their lives become infinitely more bearable.

What unfolds is a careful study of the ways affection and understanding can bloom in the most unlikely places. Based on Jim Shepard’s short story of the same name, Mona Fastvold’s desperately romantic film starts where Abigail’s diary also begins: with a new year, and new neighbors. Through lyrical voice-over and closely drawn scenes, Abigail tells of how, in the wake of unimaginable loss, her life is cracked wide open by the arrival of effervescent, free-spirited Tallie. She speaks of grief and exhaustion, but also of astonishment and joy.

Katherine Waterston as Abigail and Vanessa Kirby as Tallie in ‘The World to Come’. / Photo by Vlad Cioplea

It’s a story felt through whispers as much as kisses, framed by the blustery winds of the East-Coast frontier—and by the spectre of their husbands (Casey Affleck as the downcast Dyer, Christopher Abbott as the jealous, disturbing Finney) finding out about their new love. Fastvold gives each character just enough attention to let the relationships that matter most rise up all on their own. She does so with words, poetry that somehow feels alive, and with music—specifically, a stunningly passionate clarinet soundtrack.

The World to Come won the Queer Lion at Venice last August (where it miraculously had an in-person premiere), and won many more hearts at Sundance in January. It’s Fastvold’s second film as director, after 2014’s The Sleepwalker, which also starred Christopher Abbott, and was co-written by Fastvold’s partner (and Vox Lux director) Brady Corbet.

What did you feel when reading Jim’s story for the first time? Mona Fastvold: It was a home I wanted to move into. It was this feeling of thinking, ‘This belongs in my universe, and I belong in this universe.’ And I all of a sudden had a few images that I felt a very strong need to create. The first thing that I felt really compelled to do was creating this physical expression of joy after the first kiss. I had this image of Katherine in this wide shot, completely open and just exposed. And I was really compelled to shoot her in the snow by the grave as well.

I also wanted to frame her being tied to the house with a rope, working her way through the snowstorm. There was a lot of amazing text and maybe fewer images in the script, because it’s written by these two really wonderful writers and authors of novels, not so much screenplays. So it’s not a very technical screenplay, and there were a lot of things left to me to work out, which I enjoyed. But the foundation was this really good text.

Mona Fastvold on the set of ‘The World to Come’. / Photo by Toni Salabasev

The text is so striking, in the way it’s so verbose but never feels stiff. How did you keep the words intact while bringing these emotions to life? I cast some really good actors, so that helps! Then when you’re working with this kind of text, it’s not really a text that you can improvise or play around as much, you really just need to honor it. For me it’s really about finding the movement that will support the beats of the text. I like the edit to be motivated by a gesture, something that says, “I want you to look at this”. I’m trying to make the rhythm more exciting. Ping-ponging back and forth is less exciting to me.

When rehearsing, we’d create movement either physically, or find changes through long pauses already in the text, and then upon finding those organic beats I’d figure out with my DP how we can stay in one take for as long as possible, until we find that moment which motivates a change. I never like there to be a camera movement just for there to be something cool visually. And there’s all this subtext in the text, all these messages Abigail and Tallie are trying to send to each other. When are you being direct? When are you being understood? When are you not?

Particularly in recent years, we’ve been fortunate to have a number of films that reframe period pieces about forbidden lesbian romances. Why do you think we keep coming back to this kind of story? A lot of people feel compelled to say these stories have always been there, and to claim that part of history. It’s not modern, it’s not a new thing, but it’s just that these stories have not been told much. Especially a love story that takes place among farmers. We know a little bit about upper-class stories from some literature, but not that much from that time period. So part of the appeal for me was to say: this is a part of history. Even though it’s not a story about Napoleon, this story about these two quiet, introverted women is still worth exploring. And we’ve seen a lot of movies during this time period in America about what the husbands were out doing. I’ve grown up watching these movies, but they had wives who are at home, living their completely separate lives. What were they up to?

Finney (Christopher Abbott) reads Tallie’s mail. / Photo by Vlad Cioplea

You mention the husbands—I felt watching this film that it was set in a very different world to the likes of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which a lot of people loved precisely because of how few men were in the film. But here the husbands play a really important part within the story about these two women, helping to convey their frustration and limitations, without taking over. All characters in a story deserve equal counts of love and attention from the writers, directors and actors. It was incredibly important to portray the men with as much nuance as Abigail and Tallie. It makes for a more interesting story for them, that their relationships with their partners are complex—they’re not just these male archetypes who are terrible and awful. Dyer was an interesting character, in that he’s striving to understand even though he doesn’t quite. And he had different ambitions as well, but this is the situation he’s in, and he’s chosen a practical partner who he respects, and I guess loves and cares for. But they’re running a farm together, they’re business partners as well and depend on each other for survival. When he says “I’ll die without you” it’s quite literal, in a way. I wanted to break these characters open and make them more difficult to deal with, for themselves and for the women as well.

Your picture includes a beautiful, and really unexpected score by Daniel Blumberg—particularly in the use of the clarinet, which feels like its own kind of narrative. Can you talk me through the process of weaving that into the story? I brought in Daniel even when I was developing the script and working on casting early on. I kept listening to ‘Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet’ by Igor Stravinsky, and somehow the instrument felt really connected to Katherine’s voice-over. It was important that the voice-over was not slammed on top at the end. It’s there, I hope, to have a bit of an ASMR effect where you feel it draws you really close to Abigail in a hypnotic way. That you feel like you get this intimate experience of that character by having access to her life even if it doesn’t explain things too much.

So we wanted to have the score speaking to the voice-over, which we recorded long before we started shooting as well. We would play it on set and Daniel would come in and play music there. So constantly being in dialogue between the text being read and the music being played was an important part of the process.

It’s time for some Life in Film questions. What is your favorite ‘forbidden love’ story? A film I really love, which inspired The World to Come, is Olivia. It’s from 1951 and it’s directed by Jacqueline Audry, and it was one of the first lesbian on-screen kisses ever captured. It’s a great movie directed by a female director when that wasn’t so much of a thing. It was an important trailblazer for this film.

Marie-Claire Olivia and Simone Simon in Jacqueline Audry’s ‘Olivia’ (1951).

What’s your favourite “Dear Diary” movie, the one that best uses a confessional voice-over? Terrence Malick pretty much cornered that market with some beautiful, beautiful attempts at that. We definitely have to pay our respects! Particularly Days of Heaven is pretty amazing. The voice-over work there is extraordinary.

What is your go-to comfort movie? It’s funny because I was asked that a while ago and normally I would just be like, “Anything Nancy Meyers makes is just so lovely”. She makes these films that are just like candy. But during the pandemic, it’s just too hard to watch these cozy movies, because it just makes you feel depressed. So right now, the film I’ve watched the most in my lifetime is Eyes Wide Shut. I also find it to be a Christmas movie… If it’s on anywhere, I’ll always leave it on, or just watch a little piece of it.

What should Letterboxd members watch after The World to Come? First of all they should watch Olivia if they haven’t seen it, and then the other day I watched Martin Eden—it’s an incredible movie. So beautifully made.

What is the one film that first made you want to be a filmmaker? I grew up watching a lot of movies. My family are cinephiles and I’ve always loved films. I grew up on a steady diet of Ingmar Bergman’s films during my teenage years, and Tarkovsky too. Seeing those films made a really big impression me. But what really inspired me in many ways was seeing Claire Denis’ films. The way she approaches storytelling is so intuitive. It’s so exciting. That resonated with me, and later on I recognized some of that in Lucrecia Martel as well. I just love how she handles time and logic and character.

Related content

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Films Directed by Women

Follow Bleecker Street on Letterboxd

Follow Ella on Letterboxd

‘The World to Come’ is currently in select US theaters, and will be available on demand from March 2, via Bleecker Street.

[kookxin]

INTERVAL; jjk

Pair¬ Jungkook×(she)

Point of view¬ 3rd person

Genre¬ romance, fiction, comical, restaurant scenario

Synopsis¬ she was right at time when he was in need of a break from his shift.

Words¬ 1.2k

Weekends.

They have always been chaotic. Usually, the diner entertains about a total of 200-250 costumers per day, but that totally changes on the weekends, with around 450 to 500 costumers moving in and out of the diner.

Also, the fact that the diner's situated in a bustling mall only attracts more hungry costumers than a roadside restaurant would attract.

So here's Jungkook, stupified with the number of faces he's seen in just a day, and stultified with the boredom of doing exactly the same actions since the last 4 and a half hours, greeting, entering orders, and handing out bills.

Yup, freaking boring.

And yeah, he hasn't yet been able to get the hang of it, given it has just been 3 weeks since him joining in. What he'd imagined was a beautiful diner, furnished colorfully, nice coworkers, and happy and amiable costumers, tipping him every now and then. He was determined to at least once, receive the title of The Best Employee Of The Year. But when, some customers, all haughty and pompous, appear, almost every now and then, it's hard for him to keep up the smile. It's hard for him to control his urge to grab them by their nose, and make them smell the inside of their own shoes. Or on a milder note, smack them on the face, with a hot-and-spicy fried chicken leg.

Also, he'd imagined for him to get free snacks often, but of course he never thought of him having a manager who not only forbid him to even touch the chicken, but also who keeps an eye on him through the CCTVs.

A scowl makes way on his face, as he's reminded of that 'all-belly-no-button' man, as he's named him, and glances at the camera in the corner of the ceiling, imagining him to be seated behind the monitor scowling back at him.

He glunches even more, when a bunch of girls enter through the glass doors, faces caked with make-up, looking uglier than a decomposed chicken-wing.

The ticking of their heels is giving him a migraine. Literally.

Giggling on God-knows-what, they make their way to a vacant table, to settle down. But unfortunately, the girl leading the group drops her eyes on Jungkook, and immediately changes her path.

Jungkook groans, not-so-internally.

Said girl stands in front of him, twirling a strand of her hair around her fingers, fluttering her eyes at him, and he's suddenly grateful to the tall counter separating them.

High heels or not, the girl was still shorter than his mopper, and Jungkook scoffed at the thought.

"Hey." The girl says, leaning onto the counter, flashing to him what should remain in her clothes and out of his sight. Just what was needed to make his day better. (Kindly note the sarcasm.)

Freaking hoe.

He rolls his eyes, not-so-subtly, and then mutters out a 'what what you like to order?', keeping his eyes fixed onto her head, not wanting to look at her up this close. At least something which won't damage his vision.

"I was hoping that you'd let me know the speciality of this place. After all...someone like you would definitely have an awesome sense of taste, from what I see." She winks suggestively, running her eyes all over him.

Yup, pathetic.

A wave of pure and utter disgust washes over him. He doesn't even try to hide the grimace on his face, so done with the already crappy day.

"Uh, yea..." Instead of mingling with her, he simply goes on to fetch the menu card and gives it out to her.

Confounded at his lack of interest, or even response, she decides to retreat back to her seat with a scowl on her face.

A few minutes later after receiving their orders, Jungkook stands at the counter, spacing out yet again.

10.51 pm, the clock reads.

The diner rings with laughter and the noisy talking of the customers. His coworkers are to busy in their own worlds to bring him back to earth. Yoongi, the laziest employee of the building, dozes off on the other side of the counter, while Jimin is happily chatting away on the phone.

Yup, counter duty truly sucks.

His eyes snap back to the glass doors when they open, and someone steps in. It's a 'she'. She walks upto the counter, her boots silently ticking behind her, and she's clad in a black knitted top and blue faded jeans, her brown locks tied up in a messy ponytail.

She brings her long fingers to her half hidden face, pulling the dark mask down, and Jungkook's lips instantly curve up in a huge grin. Said girl smiles back, but gasps when she's suddenly pulled by her face into an excited kiss, and fails to hear the gasps and murmers that followed from behind her.

Pulling back, he continues to grin like a child at her, but glances behind her to smirk cockily at the literally burning girls who sit at the table nearest to the counter. His smirk turns into a genuine smile when his eyes find his girl's again.

Eyes not leaving her's, he calls out, "Hey Chim, can you fill in for me for 5?"

Jimin, who had, over his phone, watched the whole scene unfold, grumbles about something on how it would definitely go over 'just 5'.

Jungkook guides the girl to the end of the counter which still separates them, and leaves her to let her in, through the door having a sign 'only employees' hung over it. The door opens to a narrow corridor, dark with only the three doors, to the counterplace, to the kitchen, and to the break room, lighting it a bit.

He pulls her in hastily, and pins her to the wall. His eyes are lit up, twinkling again, as they did when he'd left their shared apartment for work. His smile is toothy, natural, and beautiful, erasing any scowls or frowns from earlier. His cheekbones lift with happiness and energy, and his nose crinkling with his large smile. He gleams, as if he's refreshed all over again.

She raises her fingers to his cheeks, stroking them lovingly, her own eyes shimmering at the sight of him, her love, her life.

He eliminates the gap between them and presses his lips on hers, and their bodies together. The kiss is urgent, like they've been deprived of each other since days, drinking each other in, as if the other one was their drug. His lips move fervently against hers, the air around them growing hotter by the second, and the dark atmosphere changing into something impassioned, fervid, and intense.

He pulls back, a bit breathless.

"What are you doing here?" He asks, between his heavy breaths, and she grins, yet answers shakily.

"I missed you, I wanted to see you, and I didn't want to wait."

He chuckles lightly, his voice deep and breathy.

"Well, you're right on time, and I love you."

He kisses her once again, deep and passionate, but this one's slow with precise moves.

They pull back again, chuckling against each other. The usually quiet corridor feels alive with the air energized with the passion the young couple shares, and gleaming with the radiance of their love.

°§°

All rights reserved ©

Do not copy storyline.

¬ Hajin

[intoxicatingimmediacy]

How Tracee Ellis Ross and Daveed Diggs Bonded as Members of “the Curly-Hair Family”

Daveed Diggs was certain the Emmys had already happened—so certain, in fact, that he and his partner had booked a vacation for the day of the ceremony in September...

Vanity Fair: Can you guys tell me about when you first met? Was it on the set of Black-ish or before that?

Tracee Ellis Ross: Did we meet backstage at Hamilton?

Daveed Diggs: We must have, but I don’t remember most of that stuff. If I’m being honest, it was such a crazy time. So yeah, I’m sure we did then.

Ross: But I feel like we just did the obligatory—I was like, “thank you for being brilliant.” And you were like, “thank you for coming.”

Diggs: I’m sure I told you I was a huge fan of yours, because that’s true. I must have babbled something to you about The Lyricist Lounge. I don’t know if that was then or on the Black-ish set, but I’ve been a fan of yours for a very long time. And so I remember at some point feeling the need to just be like, just so you know, I know that you got bars, I watched you rap with Mos Def when he was up on a ledge and shit. Like I remember all that.

Ross: No, we actually had this conversation on Black-ish because I then told you the backstory on that, and the fact that it was so intense getting me to do those very, very limited amount of bars. And what Daveed does, he makes it look easy, but it is not. What these rappers and these lyricists and these artists do is not something that came naturally to my rhythmic talent. Yeah. So I remember, and by the way, I did not know who you were before going to the Broadway play, before going to see you on stage, but you are so dynamic, combined with the fact that we share the curly-hair family.

Diggs: Well, it’s funny when Kenya [Barris] was like, “so I have this idea. I’ve been thinking about you as Bow’s brother.” And I was just like, “look, you can stop right there. Yes, I want to do that.” I’ve been Team Rainbow on this show for so long. I feel like she’s always getting, people don’t really understand her like I understand her. But look, let me tell you what it’s like being a mixed kid from the Bay.

Ross: Yeah. It was such a natural fit. And then they made it so much better with the way they wrote you. Johan is special.

Diggs: He’s special. He’s very special. And it fit like a glove. Very little acting happening for me.

I wanted to ask about Johan, because he blows in from France, basically, which knowing that this was filming in the fall of 2016 or summer 2016 feels very Thomas Jefferson coming down the staircase. Was that how that character got that way?

Diggs: I would imagine. I don’t know. Nobody ever told me. I very much remember my first table read there and I was all nervous. There were so many people there, this is a trip for a table read. Many years later he told me, that was because you were there. That many people didn’t usually come. But everyone was so obsessed with Hamilton, that they just wanted to see you. And he was like, I got nervous because I actually had no reason to assume that you could do this. I had just seen you in a musical and then put you in my TV show.

Ross: Oh, my God. Kenya is such a monster for saying that to you. That’s not true, because that’s not what he told me. He was convinced, I remember when he called me after he saw it and he was like, I have the best idea. And again, I’m telling you, when I saw you on stage—throughout my life, every once in a while you see people and you’re like, yeah, same tribe. You know what I mean? And usually the hair is the entrance into the indication. I’m like, we’re going to have definitely some things in common. And I want to know what product he uses, you know what I mean? But our table reads, which we have completely lost in this pandemic, were these very special, extraordinary things. Yes, there were more people there for you, but you got to feel the chemistry of all of us. And so, yeah, I do remember that day though, because that was really serious.

Daveed’s run on it came in this crazy period of work post-Hamilton, and also during the 2016 election. What do you remember from all of that?

Ross: Whiplash. Devastation. A lot of fear. So funny, we were on the precipice of so much more. I don’t know, there was a lot of wake up happening. It’s an interesting time to be on a show like Black-ish where we’re so topical and we dive in on that stuff. It made me appreciate the ability to use a platform to keep bringing light into the world, and joy, and also still talking about things and unpacking them without having to decide somebody is wrong or right. But just being able to explore them in joyful environments.

Diggs: Yeah. That show is so great at that. And it’s funny, professionally for me at that time, I was doing a bunch of things and learning so much, it almost feels separate from my emotional, personal, political journey. I was just on airplanes and in places—

Ross: You were moving a lot.

Diggs: Right? Because I was also doing Kimmy Schmidt and I was just all over the place. And so all of that was going on and then also the world was falling apart, but it was nice to work. For me, work was a good distraction from that, I guess. The times when I was on Black-ish were like, oh, we get to be in the world and also still be working and having fun, because the show was so good at that. Whereas a lot of other things that I was working on were just jobs separate from the world.

Ross: Yeah, you were moving at that point. I remember that time period, but it was a treat not only to have Daveed onset, but also for my character to have an identification with something beyond Dre’s family. Because in the Black-ish world, Bow’s point of view is an outlier point of view. And so as Daveed said, right at the beginning, when we first came on, to have somebody that actually knows that experience, not just because it’s written, but lives it in a different way. It was a really nice experience, for me, and I think for my character, if I can speak for the both of us.

What’s the contrast between going from something like Hamilton to a TV show?

Diggs: I mean, for me it was just all about learning. I didn’t know anything really. I left Hamilton and the next weekend was shooting Wonder, and then I went from there to L.A. and shot Tour De Pharmacy. And literally, I shot that for three days, and the fourth day I was on Black-ish. Broadway or doing plays, it’s repetition. It’s the art of, the goal is to make it feel new every time, right? That’s the trick. Doing TV, it’s definitely brand new every time. You don’t have to work for that. You get that part for free. The trick is playing the whole history of your relationships with all of these people as if they actually happened. But one of the great joys about being on Black-ish is just sitting around talking to everybody, soaking up game from Tracee or Anthony when he wasn’t talking shit about me, and Laurence—talking to Fish is my favorite stuff. I would just wait to find him sitting in a corner and just try to get him started.

Ross: Once you do though, you get some gems and pearls out of that man.

You guys have both moved on into more work creating and producing shows yourselves. Why is that the way forward for both of you?

Diggs: For me, it’s a continuation. I was always doing that, because no one wanted to make anything with me in it. And so we had to make it ourselves. But also, certain stories come your way that are, if you don’t tell them nobody’s going to. That’s actually the great part I’m finding about producing. It’s just that I get to help things exist because I want to watch them. I’m pretty self serving in a lot of ways.

Ross: I think I’ve always been producing. I think that I’ve always been that kind of actor. I always think of the whole thing. This is the beauty of what all of these different streaming platforms have offered, is that there is a democracy around, and a desire to keep filling our space with stories that represent the world we live in. And some of us, like Daveed and myself and Anthony, there are specific stories that we’re interested in telling. And you realize there’s a specific point of view that I want to share that is a gap in the world.

Does it feel like the industry is still moving in the right direction in terms of who gets to tell stories, like we are still opening up doors the way that we need to be?

Ross: I think for me, the biggest realization as I expand where my hands are in my career is the recognition that all aspects of this industry need fuller representation, all aspects. And that the pipeline is a little bit broken in terms of the standard that’s used to hire people in the executive positions, all these different places, that there needs to be real attention put there because without the conscious attention, it is not going to change. And that shift in equity around the table really needs absolute work. And so that’s also one of the beauties of being in this position is that I’m now in a space where I am behind the scenes, and I can say, I’m sorry, how much is she getting paid? And how much is he getting paid? And what’s the difference? Well, that’s just the way it’s been. Huh? I think that changes the dynamics, not only of the storytelling, but you look at the difference in the gaze that we’re looking through, through a camera lens, even changes how something looks and when you’re telling a story.

Diggs: That is so real, Tracee.

Ross: So real.

Diggs: And the thing about the Hollywood machine is it’s a big, slow moving machine and your intentions actually don’t matter very much. It was so interesting working with people who have the best intentions in the world and you still look around and most of your crew is white and you’re like, how did this happen? Because that’s where the machine knows how to look. It’s work. It’s actual work.

Ross: It’s actual work. And people, particularly in Hollywood, it’s a big well-oiled machine that’s been working in a certain way. So everybody figures it works. And there’s a lot of spaces in the machine that no one’s opened that door in a really long time, and you’re like, okay, so we need to go downstairs and open that door guys. There’s a weird part of the machine that’s just spilling out the same thing, and we need to go look in that room.

So these Emmys must be the last awards Hamilton can be eligible for, and Black-ish is filming its final season. How do you guys feel saying goodbye to these characters you’ve been living with or associated with for so long?

Diggs: I mean, I haven’t been living with Jefferson and Lafayette, I left them onstage. But other people have lived with them for quite a while, so it’s a bit of a different experience.

Ross: And will continue to, that’s so interesting. I imagine usually when you do a play, not everybody knows you as that.

Diggs: Almost nobody knows you as that, when you do a play. That’s kind of why you do plays.

Ross: Hamilton transcended that little scenario.

Diggs: It did a thing, and a great, wonderful thing that I’m incredibly proud to be a part of. But it is wild to keep revisiting those parts, I feel weird talking about it because I didn’t watch it yesterday and I don’t think about it ever until somebody brings it up. Like I was saying the other day, it’s like you had a kid that grew up or something and now I’m very proud of that kid, like, oh, that’s really cool that they’re off winning awards.

Hamilton would be in first grade by now.

Diggs: It’s won the spelling bee and citizenship award and all that stuff. Very proud of that kid.

Ross: I do have to say though, Daveed, that Hamilton transcended something, but also your portrayal and what you did on stage. There was a reverberation and something that you did with that role, and with that character, that I do think changed the way we see a black actor on stage, in a different way. I think the platform of Hamilton, specifically the role, and then what you did with it, the way you breathe life into it and gave it something, it’s understandable that it is continuing to live on. As an actor, it’s a funny thing, but from the outside looking in and somebody who saw you on stage and saw the TV, you know what I mean? So I do understand the ongoing relationship with that role and what you did with it.

Diggs: That’s the sweetest thing anybody’s ever said to me, and I think that’s what I mean about feeling proud of the thing. Because my only experience with it these days is as a fan of it. It’s just a weird thing as an actor, like you said, but I imagine it must be a much different kind of goodbye to Rainbow. I mean, you’ve lived with her for—

Ross: Eight years, almost nine years when we finish. What’s interesting is, this is my second time letting go of a long-time character. Letting go of Joan [her character on Girlfriends] was really challenging. I was so new to all of it that it just, it honestly felt a little scary, I just didn’t know how to navigate. It felt to me like what I imagined a basketball player retiring, or leaving the team they were on for a long time, because the pace that you keep for a 23 episode series is intense. You are in the water for more time out of the year than you’re out of the water. But the beauty of this is I get to walk into this final season, knowing it’s the final season. And the truth is for eight years, I have been challenged, intrigued, tickled, and annoyed by this woman that I’m playing. All of the above. And for me it just gets deeper and better every year. I get safer every year and I get to experience a new aspect of my skill, my talent, my thing, the thing I do. On Black-ish, 24 episodes a season, it’s like, how can I really allow this woman to be as full, as free, and as herself as she can be. And that is really fun to use my body and my being as that vehicle, it’s really fun. Particularly working with Anthony, the two of us, the way we fly together, it’s magical. It really is. Even if I don’t talk to him, like I’ve never been to his house, we don’t know each other that way. But what we know in our work relationship is magic.

Diggs: As an observer and a very close up observer too, it is really magic. And I say this about you all the time, too, the way that you fight for Bow is so inspirational. Getting to watch it, it taught me so much.

Ross: Yeah, you got to see some of that for real.

Diggs: Yeah. Watch you on set, really championing for your character, for her integrity, and her humanity, and for her fullness being like, this is a real person, don’t underserve her. I’ve taken that with me to all of my other jobs. I really learned it from you.

Is there anything else you guys want to say to each other?

Ross: I miss you.

Diggs: I miss you too.

[utterlyinevitable]

Ode and Ethan are so cute together, my heart could burst 💓

More questions coming your way

Who says I love you first? How long into the relationship? How does it happen?

How far into the relationship do they move in together?

How do they celebrate Ethans 40th?

Whats the most special gift they have given each other?

What do they love most about each other? Do they have any pet peeves?

Do they always work together? Does Ode surpass Ethan in the medical world?

Did E make up with Louise in this universe? Of so what does she think of Ode?

♥️

> ask me anything <

Yay! Okay here we go!!!!!

So my initial reaction is... neither of them actually ever says it. They feel it and they’re secure enough to just know. They have this little head jerk and eyebrow raise that basically is their way of saying “i love you” which they do all the time. Just a silent recognition without giving too much away to those around them. But eventually like 10ish months into it it’s said out loud as an off shoot. Wasn’t meant to come out but it did ever so naturally. 

How it comes out? ...................... this literally took me three days to figure out:

Ode says it first. On a phone call. She didn’t mean to say it, it just slipped out with her goodbye of “alright. love you. bye”. She didn’t even realize she said it until hours later when she was replaying the conversation, mentally checking off that she has all the things they agreed upon before she heads home.

After residency Ode and all her friends go separate ways so she needs to move into a smaller apartment. Ethan extended an offer to stay with him for a while until she finds a place (with the subtext of forever), even saying she could have the second bedroom since it’s been practically hers anyway. But Ode diplomatically declined; they’ve only been together for five months and she’s still so fearful that they’re going to fuck this up somehow. They’ve only just started having sex. So she gets herself her first solo place with one bedroom in the same neighborhood near the hospital. 

They move in together when her 16 month lease is up. By then there wasn’t a doubt in her mind anymore. She loved her little third floor walk up and the independence that came with it, but nothing could beat the views at Ethan’s place, and it’s always felt a little bit like home.

So Ethan’s 40th happens before they get together. And true to form he doesn’t want to do a damn thing. But “40 is practically mid life crisis territory and he’s due for a breakdown” (as Jackie put it). So Ode, Sienna and Kyra work together to plan the most elaborate single person party. Because Ethan is such a devout patron of the arts, BOH (after much southern belle pitching from o and k) agree to perform an abridged version of Ethan’s favorite opera at their small rehearsal theatre. Sienna makes a majority of the dinner, all Ethan’s proclaimed favorites for meal, cocktail and dessert. Ode is on getting him to actually turn up. He knows she’s planning something and wants no part of it but goes along because this is “payback for my birthday”. He’s absolutely confused as to why they’re driving out of Boston.

In the atrium is set up as a cocktail hour with a handful of Ethan’s close friends and his dad - the people who want to celebrate him. 40 minutes later the people clear out and it’s just Ode and Ethan (siennas waiting on standby to drive ode home) making their way into the performance area where there’s dinner and dessert under a klosh at a single solitary table. Ethan’s speechless As ode explains the scene they’ve walked into. He sits, she pours him a drink, says happy birthday as the music of the show starts to play and goes to leave.

“You’re not staying?”

“You said you wanted to be alone.”

“Alone and at home. Not alone watching ten people perform.”

She shoots him a look and Ethan stands to look for a second chair.

“Siennas waiting to drive me home.”

“Tell her to join. It’s the least I can do since she made much too much food for one human.”

The three of them have a lovely evening. And if Ethan wasn’t fully cognizant of the fact he loves her, he sure as hell is now. Who else would do this? For him???

The most special gift Ode’s gotten from Ethan is the keyboard. Figuring out her feelings and falling for Ethan was a great inspiration to get her to start writing again. Much to some of her roommates dissatisfaction when the girl forgot to plug headphones in at stupid o’clock.

His most prized gift actually wasn’t something she’s gotten him - over the years she’s given him make shift things, ties and cufflinks, books but nothing as special as what her dad gave him when they visited him for the first time as a couple. It was a small photo album of ode from her teen years and through college. He didn’t even recognize her in a few - sitting on a table in ripped skinny jeans with wild hair and a guitar on her lap. She’s looking at the camera out of the corner of her eyes - singing something with mouth wide open and corners turned in a smile. There’s a spark in her eyes he recognizes but the one he knows it miles duller. He likes this side of her. Wonders what happened. And wants to make her feel like that happy go lucky girl every day for the rest of forever.

Ethan loves her compassion and level-headedness when it matters, and ofc that she has so many skills and talents he keeps uncovering. Wants to spend the rest of his life finding out about. He also really loves the creases at the corner of her eyes. She won’t agree they’re crows feet - she’s much too young for that atm. But he loves them because they make her eyes all the more expressive.

Ode loves his intelligence but also his gentleness. Once you get past that coarse, jaded Ramsey front he’s such a soft bean. She likes how they can talk for hours or just sit in companionable silence. There’s no expectations that need to be fulfilled with him outside of work and it’s the healthiest relationship she’s been in.

They both hate how stubborn the other can be. He hates how she leaves teabags all over the kitchen when the garbage is right there. She hates how anal he is about cleanliness and clutter. But how he can’t seem to get all his socks in the hamper - there’s always some hiding around back.

No, they don’t always work together. Ode is on the DT for another year before getting a research opportunity to write about the most interesting cases they’ve come across, alongside Ethan. He declined the title credit, but helped with the research. She dedicated her first book to him.

The more recognition she started to get in the medical world press, the more people uncovered her musical past. It was a bit jarring to have to talk about that small part of her life when she gave a keynote on new technologies in diagnostics medicine for the digital age. So much so that she got a call from her publishing house and SESAC. Basically to push her to do a one-off gig and see if she’s interested in remastering and a couple synch and derivative deals. Her first response was ‘i’m really busy and it’s been over a decade’. But after aimlessly wandering around their apartment and eventually sitting down to play, fighting a war within her, Ethan pushes her to do it. 

She certainly surpasses Ethan in the medical world, but not for the reasons he’s known for. She ends up marrying her love of music with medicine and becomes a viral sensation. A new-age doctor for the on-demand generations. 

No, I don’t think he does make up with Louise. not really. Ethan’s cordial but doesn’t want anything else to do with her. He doesn’t became a brat when Alan brings her up, though. He respects his dad enough - with the help of Ode - to pretend to be a three-piece family. Ode actually told Ethan that it probably isn’t a good idea that he brings her to rehab - she suggested scheduling a therapy session at the rehab to try and work things through when everyone’s minds have had time to settle. Ethan told her he’d rather rip the band-aid off so they drive her together.

Louise is skeptical - she doesn’t like the idea of someone influencing her son. Yeah, the girl is pretty but who tf is she? Alan says Ethan’s been single and no chance of dating as he’s much too restless for that. Months after being released from rehab and sticking around the Providence-area, Louise tries to get back in contact. She has a job and she’s been clean ever sense. She and Alan talk every now and then but no chance of repairing the family. Louise is there for lunch when Ode and E drive up for the weekend. It’s a whole rush of emotions for E again, and Ode is oddly hopeful, wanting to make the best of the situation. Louise sees the way the ramsey men look at her and she has no choice but to get on board.

as always, thank you for these. I love them and you so so much ♥️

[steve0discusses]

S4 Ep37: Return of O R B S

Heyyyyy boy, look who’s back, it’s orbs!

So we’ve seen a lot of orbs on this show and I fully admit that I kinda started...I started feeling a kinship for the orbs. Something about these mysterious death balls of Yugioh that we see over and over just became really relatable during a pandemic. Being trapped in a bubble and unable to get close to anyone you know is such a 2020 vibe, youknow?

These orbs that are apparently so normalized in this universe that everyone is just max chilling in an orb and just doing their best at not thinking about whether or not they’ll still have to poop in this completely transparent orb in front of all of their friends.

Also, welcome back, Yugi. Apparently he was just taking a nap this entire time. That’s canon and you know what? Good for him.

And then everyone else just kinda showed up, tired, in an orb, feeling kind of frustrated because there’s literally nothing else they can do to get out of this situation. It’s basically a zoom call in 2020.

(read more under the cut)

TBH if Pegasus was in a zoom call, you know he’d just be talking about wine. You know he’d just be in a zoom call with a bunch of straight-laced teenagers just going off about the weird wine he got from a subscription box that he bought when he was day drunk a week ago. You know he’d just be like “I mean is it good? Should I keep it? Should I drink it anyway?” While popping the cork on stream and just pouring it directly into a cereal bowl.

I can feel the orb life going on here. I can especially feel Seto Kaiba, who fell asleep during the zoom call without turning off the camera.

On the other side of the room is people dying as they get sucked directly into their impending doom.

Long ago, about...last year I think...I recapped an episode from the beginning of the season where Pegasus introduced this blank card--that I assumed was blank.

But that card from that episode--it wasn’t actually blank. It was a symbolic blank card and the show runners were like “our child audience will surely get that we just don’t want to spoil the ending” as I, a full grown adult, completely thought this card was blank.

But like...this is Pegasus. You can’t just be tossing out blank cards like that!

...anyway...it’s fine, because we get a little bit more about the time that Pegasus donned that quantum hat that is sometimes square and sometimes round and then just harassed a bunch of people in Egypt until one guy tore out his eyeball and replaced it with a Christmas ornament.

I freakin have the hardest time believing this guy was married once.

PS, now I know that when you uh put people’s hair into strips like this, it’s a lot of effort to animate and it doesn’t look anything like hair. Glad Yugioh taught me that none of us ever need to do that. Ever again. Erase that idea from your to-do list, it doesn’t work.

Anyway, Pegasus lets us know that while he was trying to revive his dead wife and putting a cold compress on his new golden eye-socket, he was also like...obsessed with finding these three dragons.

And he was like “but they didn’t exist anywhere else!” He looked in outer space?? In atoms??? all over the place (this was in the show, PS, he looked on a molecular level for these duel monster dragons) until he was like “ah! That’s because they DID never exist!”

PS...are there...molecular duel monsters?

Just asking for a friend.

...so they did exist, they just had exactly the same names they do now, but were humans so I guess Pegasus just...didn’t realize that they were the same. Kinda like how when I used to read manga as a kid or watch anime and they’d go into chibi forms I thought those were different people. It’s just like that.

Anyway if dragons are turning into humans please don’t tell that to Kaiba. Blue eyes white dragon wife is much funnier as a dragon.

But like...I get that mechanically, in the game, you have to change them to human to make the cards work but...why do we care if they’re human or dragons anyway? Dartz comes from a world where most people turned into monsters. And like if no one’s trying to date them, not even Kaiba...who cares? Dartz’ wife is a freakin monster and I don’t remember seeing him divorce her at any point.

Anyway, it was an odd thing for the show to throw in there about cards we have no relationship with. It’s a complicated season, and we spent way more time on our minibosses than we ever spent with the three tragic dragon characters that are going to actually save our asses.

Now back in the soul hut, Dartz has decided to do the strategy where he convinces Pharaoh to give up. Which youknow...

The show acts like Pharaoh has any idea of who he used to be and it’s like do you even know how long Marik spent trying to teach Pharaoh anything about his past? Like Marik stood there with his back exposed and was like “I wrote it down! See? That’s about you!! Read my back scriptures!!!” and Yami kind of squinted at it and was like “Nah...” and then the island exploded.

So anyway, the only way that Dartz can convince Pharaoh to kill himself is to show Pharaoh the invite code to the orb zoom call. And so Dartz like “your friends are having so much fun in death zoom right now, don’t you want to hang one last time? Don’t you want to see what they’re up to? Don’t you want to hear them complain about working from home and how small their orb is and how their back is cramped all the time because the park is closed so they never go on walks anymore? Don’t you want to hear and secretly enjoy how much weight Joey gained from eating Doritos for 8 straight months? Don’t you want that in your life, Pharaoh?”

And then he just...decided to possess his bean because obviously that wouldn't work.

Freakin Usagi Tsukino over here.

Speaking of:

I’m also imagining that this scene in the big ol bathtub was probably...longer...in the original version? Just saying that because...what’s the point of putting a shirt on the boy? Unless it was implied that at some point you saw the whole boy? Maybe I blinked and missed a shot of the whole boy?

Anyway this scene felt heavily edited, that’s my hypothesis, if it wasn’t and someone was like “yo put a shirt on the boy” then I...don’t know what to say about that. It’s a pair of shoulders. I’m pretty sure half of their cards are racier than that.

Do you like the evidence that we have here that Tea and Tristan totally biffed it last episode? I do.

Anyway, as the Orichalcos shrinks and threatens to take Pharaoh’s soul, the puzzle taps into his dark powers, and the power of friendship and also all the minibosses who died kinda formed a ring around him and bumped the orichalcos back into place.

Nice that Mai got added to the friend pile, but only in death. Also, I’m pretty sure Alister is here and Pharaoh never met him? But there’s more of a reason as to why the mini bosses are here, since they have their own agenda outside of Pharaoh and being his best buddy so I won’t question that too much.

This is friendship from Yami’s perspective, and like...Yami kinda wants to be friends with most people. Hell, if Bakura were introduced this season, he’d be here, too. That’s just how Pharaoh rolls.

Yami decided that, although he’s a huge mess of a human being and screw it at every possible opportunity, his core isn’t made up of a dark magic curse with a crusty soul left over from some kingdom that botched it 5000 years ago. He’s decided that he’s moving on from that sort of anxiety--becoming his own sort of person--separate from Yugi, separate from his past, and separate from the powers that he’s often defined by. And it’s about time. It’s about time he recognizes that he needs to stop clinging to the ancient past (although I’m pretty sure his ancient past will be the entirety of next season)

He should give himself a real name while he’s at it, but youknow, he's not going to. Yami hasn’t quite figured out names yet.

Nightmare foreshortening, that’s what this is. Like you have to just roll a dice when you do foreshortening, and sometimes you get snake eyes, the rest of the time, you get this.

So not only are these guys voiced by Seto, Yugi, and Joey, they have faces that are like a blend of Valon, Raphael, Mai and Alister (yes that was four people for three dragon people, just go with it)--but the show doesn’t really focus on that, or at least not in this episode.

But, it does give the three mini bosses a reason to be chosen by the Orichalcos, if it’s inferred that they were some reincarnated version of the original dragons. Especially since Valon had the ability to just punch out the Orichalcos when he was still alive, and apparently that is the same thing this card does.

I can’t believe that him punching stuff was foreshadowing. I should have known. The answer in this show is always punching.

And so the episode ends with some...something that happened, but don’t ask me about it.

One of the reasons I don’t go over card games here. I mean...c’mon.

Come the freakin on.

Anyway we have some more episodes before this is over but at least this guy is at 0 hp so like...how long can you draw out one single play of cards? (I say, knowing they can stretch this game out...infinitely)

anyway, here’s where you can read these from the top. Hope y’all are staying safe!

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

[aion-rsa]

The Sopranos’ Best End Credit Songs

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

There are so many legendary aspects of The Sopranos that it’s hard to pick just one. Between masterful storytelling, deep character development, and uncanny acting, everything comes together to create a show that has been enjoyed for over two decades now. The most artistic aspect of the package, however, may just be the use of music, specifically the unique songs curated personally by creator David Chase that run during each episode’s end credits. 

Ranging from oldies, foreign ballads, jazz compositions, and pure instrumentals, the variety is stunning and can keep you exploring the track list of the series for days. We’ve decided to narrow all of the end credit songs down to the best 15 in the series, listed in chronological order of airing. Enjoy! 

Season 1 Episode 4: Meadowlands 

“Look on Down from the Bridge” by Mazzy Star

The nice father-son moment between Tony and A.J. at the closing of this episode is accompanied by this beautiful track from Mazzy Star. A.J. sees his dad in a whole new light after Meadow tells him that he’s in the mafia, but a simple smile and wink from Tony reassures the youngest Soprano child that he certainly will still “look on down from the bridge” and see his family as the only priority in his life, no matter what criminal occupation he tries to hide on a daily basis. 

Season 1 Episode 7: Down Neck 

“White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane

This one follows the pattern of the show choosing to play a song earlier in an episode and then again during the final scene and credits. The Jefferson Airplane hit refers to drug use and being intoxicated, therefore changing as a person in the process. The song plays when Tony is taking prozac mid-episode and during the final scene in which Tony and A.J share an ice cream sundae and some whip cream together. No matter how much the therapy and the meds try to alter Tony’s life, he’ll remain the same man: a depressed mobster and a father who softens for his children. 

Season 2 Episode 10: Bust Out 

“Wheel in the Sky” by Journey

If you haven’t noticed by the time you’re done watching the show, The Sopranos loves to point out how trapped all of the characters are in the lifestyles they have either chosen or been forced into. Tony has betrayal surrounding him at every corner at the end of the second season: Richie and Janice plotting his removal, Carmela falling for a painter who is working in the family home, and Pussy’s FBI informancy reaching a climax. Still, the “wheel in the sky keeps on turning”. Tony finishes the episode having some fun with A.J. on the Stugotz, and he doesn’t “know where he’ll be tomorrow” but he’ll enjoy the time he has in the present. 

Season 2 Episode 12: The Knight in White Satin Armor 

“I Saved the World Today” by the Eurythmics

Tony returns home after disposing of Richie Aprile’s body because Janice shot him to death over a domestic dispute. After informing Carmela of the night’s bloody events, she quickly moves on to the list of chores and homemaker responsibilities she is going to lay at Tony’s feet for the next week while she goes on vacation with Ro Aprile. This apt song from the Eurythmics exemplifies everything Tony has to be in the lives of friends and family around him: always there to save the world for them.

Season 3 Episode 4: Employee of the Month 

“Fisherman’s Daughter” by Daniel Lanois

This Dr. Melfi-centric episode is one of the most deservedly acclaimed hours in the drama’s history. When the final scene gives her a chance to let Tony loose on the monster who assaulted her, she powerfully takes the moral route and declines his services. The camera pans to black solemnly with this haunting instrumental track by Daniel Lanois, a perfect backdrop to allow the audience to ponder everything that just happened and why Melfi was able to maintain strength that so many others wouldn’t have mustered. Anything with singing would have detracted from the environment the writers were trying to create, so this is a great song choice. 

Season 3 Episode 12: Amour Fou 

“Affection” by Little Steven and the Lost Boys

The penultimate episode of the third season features the climax of the relationship between Tony and Gloria, in which the crazy affection that they have for one another boils over into violence. Yet another of the brilliant musical choices this show made was to use the same song twice: once earlier in an episode, and then again in the final scene and credits. This tune, sung by Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) himself, plays with Tony and Gloria spending time together mid-episode and then again at the end credits. 

Season 4 Episode 4: The Weight 

“Vesuvio” by Spaccanapoli

Another example of double dipping on the same song in one episode. The above scene between Carmela and Furio dancing and falling in love right underneath Tony’s nose uses this romantic Italian track by Spaccanapoli, and then uses it again in the final seconds when Carmela is daydreaming about Furio while having sex with Tony. So sensual and heavy, the audience knows that Carmela is going down a path she can’t see through to the end, but the music signifies the passion that she will inevitably entangle herself in for the time being. 

Season 4 Episode 7: Watching Too Much Television 

“Oh Girl” by The Chi-Lites

When an assemblyman starts an affair with Tony’s ex-lover, Irina, there is quite a bit of jealousy and ownership that exudes from the mob boss. This classic from the Chi-Lites plays in the car on the way over to the assemblyman’s house as Tony drives over to confront him about “taking” his mistress from him. It is a song which causes deep reflection and nostalgia for a lost love, and prompts Tony to get emotional listening to it. Wonderful acting by Gandolfini and superb use of in-world music that plays over to the credits, something the show got down to an art and a science simultaneously. 

Season 5 Episode 10: Cold Cuts 

“I’m Not Like Everybody Else” by The Kinks

No, Tony Soprano is certainly not like anybody else. He insists that Janice see anger management counselors at the beginning of this episode, and when she actually improves her mood because of it, his narcissism makes him antagonize her until a typical Soprano family fight breaks out at dinner. Tony walks out of the house with a despicable smile on his face to the tune of this intense rock anthem.

Season 5 Episode 11: The Test Dream 

“Three Times a Lady” by The Commodores

In an episode in which Tony spends 20 minutes literally dreaming about past and future problems in his life, culminating in the murder of Billy Leotardo by Anthony Blundetto, The Commodores soft romance hit plays us out. Tony calls Carmela to report about said dreams, part of which were repeat ones that have happened previously in Tony’s life. It’s nice for the audience to see these two having a tender exchange rather than the tense arguing that normally characterizes their marriage, especially because this was when the two were still separated previously throughout the fifth season. 

Season 6 Episode 4: The Fleshy Part of the Thigh 

“One of These Days” by Pink Floyd

Paulie Walnuts is a fan favorite for a myriad of reasons. Between his gray-haired wings and his immature one-liners, many forget that the mobster had one of the scarier violent streaks in the show. After discovering that his mother was actually his aunt, Paulie gets jealous of Jason Barone’s mother trying to protect him from the mafia after selling the sanitation business that serves as a front for the DiMeo crime family. This psychedelic, hard-rock snippet from Pink Floyd that blares in the credits after Paulie threatens Jason’s life at the end of episode is a strong reminder to the viewer that this is a character who borders on sociopathic most of the time. 

Season 6 Episode 12: Kaisha 

“Moonlight Mile” by The Rolling Stones

Unlike other iconic dramas, The Sopranos loved ending their season finales (and “Kaisha” is technically a season finale with season 6 split into two parts) with relative closure and absolutely no cliffhangers. The family has an enormous Christmas gathering at the Soprano residence, marked by A.J. bringing over an older girlfriend and Meadow’s rare absence from family time. This classic from The Rolling Stones that describes the feeling of trying to get back home off the road fits lovingly with the rare moment of calm before the storm that is the final season of the show.  

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Season 6 Episode 14: Stage 5 

“Evidently Chickentown” by John Cooper Clarke

This closing piece by John Cooper Clarke is actually considered a poetry performance, and the anger and fury that it inspires as Phil Leotardo laments being taken advantage of a few too many times is palpable. This is when we knew that war in New York was going to be bloody. The song also symbolizes the perpetual frustration both Christopher and Tony have with one another when they hug at the former’s baby’s baptism. The final season was certainly kicked up a couple notches as these final credits rolled. 

Season 6 Episode 17: Walk Like a Man 

“The Valley” by Los Lobos

This somber piece plays alongside Christopher picking up a tiny tree in his front yard after Paulie had attempted to destroy everything on his property as revenge for a violent incident. After Christopher thinks they’ve made up, Paulie and the gang start making fun of his infant daughter and laughing in his face. It is at this point that Chris understands he is forever an outsider, not loved by a single person on the planet. He will just trudge along and try to keep upright, which are themes displayed in this chilling and melancholy song of choice. 

Season 6 Episode 21: Made in America 

“Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey

The most famous song in the show is also the final one that plays right before the screen goes to black and Tony Soprano’s fate is left up to our own imagination (kind of). It’s technically not an end credits song, but there’s no way it can be excluded from this list. The song represents the nostalgia of sharing one final family meal together, the simplicities of the Soprano family when you strip away the mobster lifestyle and the murder, and it encourages the audience to never stop believing their favorite mob boss is still alive if that’s what they so choose to desire. A special ending to a legendary show!

The post The Sopranos’ Best End Credit Songs appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[scottymcgeesterwrites]

Final Fantasy XV Review

Year: 2016

Original Platform: PlayStation 4

Also available on: PC (Steam), XBox One

Version I Played: PlayStation 4

Here we go. The final Final Fantasy review of the main single-player games. I just want to say, first off, we’ve been waiting for this game since 2006. It took them ten damn years to finally release this game. I clearly remember the teaser trailer they released when it was called Final Fantasy XIII Versus, and my next-door neighbor and I were so hyped for this game when we were freaking teenagers. After years of delays, Square Enix revamped it into Final Fantasy XV.

Did it live up to the wait? Well, read and find out.

Synopsis:

Noctis Lucis Caelum is the heir to the throne of the kingdom of Lucis. On his birthday, he sets off with his three best friends and bodyguards (Ignis, Prompto, Gladio) to marry his betrothed, Lunafreya. The marriage is supposed to be a political one, though Noct and Lunafreya had grown up together and become fond of each other. But peace turns to war as the empire of Niflheim betrays Insomnia and invades. Noct, now on the run, has to reclaim his right to the throne by collecting the necessary family heirlooms which will banish the darkness.  

Gameplay:

Open-world Final Fantasy.

That is the big selling point for this game. 

A MASSIVE step up from Final Fantasy XIII’s gameplay, Final Fantasy XV has you roaming around and attacking enemies on the field in real time. The battle system returns to something slightly more conventional by having you cast spells and use items. It seems like this is what Square really intended to do after Final Fantasy XII. Looking back, Final Fantasy XIII feels like some prototype before Final Fantasy XII, so it really becomes apparent that Final Fantasy XIII’s gameplay comes off as a huge mistake.

This game’s major’s strength comes from the player engaging with a massive world. You camp. You take on hunts. You take on a bajillion sidequests. You run across the world. You drive across the world. You can ride a chocobo across the world.

However, the dip in the gameplay comes from how easily accessible these sidequests are. The map tells you exactly where you go 24/7. I started to have an existential crisis around my 50th sidequest in a row. Why am I doing this? What’s the point? I go here to kill a thing, or go there to help someone by giving a potion or taking a picture. You start to realize that a good bulk of sidequests are either hunting daemons or fetching an item. You start to deconstruct the meaning of playing a video game as you think to yourself, “Why do I play video games?” while also thinking “But wait, one more and then I swear I’m done.”.

I get it, not everyone has the time nowadays to figure out a huge game like this. I get it, video games are now marketed to everyone for ease. At the same time, I personally love a good challenge. I mean, I’m the guy who has Dark Souls as one of his favorite video games of all time, so my opinion on the matter might definitely be skewered compared to most. I generally want to feel like I actually figured something out by myself rather than following a tracker on the screen and walking from task to task and then saying, “Okay done. Next.”.

Too much of that and playing a video game starts to feel like a 9 to 5 job to me. This game is great to play during quarantine, but at one point I saw playing this game as feeling like an actual job. Wake up, eat breakfast, time to hunt some daemons.

This is the growing conflict some people have with story-driven games versus open-world games. I see the argument focused too much on words like “linear”, but in reality we should be talking about “automation”. If a video game is too automated, then did you really play a video game? Or did you watch a movie that allows you to control the camera angle? At first, the idea of driving around an open-world Final Fantasy game sounds amazing. Isn’t that what fans always dreamed of? In reality, you don’t really drive around at your leisure. Even when you have the car set to “manual”, you can’t speed up, drive off-road, or pull off a sick drift like in The Fast and the Furious. Your car still automatically stays on the road wherever you’re going. It’s not so much “manual” as it is “I can control where and when to stop and which road to take”. Riding chocobos at your leisure is much more fun, but becomes increasingly impractical as you can just fast-travel to necessary locations in your car.

The sights and sounds of the fictional world of Eos are enough to gloss over these shortcomings though. It IS still fun to roam around and fight monsters and save the day. My bottom line is, “You don’t think about just how mindless the tasks are unless you keep playing for many days straight.”. And I poured hours into this game day after day because of the 2020 pandemic quarantine.

Graphics:

Obviously the best thus far. However, in-game facial expressions on the NPCs are still quite stilted and awkward. This game made me realize that we’ve yet to jump a hurdle when it comes to in-game graphics. The game is so polished but there are still limitations when it comes to giving the characters natural movements, both in body and lips. So an NPC could be shouting “WOW THAT’S AMAZING!” but have a straight face jumping up and down, despite the fact that the character model is the most realistic we’ve created so far in a video game. I was looking back at in-game cutscenes of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, and found it ironic that they can portray body movements so much better, but that’s the trade-off. Less graphics power to portray realistic bodies, but the graphics power can then be allocated to focus on natural movements. Nowadays, all the graphics power is focused on making things look good, but that hardly leaves room for making things move naturally.

Story:

After the overly-complicated plotline of Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XV feels like a breath of fresh air. On the surface, it’s a straightforward tale of a boy seeking to become a king after his father is brutally murdered by enemy forces. The bromance between the young king and his bodyguards is endearing. Each character feels distinct and genuinely makes you laugh. The setup sounds like prime real estate for an emotionally charged storyline.

Unfortunately, it falls apart somewhere around the last quarter. What should have been a strong and straightforward story turned into a rushed, hasty mess by the final act.

The story started SO strong, they practically had it in the bag, but then it became apparent that many important elements were glossed over - especially when it came to the main villain. I realized that some things required me to read between the lines, or even were only explained in character dossiers in the archive section of the menu. Supposedly, the movie Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV explains more, but do you really expect me to have to watch a separate movie to understand the actual game? The final quarter of the story feels like someone was trying to finish NaNoWriMo, realized they were running out of time, and quickly jumped from scene to scene to reach that 50k word goal. The ten-year time-skip is a joke. The final chapter is sorely disappointing.

The ending was appropriate though, and even beautiful. However, the overall story didn’t have the necessary emotional weight to really make me feel anything. I thought to myself, “I feel like I should be tearing up but instead I feel nothing.”. Even Final Fantasy XII, which lacked a romance, had me swelling up at the end. Final Fantasy XV didn’t make me swell up until literally the last few seconds of the post-credits scene.

People complained about the advertising (Coleman, Cup Noodles) but that didn’t bother me.

What does bother me is the lack of variety in the main cast, and in numerous ways. There were so many interesting side characters that didn’t receive much screen time, or use at all in the story. The strong focus on only the four male leads made it a sausagefest. I was craving more out of Aranea Highwind and Iris Amicitia. They are important but don’t get any screen time at all in the final chapter, nor do we ever hear from them ever again after the time-skip. Aranea Highwind was such a cool character, but once again ends up being wasted potential.

The main cast lacked distinctive styles. When I first saw the main cast, I had a hard time telling them apart. They looked like a k-pop band. Compare the main cast of Final Fantasy XV to literally any other Final Fantasy main cast and you can immediately spot the difference.

The four main leads do have distinct personalities, and I quite loved hearing their comments and banter. It felt realistic, but at times it became ridiculous. I rolled my eyes when Prompto would say things like, “Hashtag sorry not sorry.” That was a bit too on the nose, and came off as Square trying to pander to the current generation.

But what really rubbed me the wrong way is the incredible lack of non-white characters in the entire game. Lestallum feels so wrong to me as a Hispanic. Lestallum is supposed to be modeled after Havana, Cuba.

Its music, its buildings, its activities. It has a tropical climate, and yet every single denizen is pale white. Every. Single. One. I am not exaggerating. It feels so absolutely wrong walking around that city and not seeing anyone with the slightest shade of brown. This isn’t some uncalled-for SJW rant, it’s a simple fact. Tropical climates breed tanner skins. My brain naturally did a double-take when seeing the all-white population, saying, “Hmmm, something’s wrong here.”. For God’s sake, Final Fantasy XII, made over a decade earlier, did a better job at displaying the various nuances in skin tones, and that was on the PlayStation 2! Final Fantasy X, even older, seemed to properly portray tropical beach populations, inspired by the Philippines, with the character Wakka.

I noticed that they really took the time to incorporate elements from virtually every single Final Fantasy game. Aside from the crystals, the modern settings, and other obvious elements, four male leads are reminiscent of Final Fantasy III, the sinister chancellor hearkens back to Kefka from Final Fantasy VI, the enemy Yojimbo resembles Final Fantasy X’s version of Yojimbo, a certain boss battle reminded me of Cid Raines from Final Fantasy XIII.

Also, there’s Dino. Quite possibly the most annoying Final Fantasy NPC ever.

The overly obnoxious Italian stereotype made me want to punch his face, and also took me out of the experience of the fictional world. Every time you spoke with him he's all like "HEY HOW YOU DOIN WELCOME TO OLIVE GARDEN YOU TALKIN TO ME BADA BING BADA BOOM SPICY PIECE OF MEATBALL CAPISCE? AMIRITE??"

Square seemed to treat this game as a milestone in the series, alluding to everything the series ever did. It’s a shame that the story itself wasn’t quite up to snuff to be held in such regard.

Music:           

The game’s major lyrical song is copyrighted, which is a first for a Final Fantasy game. It makes sense why they chose the song “Stand by Me”, both in literal and figurative terms of the story.             

The score to this game is quite fantastic. The series has its first female composer, Yoko Shimomura. I have absolutely no complaints about the music. Nobuo Uematsu didn’t even pop into my head during the entire game. It’s the first time since Uematsu’s departure that I felt immersed in the score. The motifs are distinct and strong. The battle music is vibrant and an orchestral orgasm to listen to.    

Notable Theme:            

“Somnus”  

The main theme of the game. It plays right away in the main menu. I love how it is incorporated into the rest of the score, and my brain kept wanting to hear it to its completion.   

Direct Sequel?           

Nope. However, there is downloadable content that fills in the gap of events within the game. Supposedly, Final Fantasy XV is loosely connected to Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Type-O, all sharing common themes and possibly set in the same universe. You can also watch the prequel movie, Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV.

Did it Live up to the Hype?           

Eh.           

Yes, and no.            

It was cool to play around, but the rest is a flaccid attempt at being a notable entry in the series “for fans and first-timers”, as the words proudly display every time you load the game. It’s not the worst in the series, but certainly not the best. It’s somewhere in the mid-to-low tier.

[cherryblossomshadow]

Wonder Woman 1984 review

Long, rambly, and spoilery. You’ve been warned. 

I saw WW84. I had thoughts. Let's talk about it. 

I want to preface with the fact that it's amazing that we have another female-led superhero film! I loved Patti Jenkins' work with the first Wonder Woman (and this one too) and I'm so glad she's back for this one. There's obviously a lot to pick through, but first, a couple reminders.

No film will ever be "perfect."

Not every film is made specifically for you. 

It is okay to vibe or disvibe with something. But that does not make it trash. 

Also, please, keep in mind, what I'm expressing are my opinions. I'm entitled to mine as you are entitled to yours. I hope you have a lovely time on the internet, and I hope you wish the same for everyone you interact with. 

Oh, and spoilers obviously. 

Okay, with all that out of the way, let's dig in. 

My overall experience with the film is positive! I had a great time watching it, it got me emotional, and I definitely want to watch it again. That said, I don't think it's better than the first one (although that would have been quite a feat), and that's ok. It's a continuation of a story we've already started, and it doesn't need to outshine the first. 

Okay, after all the hyping up and disclaiming I've done, let's dig into what I didn't like about the film. 

Number one is pacing. The storyline felt very erratic to me? Part of that, I feel, is because we have three (four?) main characters, and we jump between them pretty abruptly. 

Number two is the themes. Now I do like the themes of WW84 (truth and sacrifice), I just don't think they were worked into the film as cohesively as I would have liked? 

Number three is perceived character changes to Diana. And really, some of this is kinda circumstantial, I just thought it deserved its own bullet point. You'll see what I mean. 

So, on Pacing.

We jump between Diana (and Steve), Barbara, and Maxwell pretty frequently. And before I talk about that, I have to talk about my view on the characters. 

a. Now, I love the Mandalorian, but I was not personally invested in Maxwell's arc at all. Again, this is my take, and I know people disagree. Many people feel like Pedro Pascal carried the film on his shoulders. That's cool. He's a great actor. I'm glad he was in it. I just kinda checked out of every scene he was in (when he wasn't with his kid) because I wasn't invested in him. He played a sleazeball on purpose, and it worked. I was sleazed. So the movie kinda dragged for me whenever the camera panned to him. 

b. I loved the focus on Barbara. I don't know Cheetah from the comics, so this is from a movie-only perspective. But I know one of the criticisms of the first film was that Diana didn't really talk to women after she left Themyscira (even though there was a perfectly good villainess sitting right there for her to converse with and have morality debates/fights with! Even Steve Trevor got to talk to Dr Poison!), so I thought it was great that 1) they set up a villainess for her to fight and 2) it was a villainess that she knew, she had talked to, she had formed a relationship with. It honestly surprised me that Barbara was helpful for so long (bc I had seen the trailer and got spoiled that she would become a villain), but I love that she genuinely did want to help Diana, up until she hit her hard limit (giving up her powers). Now, that being said, the Nerd Girl Makeover has been done a thousand times. I knew what her vague trajectory would be from the second she appeared on screen with frizzy hair. I did like that her motivation was not solely "pretty people are mean to me, and I want revenge and/or for this hot guy to like me," but specifically, "I want to be like this really cool girl" and then "I don’t want to be like anyone else; I want to be the best/number one" for myself." But I felt like the absolute inattention that she was shown at the beginning and the absolute worship Diana and later Barbara would get was ... highly exaggerated? And I know this was another criticism of the first film, that yeah "Diana did so well in the real world because SHE'S HOT and that's actually not empowering to women" or something. But like. Watching that part made me uncomfortable instead of seen. Pandered to, instead of impacted. Showing how looks change how society treats you is important, but not to this caricaturized degree. 

c. (and d?) And lastly, Diana and Steve. Or more accurately, Diana and Steve's soul or memories or ??? that has been transplanted into some random man's body with absolutely no one's consent (I don't believe that Diana "consented" when making the wish, because she didn't know 1. That it would even work or 2. HOW it would work.). So ... Yeah. The first problem with this (chronologically, not by importance) is that it's really unclear what's going on? Some rando is reciting Steve's lines from the first film, then all of a sudden he turns into Chris Pine? (Fun fact: my aunt actually recognized the actor from Hallmark 😂 Could you imagine being the guy who gets replaced by Chris Pine for half the movie? Like "yeah, I played Steve Trevor, but they had Chris Pine do all the important parts" 😂😂😂). So, Diana and Steve finally figure out that he's inhabiting some engineer's body because of the wish she made. And then they bang. Or do they bang before they figure it out? Either way, yikes 😬. Not a good look. 

To be clear, the yikes part is that Steve is inhabiting Engineer Dude's body without their consent (without his own either tho so that part's not really his fault), but then he chooses to do things sexually with that body that Engineer Dude didn't consent to (because he's like, literally not home. Whether he's been subsumed into Chris Pine or taken out or dormant or whatever). Oh, and then like, probably doing death-defying stunts with his body is also yikes. I'm not really sure what the rules around body possession are. Cuz you know. 

Anyway, that is a huge issue that is literally not addressed. At all. 

Again, I think they may have been trying to address some criticisms from the first film about Diana "getting rid of the dreaded V-card so quickly in Wonder Woman and then pining after Chris Pine (lol) for the rest of her long life" and how that sets back female sexuality and stuff. Which I get. They actually lampshaded it in WW84, how Chris Pine wants her to move on because "the world deserves her." Which I know what they were going for in the scene, but I feel like they didn't flesh out the journey from Hippolyta's "the world doesn't deserve you Diana" to Steve's "the world deserves you (to date them)" enough. But I digress. 

I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the possession and that "the world deserves/doesn't deserve you" line in my Themes section, but honestly? From the previews, I assumed that Chris Pine was revived from the dead via time travel or something. Body possession was NOT in the the trailers. I think the Dreamstone could have created a body for him out of nothing. Or like "time-traveled" him into the future. So like. Why didn't they? Why introduce body possession at all? So they could make fun of the dude's clothes? 

Okay, back to the pacing part of the pacing section. These three (four?) characters have completely different things going on in their lives (I actually forgot to talk about Maxwell, but he wants to "be the best," and he's gonna do it by giving people what they think they want (maybe) and then taking from them whatever he wants. Yeah idk). And all three do interact at the beginning (brownie points) even if the attempted seduction of Barbara by Maxwell makes me want to throw up. But the themes aren't worked in as cohesively as I would have liked, and the tone changes were jarring, as the film switched between them all. 

Another facet of the movie is that the Dreamstone is kind of a mystery. And that was a deliberate Choice™, not a mistake. We're guessing at what the rock is doing and how and why and by who and all that stuff, and that's on purpose, but that makes for a confusing experience. Their approach is to throw something confusing at you and then explain it later. Which is great for worldbuilding. But not always for the Movie-Watching Experience™. So to recap, we're switching tracks and characters with their own separate stories while also setting up several confusing plot points that take a while to unravel. This all contributes to the Experience™, good or bad. 

Honestly, I wonder how much Covid affected this movie? My dad felt like a lot of scenes probably got cut for various reasons, and it probably affected the flow of the movie. If so, it could have affected thematic coherence, too. Speaking of... 

So, Themes. 

The themes that I got out of this film were Truth and Sacrifice. Maybe I missed some; I'm not an experienced Media Critic™. But these are the ones I noticed. 

And actually, these themes are really strong. Universally applicable, and used in all three character arcs. It's just tied in a bit ... erratically?

So working backward, knowing that the Dreamstone is giving you a lie, you need to renounce your wish and accept the Truth™. This is echoed in Diana's flashback, where she needed to accept that she didn't win. 

Working backward again, Sacrifice was a big part of the story for all three characters because Diana was willing to sacrifice her power to keep Steve, but he wanted her to sacrifice him so she could save the world. Barbara was willing to sacrifice her "humanity" or "empathy" or whatever she lost for the power and influence she got by emulating Diana, and she was unwilling to sacrifice that to save the world. Maxwell was willing to sacrifice time with his son to "become the best," but he did sacrifice that to save his son's life. 

And then, full circle, he confessed to his son that he wasn't the best, he's actually a filthy liar. Which, yes, kudos for the themes, be honest with your children, but you can still sanitize it a bit. That speech alone would have traumatized the kid. 

Speaking of speeches, Antiope's speech confused me in a similar way? Like, she stops Diana from "winning" the tournament after cheating, and goes on this weird rambly rant which goes from "accept that you're not a winner" to "cheating is bad and so is lying." Which yes, cheating is bad, but it's weird that she wouldn't have been disqualified at this point for not shooting that last target? Like, did she need to be tackled? Idk, I felt like they came up with the line they wanted Antiope to say first, and then just made her say it. (And also, in other stories, Diana would have been praised for being "clever" and "never giving up without a fight." So like, I needed a bit more preparation for which take they were going for, because the anti-cheating spiel felt jarring to me.) 

And again, I wonder if this is a response to a criticism of this first film. (Warning: WW17 rant gearing up) 

When Diana has her big motivational flashback during her fight with Ares, she thinks about Steve, this dude she just met a week ago, saying he loved her. When she could have been thinking about literally any of the women who had raised her. I personally think it would have been cool to hear some of Antiope's words at that point. Since they set up Hippolyta and Antiope to have conflicting ideas over whether Diana should fulfill her humanity-saving destiny, it might have been cool to see her saying something about humans and how they need her or how she should help them or something. They could even have done the whole thing with not being able to hear Steve's last words, but with Antiope since she dies earlier in the film and doesn't finish speaking. I also think it would have been cool for them to expand Hippolyta's earlier line about "They don't deserve you, Diana," here to like "They need you, Diana," or something. And then Steve's line in WW84 could have been something like "They're with you, Diana," or "They could get to know you, Diana," and her character arc could have been about actually living among society and maybe getting to know these humans that she's saved so many times (which they kind of alluded to when she and Barbara had their little date at the beginning of the film). But I digress. 

So, yeah, I found both of these speeches to be ... Not great? Like I can tell what they're going for and how they tie into the themes, but they're so heavy-handed and they don't actually fit in too well to the moment they happen in. Like as soon as the speech starts, you realize that they started going meta on you. The character isn't really speaking to the other character, they're speaking to us, and they're telling us how this scene ties into the greater themes of the film. 

Oh and they have this great quote from Antiope "greatness is not what you think" and then Maxwell's son wishes for him to be "great." And they do nothing with it :(

As promised, I want to talk about the body possession a little bit more. So again, one of the recurring themes is Truth™. Which is a great choice for Wonder Woman, what with her Lasso of Truth. 

But it's tied in a bit haphazardly. They force it into a conversation about cheating in a flashback at the beginning of the film. And then they talk about how you need to accept the Truth™ in order to defeat the Dreamstone. I already talked about the cheating, and how the "accept that you're not a winner" was kind of a weird path to take to get your point across to a ten year old girl. 

But the Dreamstone. Oh, the Dreamstone. I said before that the movie is a mystery. It shows you things but doesn't explain them. Well, this is a bit of a problem. Because they never actually explain that the Dreamstone is giving you lies. To my eyes, the Dreamstone is changing reality. Steve is back, Barbara is powerful, and Maxwell is doing whatever he wants with the powers of the Dreamstone. THIS DOES NOT LOOK LIKE A LIE TO ME. THERE IS NO "TRUTH" TO ACCEPT, JUST YOUR NEW REALITY. And that made the film less thematically strong (to my eyes, anyway. Other people probably picked up on stuff I didn't). But I feel like this might have been an easy fix? Like you already have Chris Pine in someone else's body (oh! So that's why they chose body possession! Because he's a Lie™! ... Still don't like it) I still think he should have manifested his own body or something but whatever. Barbara's appearance hardly changed at first. If they had people reacting to her as if she was hot when she really looked the same as she always does, then I would have bought your "but the Dreamstone only gives you lies." Instead, Barbara gained the power to walk in heels and then hotness and then the literal power of a God™ (a la Diana) which makes me think the Dreamstone is changing reality. Not bringing lies. 

Oh, also, they could have had Diana's Lasso of Truth stop working for her. I thought that's what they were going for at first, but it turns out that Diana is just losing her powers. They also started with "the Dreamstone will give you what you want most," but then Maxwell started using it to clear traffic? Which by the way, is NOT an illusion. That is reality-bending. 

There were just so many ways to make it obvious that "the Dreamstone is giving you lies," but they didn't use them. Or at the very least, they didn't commit. I felt like they used a little bit of "be careful what you wish for" (mostly on randos that Maxwell is duping), a little bit of "what are you willing to sacrifice," and a little of "you can have what you want, but it won't be real." All of which are valid ways to take a Dreamstone kind of story, but if they wanted to rely so heavily on Truth™ as the main theme, then I feel like more of the wishes should have been showcasing that. Instead, it felt like a jumble of all the kinds of messages we're used to seeing with Wish-Granting Objects, with no emphasis on specifically the "it's all a lie" part. 

Ugh, I'm actually mad now, because I'm trying to think of a story I've heard where this magical thing is granting wishes but they're Explicitly Not Real. Like all the money gets turned back to leaves or whatever (kinda like Cinderella's pumpkin lol). Oh, Aladdin does this, too, because yeah Genie is granting wishes and changing reality, but not permanently? Like, almost all of the stuff he uses magic to do dissolves as soon as we're looking away from it or gets fixed by the end of the movie? And the film is very very clear on the fact that Aladdin is not factually a Prince. 

But this film doesn't do that. They make it seem like the Dreamstone can change reality, then berate the characters for not Accepting the Truth™ about themselves. Maybe if they had made a bigger deal out of Steve coming back in someone else's body, it would have been 1) less confusing, 2) less icky (provided they don't do the sex in Engineer Dude's body), and 3) more thematically coherent. 

Lastly, Diana's perceived character changes. 

This one is probably the most subjective. Diana, as a character, in the first film was very morally grounded and motivated. The Diana in this film felt ... different. Again. Subjective. And also circumstantial. 

Diana is still morally grounded in this film. But she's also willing to sacrifice the world to keep Steve Trevor around. Which feels like a jarring change from her characterization in the first film. She was so idealistic and optimistic in that first film, I couldn't imagine her making that choice. It just felt like such a tone change for her character. How did we go from "Who will I be if I stay?" to "Why, for once, can't I just have this one thing, Steve? ... I can't give you up. I can't. So I won't."

Also, her motivation in this film seemed to center around her loss of Steve Trevor and wanting him, and less around "save the world." Which, to be fair, I'm all for women being selfish in film. Give me women of all motivations and desires. I don't want Diana to be Perfect™. I just want her to be consistent. And I didn't think this characterization was as consistent as I expected. Was her life so terrible without Steve (even though they only knew each other for a short time)? Not to say this couldn't be a valid take on Diana (reminder: I haven't read any comics, so maybe it's not in character at all 🤷‍♀️), but if that's what they were going for, they should have developed the journey from naive idealist to jaded romantic more in order to justify this character change. 

Also, the body possession thing. She's really okay with her boyfriend possessing somebody else's body. I did like the "All I See Is You" line, since it's romantic, but up until that point, we as viewers aren't really sure why Chris Pine and Hallmark Dude are both playing this guy. Then we find out in a romantic line that Chris Pine is just Wonder Woman's view of him. He still looks like Engineer Dude because he is Engineer Dude. At first, I thought that they used a different guy for the first meeting because Diana didn't recognize him. That this was her perception of him until she realized who it was. (I thought this was supported by Chris Pine's more rugged look in this film. But actually they were probably matching him to the body he was inhabiting, since the character really didn't look like himself). Leverage does a similar thing in the Rashomon Job. All the characters saw each other at the same event, but they didn't know each other back then, so they had different actors play their parts until it's slowly revealed that actually the random people at the event were the characters we know and love. It's great. Anyway, that's not what they're going for here, and the ambiguous framing along with Diana and Steve's chemistry is supposed to make you forget that he is possessing someone else’s body! Against their will! (Again, Steve and Diana didn't consent to the initial possession either, but they absolutely consented to what they did together. Engineer Dude did not.) 

Yikes  😬

I will say, she didn't kill innocents this time. One of my critiques of the first movie was that she was so willing to kill Germans. And I get it, Nazis are usually an "acceptable" target in American media. But as a character, she believed that they were innocents who had been manipulated by Ares. And yet, she was slaughtering them en masse. But, in this movie, they're really careful to make sure that she's nonlethal. 

And yeah, that's it.

Asteria was of course awesome. That bonus credit scene was 👌

I'm glad they got Linda Hemming back for costuming after the disaster of Justice League. Unfortunately, being set in the 80's, the outfits are not quite so modest as the first movie. But the important thing was the lack of male gaze in those shots.

The movie definitely hit me in my emotions. I cried three times: first during the tournament, watching the Amazon's being awesome. Then during Diana and Steve's fight, and when Steve convinced Diana to let him go. 😭

As I said, I definitely plan on rewatching. It makes me sad to see how much negative press that the movie is getting when it's one of so few female-led blockbusters. A lot of people are comparing it to the original or to the comics or TV show, when those are just not valuable comparisons. Comic books and TV shows are completely different mediums. And a successful sequel CONTINUES a story, instead of rehashing it. And also, not all films are created specifically for YOU. A lot of the 80's references went over my head, but that's ok. They weren't for me. I don't begrudge their existence just because I don't vibe with them. 

Again, no film is perfect! I think I talked through a lot of its weaknesses pretty thoroughly, but I still think it's a strong film, and I want it to succeed. 

Anyhoo, I hope you had fun watching the movie (even though it's not perfect) and I hope you had fun reading my commentary. 

(Fun fact: I actually ran out of space in my notes app and had to stretch it across two notes)

[sincerelyreidburke]

Omg can I please have a fic where Quinn (possibly backed by all of SMH) absolutely throws down N*te. And then maybe comforts a Sad Nando bc nando is Soft and needles all the cuddles and support

Okay, this has been in popular demand for quite some time now. It may be 1:31 AM, but I’m counting this as a little birthday present for Nando.

Set during Quinn’s summer in Arizona. :D

//

One of the first steps of taking your boyfriend home for the summer is showing him around.

For the past six days, that’s what Nando has taken it upon himself to do. He can’t believe, actually, that he and Quinn have been home from school for an entire week already— well, a week tomorrow, but still— and yet here they are, arrived at the last day of Nando’s extensive tour of the Phoenix metro area. They’ve spaced it out— something one day, something another— like dinner at Tio’s one night, an afternoon meeting his best friends from home, showing Quinn his childhood rink.

He’s satisfied with his own performance as a tour guide, but tomorrow means his first shift at Tio’s restaurant, which means that summer job season is really beginning. Which, like, obviously he and Quinn can still hang out— they’re living under the same roof; and if it’s not Mama or one of the girls, Quinn is the first person he sees every morning. It’s just that once he has a summer job schedule, their days won’t be entirely their own anymore.

For Quinn, he knows, that might be a little weird, at least for these first three weeks until Gabi and Rosa get out of school. Once they’re done, the summer theatre stuff starts up, and Quinn is getting paid to do that, so he’ll have something to do.

In the meantime, though, Nando knows he brought things with him. Like his knitting stuff. And a few books. And his camera.

And until tomorrow, the time is still theirs.

“Okay, my love,” Quinn says, at the kitchen table, over his toast and eggs. The morning is all theirs; Mama is at work, so once they got the twins out the door and onto the bus, Nando made him breakfast. “What’s on the agenda today?”

Nando grins at him. “Oh, you’re curious?”

He shrugs. “In a way.” He’s wearing a baggy KMH shirt tucked into his pajama bottoms, and he hasn’t even done his hair yet. Nando lives for seeing him like this— his obsessively proper boyfriend, who won’t be caught dead in jeans outside of a party, in his pajamas in his family’s kitchen.

It has been six days, and having Quinn at home has given him enough fuel for domestic daydreaming to last a lifetime.

It’s going to be a good summer.

“Well, I saved a good thing for last,” Nando tells him, reaching for his hand across the table. “We’re going to the beach.”

Quinn raises his eyebrows, skeptical. “In Arizona.”

“Yes,” he chirps back, because two can play at this game. “I’m driving you eight hours south to the ocean. Do you have your passport?” Quinn laughs a little, and he adds, “No, baby, the beach by the river. There’s a little park there. We can sit by the water in the sun.”

“Ooh.” Quinn smiles. “That sounds lovely.”

“But first,” he adds, squeezing his hand. “I’m taking you to my favorite Starbucks.”

Quinn cocks his head, with amusement in his smile now. “You have a favorite Starbucks?”

“You don’t have a favorite Starbucks?” he replies.

“I…” He trails off a little. “I can’t say I do, actually.”

“Well, I’ll educate you.” He brings his hand to his face, kisses it, and says, “Maybe this one will become your favorite.”

Quinn’s smile is the cutest shit he has ever seen. “Maybe so.”

*

In the truck, on the way there, Quinn is watching out the window. “So why is it your favorite?”

“Huh?”

“The Starbucks.” He looks to him across the console. “Why is it your favorite?”

“Oh.” Nando grins. “Well, okay. It’s, like, classic Arizona architecture, and—”

“Wait, you like it because of the architecture?” Quinn chuckles a little. “Are you Ben?”

“Jesus, baby, are you chirping me?” Nando jostles his arm, and Quinn laughs. “You’re a regular KMH member. I’m impressed.”

Quinn shrugs. “I suppose you’re finally rubbing off on me.”

“Wow.” Nando loves his boyfriend. “I’m honored. But FYI, I was only starting with the reasons I liked it.”

“Okay, continue, then.”

“Okay, so it has a lot of really nice outdoor seating.” Nando pauses. “It’s, like, near a shopping center, but it’s separate from the rest of the stores, so it’s not just some ugly spot. They always have the good cake pops, and plus, the manager is cool. They have blue hair and they wear a bunch of pride pins on their apron.”

“Okay.” Quinn nods, as Nando watches him process. Or at least sort of watches him, because he is, technically, still driving a vehicle, cute as the boy in the passenger’s seat may be. “That does sound like a good Starbucks.” He pauses. “What do you mean by the good cake pops?”

“Lemon ones,” he replies. “And chocolate. And, during Pride month, rainbow.”

“Oh my goodness.” Quinn closes his eyes, like he’s having a moment. “Now I’m craving a cake pop.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we’re on our way there,” Nando replies, and he laughs.

It only takes a few more minutes to arrive. The parking lot is sort of crowded, but it doesn’t look like a mob scene, which is nice. Nando sees an empty table for two under a palm tree on the patio that has their name on it.

“Here we are,” he remarks, parking the truck across the lot from the door. “Our cake pops await.”

Quinn puts on his sunglasses. Their lenses are rose-gold and circular, and he looks criminally adorable in them. And also kind of super hot. That’s the thing about Quinn. He’s the cutest thing in the world and he’s also the source of literally all of Nando’s thirst. And he can turn on a dime. “I’m ready,” he tells him, combing back his hair. Already, with the past week in the sun, it’s gone a little lighter blond on the top. “I’ll have you know, my expectations are extremely high.”

“Oh, this won’t disappoint you,” Nando assures him. “I promise.”

They walk hand-in-hand across the parking lot, and Nando grabs the door for him. Inside is sweet air-conditioned bliss, and it smells like fresh-roasted coffee beans and the bakery case. Nando hasn’t been in here since Christmas break, and it’s been too long.

There’s a small line, but it won’t take more than a few minutes to get to the register. He tries to see who’s working, in case it’s Shai, but he can’t get a good look at the cashier, and there’s no sign of their blue mohawk among the baristas making the drinks.

Shai is actually, like, thirty, and possibly married, but they memorized his drink order in high school and always complimented him on his pride shirts, so they’re one of those older queer people Nando has just imprinted on. And, okay, yeah. He was totally excited to bring his boyfriend in here to meet them. It’s the little things.

Going around town with Quinn is like showing him off, and he has never been happier.

As they get in line, Quinn wraps his hand around his elbow, leaning into him. “It smells good in here,” he hums, with his head against his shoulder.

“I told you,” Nando replies, kissing his temple. “This is a magical place.”

He checks his phone, briefly, while they wait in line; he hasn’t actually looked at it since he woke up this morning. He has a few Snapchats in the cricket group chat, plus one from Nursey (he and Dex just got engaged, which, !!!!!!), and a separate text from Rhodey (it looks like he sent him a TikTok; Rhodey is obsessed with TikTok). He opens the cricket group, turns his front camera on, and snaps a selfie. Quinn is smiling with his cheek against his shoulder, and he himself looks like a little bit of a meme, but Quinn looks cute, so he saves it before he types the caption (coffee run y’all want anything) and sends it through.

In exactly twenty seconds, Rhodey replies. It’s a picture of himself in his work uniform— he delivers pizzas in Providence— and he’s flashing a peace sign at the camera. His hair is in a pink, blue, and yellow striped scrunchie. ya get me an americano. also yall are gay

Quinn snickers. “Well, I would sure hope so, Ben.”

Nando pockets his phone and hooks his arm around his neck. “Super gay.”

Quinn leans into his shoulder. “Mm.” He nods. “The gayest.”

They move forward a spot in line, then another. In fact, they move forward three entire spots without incident. Quinn is humming some showtune— it’s from Spring Awakening; he recognizes it— and Nando is keeping his eyes peeled for Shai, or at least someone he knows. Look at me! I’m in love and I’m happy.

But then God says, be careful what you wish for.

Because as they move into the spot where they’re up next to order, he catches the sound of the cashier’s voice. “... and can I get a name for the order?”

All of the life leaves Nando’s body.

“Holly? Great.” The voice is nasally, and a little artificially cheerful. He hasn’t heard it— outside of a few drunk voicemails— in over two years, but it evokes a visceral reaction in him. He feels sick, all of a sudden. “That’ll be right up.”

He must be tense all of a sudden, because Quinn peers up at him. “Sebastián?” he asks, and what a difference between two voices. “Are you alright?”

He tries to take a deep breath. “I, um.” He pauses. “I think we have to leave.”

“Next customer, please?”

“Leave?” Quinn squints. “But we’re next!”

The people in front of them step to the side counter, and Nando sputters too long. “We, uh—”

But when the way is clear, it’s too late. “Sebby!”

Nando wants to die.

“Holy shit!” Nate has a different haircut, and a Starbucks apron, but otherwise he’s the same— the same pasty pale skin, the same bony stature, the same face so easily twisted into a scowl. Right now, though, he’s smiling, which, honestly, is an expression that looks alien on him, based on Nando’s memory. “You didn’t tell me you were home from school!”

What he wants to say is, Nate, why the fuck would I tell you I was home from school, but what he does say is, “Uh, hi.”

He is going to cringe himself to death. He’s been home for no less than six days, and he is already running into his ex with his boyfriend.

When did he start working here?

“It’s been forever!” As Nate keeps on this weirdly cordial tangent, Nando feels Quinn still next to him. Quinn knows vaguely what Nate looks like, but what he knows better is the way he used to act, and the fact that he used to call him Sebby. Also, he’s wearing a nametag. And Nando feels as stiff as a board. “How’ve you been?”

Very carefully, Quinn unwinds his arm from his, and takes a firm, obvious grip on his hand.

“Jeez, I keep trying to reach out to you,” Nate continues, like they’re old friends running into each other, and not exes with a toxic history. “We really should catch up sometime, now that you’re in town.”

Nando takes a long breath, like it’ll fix the tension in his chest. He squeezes at Quinn’s hand, which helps a little. Quinn leads when they step up to the counter, and he inhales like he wants to order, but Nate is still fucking going. “Who’s your friend?” he asks.

“Boyfriend,” Quinn blurts, in his I’m pissed and I mean business voice, which, thank God for this boy. “I’m his boyfriend.”

Nate raises his eyebrows a little, looking at Quinn like he’s a five-year-old having a tantrum. “Oh,” he says, shrugging. “My bad. Although, I should’ve known.” Nate’s eyes dart to him for a second, and Nando wants to scrub himself clean of that gaze. “He tends to go for the little guys,” Nate continues, to Quinn, gesturing between the two of them like he’s comparing their heights. Then he shrugs again. “Gotta balance it out, y’know?”

Nando’s stomach turns. It stings, so much, and as soon as this is out of Nate’s mouth he feels Quinn squeeze his hand so hard it’s like he intends to break bones. He squeezes right back, and God, he knows it’s cruel and unnecessary and shouldn’t bother him, and it’s been almost three fucking years since he had to deal with Nate, but it still hurts. It hurts just as much as every comment like that did from him. It sends him back to memories of hating and second-guessing himself, and he just. He feels so fucking humiliated.

Quinn takes a very long breath, his eyes on Nate, while he digests this, and then he says, “Can I get a peach green tea, please.” He pauses, still squeezing the circulation out of his hand, and it is the only thing keeping Nando from tearing up. Which is pathetic. But he’s just. It hurts. “And he’ll have a—”

“Mocha frappe. Yeah. I know.” Nate chuckles a little, already grabbing a cup. “Extra whip, right?”

Quinn bristles, face flushing, and finally, Nando finds his voice. “Actually,” he says, “no.” Because even though that was what he was going to order, he doesn’t want to give Nate the satisfaction of thinking he still knows him that well. His Starbucks order may be the same, but there’s so much about him that’s changed since Nate knew him. So much about him that’s better now. Without him. He orders his second favorite. “An iced vanilla latte.” And then, because even though he really doesn’t feel like being polite to him, he feels like Mama might manifest in this Starbucks and kick his ass if he doesn’t say it, he adds, “Please.”

“Hm, my mistake,” Nate says, with a shrug, as he’s writing on the two cups. “I guess you’re a new man, Sebby. We really should catch up.” Quinn’s death grip intensifies, because he knows how much Nando cannot stand being called that. He brings his other hand back to wrap around his elbow, too, like he’s being protective, and Nando has never been more grateful for him.

“Anyway, that’ll be right up.” Nate looks so unbothered, just the way he always did, years ago, when he’d make a comment that left Nando’s self-esteem reeling for days afterward. “I guess I don’t really need your name for the order, huh?”

He’s writing on the cup, and Nando can’t see— or just doesn’t want to— but Quinn must be able to, because he says, “His name is Sebastián.”

Nate raises his eyebrows. “Ooh, feisty.” And of course Quinn sounds mad— but Nate making fun of him will do nothing but add more fuel to the fire. Nate looks to him, past Quinn entirely, and adds, “Does he speak for you all the time like this, or—?”

Nando wants to melt into the floor. “Just give us our total, Nate,” he says, because the faster they can get out of here, the better. Quinn is bristling next to him, but stays quiet. 

Nate sighs, shrugs a little, and punches into the cash register. “If you say so,” he says, then announces, “6.23.”

And he thinks that’s going to be the end, but then, as he’s handing over his card, Nate keeps fucking talking. “Oh!” he says, still all faux-fake. “Sebby, you should take him to the lake. Remember, when we’d go down there in high school?”

Quinn’s grip on him tightens. This transaction cannot process fast enough. “We had a lot of fun,” Nate says, like he’s reminiscing. “Always did. It’s a shame; I feel like we never really had closure.”

Finally, finally, after what feels like a million years, he hands his card back, and Nando pockets it in a hurry. “C’mon,” he says to Quinn, because he cannot stand here for one more second, and as they walk away, Nate calls after them.

“Hey, give me a shout sometime!” He’s doing the fake-smile thing again. “We should really hang out, now that you’re in town again.”

Nando squeezes his eyes shut and takes a tight breath; he didn’t realize it before, but it’s hard to breathe. He feels sick and humiliated and awful, and when they’re far enough away to be out of earshot, he looks to Quinn and whispers, “Baby, I am so sorry.”

Quinn is surprisingly calm, at least in comparison to his clear irritation at the register. He shakes his head and rubs his arm with the free hand that’s not holding his. “Don’t apologize,” he says. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“But I just—” He wants to melt. “I had no idea he started working here; I haven’t even seen him since before freshman year, and it just— like, it figures, right—”

“Sebastián,” Quinn says, and his even voice pulls Nando out of his head. “I’m going to get our drinks, and then we can get out of here, okay?”

Nando lets all his breath out at once, then nods. “I— yeah. Okay. That’s— perfect. I’m sorry, baby.”

“Do not be sorry.” Quinn rises on tiptoe and kisses his cheek. “None of that was your fault.”

Quinn seems surprisingly collected for someone who was just ignored and insulted a minute ago, and Nando has this feeling, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he’s planning something, some kind of revenge— but what could he do, with Nate just working?

They station themselves against the wall by the pick-up counter, and it isn’t lost on Nando how touchy Quinn is being— not that they’d hold back in public for any reason in general, but he’s definitely going the extra mile right now, rubbing the inside of his elbow and leaning his head on his shoulder and holding his hand all at once. Not only is the touch grounding; Nando is also fully aware that Quinn is trying to rub it in Nate’s face should he glance over from his spot behind the counter.

Which, good. Let him fucking stare if he wants to. Nando hasn’t felt that humiliated in a long time.

And he hates that he let it hurt him, that one stupid comment— but it was such a reminder of worse times, times when he’d have to process things like that from the person who was supposed to be his partner all the time, and it was just. It was always hard, and it was always awful, and being with Quinn has helped him work so much on all of that. Quinn taught him, so early on, that he deserved better. Everything with Quinn is better.

He just focuses on holding Quinn’s hand for a minute, until Nate puts their drinks out at the pick-up counter. “Stay here, honey,” Quinn tells him, squeezing his hand before he unwinds his fingers from it. “I’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” Nando replies, and watches him go.

Quinn squares his shoulders, takes a short breath, and walks to the counter. Nando is suddenly very aware that something might be about to happen. He leans against the wall and listens in, as he watches Quinn take the two drinks from across the counter.

He’s right. Quinn looks Nate dead in the eye and says, “Hi, could I just remind you of something?”

Oh my God. Nando widens his eyes. Is Quinn about to chew him out?

Nate says nothing, but looks unamused, and Quinn continues. “You broke up with him,” Nando hears him say. “After you cheated on him, by the way. Just in case you forgot.” Nate raises his eyebrows, but stays silent. Quinn is reeling now, and there’s no stopping him. “And I happen to know an awful lot about the way you treated him, and how much that hurt him, so don’t you dare try to act so friendly, like you didn’t break him.” Nando is frozen in place, as Quinn picks up both of the drinks. “He owes you nothing. He clearly does not want to reconnect with you, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to do that either with someone who did nothing but make me feel awful about myself for two years.” Quinn isn’t even making a scene— the only reason Nando can hear what he’s saying is because he’s not standing that far away— but Jesus Christ, if this isn’t the most satisfying thing to witness in the world. Nate is red in the face and absolutely silent, and Quinn is staring daggers at him; if looks could kill, he’d be dead on sight. “If you wanted to be his friend, maybe you shouldn’t have stomped all over his heart.”

Nando cannot believe his ears.

“And,” Quinn adds, like it’s the end of a big monologue, “I’m going to need two straws.”

Nando is so in love with this boy.

He watches, trying not to smile or even laugh, as Nate fumbles into the thing of straws and shoves two in Quinn’s direction. Quinn takes them, flashes a big, stage smile, and says, “Thank you!” before he turns and walks back in Nando’s direction.

The fake smile turns self-satisfied in a second flat, as he meets Nando’s eyes again. Nando is still kind of frozen, but he wants to kiss him, right in the middle of Starbucks.

All he can say is, “Baby.”

Quinn is all smiles. He looks the way he does when he comes out of the stage door after a great show. “Ready to go, honey?”

“Am I ever,” Nando says, and they join hands again as they head for the door. He’s not sure if Quinn knows that he heard what he said. “That… was kind of the most satisfying thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”

“Oh,” Quinn replies as he sticks his straw into his iced tea, “trust me, Sebastián. It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve done as long as I can remember.” He pauses, as he takes a sip, and then adds, “I’ve been wanting to do that for longer than I can even say.”

“It was hot,” he says, because, well, it was. “And just… jeez, I— maybe something good did come out of this situation.”

“Of course it did,” Quinn replies. His smile is kind of maniacal, and Nando is into it. “I got to have the confrontation of my dreams, and I got an iced tea.” He holds up his drink. “Cheers!”

Nando bumps his vanilla coffee against it and laughs. “Cheers, baby.”

Quinn squeezes his hand. They walk back outside into the summer day, and Nando doesn’t look back.

Not even a glance.

[spideyy-girl]

Hope ~ Peter Parker (pt. III)

Summary:  Y/N gears up and gets ready to go into battle, determined as ever to get her best friend and the love of her life, Peter Parker, back to her after 5 long years without him.

Fandom: MCU

Warnings: bit of swearing as per usual, depictions of violence, fighting, blood, death, and other gory scenes, angst and fluffy at the end. THIS DOES NOT FOLLOW MCU CANON! EVERYONE WHO HAS BEEN SNAPPED WAS AGED THE SAME AS THOSE WHO WEREN’T, SO PETER IS STILL THE SAME AGE OF Y/N, AND THEY ARE BOTH AROUND 21!!!!

Word Count: 10100 (28 pages wOAh)

A/N: finally, the long-awaited finale for Hope is here! Thanks to everyone who showed so much support for this series I love every single one of you honestly! Lmk if you guys want an epilogue? cause I don’t wanna be done with this series yet lol

If you haven’t read the first two parts, I would suggest looking through them before reading this!

PART 1 ~ PART 2 ~ MASTERLIST

~~~

Y/N walked towards the large platform in the middle of the room with the remaining of the Avengers, all in their rather cool looking matching time heist suits. She had to admit that she felt pretty badass, walking alongside the world’s mightiest heroes, going off to save the world like it was any other Tuesday for them.

After the young girl found out the formula of time travel and showed it to Tony, they had created a steady device and explained the idea to the team, which everyone quickly agreed with. They had been split up into three teams to go back in time and gather all six infinity stones before Thanos could find or use them. The teams were split up into Natasha, Clint, Nebula and Rhodey to get the soul and power stones, Thor, and Rocket to get the reality stone (or ether I guess), and Scott,  Bruce, Tony, Steve and Y/N to get the Time, Mind, and Space stones.

The team now stood on the platform, putting their hands together as Steve performed his motivational speech, Y/N clung onto every word, still shocked that she got to suit up with them, and also a bit nervous. But she knew that she had the proper training if it came to it and if worse comes to worst, she has a quick solution handy in her pocket, one that she’s been carrying around for years.

“One round trip each. No mistakes, no do-overs,” Cap spoke as he looked around at everyone in the circle. “Most of us are going to a place we know; that doesn’t mean we should know what to expect. Be careful, look out for each other.” Y/N looked beside her up at Tony, who smiled reassuringly at her. “This is the fight of our lives, and we’re gonna win. Whatever it takes.” Steve finished his speech as they separated hands. Y/N looked over at Nat and gave her a smile, to which she returned.

“See you in a minute,” she says winking over at her mentee. She rolled her eyes but laughed. Suddenly the machine above them started to whir and spin around, and the mask on Y/N’s suit came up to cover her face. She felt her breathing start to go heavy but soon relaxed as Tony gave her hand a squeeze. She felt her body being compressed down into the size of an atom and swept away into the quantum realm, trying to control herself and following the lead of Tony just in front of her.

Before she knew it her feet hit the ground below her and her knees buckled from underneath her. As she regained her balance and looked up, her eyes went wide as she took in the scene in front of her. Just a few feet away, she saw the original Avengers, formed in a circle and gearing up for the infamous battle of 2012 against Loki. Y/N almost let out a squeal, remembering watching them do their work on the news when she was younger.

“You alright there?” Tony asked as he gave the girl a teasing smile. “You look like you’re about to explode.” Y/N shook her head but smiled back.

“Yeah I just, wow I was such a fan of you guys when I was younger,” she said as she watched on as they parted ways and did their own thing to take down as many aliens as possible. She then looked back up at Tony and smirked, one that reminded him of himself. “You guys were so much cooler back then. Now you’re all like, big old grampa’s.”

“Woah!” Tony said, giving her a playful look of pain as he grabbed his heart as if she had stabbed him with her comment. “Ouch, you know I understand why you would say that for Cap, cause he’s literally like, 100 years old but for me?”

“Guys we have to focus here,” Bruce caught their attention before Y/N could come back with another snarky comeback. “God sometimes I wonder how the two of you arent’s related, you’re like the same person nowadays.” Tony rolled his eyes, looking back out onto the street.

Before they could try and cross the street to get to the Stark Tower, a giant and raging green Hulk came down from the ground, pounding robots into the ground and flinging them around like ragdolls. As the group looked back at Bruce he covered his face, embarrassed of what he used to be. Steve told Bruce and Scott to find Dr. Strange and the time stone while he, Tony, and Y/N went up to the Stark tower to get the mind and space stone. As they got in and saw the past Avengers, Steve departed to get Loki’s staff, containing the mind stone, while Tony and Y/N worked on getting the Tesseract.

Y/N hid out in a small conference room out of sight, since Tony didn’t want her directly participating in the mission, much to her demise. She opened her laptop, which she disguised as a briefcase. She quickly typed in the password before pulling up multiple programs on the small screen, including a camera view from Tony’s glasses and a controller for a small robotic device she’d use to slip around without being realized.

“You sure this is gonna work, kid?” Tony asked quietly through the comm, causing Y/N to roll her eyes.

“Yes, Tony. I’ve been working on this model forever, I know what I’m doing,” she sassed back, looking through a small camera on the spider-shaped device she originally created with Peter. “Just remember I’m the reason we’re all here. I’m not just a pretty face, Stark.”

“Yeah yeah,” he mumbled as he watched his past self pack up the Tesseract in a briefcase. “Ok, spider-girl, release your little spiderling.” He says dramatically as the spider crawls from his pocket and makes its way onto the roof. Y/N chuckled at the nickname before focusing on controlling the spider-robot, the decoy lowering itself onto past Tony’s shoulder without anyone noticing. She couldn’t help but let out a little squeal at her excellent work. She watched through the small cam as the Avengers (excluding Hulk, who was told to take the stairs) made their way into the foyer of the building.

Tony watched along as his past self walks along with the other original Avengers and Loki. Alexander Pierce and his crew walked towards them as present-day Tony gave Y/N the signal to drop down. Y/N dropped the spider drone into Tony’s beard and then down onto his chest, the almost microscopic robot slipping through and into his arc reactor. She explores for a while until she finds what Tony had told her would cause the distraction.

“Is this really a good idea, Stark?” Y/N asked worriedly, not thinking of the consequences until then.

“Yeah, sure. It’ll only cause me to go into a tiny cardiac distract,” Tony stated casually, and Y/N’s eyes widened immediately, stopping the robot.

“What?!” She says, shaking her head. “Okay, no. No no no no no. I’m not gonna do this, we can figure out something else it’ll be fine.”

“Y/N, hey, calm down,” Tony says, his voice going lower. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I mean I’m still here, so that’s gotta mean something right? If I died I wouldn’t be here.” Y/N scoffed at his words, but still, her hands were shaking, not wanting to hurt someone she had gotten so close to. She couldn’t bear if anything happened to him.

“No shit, Sherlock,” she whispers back into the comm, but loud enough for him to hear it. He rolled his eyes and continued to watch as Pierce tried to snatch the case away from his hands. “Time’s running out, Y/N. Pull my pin!”

“Okay, okay, give me a second.” She said as she maneuvered the tiny device to the said area with a small pin that helped keep everything in the arc reactor together. “But if you die, Tony, it’ll be your funeral. Literally.” She comments back to try and defuse the tension she felt. He quietly gave her another reassurance before giving the signal. With the small metal pinchers, Y/N pulled the cord in the arc reactor and through the other camera through Tony’s glasses she saw past Tony fall to the floor just as Pierce was taking the case containing the Tesseract from his hands.

The metal case fell to the floor with a hard clank and 2012 Tony followed soon after it, shaking slightly on the floor. Pierce and his crew members, as well as the other Avengers there, kneeled down beside him and tried to figure out what was wrong.

The small metallic robot climbed out from Tony’s reactor and pushed the case over to Tony, who was disguised as a staff of security. He discreetly picked it up and began walking away from the scene as medics began rushing to help the famous billionaire on the floor. What they didn’t know was that they weren’t as discreet as they thought.

“Good job, kid. Meet me in the alley, I’m gonna-” but was cut off as a big green angry hulk burst through the door, knocking down Tony and flinging the tesseract out of its case and down the hallway. The bright blue square landed right at the feet of Loki, who looked down and quickly picked it up, using its powers to teleport him out of the tower as people were too distracted running in terror.

Thor tapped his hammer against Tony’s chest, causing him to stop shaking and blink frantically, looking at his surroundings. “Where’s the case?” Y/N heard him ask. Her face dropped as she moved to drone to look all around the room, finding no clue where the Tesseract or Loki himself was.

“Fuck this,” she mumbled, working her computers to try and get into the security tapes, looking for what might’ve happened to either of them. “That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?"

Tony sat himself up on his elbows looking around to see people screaming and running away from the Hulk, who was screaming about no stairs, and to his other side, officers looking for Loki and the Tesseract. “Shit.”

Y/N quickly packed up her computers and put them back into her bag, running out to meet Tony at the alleyway where they had come in. She found an abandoned car parked beside it and saw Tony already sitting in its head in his hand as he observed the destruction outside.

“What the hell happened, Stark?” She said as she got into the back seat. “We had the Tesseract, where did it go?” Tony sighed, closing his eyes as he responded, trying to keep calm.

“I don’t know what happened, Y/N,” he said tensely. “I know we had it but now we don’t, okay? Something happened, I don’t know what.”

“Well, you better fucking figure it out!” She yelled, her ears going red as she got more angry by him not seeming to care. “Did you not hear what Cap said? No do-overs! We fucked up so what are we gonna do now!”

“I don’t know what we’re gonna do!” He screamed back turning to face her. He sighed, running a hand down his face and closed his eyes. He stayed silent for a bit, using the silence to calm himself down. He knew she was only acting like this because she was scared. And honestly, he was too. “But we’ll figure something out. I promise. Everything will be okay.”

Y/N gulped to hold back her screaming, not wanting to rant to him about every little thing that had already gone wrong, and how she was starting to lose hope. Then Cap jumped down from a balcony, one hand propping up the shield while the other gripped Loki’s staff.

“Cap,” Tony caught his attention. Steve saw them in the dirt-covered car as he walked towards them. “We’ve got a bit of a problem here.” Y/N scoffed, shaking her head as she let her stress get the better of her again.

“A bit of a problem?” She asked sarcastically. “More like we’re in deep shit!” She said getting out of the car and slamming the door shut with surprising force. Tony rolled his eyes. Steve looked between the two, his eyebrows scrunching up in confusion.

“What happened?” he asked, looking at Y/N. She laughed ironically, starting to pace along the alleyway.

“We lost the goddamn Tesseract is what happened!” She said as she aggressively kicked a piece of debris on the ground. “It’s gone and now the plan isn’t gonna work. We don’t have enough Pym particles to go back again. It’s over, we’re done.” She leaned down and sat against the wall, leaning her head back.

“Are there any other options with the Tesseract,” Steve asked, causing Y/N to roll her eyes at his always enthusiastic goody-two-shoes energy.

“No. No there’s not,” she said annoyed as she stood up and walking over to him. “You said it yourself, there are no do-overs. If we use that last Pym particle, we’re never getting home.”

“Well, if we don’t try, no one else is going home either,” he stated. Y/N sighed, squeezing her eyes shut as she leaned against the car. She knew he was right. But what was the use of going back again to get the stone if they couldn’t get back in the present to put it in the gauntlet?

“I got it,” Tony said suddenly, getting out of the car. Y/N’s head shot up as she stood up and followed him as he got out of the car himself. “There’s another way to get the Tesseract and acquire new particles. We’ll take a stroll down memory lane. Military installation Garden State.”

“Why were they both there?” Steve asked, causing Y/N to look between the two as they continued their conversation. Tony shrugged.

“They were both there for a…” he trailed off as he thought. “I have a vaguely exact idea,” he defended himself. Cap gave him a look, the same one he gave Y/N when he caught her doing something she shouldn’t have around the compound or when she sasses one of the other team members a bit too much.

“How vague,” he asked.

“Woah, okay, what’s going on?” Y/ finally butted in. “What are you guys talking about? Where are we going?”  She asked eagerly as they started entering in the time date and coordinates.

“Correction, we’re going. You’re travelling back to the present to give this to the others,” Tony said as he handed her Loki’s staff. Her eyes bulged out as she stood up straighter.

“Tony, I can help. I’m not letting you guys go alone, I’m coming with you,” she stated strongly as she put her suit up. Tony shook his head.

"I trust you with this, kid, okay? get back to home base, we’ll be there by the time you get back.” He said as he and Steve put up their own suits. He took her hand and entered in the present-day coordinates to get back home as she looked at him like he was crazy, which she currently felt he was.

“What?! But Tony-!” She started, but before Y/N could argue, she felt the ground sweep from under her feet and she was being sent back to the present day, Loki’s staff still held tightly in her hand.

As she regained her balance, she looked around the room, seeing that everyone had their respective stone’s, including Tony with the Tesseract. But something seemed off. She did another swift headcount of everyone and realized someone had to be missing.

“Where’s Nat?” She asked, looking around at everyone’s confused faces before looking at Clint, whose eyes were red and glassy. She watched as he looked up at her, shaking his head slightly as a fresh tear rolled down his face. Y/N felt her chest tighten as her mouth opened slightly, letting out a shuttering breath. She knew that face, she wore the same expression five years ago.

She felt tears well up into her eyes, not even thinking of losing a mentor, someone she considered family during the process of getting those who were snapped away back. She felt tears starting to form in her own eyes as regret and sadness took over the whole team.

~~~

The team had taken a quick break to take a moment to mourn their friend, to some even their family. It was odd to not have Natasha around, making small sarcastic quips at any person in the room when you’d least expect it. Y/N quickly splashed her face with water, making the tears on her face earlier vanish as she went back into the room where Tony had just completed the infinity gauntlet 2.0 and everyone was arguing over who should snap their fingers.

“What do you think is coursing through my veins right now?” She heard as she exited the ladies bathroom just beside the room. She leaned against the doorframe as she answered.

“Cheez Whiz?” she asked sarcastically as she came up to stand in between the god and Tony. Thor looked down, confusion on his face as he pointed at her and she, in return, gave him a sly smile.

“Lightning,” he emphasized. Y/N sucked in a breath and averted her gaze as he looked expectantly at Tony, who let out a sigh as he pinched his eyebrows together in concentration.

“Lightning won’t help you, pal. It’s gotta be me,” she heard Bruce say from behind her as he walked to the group. She listened intently as he continued. “You saw what those stones did to Thanos; it almost killed him. None of you would survive.”

“Well, how will we know if you will?” Cap said seriously. Y/N looked at Tony, who looked down at her and gave her a knowing glance, that showed he knew it was true. Y/N nodded slightly as Bruce continued.

“We don’t. But the radiation is mostly gamma. It’s… it’s like I was made for this.” The team looked around before Tony stepped out and started explaining the rules of the stones.

“Remember, everyone Thanos snapped away five years ago, we’re just bringing them back to now. Don’t change anything from the past five years,” he said and Bruce nodded, looking at his arm which he prepared to hold the gauntlet in.

The team around him suited up. Y/N felt the cool nanotech of her newly modelled suit slide over her skin, occasionally catching a thin hair. The spiderman-inspired outfit was of the colours white, black, and magenta, with fine reflective webbing details along the side of her arms, legs and torso. She stood behind Tony as he created a protective shield in front of them and Clint on the other side of him.

Metallic barn doors shut around all doors and windows in the room and around the compound. Bruce put on the glove holding the infinity stones and immediately began to scream in pain, doubling down to the ground as he struggled to push his fingers together to snap.

“Take it off! Take it off!” Thor said as he stepped towards Banner, who was still struggling to stay upright. Steve held out his hand to Thor as a sign to stop.

“No, wait! Bruce, are you okay?” Steve asked as he looked at the green giant. Bruce continued to moan but nodded slightly. Y/N stood back further as she heard Banner scream loudly and saw his fingers coming closer together and finally the sound of the metal hitting metal in the snap.

There was a surge of power that almost knocked her over, stumbling to catch her balance. She heard a loud thump as Bruce’s body finally collided with the floor, unconscious. Many people ran towards him to help but Y/N just looked around. She felt her feet carry her to the window as they opened again, seeing birds chirping happily outside.

“D-did it work?” Y/N mumbled as the mask of her suit disappeared from around her face. Everyone turned to look at where she was, seeing multiple new birds coming into sight, planting themselves on a nearby sapling. A phone started to ring, and Clint walked over to his cell vibrating on the glass table, a picture of his beloved wife displayed on the screen. He picked it up and started talking to her.

Tony walked over to Y/N, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder, bringing her attention over to him. He wore a giant smile and even looked like he was in tears. He squeezed her shoulder as she let out a gasp, hand covering her mouth as the biggest smile spread across her soft features. She laughed softly, in disbelief but so happy. Tony matched her actions and pulled her into the biggest hug, and she felt comfortable as she placed her head on his chest.

“We did it, kid,” he mumbled into her messy hair, feeling her locks dampen with his tears. “We finally did it. They’re back.” Y/N laughed again into his suit as she pulled him closer and hugged him tighter, closing her eyes as she felt true relief finally wash over her entire being. But of course, that wouldn’t last for long.

Next thing she knew she was being flung across the compound while a missile hit just outside the window. She felt herself fly through multiple layers of brick and glass, piercing her skin and knocking the breath from her lungs. She coughed heavily as the dust from the rubble entered her system, trying to balance herself enough to stand up and analyze the situation.

“Tony?!” She screamed, looking for the older man that she was just in contact with. “Tony?! Cap?! Thor?!” She screamed any name that came to mind, hoping for someone to hear her, and possibly give her an explanation. She was limping, pain shooting through her ankle whenever she out the slightest pressure on it. It was definitely broken. She felt the metallic taste of blood entering her mouth, and she was scared to say she didn’t know where it came from, her now bleeding nose or the small cuts that littered her cheeks and lips.

“Y/N?” She heard a voice say and sighed with relief. From the dust came Clint, holding something in his arms, the Infinity Gauntlet. “Hey, I got you, you’re okay,” He reassures her as he puts an arm across her back and under her arms, supporting her weight so she can walk. “Tony, I’m with the kid, she seems okay.”

“Is he okay?” she asked quietly when Clint found a safe spot. He looked at her and nodded.

“yeah he’s fine, but almost had a heart attack when he couldn’t find you,” he says, offering her a smile before his face went stoic again. “But he’s here. Thanos. He found us.” Y/N’s eyes went wide, her eyebrows furrowing into a line of confusion. She blinked a couple of times as she processed the new information.

“What? But– but Thanos i-is dead? He’s dead! You said he was dead!” She screams as she feels her heart rate quicken, her breath refusing to meet her lips as if it was stuck inside her throat. Clint reached down and held her hand, rubbing his thumb against the back of her hands as a calming method he has seen Tony use on her before.

“I know, I thought he was gone too,” he whispered, looking back at the dark tunnel before turning back to her. “But this is a different Thanos, he followed us from the past.” Y/N felt her throat close up, dark thoughts filling her mind. Fuck. This was all her fault.

There was a sound that came from down the tunnel, almost like a snarl. The pair went quiet, looking towards the source. Clint slowly took out an arrow from the collection he kept on his back, placing it in his bow and shooting it straight down the line, the end glowing up– revealing about ten or twelve alien-looking dogs. Y/N let out a breath as the two scurried to get up. Clint held up her weight as they ran, eventually settling to pick her up as he ran from the dogs.

As they came to a split in the road, Clint threw her to a different path, signalling for her to run and hide as he continued to run down the other path, provoking the dogs to follow him and leave her. Y/N limped down the path, using the wall to support her as she hopped along. Soon she came across a mop of messy hair frantically looking around the rubble.

“Tony,” she tried to say but found that her voice was scratchy and weak. “Tony, I’m right here.” The said man turned around the stress on his face leaving as he saw the girl he was looking for. He quickly wrapped an arm around as Clint had earlier and walked her away from the scene.

“God, hey kid. You hanging in there?” He said, checking the area before leading her to a small space of coverage under a piece of rubble that looked like it used to be the floor. She nodded in reassurance before grabbing his arm and pulling him back up.

“I need you to take me to our lab, now,” she said urgently and he obliged, not even thinking of asking why. He directed her to a small metal door attached to a broken piece of wall, typing in a code on the damaged keyboard before pushing the heavy doors open.

She rushed over to her part of the lab, the barely working glass screen table popping up and she quickly punched in a few passwords before looking in a locked drawer for one of the small viles kept safely there. Tony looked from her face to the small tube, confusion painting his face as he watched her pop the lid, hesitating before bringing it to her lips and gulping down the small amount of dark red liquid.

Y/N felt the iron tasting liquid slid down her throat as she swallowed it uncomfortably, immediately feeling the effects. Her eyesight went black and her head started to spin. She went to grab the nearest object her hold herself up, the dizziness and broken ankle not being the best combination. Tony rushed to her side, grabbing her other arm.

“Y/N, what the hell was that,” Tony said, concern laced his voice as he watched the girl groan, squeezing her eyes shut and throwing her head back. She gulped before answering in short breaths.

“That answer may vary between poison and what I like to call a spider-serum,” she replied, sarcasm still in use through her pain. Tony looked at her with bewilderment in his eyes, as this was not a project approved by him or not even one they’ve talked about. She gritted her teeth together, continuing to moan out in pain as she collapsed to the floor, Tony calling out her name.

As Y/N got her self together, she placed both hands on the desk in front of her nailed into the floor, using it to pull herself back on her feet. She felt everything in her body changing, she could hear the blood rushing through her veins, she could smell the smoke from across the battlefield outside the reinforced metal door, she could feel the small hairs on Tony’s arms tickling her own as he tried to shake her out of her trance.

“Y/N! Kid come on, snap out of it. What the hell was that?” He said as he continued to shake her. She was going to bring a hand up to slap his own away but instead found them stuck to the table. As she tried tugging again, the steal table breaking off the floor while still sticking to her hands. Y/N and Tony looked in shock.

Y/N then began to laugh, her eyes wide in disbelief. She widened her hands and the desk fell from her palms, crashing against the floor. “Holy shit,” she whispered as she looked at Tony, who was looking from the now broken table to her. “It worked! Oh god, I can’t believe it actually worked!” She screamed as she jumped up and down and headed towards the door.

“No no no, what the hell was that?!” Tony asked. Y/N rolled her eyes, still smiling as she impatiently grabbing his arm and dragged him outside towards the fight. She smiled at him, a great look of success overgoing her as she showed him the potion she had been perfecting for the last couple of years.

“Well, I took a blood sample of Peter’s and checked it to see what kind of stuff the spider had injected into him,” she said as Tony gave her a weird look. “Don’t ask how I got it, I don’t really know either. But as I analyzed it further, I had an idea to take the sample and separate the effects of the injection, and used it to create a serum that would give me powers similar to Peter’s, using the poison of his spider to create powers of my own.”

Tony looked at her mesmerized, then looked at the stash of dark red vials in the drawer. He lifted his eyebrows and nodded, impressed beyond words of the young girl’s discovery. Then he paused and looked back at her. “Wait, so you technically drank spiderboy’s blood?” He asked suspiciously. Y/N opened her mouth to respond but didn’t quite know how.

“I-” she paused, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “Okay, no, we don’t have time for this conversation right now. There’s a giant purple grape out that waiting to be slain.” Tony nodded and soon the two headed out the door without any further questions, saluting each other before Y/N darted off at an irregularly fast tempo.

She felt the wind blow rapidly against her hair as she ran through the bad guys, dodging hits with swiftness. Of course, she wasn’t fast like Pietro but definitely was faster than she usually was, which proved to be a great advantage while on the battlefield. Y/N saw Tony, Thor and Steve fighting against Thanos in the background as she thwiped out a web and flew into the air, grabbing one of the Chiari and slamming it into another group coming towards her.

She continued to fight when suddenly she felt a tingly sense that made her head shoot towards Steve, watching as he stood up by himself, his shield broken in his hand, as he prepared to single-handedly fight the titan. Y/N ran towards him when she heard a voice in her comm, that definitely wasn’t from anyone on their battlefield.

“On your left…”

She seemed to distantly recognize the voice but couldn’t quite place it. That is until a portal appeared beside Steve, made of orange sparks that she had remembered. There, the king of Wakanda, T'Challa, his younger sister, Shuri she thought her name was, and another girl who was dressed in a warriors uniform and a shaved head, holding a golden spear stood beside the king.

After that, portal after portal began to form around the atmosphere, with more battleships, superheroes and warriors of all kinds of countries and galaxies appearing through them and getting into their battle positions. Y/N smiled proudly before running up to the giant team and taking her place next to the Wakandian princess, lunging down into the iconic spidey stance and getting ready to avenge the rest of the universe. She looked at Steve as he watched everyone take their places among him.

“Avengers…” he starts as he holds out his hand and Mjolner flies into his grip. “Assemble!”

Battle cries and the sound of machines whirring and flying filled the atmosphere as they ran towards the alien army opposite of them. Y/N flicked out her wrist and grabbed onto one of the giants floating motherships and swung low to the ground, knocking out multiple enemies at once. Once she landed on the ground she continued to fist fight them off of her one by one, like Natasha had taught her for so many years.

But as good as she was doing at the moment, it wasn’t hard for her to get overpowered when a bunch jumped on her back at once, knocking her down to the floor, struggling to keep them from ripping out her skin. She tried to push them off, and successfully webbed some to the ground to keep them off of her, but it wasn’t enough to handle them all.

“Hey, watch out!” A boyish voice sounded through her comms as all the aliens were kicked right off of her, giving her a chance to stand up and fight off the rest, her rescuer standing behind her, back to back, as they both slung down the dogs and threw them across the battlefield. Y/N stabbed some with her pincer things Tony put on her back.

Once they were gone, Y/N grabbed the boy behind her and pulled him into a quieter place as she unmasked herself, looking expectantly at the boy. “Peter?” She said, her voice breaking as she looked at the Iron Spider suit, which disappeared from his face, revealing his unruly curls and a just as shocked look on his face.

“Y/N?” He whispered, disbelief in his eyes as she saw a single tear escape his brown orbs and gently slide down his cheek. He looked the same, but at the same time looked more mature, and she was relieved that he had seemed to grow while he was gone, or else the near future situation would be a bit awkward. “W-what are you doing here?” Y/N giggled a bit, feeling her own hot tears sliding down her dirt and blood covered cheek as her delicate hand went up to grab his own, wiping his tears.

“I came to save you, dummy,” she joked. Peter smiled at her, placing his hands on her waist. Although it wasn’t as long for Peter in the soul stone as it was for Y/N while on Earth since he was in a coma-like state pretty much the whole time, he had missed her honey-coated voice and sickly sweet smile. He had waited too long for this.

They watched each other for a little longer, analyzing the small details that had changed around their faces since the years passed before Peter leaned down and attached their lips together for a very long-awaited kiss. Y/N squeezed her eyes shut as her hands trailed back to rest on the back of his neck, playing with the small hairs at the nape of his neck as she felt the cold metal of his suit brush against her fingertips.

As they parted, he leaned down and pressed his forehead to hers, her sweat mixing with his as they kept their eyes closed and smiled at the feeling. Even though they were in the middle of a war, Y/N has never felt more at peace than that moment while she was in his arms.

Suddenly she felt the fine hairs on the back of her arm and the back of her neck stand up, and without thinking she extended her arms and traps the alien running towards them in one of her webs, throwing it up before pulling it back down to the ground, crushing it.

Apparently, Peter felt it too because when she looked back to him he was already looking back at the now-dead dog. His head turned back towards her, his mouth hanging open a bit as he let out a breath, a beautiful smile painting his lips as he grabbed her face, looking her in the eye.

‘God, I love you so much,“ he mumbles as he brings her mouth up to his again, this kiss a bit more passionate than the last. Y/N laughed into the kiss as she brought her arms around his neck and played with his hair. She pulled him back a bit, their noses still brushing against one another as she pecked him on the lips.

"I love you too,” she whispered, looking into his eyes with such adoration he almost exploded right there with the adrenaline he was feeling just having her this close to him. He smiled wider as he pecked her on the lips; once, twice, and a third time brought her into a proper kiss.

“Y'know as heartwarming as this moment is, you lovebirds realize we’re still fighting a war,” someone said from behind them. They quickly pulled away, stepping back from one another to face Tony Stark, a smirk on his lips as he examined the blush on the young adult’s faces, bashfully looking away from one another.

“Oh shut it, Tony. I deserve this at least,” she shook her head as she looked at the perfect boy beside her, someone she had known pretty much her whole life and had been in love with for just as long. Peter smiled at Tony and walked over to greet him, excited to see his mentor again after so long.

“Mr. Stark! Holy cow you will not believe what has happened to me,” Peter began to ramble as he walked up to him and started to do his usual over-exaggerated hand gestures. “Do you remember when we were in space? Right? And I got all dusty? Well I must have passed out and Dr. Strange said we went to the Soul Stone and we were in like a coma for like five years, and when I woke up, Dr. Strange was there too and he was like 'it’s been five years we have to go’, and then he started doing that yellow sparkly thingy, uh, that he does and… what are you doing? …oh.” Peter stopped when Tony wrapped his arms around him and pulled him into a tight embrace.

Tony felt such a great sense of relief as he hugged Peter, never realizing that the kid was like his first son until it was too late and having to wait so many years to hear his voice again. He placed a kiss on his cheek, in a fatherly way, and opened his eyes, smiling at Y/N who looked so happy.

“This is nice,” Peter said before they pulled away, Peter turned back at Y/N and smiled at her, his grin reaching his sparkling eyes. Tony patted his shoulder.

“I think it’s time we get back into battle,” he stated, his mask going back over his face as he got his repulsors ready. “You two don’t take too long, and NO funny business.” The pair nodded as he flew back into the air, going to help Banner or the Hulk. Peter turned back to Y/N.

“Wow, this is so awesome,” he said as he walked back to her, holding her arms as he admired her suit, which looked similar to his. “You’re like, my spider-girl sidekick.” Y/N laughed and pushed his chest playfully.

“I’m nobody’s sidekick, Parker,” she said. “But I can be your… partner?” Peter smiled and blushed. He bit his lip as he looked her over again, his grin contagious.

“In what way?” He asked, trying to sound sly but sounding more scared of the answer. Y/N laughed and walked over to him, wrapping her arms around his waist.

“In whatever way you want me to be,” she said, kissing his cheek before putting her mask back on and saluting him before swinging of back into battle. Peter stood there with a red blush crawling up his neck and feeling breathless, his smile growing wider if that was even possible.

“Awesome,” he muttered before his mask also went over his face and he went to go help as well.

Y/N was swinging over the battle, occasionally knocking out an airborne enemy in her way if she had to. She scanned through the people fighting, looking for anyone who needed help. But then her web was seemed to be disintegrated as she fell hard onto the floor, another lazer like beam hit right beside her just barely grazing her shoulder. She saw the witch people? (that’s what Tony called them at least) started to make barriers which she quickly ran under. She looked around for Tony and Peter, but couldn’t see them. Until she heard the latter’s voice through her comm.

“Help! Somebody help!” He said, sounding panicked and she heard his grunts as he tried to fight off the aliens. Without thinking of the possible dangers she ran out to help him, her spider-senses helping her locate him. She saw him under a bunch of the aliens and shot a web up.

“Peter, duck!” She said as she rammed through the enemies, knocking them over like bowling pins. She grabbed Peter around the waist and tugged him into her as she shot a web and took them out, grabbing onto Mjloner which had flown right above.

“Aw, thanks, Y/N,” Peter said as he put his head into her neck, which she couldn’t help but blush at. She thought it was cute how their roles were sort of reversed and he was just so baby.

Y/N continued to ride onto the hammer until she saw that it was heading straight towards one of the flying motherships. Her eyes went wide as she looked for a way to get off. She saw Valkerye, one of Thor’s friends, and called out for her as a warning before throwing Peter up so he could get the gauntlet back to Scott.

Y/N then stood on the small handle of the hammer before using her web to fling herself forward, jumping up to get on top of the ship as the hammer continued to destroy it from the inside. As she jumped off and landed surprisingly gracefully on the ground, she looked up to realize that the ships were no longer firing at them, but at something in the atmosphere above.

Y/N squinted before watching a figure move at lightning speed straight through one of the ships firing at them, exploding the whole thing. Y/N smiled, knowing who it was as she ran down to help Peter up, who had just almost been hit by one of the beams.

“Hey, you alright?” She asked softly as she grabbed his arm and helped him get up, him going to get the gauntlet which had escaped his grip after falling. He nodded, his mask going back as hers did.

“Yeah, yeah, all good,” he reassured as he held onto her shoulder for support. “That was so badass, by the way. When I was like, stuck, you know, under those aliens. And then you came and was like wham! and like kicked them off and then you just sorta like picked me up and then you just like threw me onto that flying horse, which is crazy. But you like saved me and that was so cool. Like really cool. Thanks.” Peter rambled as he looked at her in awe, which she gave a sweet smile in return.

Before he could comment any more someone landed right in front of them. Captain Marvel smiled and nodded at Y/N, as she returned the gesture, and looked at Peter, who was still holding tightly onto the infinity stones. Peter looked at her with wide eyes and in awe.

“Hi I-I’m Peter.. Parker,” he said shyly. Captain Marvel smiled at him, looking between the two teenagers.

“I know,” she said as she gave Y/N a knowing glance. “Hey, Peter Parker. You got something for me?” Peter looked at the gauntlet before looking out at the army that was racing towards them, feeling scared at the moment.

“I don’t know how you’re gonna get through that,” he said as he delicately handed the glove to Carol as the other female Avengers and superheroes gathered together around her. Y/N felt immediately at home and looked over at Peter reassuringly as Wanda landed by her side.

“Don’t worry,” Y/N said with a smile as her mask got on and Okoye, T’Challa’s head of king’s guard, finished her sentence for her.

“She’s got help,” she said, and the group of them began to run like hell towards the growing army, all doing their own thing to slam through and take down the enemy. Y/N webbed them down as they tried to attack her sisters and knocked them over as she swung by. She saw one of the bigger monsters making its way towards her, and effortlessly picked it up and threw it into the rest of the aliens making their way towards her at a fast rate.

As she continued to fight off the enemy, she felt a strong surge of energy pass through her, making her stumble slightly. As she regained her balance, she watched as the aliens that were once running straight for her turned into dust, disappearing into the wind. She squinted her eyebrows, looking around for who had snapped before she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, warning her that something was wrong.

She followed her senses to find Tony sitting against a piece of debris, extremely pale and barely moving, his arm and part of his face burnt off. She felt her breathing stop as she stumbled towards him, muttering his name as she collapsed in front of him in front of all the other Avengers.

“T-Tony? Tony! No!” She said as fell in front of him, going to grab his hand with both of hers. She hadn’t felt this type of heartbreak since 2018 when she had lost Peter, her mom, and the rest of her friends. But this time she was losing her father.

“Hey, kid,” he said so quietly she wouldn’t have heard him, but she was practically hugging him by now, clinging onto him as a silent way of asking not to leave her. As she heard his voice, an ugly sob ripped through her as she buried her head in his chest as a form of comfort.

“Tony, please not you too,” she asked quietly, squeezing his hand so tight that the metal surrounding it had started to cut into her palms, but she could care less. “Not you too, please. We need you, Tony. I need you, and Morgan, please.” She couldn’t even finish before breaking down.

“Mr. Stark? Can you hear me? It’s Peter.” Peter asked from behind her, shocked to see Y/N holding onto him and crying into him. Tony weakly looked up and brought his attention to the original web-slinging spider.  “We won, Mr. Stark. You did it. You did it, sir.”

At the mention of his name, Y/N finally looked up towards Peter, and he felt his heart shatter looking at her already bloodshot red eyes and the tear tracks that were a bright contrast against the rest of her face, which was covered in dust and blood. He walked over to her and wrapped his arms around her, gently pulling her off and into his own arms.

“No, No! Let go, please! I need to help him. Please. No.” Her voice got quieter as Peter held her closely, her back pressed against his chest as they both watched him. Tony looked between the pair, and although it hurt him to see the tears in their eyes, he was happy that they would be able to work through it together. He looked up at Peter and nodded his chin towards Y/N.

“Take… take care of… of her,” he whispered, causing a sob to come over Peter as well as he nodded vigorously, holding her tighter against him if that was even possible at this point.

“Of course, yes always,” he said as he felt salty tears run down at a rapid pace. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Tony.” Tony tried to give him a smile, tried to give him a sign that everything would be okay, but found that he couldn’t.

Then Tony looked at Y/N. He remembered the last time she was like this, and it hurt him that he had to cause her the same pain. But he cared for her and knew that this was what had to happen to keep both of his daughters safe. “I love you.”

Y/N’s head fell as she heard the three simple words come from his mouth, leaning into Peter as she tries to control herself, trying to look strong in front of him, knowing who worried he must be already. “I love you, too, dad.” She whispered and nodded, reaching out to squeeze his hand one more time before Pepper came to his side. Peter carefully pulled Y/N back, her collapsing into his lap and crying into his shoulder as he rubbed her back tried to keep in his own tears to be strong for her but ended up letting go and crying into her soft hair.

“Friday?” Pepper asked, her hand on Tony’s chest as Tony’s hand was placed gently on top of hers.

“Life functions critical,” the AI responded. Y/N felt like she was gonna be sick. She couldn’t think she could breathe, how do you even breathe again? Because she couldn’t quite remember at the moment. She listened to Peter’s heartbeat and used his rising and falling chest as a model.

“Tony? Look at me,” Pepper managed a smile at Tony as he groaned while turning to look towards her. “You’re gonna be okay, you can rest now,” she said as she put a hand on his cheek, gently caressing it before placing a soft kiss to it. And after that, the light on his chest went dim, and it took everything in Y/N not to scream like the day she found out Peter wasn’t coming home for dinner that night.

She felt Peter shaking around her, choking on sobs. She knew he would try and act as a support base for her, and he always liked to put others before himself. But she just held onto him, her hands going up to his messy hair and carting her fingers through the strands as a silent way to tell him that she was there for him too.

The Avengers and other heroes and warriors who had teamed up together to fight kneeled down, showing their respect to another beautiful life taken. The chaos in the warzone had gone quiet, a moment of silence taken in honour of Tony Stark.

And just like that, he was gone, just another figure of history in the textbooks. But to others he was a friend, he was a teammate, he was an idol, he was family. And God knows that he wouldn’t be forgotten for what he was, a hero.

~~~

The funeral occurred a couple of weeks later, only close friends and family were invited at the small gathering at the lake house where he lived with his family. It was odd, walking into the house and feeling so much dread in a place she considered a getaway just days before, a place that brought her such a feeling of happiness and relief.

She sat quietly in a soft chair in the corner, trying to process everything that was happening and everything that would come with it afterwards.  She had just finished watching Tony’s video to his family, which Pepper insisted included her, and felt heartbroken at the thought that it would truly be the last time she saw him, ever again.

“Hey,” his soft voice said as Peter crouched down next to her, a hand on her knee as he gently squeezed. His eyes were red and puffy, just as hers were, and he wore a black and white suit that looked nice on him, though it seemed an inappropriate time to comment on it. “They’re starting the service soon, um, by the lake. I think we should go.” Y/N nodded, standing up from her chair and taking his hand in her own, finding comfort in his warm and soft grip.

The two walked out to the deck, one that she had so many memories on with the rest of the Stark family. Peter brought her to stand beside him and his aunt May, who smiled at Y/N and squeezed her hand. Y/N smiled back, but it came out as more of a grimace. They stood just behind Happy, Pepper and Morgan, as Pepper leaned down and set the wreath onto the lake, in the middle it had Tony’s original arc reactor from 2008, with words engraved into it.

‘Proof Tony Stark has a heart’

She found humour in the words but also wondered why anyone had ever thought otherwise. Sure he was a bit egotistical and petty sometimes, and often took to bragging when it came to being one of the smartest people on earth. But if you had known him like I had, she thought to herself, you’d know that he was one of the most caring people ever.

She watched as it floated away down through the calm river, eventually turning into a speck in the distant, covered by trees and the glistening light reflected off the water. Y/N gulped harshly as she tried to keep her tears in, not trying to break the strong personality she had set in stone for the past five years, but nonetheless couldn’t help a few of them slip from her eyes.

When the funeral had ended Y/N went to greet the others that had attended, wearing her best fake smile as people commented on how sorry they were for her loss and she did the same for them. She had gotten many embraces from people she did and didn’t know, and shared small laughs and memories with them.

After Y/N got tired of talking to everyone she tapped Peter, who had stayed by her side through the whole day, and told him she was going to get a drink of water. Peter had insisted on coming and held her hand as they walked away from the crowd and to the cute lakeside cottage, Y/N had considered home for so many years. On the small bench beside the door sat Happy with little Morgan in his lap, who sprung off and ran towards the girl with a bright smile on her face.

“Y/N! Y/N!” Morgan chanted happily as she ran closer, arms stretched out. Y/N smiled genuinely at the young girl and crouched down, picked her up as she ran into her chest and resting her on her hip. She brushed her nose against her soft cheek and placed a kiss upon it.

“Hi, baby,” Y/N said as she bounced Morgan. Peter looked at Morgan with a grin as well, since it was honestly astounding how similar she was to her father. Morgan giggled and played with Y/N’s hair as they had a small conversation and Peter could only watch on in awe. Then Y/N turned Morgan to face Peter. “You remember who this is, don’t you? It’s uncle Peter!” Y/N said, looking at Morgan and then smiling up at Peter, who felt like he was about to cry again just hearing those words.

“Spidey! Spidey!” Morgan screeched happily as she leaned over and made grabbing hands towards Peter, asking him to pick her up. Peter smiled widely before taking her from Y/N’s grip and holding her on his own hip now.

“Hey there, nice to finally meet you,” he said as he rocked slightly and Morgan placed her head on his shoulder, wrapping her small arms around his neck. Peter felt like he might explode from cuteness overload.

“Yeah. Daddy and Y/N says that-that you is the bestest,” she says as she played with the collar of Peter’s shirt. “You’re my favourite superhero! But after daddy.” She says as she smiled up at him. Peter raises his eyebrows and nods, letting out a laugh as he continued to talk with her. Soon the girl was falling asleep on Peter’s shoulder and the two walked inside to put her down for a nap.

Peter gently placed her down on her bed as he put a few stuffed animals by her side and covered her with the pink, fluffy blanket at the end of the bed. He kissed her forehead as Y/N went to place another on her cheek.

“Love you 3000,” she mumbled in her half-asleep state, and Y/N smiled, feeling tears brimming in her eyes as she replied.

“Love you infinity,” she says as she kissed her head. Morgan smiled in her sleepy state as the two stood up and exited the room, closing the door as quietly as they could to not stir her. Peter pulled Y/N into a hug, rocking them from side to side as he felt her tears start to make his shirt wet, but he didn’t seem to care. He kissed her temple and gently grabbed her chin, guiding her to look up at him as he smiled down at her.

“You know, I love you infinity,” he mumbled as he leaned down to brush against her lips. She laughed, his presence making her feel so much better since he really was her saviour. She shook her head, scoffing.

“You’re such a dork, Parker,” she said as she looked up at him, smiling for what felt like the first time in forever. She didn’t know how he had that effect on her, but then again she wasn’t complaining. God knows she needs a bit of relief. “I love you infinity too,” she replied after leaving him hanging for a while, and she stood up on her toes to press her lips to his, the kiss soft and short but still full of emotion.

As they broke apart, he pressed another kiss on her forehead and pulled her into his embrace. “You know what would make you feel better?” He said into her ear, which she replied with a ‘hm?’, asking for him to continue. “If we went home and binge-watched that Shane Dawson conspiracy theory video you told me about the other day.” Y/N scrunched up her eyebrows and looked up at him, a soft laugh passing her lips.

“Right now? Are you serious?” she said, shaking her head as she jokingly pushed his chest. He also chuckled a bit.

“What?” He asked, taking her hand and backing down the hallway. “C’mon, Y/N, you know how long I’ve waited for this video! You can’t just tease me with it!” Y/N raised her eyebrow as she watched Peter bounce a bit, begging her with his adorable brown puppy eyes to come with him.

“Well, you know what? There’s actually two, and they’re an hour and a half each” she whispered, causing Peter to groan and throw his head back. As he looked back up he was smirking, his tongue swiping over his teeth as he looked at her.

“You’re gonna be the death of me,” he whispered as he tugged on her hand and pulled her away, Y/N following a giggling mess as he brought her to Aunt May’s car and drove them back home, both excitedly discussing different videos and movies and other events that Peter had missed while he was gone.

Even though it meant sacrificing a lot, and even though she was still devastated about Tony and Nat’s death, Y/N felt as if everything would be okay as she lied on Peter’s chest, his strong arms wrapped securely around her as they watched the movie long conspiracy videos together. They exchanged small kisses and soft words, and even feeding popcorn to each other cause they were that grossly sweet kind of couple. And Y/N had finally found her hope.

~~~

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[thecastingcircle]

‘A Goofy Movie’ at 25: An Oral History of “I2I” and the Powerline Concert Scene Posted on Friday, April 24th, 2020 by Ben Pearson

Part Two

Kevin Lima: We storyboarded the entire sequence first, so we had a very intricate sense of what we wanted from it.

Gregory Perler (Editor): Brian Pimental, who was in charge of storyboards, he and his team boarded it. The way they used to do it in those days was pin every single storyboard up, play the song, and then run with a little pointer and point out the beats. The one unique thing about that song, though, was that there was live-action reference done for it.

Kevin Lima: It was actually one of the very last sequences to be finished in the film. We found that we were up against a huge deadline with the movie. I actually asked a good friend of mine, who was a storyboard artist on the movie, Steve Moore, to go to Australia and the entire sequence was animated in Australia.

Steve Moore (Storyboard Artist and Sequence Director, Sydney): [Kevin] called and said they were behind schedule, and said the concert sequence at the end had a ton of effects and it was more than they could do to hit their deadline. So he said Disney had a studio in Australia that does a lot of their TV stuff, one of their top outsourced studios down there, and would I want to go down there and supervise this sequence? I was like, “Yeah, sure. Go to Australia for six months? What’s the problem?” (laughs) They were in such a hurry that they were like, “Tomorrow, can you meet with the choreographer?”

Kevin Lima: We choreographed the whole [scene] based on the storyboards.

Steve Moore: We met, looked at the storyboard reel, and talked for a bit, and then two or three days after that, we were in a little soundstage in Burbank. We’d hired a guy to video record [the choreographer] and his dancers, and they did the “I2I” dance. From the boards, he came up with the “I2I” dance, and that’s why you can actually do the dance – because it wasn’t left to animators to come up with, it had actual moves to it.

Kevin Lima: I wanted to create a dynamic that separated Powerline being more grounded in the choreography that he does, as opposed to Max and Goofy, who can slide across a 50-foot stage, fall from the rafters, blow up, and who can do The Perfect Cast. Which, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it, but it is quite difficult.

Gregory Perler: In the old Disney films, they filmed the actors moving in live action and then the artists literally traced over them. If you look at Snow White, for example, who is human, she moves exactly like her live-action reference. But with Max and Goofy and Powerline, they’re not the same proportions. So you can’t do that.

Kevin Lima: We knew that we wanted The Perfect Cast to be the center of the whole thing…we used that, as a lot of animation does, to be an influence for the animators. They didn’t copy it, exactly, but they certainly used it to get a real sense of continuity and an overall sense that there was a beginning, middle, and end to the piece.

Gregory Perler: Kevin thumbnailed every single shot from the live-action reference that he wanted to include in the song, and he spaced it out in the middle of the storyboard sequence that Brian had done. We incorporated that into the shoot.

Steve Moore: I had this one animator, he kept pulling out Paula Abdul videos. I said, “We have reference.” He goes, “Yeah, but she does this really good – ” [And I was like] “The reference!” He just wouldn’t do it. I finally had to boot him off the crew because I couldn’t get any work out of him. He was so obsessed with Paula Abdul. (laughs) He was a good animator, too! But I was like, “Look, if you can’t do this, I have to move on.” I warned him, and he just wouldn’t listen to me. He thought, “Ah, what’s he going to do?” Well, I put him back on the series stuff [like Goof Troop], because the studio was doing series work for Disney at the same time. They were not so happy with me because I was getting all their best people. Once I let that guy go, they were very happy. They said, “Thanks for doing that! We got a lot of footage out of him last week because he’s so mad!”

Gregory Perler: It cuts from Max and Goofy very high up at the top of the waterfall where the little rescue has happened, and a map flies in, and the map transitions you to the concert. So then you have that music start, you have a couple of establishing shots of a stadium, and people arriving. Then these roadies throw these cases in, the cases open up, and Max and Goofy come out. And you just go with it. It may have been one of the later sequences that was boarded, so there wasn’t a lot of time. Early on in the process, a sequence can be overthought. And I’m sure if we had done this one very early on, someone would have said, “Well, how did they even get in the cases?” (laughs) But we didn’t, and it’s such a treat to watch it and you just buy it.

Kevin Lima: I was always fascinated with David Bowie, and the way that he became characters. He put on a theatrical version of himself as he performed. I thought, “How can we do this with Powerline? Is there a way to give him a visual identity that makes him ultimately super theatricalized?” That’s where it all came from. That’s where the atom came from, the electricity. It was really about creating this identity that could live within the world of Goofy and Max.

Bill Farmer (Voice of Goofy): When you do a take and they say, “OK, be electrocuted,” then you just let your mind go with it. What’s it like to be electrocuted? Sometimes you go, “Whoa!” or grab your throat and kind of shake it, like, “Whoa-oh-oh!” High ones, big yells, all that. Then they pick the best ones and put them in. But when you do those yells and things that are rough on the vocal cords, they always save those for the end of the day, because if you strain your throat you don’t have anything else to do after that.

Bambi Moé: Up until this pandemic, I think going to see live music was – there’s nothing like it on the planet. I think what Kevin and his team did was to visually animate something that we could all relate to. The experience of it. The way it was communicated. It wasn’t just seeing the character performing. I think what really makes it so special is that it felt to me that there was an intimacy. You were a fly on the wall in the middle of this unbelievable concert. You were seeing it through the eyes of the lead characters – in this case, Goofy and Max. It was less about Powerline and more about them.

Gregory Perler: You’ve got to be on certain things on certain times within the song. All the backstage stuff that involves Goofy getting separated from Max, Max being chased by a guy – they’re cut within an inch of their lives. Because you’ve gotta be back on stage when you’ve gotta be back on stage. I do a lot of movies that have songs that have performance stuff but also story stuff, and this was a great first one to do because it really works.

Kevin Lima: Because we were all separated – we were all in different parts of the world – I would do videotapes in which I acted out all the scenes. I may have gone through that scene with them. I didn’t dance it, but I did do the acting that the characters would have done. So all of the surprises, the double-takes, Goofy holding his face when he sees Trini in her dressing room, all of that stuff are things that I actually was doing on my videotapes to help the animators understand what I wanted from the scene.

Bill Farmer: The heavyset woman who sings with Powerline in that scene was a character who was in the “Open Road” scene, traveling along with a little nebbish kind of a character. She had a lot more in the movie that got cut out, except for her in the scene of “Open Road” and then as one of the backup singers that Goofy sees in the dressing room and has the most weird look on his face. (laughs) He’s all embarrassed. She’s the one that’s vocalizing with Powerline on “I2I.”

Steve Moore: It was pretty tight. We had it down to what it needed to be, and there was no time to waste on anything. The only thing that still had to be worked out when I got to Australia was how the lighting was going to work. Because there was so much concert lighting to figure out…one of the concert scenes had so many different light things going on that we had like 32 levels of animation. Because we were shooting it all in a camera back then. They had given up their conference room for me to have an office, and the entire conference room floor was covered in layers of this scene while we were checking it before it went to camera…In CG, you would just set the lights. But we had to figure it out. We had one thing where it was flashing overhead, and another thing going around the sides of them when they were dancing. So the source of light’s coming from here, and we had to draw a rim matte kind of thing, and they would paint that. It was a lot of stuff to figure out like that.

Gregory Perler: It was one of the first scenes I ever edited on the Avid, digitally. Prior to that, we were editing on film. When we started the movie, we were on 35mm film that was shot and edited on an editing table, and then after about a year, Disney said, “Hey, we’re thinking of switching to these digital editing platforms. Are you interested?” And I said no, because we were already halfway through. Then I realized it wasn’t really a question. (laughs) It was, “OK, you’re going to get an Avid and you’re going to learn how to use one.” Even though I was reluctant, I admit that “I2I” was the perfect sequence to cut on the Avid because A) you were integrating another source medium, which was 30 frame per second video of the [reference footage of the dancers], and B) you have to be able to react so quickly and extend a drawing, take away from a drawing, or repeat a drawing so much more nimbly than you could if you were working on film.

Kevin Lima: With film, you have to pull it out of the gate, cut it, splice it, and put it back into the flatbed. With Avid, you could do it seamlessly without physically having to handle anything. I remember when they told us they wanted us to do this, and we may have been the very first to do Avid work at the studio. I remember us looking at each other and saying, “Oh man, we’re in for it now, because we’re going to be working out all the bugs as we go along.” But really, it was kind of seamless.

Carole Holliday (Character Designer, Roxanne and Stacey): It wasn’t until maybe about ten years ago that I found out that people your age love A Goofy Movie. Because it was the movie of their childhood. I had a girl that I went to church with who was like, “Can you draw Roxanne and Max on my Keds?” She bought brand new Keds so I could draw them on her shoes. I was like, “OK!” (laughs)

Gregory Perler: I don’t even know how long the song is. It might only be three minutes, but there’s so much jammed in there. You’ve gotta see the kids watching them on TV.

Kevin Lima: I don’t recall when we actually pulled in the idea that they were going to be on television. The concert being on television gave us the ability to cut around the country, or cut to the different players within the movie. We knew that we wanted Roxanne to see what had happened, we didn’t just want her to hear that it happened. So that’s where this idea of being on television came into play. We knew that was really the crux of it: Roxanne seeing Max and recognizing that he wasn’t just pulling one over on her, that he wasn’t lying to her because he was afraid – he was actually there.

Carole Holliday: I was always drawing Roxanne because I [joined the production in] France hopefully to animate the character that I designed. I didn’t realize until I got there that she was popular. At one point, I had done a doodle of Roxanne with an Eiffel Tower hat on. I drew another picture over it, so I took the rough, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash can. The next day, I came back to my desk and my desk mate had pulled it out of the trash can and put it on his wall. I was like, “What?” It was very touching…I went there, and all of the French guys were like, “I want to draw Roxanne!” I think that’s the thing: she’s innocent. She was just this schoolgirl. People like innocence. They’re drawn to innocence. Even though in her biography, her favorite song was The Police song “Roxanne,” a story about a girl who’s not innocent. But Roxanne was. At the time, I was working with teenagers through my church, and I just treated her like the kids that I knew, and I think people saw that in the character.

Gregory Perler: If I remember correctly, it’s Bobby who sees him first. It’s treated as, not a joke, because it has real importance for [Roxanne]. And it sets up the fact that [Max] has to go back and tell her the truth, even though he actually completed his whole deception.

Carole Holliday: The ending doesn’t work unless the director and his head of story and the story crew have set up from the beginning what the character’s emotional want is. The fact that Max thought he wanted one thing and was fighting the very thing that Goofy wanted through the whole thing, and at the end, gets the relationship with his father. It’s like, “I’ve missed out on everything else, but I got this one thing I wasn’t expecting.” Then the Powerline concert at the end becomes the cherry on top. It’s like, “Oh my goodness, you get your dad and you get this! You were a bad kid, but you won because you actually acknowledged your foolishness!” I think that’s why it pays off, is because he repents. He gets what’s important, and then he gets given this other gift on top of that.

Kevin Lima: I was really wanting to make a John Hughes movie in animation. That was really my goal. Can we tell a more contemporary story with contemporary characters than had been told in animation up to that point? So at every turn, I was trying to make it feel like it was happening today. Well, 1995 “today.”

Gregory Perler: I don’t remember how the whole thing with Bobby and Stacey came about, but I think the music is vamping a little bit there, so there was time to play that out. Kevin and Brian came up with that, and we made it fit as best we could.

Kevin Lima: We felt like we should wrap up all the other stories that we’ve been telling. Pete, especially, being just flabbergasted and spitting out his beer on the television screen. I think maybe we’re the only Disney movie to have a character drink a beer. But he spits it all over the television because he is just amazed that what Goofy said was going to go down, went down. The concert really gave us a way to tie everybody’s story together. It’s amazing for me how, in animation especially, you can use music or a song to tell so much of your story in a really economic way.

Gregory Perler: It really does feel like the climax to a movie. You’re putting this thing together sequence by sequence, not always in order. Everybody loved “Stand Out” at the beginning of the movie, but by God, [“I2I”] is a climactic musical number, and it has real scope and scale that maybe the rest of the movie didn’t. You’ve got wide shots with crowds and things we take for granted today.

Steve Moore: We’d hear that song every day. It was like, “Here it goes again.” But for me, it never got to a point where I didn’t like the song anymore or couldn’t stand to hear it anymore.

David Z.: It’s funny, but those songs really lasted. Actually, the whole movie has taken on a second and third generation. My kids loved it when we did it, but then all these other people, I guess it was just the time where a lot of people had kids. But it was for grown-ups, too, because we didn’t make the song as a kid’s song. We made the songs as a sophisticated, radio-friendly groove.

Gregory Perler: It’s the culmination of this little movie that people have really grown to love and become invested in. It feels like this is the most satisfying way the movie can end. It feels inevitable in the best possible way for a movie. When it takes two, two and a half years to do a movie like that, and you don’t necessarily work in order and we have other songs that we didn’t use and stuff, you just never know.

Kevin Lima: I think the scene resonates because it’s backed with a powerful emotional through line. I think you get to see the culmination of a very difficult journey for Max and his dad come to a very rewarding end. Max fulfills a dream in some ways. Not only does he get to go on stage with Powerline, but he gets the girl at the end of the day. I think those are all very powerful themes wrapped up in one big song that echoes those themes. The song truly echoes what is happening in the plot. I think that’s what makes it truly stick in a real way.

David Z.: That was one of the hippest movies to come out, musically. There hasn’t been anything as cool since maybe an old Betty Boop cartoon where they used Cab Calloway. That was some great music. But cartoons didn’t have great music until then – not that I can remember. It was sort of a brave statement for me to make because it hadn’t been done.

Patrick DeRemer: My kids, who are adults now, they still have this song in their playlists. As do their friends. This generation of millennials – late twenties to mid-thirties – love this song. It makes me very proud as a writer to be proud of, first of all, the Disney movie catalogue. But then to be a part of such a popular song that’s touched so many people, it’s really exciting to me. It’s one of my favorite moments in my career, being able to touch that many people so deeply. It’s an emotional thing. It’s that magic relationship when lyric, music, emotion, and film all comes together, and it fits. It’s kind of hard to describe exactly why or how it happens, but when it does, you know it.

David Z.: It expanded so far, and had such a big audience. And still has a big audience. I didn’t realize people were so dedicated to it. We went to a screening, a 20-year celebration, and it was packed to the gills. I couldn’t believe it. People were running on that memory for a long time. The popularity of it has exploded.

Steve Moore: For people today, they grew up with it. This was the age of the VCR, and kids watched this over and over and over again, and now they’re in their thirties, and you mention A Goofy Movie and they get gooey about it. It’s in their hearts from their childhood, and they can watch it today as adults and still enjoy it. It still holds up, and I think that has to do with the emotional quality of the film, how it draws you in, how the song was part of the story, it’s the climax of the movie, and the father and son are dancing together. It’s just a nice sentiment and a nice way to end the movie.

Roy Freeland: I’ve been watching the TikTok dance challenge. I’m OK [at it] now. I tried it. I decided not to post my attempt. (laughs) But it’s so much fun to see people get up and do it. There was a high school principal, there was a doctor in New York wearing his scrubs with an inspiring message on top of that about good news of how the curve is flattening. It’s a contemporary message, of the moment right now – that hopefulness and connection between people.

Bill Farmer: I have tried to get that [dance] down as close as I can. I’ve tried to remember how it is, and I actually found my old script. “Ten o’clock, two o’clock…” I’ll attempt it, but it’s not really a video-worthy thing. (laughs)

Patrick DeRemer: If you know Bruno Mars and any of the people at Disney live action, they should put a live stage version of this together with Bruno as Powerline. That would be great! Can’t you hear him singing this?

Bill Farmer: Over the years, many fans have come up to me – probably more than any other project I’ve ever worked on, and I’ve done close to 4,000 projects for Disney – and A Goofy Movie stands out among all of them with the fans. They always come up and say, “I couldn’t talk to my dad, but we saw this movie, and it became our movie.” They’d watch it every year or listen to the soundtrack together, and “I2I,” it encapsulates the whole theory of the movie. They can see eye to eye without seeing eye to eye on everything. A father and a son can find common ground and be buddies, even though they’re separated by one being Goofy and one being embarrassed of his dad. And everybody’s been embarrassed of their parents, so it really strikes a note that you can relate to.

***

A Goofy Movie is currently streaming on Disney+. All screengrabs are either from that presentation or from this “Making Of” documentary about the movie found on YouTube. Tevin Campbell’s representatives did not respond to our requests for an interview, but if you’d like to read his reflections on his contribution to the film, you can do so here.

The End

[rwbyconversations]

Why Emerald and Mercury’s scene in Lost is one of the best scenes in all of RWBY

Lost is a really underappreciated episode in Volume 6. It tends to get overlooked because Dead End precedes it and that’s easily the weakest episode of the season, while right afterwards we get the three-parter of the Argus Battle and Adam’s return meant focus was shifted for a hot minute. But I adore this episode, nearly every second of it barring some choices at the end (barring Oscar getting shafted for development- again- and Ruby’s oddball speech of “we didn’t need adults this far” to Qrow), but it’s honestly one of the best episodes of the season in my eyes, and that falls down to one major scene- Emerald and Mercury’s conversation in the first third of the episode, which is one of my favorite scenes in all of RWBY.

I know when people think of character arcs involving Lost they tend to go for the obvious lure of the Pyrrha statue, which, to be fair, is a really solid character moment and I loved a lot about it- especially the small reference to the Volume 1 OP of Jaune looking at the statue, it’s framed with almost the exact same camera angle. But as someone who mains my two murder kids, I cannot stress how hyped up I was going into Lost. Finally, after years of being relegated to background fodder with their one big moment since Volume 3 being their humiliating appearance at Haven where Emerald took a literal dive and Merc was left holding an arm like a numbnuts, Lost was gonna give me the content I’d been waiting for.

The fact that Merc and Em were getting the thumbnail- something neither of them had been in since Volume 3- was something that made my goddamn day when the thumbnail went up on VRV

And ultimately, I think the scene delivered, and delivered with a gusto that makes me unironically call it one of the best scenes of the Volume, one of the best of the show, in fact- and today I’d like to explain why I love Emerald and Mercury’s scene in Volume 6 Chapter 9, Lost.

1) The establishing context, or: a quick breakdown of Merc and Em in V6C4 

Merc and Em had one scene earlier this volume, in Chapter 4, “So That’s How It Is.” It chronicles them and Hazel returning from Mistral several weeks after the Battle of Haven, Hazel having contacted Little Miss Malachite and gotten the heads up on where RWBY were going next. Spirits are low as they leave the ship, and an unexpected welcoming party in Tyrian doesn’t lift the mood. Emerald in particular lashes out at Tyrian when he mockingly notices Cinder’s absence, which just gives him all the motivation he needs to get up in Emerald’s personal space and mock her for her weakness. 

Fun fact, in the Volume 6 trailer, Tyrian creeping on Emerald happens in Salem’s conference room, presumably to throw people off the scene on when the scene would be happening. 

Tyrian proves to be as sharp as his dearly-departed stinger (now resting in Ruby’s cabinet of Maimed Body Parts), mocking Emerald in a delightfully chilling voice that “Cinder isn’t here to protect you anymore.” You know who is though? 

This asshole, that’s who. Mercury fucking Black, finally showing the spine he lost after Volume 3 and getting up in Tyrian’s grill to protect Emerald. He even got his eyebrows back just for the occasion! 

Never forget Volume 4 and Merc’s penciled-on eyebrows

It’s a short but sweet scene that sets up the duo’s dynamic well- they’ve really only got each other out in Evernight so even if they bicker... a lot... Merc and Em will watch each other’s backs because it’s that or deal with Tyrian, Watts and most importantly Salem alone. And that’s not a thought either of them truly want to consider. 

The rest of the Evernight scene in chapter 4 has some small but important moments for them- I especially love Mercury being the first person we see realizing Salem’s about to snap because of his abusive father. If anyone’s gonna know how to read the room and know to get out of dodge before the glass starts shattering, it’ll be him. How he just stands at attention, eyes locked forward when everyone else looks at Salem is also a nice subtle bit of character- eyes forward, since he was probably told not to move without permission. Emerald’s sheer terror for much of the debriefing is just a masterclass in animation- her eyes are these narrow pinpricks that can’t focus on a single spot, she cringes in anticipation of a slap when she rats out Cinder (gee it’s almost as if Cinder is her abuser who conditioned her or something why do people still ship them), how she flinches when Salem touches her shoulder and only relaxes when Salem moves on and reveals that Cinder’s alive. It’s all just great stuff for their characters that you get from looking at their body language. 

That’s all that we see of Mercury and Emerald until chapter 9, and unfortunately the last we see of them from there until the post-credits scene, but fortunately, this is a real doozy of a scene. 

2) The actual scene

We open with Merc and Em alone in a room, Emerald bitterly noting how much she hates being kept in the dark about Salem’s future plans. Mercury agrees, stopping some training to note that at least Cinder kept them up to speed, before resuming his combat. 

Mercury and Yang are two of the easier foils to compare and contrast to in the series, especially in the RWBY/CRME contrasts between Ruby/Cinder, Weiss/Emerald, Blake/Roman and later Adam and Yang/Mercury. Both are close range fights with firearms strapped to their limbs of choice, both have cybernetic limbs and as we learn later this episode, both had fathers with wildly differing views on their Semblances. But something else that connects them is that neither Mercury or Yang stay down for long when they get knocked out. Yang lost her arm and once she got back on her feet, she updated her fighting style to be more acrobatic and all-around, which paid off in dividends when she got to fight Adam and was able to move around his strikes. Similarly, the first time we see Mercury get some free time after Haven, he’s training... except he’s working on his fists, since he was overly reliant on his legs until now. I like this, it would have been easy to have Mercury just working on his legs or even just doing nothing but not only does it give the conversation a more lively feel, but it shows that Mercury is working on covering his weaknesses. And if there’s one thing Mercury hates, it’s leaving a weakness uncovered.

Your daily reminder that Yang vs Mercury is some of the best choreography in the show BTW

Emerald, seemingly out of boredom, decides to pry a bit and asks Mercury why he came with Cinder and Emerald in the Volume 3 flashback. I’ve seen some people criticize that Emerald is only asking this now, but given how when she tried to object to Cinder she got a slap for her troubles, I think it’s safe to say she decided it wasn’t worth Cinder’s wrath a second time for asking too many questions about Mercury. 

Mercury tries deflecting with a simple answer “Just made sense,” to which Emerald calls bullshit with one of the most deadpan-laden lines she’s ever uttered. “It ‘made sense.’” 

Mercury decides to keep up that path, trying to cover the question with his usual sarcasm and wit. It’s notable that his explanation gives nothing away that Emerald didn’t already know- Marcus trained Mercury to be an assassin, Mercury killed him and right afterwards, Cinder showed up. It’s almost clinical how, despite covering it with his usual wit, Mercury doesn’t let anything slip until Emerald gets under his skin by calling bullshit again, since to her that Mercury joined Cinder for as shallow a reason as “right place right time” is anathema to her- there has to be something in this for Mercury beyond just getting to fight. Mercury again deflects, giving Emerald knowledge she already knows- “Salem’s promised us everything. We win this thing, we’ll be top dogs in her new world.” Again, he’s only telling her what she already knows, and when he asks her what she gets out of this, Mercury manages to throw Emerald off the scent and tricks her into talking about herself- a topic Mercury enjoys because it means he’s not the one under the microscope. 

Something I adore and hate in equal measure is how musically when Emerald talks about Cinder, the score itself changes to a more whimsical version of Cinder’s theme- as if Emerald’s using her Semblance on the soundtrack itself to paint Cinder in a better light. 

Also something worth noting is the lighting symbolism for Emerald in the first part of this scene:

She starts in darkness, surrounded by light.

When Mercury gets a rise out of her, she walks out into the light to confront him, but Mercury moves into the darkness, a barrier separating them. But when Emerald begins talking about Cinder...

The camera pans to put Emerald back into darkness. This scene is loaded with this kind of symbolism on a lighting and musical level, the two dancing around the edges of light and dark, separated usually by the barriers that form from the overhead light.

Regardless, Mercury is perfectly fine to let Emerald prattle on about Cinder, right up until Emerald begins having a crisis of conscience. Not one based on how Cinder used her to stage a terrorist attack, no. Mercury butts in when Emerald’s crisis of conscience is based on how now that Cinder isn’t here, Emerald isn’t sure if they’re doing the right thing. And thus Mercury’s fandom finally got to see the scene they had been waiting years for: Mercury telling Emerald Cinder doesn’t care for them. Emerald gets angry, still caught up in the web of lies that Cinder spun around her, but Mercury doesn’t give a solitary shit about any of that and keeps saying things Emerald doesn’t want to hear- that Cinder never cared about Emerald, let alone either of them. 

I absolutely adore how the ever-present smirk on Mercury’s face just melts off while he’s trying to get Emerald to realize Cinder never cared for them- either because he’s done playing nice or because he’s trying to stress to Emerald that he’s not messing around, just this once.

Mercury’s mocking line to Emerald finally sets her off, and she charges him furiously, trying to beat him into shutting up. But it doesn’t work- of course it wouldn’t, Mercury is leagues above Emerald in skill even if she uses her weapons, going in without them is tantramount to suicide. This guy danced around Coco and Yatuhashi and gave Yang and Pyrrha good fights while deliberately throwing both fights. Beating Emerald would take less than a minute if he tried. But he doesn’t. Mercury never actually hits Emerald, focusing on just blocking her blows. It’s only when Mercury finally decides to stop giving Emerald information she already knows and actually give her some honest truth that he begins trying, and immediately Emerald is forced back. But even then, Mercury throws his kicks. Compared to the ones he threw in training they’re sluggish, easily predicted. He’s not trying to hurt Emerald, he’s just stressing his point. 

Literal chills went down my back when I heard that line the first time, Yuri killed it.

Mercury basically decides to throw his abuse in Emerald’s face, which I’ve seen some people deride and describe as Mercury basically playing the victim card, but I think this is perfectly in-character for him. Emerald’s locked in her cycle of abuse with Cinder, even though the bitch is on another continent and now is the perfect time for Emerald to break free, to get out before Cinder maims her like Marcus did Mercury... and she’s not. Taking. The chance. Of course Mercury would be pissed, of course he’d get heated for the first time- he’s basically watching Emerald squander one of the only chances she has to get out of this life before Cinder catches her again, and he (and the audience) know if Cinder gets her hands on Emerald again, that’ll be it; Emerald will be ride or die for Cinder all the way to the finish line due to her paternal/romantic love. If it takes Mercury being this most callous and blunt he’s ever been to finally get Emerald to see the truth or even just to make sure where she draws her battlelines, then he’ll do whatever it takes. 

As we get an orchestral reprise of I’m The One, Mercury finally gives us a new hint into his backstory- one of the most fucked up of all the cast according to Kerry- for the first time in three years. Marcus didn’t just beat Mercury senseless, didn’t just excuse it as training and potentially even cut off Mercury’s legs to refine him into a perfect killer- he stole Mercury’s Semblance with his own, seeing it as a crutch that Mercury relied on and holding it over his head with the promise of its return once Mercury got strong. To quote the normally Unirkable Merc himself, “So I got strong, but I never got it back!” 

Mercury forced himself to get on the level of titans like Pyrrha and Yang without having the safety net of a Semblance like they have- he got strong in spite of his father, not because of Marcus taking his power from him. But that power- that strength that lets him fight at a skill ceiling beyond what Marcus likely thought possible, destroyed this young child. It stole from Mercury, things that he can never get back- a literal piece of his soul was taken from him and the thrill of the fight is the only thing he’s ever found that can fill the hole. That confidence is earned because Mercury was defiled by his father and spat in the face of destiny, he chose to get back up and try and earn back what was rightfully his. And when he got the strength to kill his abuser and burn his house down, just to realize he couldn’t get that power back? In walked Cinder Fall, looking for another lost youth to corrupt and twist the worldview of- and here was one such youth, with all the corruption done complete with a neat little bow on top. 

All of this- all of this- goes without mentioning how not two volumes prior we had a different character go through an arc involving her Semblance and a father figure teaching her how to control it and not let it control her. 

I’m just saying guys if you still wanna live in denial over Yang and Merc’s foil status and how they’d be the coolest rivals in the show, door’s right there, I’m gonna be here eagerly awaiting their proper rematch (Fuck off and die Volume 5, you mountain of wasted potential). 

The kicker (pun not intended) is Mercury’s line at the end of the training with Emerald- “I’m right where I’m supposed to be,” he confidently declares, absolutely sure in himself. The whole dynamic of the scene has been Mercury and Emerald calling bullshit on each other’s excuses, with Mercury dominating once he got Emerald to play the Cinder card. But he gets so caught up in his rage over how he got defiled by Marcus, that he loses sight for a second and forgets that he’s lying to himself as much as Emerald- the difference is he’s gone thought he cycle before and seen it so he can see that Emerald’s in it, but he hasn’t yet realized he’s gotten caught in a different cycle and still can’t see the trees from the forest. Denial is a recurring trait in Mercury and Emerald, and one neither of them are ever truly free from (”Salem promised us everything,” like how Marcus promised you back your Semblance, Mercury?). Emerald attacking Mercury after he mocks her “crisis of identity” can almost be taken as her subconsciously agreeing with Merc that Cinder doesn’t care, but after all she’s done for Cinder, everyone she’s hurt and helped kill, the idea that it was all for less than nothing is something she’s got to run away from- the alternative is just too nightmarish.

Mercury “I’m right where I’m supposed to be” Black, ladies and gents. He’s feeling really confident in these scenes, can’t you tell?! 

And who sees this and realizes it, but none other than Tyrian fucking Callows of all people. And of all the people in Salem’s castle, who expected him to be an adept armchair psychologist? Tyrian is blunt, completely unforgiving in his assessment of Mercury and Emerald- they’re trapped in a cycle of violence, pain and misery, and they’re too afraid of what’s on the other side to ever leave it- what’s waiting for Mercury out in the world of Remnant? All he can do is kill, and now that he’s burned his bridges with Huntsmen society, all he’d wind up doing is assassination work like father like son. Granted, Tyrian being the one to break this down to them both is... ironic given how Tyrian himself is trapped in Salem’s web of devotion and has been for so long he couldn’t find his way out if he wanted to, but here he raises a valid point. 

After this the scene mostly moves away from Mercury and Emerald and becomes Tyrian informing them and the audience that Watts and Tyrian are going to Atlas to intercept RWBY, but before he leaves, Tyrian leaves some parting advice.

“Do what makes you happy children, please? I’m begging you.” 

Reading through the mile-wide lines, it’s obvious Tyrian wants them to run so he can hunt them down himself, even though he denies telling them they should leave earlier when Emerald asks point-blank if he’s telling them to go (of course he isn’t saying that, he wants them to come to the conclusion himself, no fun stalking prey when the hunt’s made easy for you after all). But the scene ends with a somewhat more optimistic note.

Emerald and Mercury, still unsure about a lot of things after this group therapy session, are still standing together, almost more unified than they were before now- no barriers of light and darkness separating the two now. And that should be something that terrifies anyone who crosses their paths, especially the guy who made a point to T-Bag Mercury and basically promise he’ll draw the straw on killing them if they stray out of line. 

3) Conclusion

Mercury and Emerald are my favorite characters in the show, and while that’s been a bit harder to maintain in the Dark Times of Volumes 4 and 5 where they got nothing to do, 6 reminded me and a lot of other people why they’re the characters to keep an eye on in future years. They have these wonderfully dark backstories that let them serve as haunting foils for two members of team RWBY each (Emerald and Ruby and Weiss, Mercury for Blake and Yang) that show how far things could have gone if the RWBY girls had been born with a bit less luck. On top of all that, I’m The One is just a killer of a song that excites with its spiteful air, its cockiness only accentuating how horrific these two have had it. 

Mercury and Emerald start the Mistral seasons separated by a barrier (the window) but after their conversation in Lost and time away from Cinder, the barrier’s gone. They’re closer than they were before. And Merc got his eyebrows back too, that’s a sign he started caring about Emerald! 

Their scene in Lost I feel encapsulates a lot of what keeps them together and what makes for one of RWBY’s best dynamics- they don’t really like each other a lot of the time, but they have each other’s back come hell or high water because they need each other like a lifeline. Mercury does, at least a little, genuinely care for Emerald; he goes about it in a dickish way but trying to recognize Cinder’s abusive behavior is one of the most noble things he’s done all show. And while Emerald did try to attack him, he goaded her into it and she was indignant with rage when Tyrian pinned Merc down. Everything about the scene just works for me, from the small musical cues (alongside the return of I’m The One and Cinder’s theme, I love how right before Emerald attacks Mercury, this beeping starts and then accelerates into this droning sound like a flatline, which really captures Emerald’s temper reaching fever pitch and then snapping, to the lighting symbolism (Merc and Em both begin the scene in darkness but come together in the light at the end after Tyrian leaves, alongside everything I said above) and of course, Katie Newville and Yuri Lowenthal both knocking it out of the park with a home run of a performance, alongside Josh Grelle being his usual self when Tyrian shows up. While it was overshadowed by Jaune’s scene with the Pyrrha statue, I’d be very comfortable marking Emerald and Mercury’s spotlight scene in Lost as not just a highlight of the season, but one of the best scenes of the entire show. Everything came together for this ambrosia of a scene, and I can only hope I sold how much it means to me and how much I appreciate the work that went into it on a technical, writing, animation, acting and musical level. 

Keep an eye on Merc and Em is all I’m saying, and if you’ve written them off in the past, I hope this convinced you to take another look at them and hope they get their due time to shine in future. 

Thank you for reading. 

[doctorocsid]

THE MAKING OF PHOENIX WRIGHT’S SECOND DAY OFF

Or: The Immense Struggle of Trying to Make Decent Content

A good year and a half. That’s how much time passed between me starting Phoenix Wright’s Second Day Off and me uploading it to YouTube. What a hell of a load off my back that was. If you couldn��t tell, making this video was a bit of an undertaking, to say the least. And by “undertaking” I mean “an exercise in pure agony”. So, I figured I’d do a bit of a writeup here so I can get across to you the absolute hell of an experience making this video was.

PART 1: THE INITIAL PLANNING STAGES

The original “Phoenix Wright’s Day Off” was released in February 2018 to, though not a lot of views, a generally very positive response. Despite its janky animation, people seemed to enjoy it for its complete ridiculousness, comedic timing, and overly-choreographed fighting. Not to mention literally being the only Ace Attorney-themed Garry’s Mod video ever made that actually uses the Ace Attorney characters. (I’m still the only person to ever do that as of the time of writing. Woohoo.)

Given the positive reception and the fact that I literally ended the video with a “To Be Continued”, I was ready as I could ever be to start work on a sequel. The first one only took me a couple weeks to make, so surely a sequel wouldn’t take much longer, right?

Oh, how wrong I was. Still, I started planning out exactly how things would go. Throwing around ideas in my head. I needed it to be bigger and better than the original, of course. How was I gonna do that? Well, my initial plan was, uh, misguided, to say the least. What I wanted to do at first was create the sequel entirely in Source Filmmaker, along with giving it a darker, more serious tone to contrast the ridiculous slapstick of the first. Not a great idea for a sequel to a video that mainly relied on throwing ragdolls around for comedy.

https://streamable.com/taxrn

The original intro for PW2DO, based off the intro for “Fargo”. A lot less cool-looking than the final intro I made. (Even though I intended the video to be made in SFM, I made the intro in Gmod solely because I could just film myself driving the car instead of having to animate it manually.)

The final intro was done in a not too difficult fashion - the characters were animated in Garry’s Mod on top of greenscreens, which I then imported into Premiere and changed to solid colors. Added some extra video effects I found in places. Set it to an instrumental of Propane Nightmares. I’m proud of how it turned out, mostly. I won’t deny after I introduced the characters I didn’t exactly know what else to do with it, so I just filled it with some random actiony shots I thought might look cool. Incidentally, this was the only part of the final video that was made in Premiere - the rest of it was just edited together in Vegas Pro. Which crashed many times during editing. Fun.

PART 2: THE PAINS OF INDECISION (AND ALSO SOURCE FILMMAKER)

Nonetheless, I got to work, despite not actually knowing how to use Source Filmmaker. “I’ll figure it out as I go along,” I figured. And over time, more or less, I managed to figure it out. Sort of. And by “figure it out” I mean “become subject to the true hell that is SFM”.

Let me give you some quick background here. SFM has two main editors for animation: The “motion editor”, and the “graph editor”. The motion editor uses a relatively easy-to-understand method of animating: you select an object you want to animate (a prop, weapon, ragdoll, etc), select the span of time in which you want the thing to move to its new destination, and then you move it to the new destination. Sounds simplistic, but can be used extensively to create good-looking animation. (I myself used this method for the bar fight in PW2DO.) The graph editor on the other hand, is much more involved, depending on the tried-and-true method of using keyframes for animation. Some people prefer this one because it allows you to directly edit and fine-tune each little animation curve to your liking. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUXnpk8xDLg

This unfinished PW2DO prototype was animated entirely with the graph editor in SFM.

Really, you can use either one for animating, whichever suits you best. For me, personally, the graph editor feels like something designed in the seventh circle of hell specifically to torture me. Why does adding a new keyframe screw up all my preexisting animation? Why does adding a new keyframe make the ragdoll’s bones stretch out to infinity? Those are just a couple questions I shouted at my computer screen while trying to figure it out.

Eventually, I just gave up. I came to terms both with the fact that I wasn’t satisfied with what I was making, and with the fact that trying to use SFM’s graph editor to animate was making me want to julienne my keyboard. (I hadn’t figured out, or really even considered the motion editor at the time.) “Screw it,” I said to myself. “I’ll do in Gmod, like the last one.”

PART 3: OH RIGHT, GMOD SUCKS TOO

The first PWDO was relatively simple to make, at least compared to the second one. There were two main tools I used: Stop Motion Helper (a tool for animating stuff within Gmod itself without the need for actual stop motion or whatnot), and the classic technique of “throw stuff around in front of the camera”. I had little to no experience doing 3D animation when making it, but it worked out anyway. It let me practice some camera framing stuff, too. All I was really doing for most of it was animating the characters moving along with the camera. But for the second video, I desperately wanted to up the ante. I wanted it to be cooler. More edgy. More cinematic. Turns out, there’s one main reason that proved difficult for me. And that’s that Garry’s Mod kinda sucks for long-term animation.

Here’s the difference between animating in SFM and animating in GMod. SFM is made for animation. GMod isn’t. So, if you want animating in GMod to be anything less than horrendously tedious, you need some addons to help you. Stop Motion Helper is a neat little addon that lets you animate stuff in Garry’s Mod with the “tweening” type of animation. Simply put, you pose something in point A, make a keyframe, move it to point B, and then make another keyframe. Stop Motion Helper will then automatically animate it moving between the two points. Thus, instead of the stop motion method where you have to pose every individual frame, you technically only have to pose the beginning and end. Not that it looks very good if you only do that. Of course, like any kind of animation, it’s still something that requires a lot of effort if you don’t want it to look cheap and robotic. But it works. Sort of.

Doesn’t work too well with vehicles, though.

There were a multitude of small limitations and annoyances, however, that proved to be annoying to deal with in GMod nonetheless.

FIRST PROBLEM: Because GMod isn’t made specifically for animation, resuming a project within it is kind of a hellish endeavor at times. Unlike Source Filmmaker where you can just open a project file and everything remains the same, Garry’s Mod’s saving tool doesn’t save a lot of the addon-related data when you create a save file of whatever scenario you’ve made. That includes stop motion helper animation. While SMH does have its own support for saving animations, you have to save every single animation as its own separate file. Take the scene in PW2DO, for instance, where Phoenix shoots those cops to get the security footage.

https://streamable.com/2ikd1

There are seven moving parts in this scene - Phoenix, the picture frame, both cops, the gun, the shampoo bottle, and the camera. Note how many of these are moving in each camera shot along with how many shots there are (ignoring after the cop goes out the window, because that’s not done with SMH). That’s ten shots, if you didn’t want to count. If I wanted to save this whole scene for potential later tweaking, I’d have to make a save file for the session along with saving the animation data for all ten shots - that’s ten separate animation files for this one scene - and then I would have to manually reapply the animation to each individual moving element. 

On top of that, not everything can be saved at all just by sheer concept. The muzzle flash, for instance. While the flash graphic over the gun was added in post, the actual light emanating from it was something I had to do in-game, and it’s not something you can animate with SMH. Therefore, I had to play the animation in GMod, and then specifically time me hitting a button on my keyboard to make the flash happen at just the right point. That’s just one workaround in a program that, when animating in it, is like 80% workarounds.

But nothing about Garry’s Mod frustrated me quite as much as the final fight scene.

PART 4: THE BAR FIGHT

The final fight scene of PW2DO was the one thing that kept me from releasing the video sooner. Seriously, out of that year and a half or so, I’d say only a month or so was spent working on the GMod portions of the video. The rest was just that stupid, godforsaken fight scene. (And mostly procrastinating on making it.) Allow me to try and outline to you what I went through doing this.

Now, the fight scene went through three specific incarnations. They were all based around Maya and Athena tracking down Phoenix and beating the crap out of him, it just differed on two basic things: the location, and the fight music. The first idea I had was them fighting Phoenix in an alleyway while ABBA’s “Waterloo” played in the background. (i know that sounds silly but i swear i couldve made it work) That one didn’t get beyond planning stages - I’d kinda choreographed some of it in my head, I know Phoenix was supposed to get a crowbar at some point, but it didn’t get any farther than that.

The second incarnation was much more well-developed. The way I figured it was as such: Phoenix, after retrieving the security footage from his office, would go on the run and get on a bus. However, when he got on the bus, it’d be revealed that Athena was driving it, and Phoenix would fight Maya as they went down the road. (No comment on how Maya and Athena got a bus.) This was gonna be set to “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince, inspired by the opening car chase scene from Kingsman: The Golden Circle. (Meh movie, neat fight scenes.) Eventually they’d crash the bus, all go flying out the window, and then Phoenix would get arrested by the cops as he did in the final video. Sounds neat, right? So, what stopped me from doing this?

jesus christ so many things

Everything wrong with this concept centered around one particular problem. I absolutely could not, for the life of me, figure out how to animate a fight scene in a bus that was moving down the road. In SFM that might’ve been possible, but in Garry’s Mod? Good luck with that one. I practically tore my hair out trying to come up with a single working solution to this. Allow me to present to you the various ideas I had and why they all failed miserably.

IDEA 1: Animate the bus moving and the characters moving in it at the same time

This was the fastest-thrown-out idea because the complexity of something like this was just too much for Gmod and an animation addon. What’s that? You want to be able to stay with the scene as it animates? No, that’s basically impossible to do. It’s not like SFM where you could just attach yourself and a camera to the moving vehicle and animate from there. It just wasn’t feasible.

IDEA 2: Create moving textures and place them outside the windows to give the illusion of movement

This one went out the window too, unfortunately, as rotating the camera to any degree kinda just seriously killed the illusion. I could’ve done the scene without the cool cinematic fighting camera movements, but… is it really Phoenix Wright’s Day Off without those?

IDEA 3: Create a 3d video of going down the street in GMOD and paste it onto a greenscreen outside the bus, and animate it rotating properly in Premiere

I don’t blame you if you don’t understand what the hell I’m talking about. See, miraculously enough, there is actually an addon for GMod that allows you to record 360 degree videos within it - and after a decent amount of finicking around with it, I actually managed to make one that seemed to work fine. It was from this point I actually set out and started making the scene - I got about ten seconds in, mostly comprised of driving shots, a neat easter egg with Homestar Runner (not something i’d do nowadays tbh) and a single shot of Phoenix beating on Maya. I was all set to get going.

And then Premiere just refused to work with the 360 video. Don’t get me wrong, I was able to animate it rotating and stuff, but it wouldn’t let me do this at the same time as the normal 2D video that was meant to be pasted on top of it. It frankly just. Wouldn’t let me. And after a lot of struggling, I just. Gave up. That ten seconds of video, trashed.

https://streamable.com/4omnep

I did manage to re-piece it together from the old files on my drive, though. With mostly missing sound effects.

So, that was scrapped. I wasn’t doing the bus fight. What, then, would work out better than a fight scene based off the first fight scene of Golden Circle? Apparently, my mind decided that would be the last fight scene of Golden Circle. Cool.

Thankfully, things went a lot smoother there, but it wasn’t without hiccups. Now, if you’ve seen Phoenix Wright’s Second Day Off - I don’t know why you’re reading this if you haven’t - there’s a chance you might’ve found the music choice for the bar fight scene a bit odd. If you’re not aware, it’s a cover of the 1986 Cameo song “Word Up”, by a German country band called The Bosshoss. This is the song they used in the movie so you’re not allowed to question me on this.

Given how western-y the song sounds, though, I had to at least make the context fit. Despite that, I couldn’t really find any GMod maps that had a good enough bar interior for a while - and I really wanted it to be a bar fight. Bar fights are cool. Thankfully, I did eventually manage to find one. This one, in particular: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=806759276&searchtext=

Yes, that’s a My Little Pony based map. I worked with what I had, okay? That was the least of the issues, anyway. By this point I’d had enough of trying to animate with GMod, and as such I’d decided to move back to SFM, but that caused a whole new issue. This map wasn’t made for SFM. And opening it in SFM just. Crashed. I won’t go super into detail of how I fixed this, but essentially I had to download a program called BSPSource so I could decompile the map, re-open it in Hammer, and export it to properly work with SFM.

Still left me with some annoying issues though, as you can see. Not too difficult fixes, though - The first one I just covered up with another corkboard, and the second thing was fixed by typing mat_specular 0 in console. Was a bit annoying that I had to do that every time I reopened SFM, but whatever. It was working, at least. (that’s something you’ll think to yourself a lot if you ever get into using SFM.)

 Anyway, things went pretty okay from this point on. You know, aside from me proceeding to barely ever work on the thing for like a year and a half. I didn’t have many hardships during it other than my own procrastination, so instead take a look at some of the funny tricks I pulled to get this scene to go the way I wanted.

https://gfycat.com/OldfashionedForkedFlatcoatretriever

Engineer telekinetically swooces his shotgun back to himself.

https://gfycat.com/SleepyShadowyLadybird

I had to make Phoenix hover over Engie to let his arms reach him without his legs obscuring the camera.

https://gfycat.com/AptHomelyGoral

The rope was way too short to reach the soldier, so I had to have Phoenix basically throw the rope in order to reach his gun. I also forgot to detach the rope from his hand afterward, so it kinda gets flung around with it off-camera.

https://gfycat.com/AgonizingScrawnyAbalone

Phoenix apparently decided for himself he wanted to go out the window.

Aside from all that, though, things finally went okay. Eventually. I managed to finish up the animation, add some extra ending stuff in GMod, and do a neat credits sequence to David Bowie music. All in all, it went okay.

And that’s it. After all that waiting, I finally managed to put an 8 minute video out from one and a half years of it not being finished. It was quite a load off my mind, for sure, and to this day it stands as my proudest video. It’s silly, has its down moments, but I can at least confidently say it’s the best Ace Attorney gmod video. If only because there is basically no competition.

So, what’s in store next? Not much of anything as far as I feel right now. I could make a third one, one day - I did envision it as a trilogy - but although I do have some ideas for it, I still have zero motivation to actually make it. So who knows. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe Phoenix Wright will escape from prison one day.

So, this was the experience of making Phoenix Wright’s Second Day Off. I hope this gave you something of an idea on how agonizing this video was to make, and totally means you should go and share it everywhere to get me more views because I DESERVE it after the hell I went through.

Seriously, though, thanks for reading, and may this post serve as a warning if you ever decide to do Garry’s Mod or SFM videos. Not a warning against it, mind you, you can make some totally cool stuff. Just be prepared to suffer a bit in the process.