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fisheadz · 26 days ago

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A bit of a rundown for the Still Wakes The Cordyceps AU plot line. Ain’t no way I’m making any multi-chapter fic out of this one, and if I do then people are legally obliged to yell at me. Spoilers for both games/show, and @milestonekestrel inspired the AU. Plus, this has Caz Survives elements, sooooo. :P.

• outbreak day happens, and the McLeary family, along with family friends Roy and Billy try to escape their town, which is falling into chaos.

• they get stopped by a soldier in the outskirts, and are almost all killed by him. He’s killed, but not before he manages to kill Cait and Maidie.

• Billy is blamed, due to either getting the guard’s attention in the first place, or failing to save the girls some way or another. He and them go their separate ways. (After getting his shit clobbered by Guess Who).

• many years later, Caz and Suze have separated. He goes to stay in Beira D, one of the QZs, and she runs off to join the Fireflies, eventually settling down in a little survivor settlement (either Jackson, or something else SWTD related).

• Roy and Caz go to "have a chat" with a supplier that screwed them over. Afterwards, they come across Rennick, a Firefly leader. He’s injured, and has a "product" that needs to be smuggled to a group outside of the QZ. Roy and Caz agree on the condition that Rennick gets them back the stuff the supplier sold.

• only, said "product" is actually a man. A very, suspiciously familiar man. Yup. It’s Billy Fuckoff Chamberlain. He’s chained to a wall heater, his arm in a sling and he’s also giving off some very Not Doing So Good vibes.

• Caz is not amused and wants to call it off, but Roy has infinitely more sympathy, and convinces Caz to go through with it. They need their stuff to make it to Suze, after all.

• and so, they start their journey to get out of Beira D and into the open, fucked world. There’s some hiccups along the way, including Caz beating a guy to death and almost getting shot by patrolling Cadal soldiers, but other than all of… that, things go smooth enough.

• then, they find out why exactly Billy is being smuggled by the Fireflies. He’s infected… but immune. A while ago, his arm was torn up by an Infected, and while his friend and totes not crush Kieran turned, he didn’t. He was found by Rennick’s group, and now he’s being sent off to a lab to try and make a cure.

• of course, this sets Caz off again, and he’s SO ready to just fuck right back off to Beira D, but he did already kill a bunch of people getting out of it, and they’ve gotten this far, so why turn back now when they’re so close? Roy tells him as much, and they continue on, a bit more weary of their old "friend".

• they reach an Infected-infested museum, and while they’re sneaking through it, there’s a fight. Roy gets bit, but he doesn’t tell anyone. They’re almost there, and, well, he wasn’t going to last much longer in the End Of The World, either way. They could only give away so much for his insulin.

• they reach the meeting spot… only to find that all of the Fireflies have died, via infection and infighting due to the paranoia.

• Roy is devastated. Getting Billy to the Fireflies was supposed to save everybody, and now the group that was supposed to take him were all dead. During his subsequent breakdown, Caz discovers that he’s bit.

• Roy makes Caz promise to get Billy to the Firefly lab, and evek though Caz doesn’t believe in the so called "cure", he agrees. Roy stays behind to give them time to escape the Cadal soldiers that had followed them there, and Caz and Billy officially set off on their cross-country journey. What could go wrong?

• Caz takes them to a small town a couple miles away from the QZ, where an old smuggler friend of his and Roy’s lived. Well, "lived" is a strong word. More like "holed-up".

• after they dodged all of his traps and the Infected lurking around the outskirts of his base, Innes finds them, and agrees to help them fix up his truck, and take some of his supplies to last them the trip.

• it’s not that easy, though. There’s a lot of setbacks and a lot more sneaking, running, and killing, but they eventually find a truck that’s actually salvageable. They also find Innes’ old partner, Muir. He had been infected, and took the easy way out.

• it’s clear that the sight hurt him, but Innes wasn’t about to stop now. They get the vehicle running, and manage to escape the hoard. Outside of the town, Innes gives them his half-hearted well-wishes, and then Caz and Billy are off.

• they take the truck as far as they can, and make good distance. Until they drive into a bigger city, and encounter a group of scavengers.

• the truck is fucked. They’re stuck sneaking through the city on foot, trying to avoid the scavengers that had overthrown the Cadal base there. The scavengers are relentless, though.

• thankfully, they’re saved by two men, Brodie and Raffs. The two are like father and son, separated from their own group and also trying to get out of the city. So, they all agree to work together, and figure out the next step once they’re in relative safety. (It’s the apocalypse. There is no safety.)

• escaping the scavengers is taxing, and scary, and very annoying, but they make it out. There’s one scare, where Caz nearly drowns in the river, but Brodie is able to get him out and keep him alive. Typical Brodie activities.

• they find a secret little community, that had lived in the sewers outside of the city. Unfortunately, though, it’s clear that no one has been there in a long, long time. Instead, the underground settlement is infested with Infected. Unable to go back, the only way for Caz, Billy, Brodie and Raffs to leave, is to go through.

• they find children, or at least the ones that got the easy way out. They’re stalked by Infected, and eventually, they make it out, and into the suburbs. There, they find more notes from the person who started the community, a woman named Finlay. She and a few others had escaped the sewers, and were out there somewhere.

• when they were almost home free, the scavengers find them yet again, as well as a hoard. They fight them off, with Caz providing backup from afar, and they get away!

• not before Raffs is bit, though. Billy finds out, and tries to use his blood to cure him. The next morning, however, he turns, and Brodie is forced to kill him to save Billy. Distraught, he follows his son a moment later.

• it’s a horrible experience, but Caz and Billy move on. Finally, they make it to the forest surrounding the settlement Suze is at.

• She is surprised, but overall happy to see that Caz is safe. Despite the bad note they left on, it’s clear that they still loved each other, no matter what. Billy, on the other hand, is not as welcome. Caz’s plan was to have Suze send Billy off with some former Fireflies, since she was one herself, and knew where the lab was. She refuses, not wanting to risk lives for Billy. Especially after losing some of her friends to a raid.

• Billy overhears this, and runs off. Suze and Caz go to find him, but first find a bunch of raiders. After they’re dealt with, they find Billy in an old farmhouse. They have a talk, him and Caz, that ends with Billy telling him that he loves him and Suze, Caz telling him that he would never love him back. This… does not go over well for any of them, but they have the raiders to worry about, at the moment.

• in the end, Caz and Billy leave to find the lab, Caz having decided that maybe he went a bit too far, and should make up for it by being nice to his old friend and taking him the rest of the way. Suze stays because she’s an important member of the settlement, but not before she tells them both to get their asses back afterwards.

• on horseback, they reach the college where the lab is, and also find more Infected. The worst thing, however, is that the lab is abandoned. They moved shop to a hospital miles away, after some escaped experiments left the place too dangerous to hang around. To make things even worse, the fucking scavs are back.

• Caz is injured. Bad. Like, high chance he won’t recover or walk ever again, bad. Capital B Bad. It’s winter by now, and with no sign of Caz getting better, Billy is getting desperate.

• so, when a man named Bernard and his goonie friend take the deer that HE took down, and offer anything in exchange for it, he jumps on the opportunity to get Caz the much needed medicine for his - more human - infection.

• as soon as they’re alone, Bernard drops a bomb on Billy: the scavs at the college, weren’t scavs. They were part of Bernard’s community (even Billy can tell that it’s actually a cult, from context clues alone), and the survivors had reported that they were all killed by a man matching Billy’s description, and a short, cunty bastard with a beanie.

• Bernard says he isn’t mad, even stops his goonie friend from shooting him. All he wants, is for Billy to tell them where Caz is. See, Bernard believes that Caz made Billy do those things, due to his bum arm and Caz’s general bossiness. He even wants Billy to join his cult, because he likes his vibe. Billy properly tells him to go get fucked, and his mother as well, before taking off with the medicine. Caz may be an asshole, but he’s Billy’s asshole friend.

• after giving Caz the medicine, he finds out that he was followed, and goes to lure them away from the basement where they were holed up. That’s doesn’t really go very well.

• Billy wakes up to a cannibal live presentation, and after breaking Bernard’s finger while the bastard is trying to butter him up with "community" and "love" and "safety", is almost chopped up to be tonight’s venison stew. He’s saved by the bite marks on his arm. He bites Bernard, making the man believe he’s infected… not for long, but long enough for Billy to escape into the town, and the snowstorm.

• meanwhile, Caz is busy a mile away with torturing and killing some of Bernard’s cultists. He gets a location and books it, killing every fucker that doesn’t have Billy’s stupid face along the way.

• Billy kills a few guys, more out of a craving for vengeance than anything else (Caz’s winning personality is totally rubbing off on him) and, inevitably, gets trapped in the burning diner with Bernard.

• Bernard tries to kill him, hurting his arm even more and is thankfully not as much of a fucking freak as some of his alternate universe counterparts, but he’s still awful and able to get under Billy’s skin with horrible words and accusations.

• by the time Caz finds the burning building, Bernard no longer has any semblance of a face. He catches Billy stumbling out, and there’s a whole reunion, with Billy an absolute mess of blood and gore and tears, and Caz is no better. Through the storm, you can just faintly hear a cartoony "mwah <3". Heart included.

• fast forward many, many days, and they reach the hospital. And are immediately knocked the fuck out by patrolling Fireflies. Caz just cannot stop adding to his concussion collection.

• he wakes up, and Rennick is there, healed and well. And then he says some shit like “you don’t have to worry about him anymore” and “your stuff that we promised you is in your brand new Chevy Tahoe”.

• so, Caz kills a bunch more people, and finds Billy on the operating table, about to have his brain cut out to have a 3% chance of finding some sort of miracle cure. He kills the shit out of the lead surgeon, traumatizes all the nurses, and runs out with Billy.

• before leaving, Rennick tries to stop him. He says they can still fix this, as long as he leaves Billy, and just drives away. Then, when Caz shoots him, he says it’ll all be okay as long as Caz lets him live. Then, when Caz shoots him again, he says… nothing, because he’s dead.

• when Billy wakes up, Caz lies. He tells him that, there was no cure. The Fireflies all died in a hoard attack, and they just barely made it out alive. No, Rennick did not survive. Yes, there was absolutely no way anyone could’ve been saved. No, he’s not lying, what kinda asshole do you take me for?

• they make it back to the settlement with Caz sporting a brand new Shit Leg and Billy’s arm and mental health about 50% worse than it was at the beginning, and meet the leaders Trots and Simon, who welcome them with open arms. Suze is ecstatic, and Caz admits that he and Billy are in love, and she decides "huh. That sounds nice, scoot over I want a spot in this not-quite-situationship" and they live happily ever after.

• for now :>. Until I play the TLOU pt2. Maybe I won’t, all I hear is that it sucks ass and that you’re better off with just your imagination. But I will. Someday. Cos I wanna.

• …I’m gonna regret, aren’t I?

#I didn’t know if o should make Addair the first soldier or the goonie friend or WHAT so he’s not here yet #I am not going back and reading through all of this to fix grammar n stuff so. oof #I feel like o should put a warning for all of the mentioned Bad Stuff but if you play SWTD or TLOU then you probs know what’s up #I gotta play SWTD for something but I can’t rn so instead I wrote this #blep #still wakes the deep #the last of us #still wakes the cordyceps au #rip Roy #and muir #and Brodie and Raffs and… no not Finlay she’s good probably #rip all of those nameless people Caz just absolutely slaughtered #rip Billy’s arm and sanity :P #rip Bernard. limb from limb. on a rack. I just rly hate him for literally no discernible reason idk it’s weird man

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j-esbian · 2 months ago

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ok here is my hot voltron take in 2024*

it’s all right. it’s not a masterpiece but that’s ok. it holds up and i still think it’s fun

i feel like it suffered from a lot of factors while it was coming out. the rushed production (76 episodes in just 2 years), fandom expectations exploding and exceeding what the show had ever planned to do, the creators running their mouths and people putting more faith in word of god than what made it into the actual show, etc.

it’s not the pinnacle of television. i think a lot of people had high hopes when it came out; i remember a lot of folks talking about how the people who made it had worked on the last airbender, so they were expecting a similar caliber. i think a better analogy would be that this is a mech anime for western audiences where mech animes aren’t really a thing. but it struggled to deliver on that

i do think the biggest thing it suffered from was the production schedule. i still don’t understand why it was divided up the way it was, into a bunch of small, unevenly distributed seasons. there’s a lot of things that could have been executed better, but didn’t get developed in the way they should have. and the final product (for a lot of the character stuff specifically) feels like a line of tropes strung together rather than a coherent narrative, and the plot had very little thought put into it long-term (there’s almost entire seasons that give no screen time to haggar/honerva and like. maybe we could have spent a bit more time showing her pulling the strings and manipulating zarkon/sendak/etc. rather than Only focusing on them, in the seasons where they’re the villains). this is generally something i associate with things that lasted past their expiration date (like supernatural lol). i would have to look more closely into the development of the later seasons, because it really gives the impression they just had to run with their first thoughts and didn’t have time to flesh things out properly, especially in contrast to the seasons with lotor because they were almost cooking with that

for example, they almost sold me that allura had developed feelings for lance, but then in order to make it clear, they started making her all blushy and awkward around him because That’s A Trope People Understand That Means A Girl Likes A Boy, when that was really never who she was. they reached for it as shorthand to signal to the audience but didn’t really think too deeply about Who they were applying it to. the whole thing with shiro’s partner (and ambiguous autoimmune disease that exists only for one scene) would have been nothing if the creators hadn’t hyped it up so much beforehand, and if a little more time had been given and a little more care had gone into the scenes where that mattered, and if there had been literally any indication of it in the previous 6 seasons. they could have thought about how audiences would interpret pidge’s gender fuckery and done something to address that to avoid accusations of queerbaiting. it just added drama to season 1, they made a bathroom joke in season 2, and then forgot it was ever a plot point. whenever keith is on screen he’s the main character. he has the most developed arc out of any of the paladins (finding his family, becoming a leader, learning to not be such a loner) but again, whole swathes of episodes go by without him. and in his absence no one else really takes the spotlight. it just focuses on plot. hunk doesn’t really get anything to do until season 7, and it’s a very good scene where he’s jealous of lance and pidge for having their families back but it also feels like the first time he’s taken seriously in 60+ episodes. et cetera.

*big caveat that i just finished season 7, and season 8 was where i lost interest and never finished. i know The Big Thing that happened in season 8 and i can see where they were coming from. i’m sure they were thinking about doing a Big Damn Sacrifice and making some statement about the loss of the Old World to give birth to the New. i just don’t think they were mindful of 1) who they were sacrificing or 2) the fact that they were telling this story in the real world, where there’s countless other stories about black women being denied happiness in order to further someone else’s story. i don’t think this show Uniquely Hates Women because it has the same level of sexism that’s present pretty much across the board in modern sci-fi. they didn’t need to shoehorn in the romance but they clearly tried to be more mindful than the original (instead of Zero female paladins, there were two for most of the show.) they definitely had huge blind spots and i’m not excusing that but i do think that doesn’t cancel out everything else. it seems to be due to obliviousness rather than active malice. but again, i have yet to watch the final episodes

#starting season 8 tonight so we’ll see how that goes #please no one @ me i’m not trying to bring up old discourse im just getting my thoughts out #mine #voltron #still one of my most popular tags despite not posting Content for several years. damn #i’m gonna miss it. i feel like i should have given it a second shot earlier #rly just got swept up in and then repelled by fandom culture #but it is fun and it has potential. i can fix her #not me rewriting voltron legendary defender in the year 2024. four days before it disappears forever #i am less annoyed with the treatment of pidge because i hc her as a trans girl and it’s like. all right to not be a big deal #once she’s said her piece. there is a weird moment in season like 4-5 where a stranger misgenders her. and that never comes up again #also still not a huge keith head but i’m chewing on heith a little more. used to just kinda be a crack ship for me #man i’m kinda wishing i’d dug out the rover i made when i was at my parents’ house last week #but again. this is almost where they lost me last time so i’m reserving judgement #just realizing a bad final season shouldn’t have made me feel like i couldn’t enjoy Any of it yknow

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