#they were in proximity u_u

[clonerightsagenda]

Kipps 🤝 Peris: innocent victims of love n-drangle creep

[shinygoku]

If you are taking non-train characters, what are your answers for The Other Gordon 👀

For simplicity, or maybe for complexity, I’ll refer to Both the TOS and the TAG versions, though I’m much more thoroughly acquainted with his TAG ver.

There wasn’t a Gordon Tracy in the movie, so I can skip that entirely lmao

To signify which Gord I’m talking about, TOS will have Orange and TAG will have Yellow heart emojis.

First impression

🧡 (Was very young at the time and not much good at reading quickly) “Gordon Tracy.... Astronaut.” I always liked TB4 herself, but I don’t think I got to see the TOS eps where Gordon really shines, which is a pity u_u;

💛 I was a little taken aback but the redesign, but also intrigued! This time I was already an adult and didn’t have issue reading Aquanaut lmao, but also got in on the ground floor of the show, getting to see the soon-to-be beloved shine in the very first episode.

Impression now

🧡 Holy cow is this dude ever underrated! In the episodes where he’s allowed to play a part, he actually shines so brightly! Several of the Best eps have him prominent, like Terror in New York and Operation Crash Dive, but even the ones where he is sidelined, the short moments we get can still do a lot, like his jokes and being The Most Fashionable of them Tracy Boys. They sneakily wrote in a potential reason why he ain’t used more with the notorious Hydrofoil Accident, but then maybe they coulda mentioned it in the show proper instead of in supplementary lore books? Oh well, the fans go very hard for this plot :P

💛 Holy cow, this time he’s not underrated so much as victim to Shoddy Writing!!! By both the show and the fans! [Mario from Super Mario Sunshine when he’s on low health voice] YAH-HOooorrrugughghh

Ok, seriously, this lad is again such a wonderful character, when he’s allowed to be written well. But they leaned very deliberately into his lighthearted, joking side and that fine character note became the unfortunate handlebars for people to grip into that being all there is to him, or to spin off into more annoying and out of character behaviours, like Season 2′s stupid underwater city episode that I hate so much, I hate it so fucking much that they wrote a whole episode to dunk on him by not only making him fill TB4 with food wrappers, but he doesn’t even pilot her for most of the episode >:V

Uhm yeah, when allowed to be written as more than Token Comic Relief, he’s fantastic. There’s such a wide range to his knowledge, his experience and his emotions. David Menkin defo brings his A Game to voicing Gordon and he has a beautifully nuanced performance [better than Virgil’s, who seems to be pretty much in one mode all the time lol... it can’t be easy being a VA where the characters are in high stress situations a lot]

I also think his feelings for Lady Penelope were actually handled really, really well. That he’s obviously got a Thing for her but doesn’t bring it up every time they’re in proximity, or that he doesn’t spend hours angsting over it. But s1 and s3′s advancement of this subplot feels sooo goooood and natural and is a lot of my good faith for s3 as a whole, to be honest! 💕

Favourite moment

🧡 Times like this make me wanna get the OG Series on DVD...! Hmm, gonna hafta go with the mad lad boarding a plane, getting in a firefight with the guy who’d been causing them all to crash, shooting him in the back, then holding the severed wires back together with his bare hands, all from Operation Crash Dive. That whole ep is a jewel and he did more earlier on too, but this short sequence is the ultimate Chaotic Good, the likes of which one rarely sees outside of Shounen Anime.

💛 I’m not gonna be so mean as to say SOS Part 1 lol, though that ep was Transcendent. It’s hard to pick one, he excels in the lovely new TB4, but I think it’s less his skills there and more his resourcefulness and emotional intelligence in eps like Extraction that have me the fondest. Also lmao, the contrast in my pick from this compared to TOS...!

Honourable mention to Heavy Metal for an action pick, we see 4′s Demo Missiles solve the problem by blowing stuff up, all while dangled in mid air! Niiiiice~

Idea for a story

🧡 It’s not so much of an idea, but whenever I do make myself watch Thunderbirds Are Go (The 1966 Film), I feel like there’s a potential plot thread of him feeling disappointed to be left out of the happenings that clearly the Andersons didn’t mean to pick up on. But he’s so clearly saddened when Jeff stupidly says Gordon won’t be needed [note that the previous failed Zero-X hand the crew land in the ocean....!] to help guard the 2nd Zero-X [in the end, only Scott is slightly relevant, Lady Penelope and Parker carry that mission!], and we also see him looking out of the balcony as the others launch, like he’s wistful.

Unfortunately the film turns into a weird ass Alan centric soap and barely skates over the main plot, too, before oh shit it’s time for the big climatic rescue. Gordon is overjoyed to be give a token role in that, which amounts to shooting a grapple line. Goes with the lore of him being the Best Shot, but oof! That’s it?! RUBBISH

So yeah idk, a rewrite of that shitshow that actually uses him? Could be an idea lol. Maybe it could even be combined with the strange narrative choice of an Alan pity party, the two could discuss the ups and downs of the gig and feeling over/under worked.

💛 Uhhh harder to say as I’m consumed many, many TAG fics since 2015 and still come and go and come back again for more at times, I don’t think I have any pitches that haven’t already been done, for better and for worse lmao

Honestly, I still ain’t let go entirely of the desire to cross over TAG with CSatM, but I don’t think I can make it work as a long form story which it deserves, plus I’d hafta focus on non-Gordon characters too, so uhh.... yeah, at the mo I got nothing ^^;

Unpopular opinion

🧡 Nooo babe, don’t smoke!! Also anyone who claims he isn’t the most handsome of the Tracy clan is lying.

💛 For years, the TAG fandom copypasted the TOS backstory in, which is understandable, but only a few works/authors could get the balance right. Look, the dude is clearly in his 20′s and it’s more than a little unrealistic for him to have done all 3 of the Served in WASP, Got Olympic Gold Medal, Hydrofoil Incident happenings. Like, the same applies to TOS but you could wave that away as being 60′s writing, where Military service as a young thing [eww] was common and Gordon looks older in that.

This got de-emphasised after SOS part 1, natch, as that seems pretty heavily implied to be This Universe’s answer to the Hydrofoil. The WASP and Gold Medal do continue to pop up, but at least 2 massive life achievements before being ....~23?? ish??? is a bit easier to grasp than 3 ¬w¬;

Favourite relationship

🧡 Did Gordon really get to interact with anyone other than his family and the other Tracy Island residents? I’ve read fic which gives him and Tin-Tin some fantastic platonic closeness, but I suspect the show itself wasn’t that generous...!

💛 All too easily, Pen & Ink! That is, Lady Penelope and he!

As I’ve said before, the romantic interest he has is played refreshingly well, and they get several great scenes together with the casual flirting and working well as a team. The Deep Water -> SOS 1 -> Upside Down triple punch really seals the deal, but it was hinted as early as Ep 1 and made obvious on his end in Tunnels of Time. All soooo good~ 💗

Favourite headcanon

🧡 Gordon rules at chess. We see chessboards in the episodes and occasionally the characters are seated by one, and I saw the notion that Gordon’s shockingly good at it in a fic and would like to embrace that~

💛 First, before the show made it be Virgil, I was introduced to the notion that Gordon was the most qualified First Aider type. I still prefer this lmao

Even though the series holds out on us, I firmly believe he has more Uniform variants than his wetsuit, and more causal clothes [though I am fond of his 1 Hawaiian Shirt n Jeans combo] and can make pretty much anything Work. Also his hair naturally has the same style as TOS when it’s not gelled upwards lol

[evanescent-epiphanies]

like a passage from goodnight moon

It has been a very long time since I wrote a fic, but doing some music recs yesterday reminded me of how much I wanted to write some kind of musicians AU for the song Goodnight Moon by Go Radio! So yeah, have 1.5K of musician!mika yuumikayuu that I cranked out in like five hours last night. I love the sweet smell of hurt/comfort in the dead of night u_u (there are mentions of mitsunoa in here too)

@kuruenairazz look I actually did it *finger guns*

And sing for me softly, love, your song for tomorrow

And tell me my name’s the one that’s hidden in there somewhere

Yuu is lulled back into consciousness by the soft brush of a melody against his cheek.

He rolls over in bed, kicking off the covers that he doesn’t remember dragging over himself. The walls light up with the splashes of headlights through the window. Yuu checks the time: four in the morning. He squints. His lover croons sweetly from elsewhere in their shared apartment, the same mellow ballad that Yuu drifted off to yesterday evening. Mika has always worked far too hard.

He cards a hand through his bedraggled hair and swings upright. By the time he reaches the door, fingers ghosting the knob, the song has faded; it’s replaced by the low rustle of paper and the drumming of fingertips against wood. Yuu stares at the warm lamplight bleeding in from under the door. He shuffles out to the living room.

Mika is right where Yuu left him, perched at the end of the couch and hunched over sheets upon sheets of half-scribbled music. He doesn’t look up from the crumpled score in his hand, even when Yuu slides in behind him and lazily snakes arms around his waist. His chin finds a home on Mika’s shoulder.

“It’s late, darling,” mutters Yuu, voice thick with sleep, as he nuzzles his love’s jawline. Mika hesitates; his grip slowly slackens, muscles uncoiling, and Yuu hums in wholehearted approval. “Come to bed.”

Yuu reaches for the lamp beside them, but Mika gently seizes his wrist. His blue eyes are red-rimmed with exhaustion, brows drawn thoughtfully, and Yuu wants nothing more than the smooth them out with kisses and honeyed words. He leans in to do so, but Mika suddenly goes boneless. He chuckles hoarsely and presses his back into Yuu’s chest like it grounds him, and--Yuu eyes the sea of balled-up paper scattered around them--maybe it does.

“Let’s just stay here for a while,” Mika whispers, quiet enough to get swallowed in the silence around them, and dodges Yuu’s quizzical stare. Yuu lowers his arm--takes Mika’s down with it--and twines their fingers together. They sit. Mika opens and closes his mouth a few times, as if mustering the courage to say something, so Yuu waits. He listens to the forced pattern of Mika’s breaths and counts the pockmarks on the ceiling.

“Do you--,” Mika starts, air catching in his throat, and Yuu squeezes, “do you ever think that…. This isn’t what I’m meant to be doing?”

Yuu hides his frown behind golden curls. “What do you mean, love?”

Mika makes a helpless little gesture at the reject ideas on the floor. “I don’t know. The music, the writing, the--.... I’ve had slumps before, but this is just….”

“That tune you were working on earlier was good,” Yuu says. He rubs soothing circles into Mika’s skin when his shoulders begin to hike, trying to ease away the frustration seeping back into his bones. “I liked it a lot. It was rich and soulful, kind of like the one you wrote for--”

--“Shinoa and Mitsuba’s wedding? Yeah.” His lips curl up at the corners, mirthless. “I was looking at it earlier. Thought visiting my old stuff would help, but nothing’s good enough.”

Mika lowers his gaze to the music sheet still caged in his grasp. He lets it go. Yuu watches it flutter to the ground. “I’ve been working on this song for weeks, but I can’t even come up with something that even resembles what I’m trying to do. Maybe I’m just,” his voice cracks, “.... not cut out for it.”

Something in his gut twists horribly in response, wrenching even harder when Mika untangles his fingers from Yuu’s and moves to get off of him. Cold air floods the empty space that he occupied. “I’m sorry, this is stupid. You’re right, I should just go to sleep--”

--that’s as far as Yuu lets him get before he yanks him back down. A surprised noise escapes Mika as Yuu clutches him to his body like a lifeline, burying his face in the crook of Mika’s neck and inhaling deeply. Mika trembles against him, hands fisting and unfisting themselves numbly at his sides like he doesn’t know what to do with them. And it hurts to witness, because Yuu has seen those hands in so many ways--curled around the neck of a violin, splayed over monochrome piano keys, dancing across the lengths of flutes and clarinets and all manner of instruments--and he can’t stand the thought of Mika giving up the very thing he lives and breathes.

Yuu is not a musician. Yuu is not a musician, but he knows Mika, and that will have to be enough.

“Baby,” he murmurs, threading their fingers together once more, “That’s complete bull. You’re dedicated, you’re a hard worker, and you’ve got more talent in your pinkie finger than I’ve probably got in my whole body. Don’t say you’re not cut out for the thing that makes you happy.”

Mika makes a distressed sound in the back of his throat. “Yuu-chan--”

--“no, you need to hear this. You need to hear about the way your eyes light up when you make music. About how your voice steals the air from everyone in the room. I remember when Shinoa and Mitsuba asked you to compose that song for their wedding, and the way you positively glowed with happiness; you threw yourself into it with everything you had and chattered my ear off every chance you got. You had everyone crying halfway through your performance the day of because it was just so beautiful. That… That’s why I can’t let you quit. Music makes you come alive, and…. I don’t know how I breathed without you by my side.”

“You don’t know how you--,” Mika laughs, fond and incredulous all at once. “God, Yuu-chan, that’s my line.”

Yuu blinks, genuinely baffled, when Mika manages to loosen the arms around him enough to bring Yuu’s hand up to his face. He’s still chuckling as he kisses each of Yuu’s knuckles reverently; Yuu’s cheeks redden.

“You’re all that I think about. All that I dream about,” Mika says, voice raw with devotion, into his lover’s skin. “I’d drop music in a heartbeat if it meant I could be with you. You’ve given me the whole world and expected nothing in return. A life with you…. That’s the kind of hope everyone talks about. The kind of feelings we sing about, and,” he lays Yuu’s hand on his cheek and covers it with his own, “if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have any music in me anyway.”

There is silence. Bewildered, Mika swivels around to the sight of a bright flush spiraling down the collar of Yuu’s t-shirt. He chortles, and Yuu scrambles to recollect his composure.

“Dammit, Mika,” he says weakly, “Give a guy a warning, will you?”

Mika’s laughter grows fainter as he readjusts himself, tips his forehead against Yuu’s, breathes in his space. His eyes are closed, so Yuu studies the sweep of his lashes and the way they glimmer in the artificial light. His vision blurs from the proximity.

“I want to write the perfect song.” Mika looks at him dead on, eyes intent and so very blue. They snatch the oxygen right out of Yuu’s lungs. “I want to write the perfect song, and I want it to be about you.”

“Then do it,” replies Yuu quietly, cupping his other cheek. Mika leans into the contact with a warm exhale. “You can. I believe in you.”

Mika breathes out and Yuu breathes in, and god, he loves this feeling. “You make me feel like I’m actually living. There’s just a jumble of emotions inside me that are all associated with you. I can’t do it justice.”

And it’s Yuu’s turn to grin and giggle now, because his lover is so silly, sometimes. “This is what you’ve been stressing about for all these weeks? Darling, I’ll love the hell out of anything you write for me. I’ll make you play it for me all the time, blast it on the speakers while I’m driving, and make you cringe by singing it in the shower. You can do it. Take your time.”

Mika nods, and a beautiful smile blooms on his face as his head slides down to Yuu’s shoulder. “Okay…. Thanks, Yuu-chan.”

Yuu hums in lieu of a response, gripping Mika tighter when it becomes apparent that he’s falling asleep, warm and solid in his arms. He huffs a little in mock exasperation, but gathers his snoozing blond up anyway, heaving them off the couch, down the hall, and to the bedroom. He manages to situate them both under the covers--despite Mika’s incessant clinging and gangly limbs everywhere--and checks the time again: five in the morning.

“Good night, Mika,” Yuu whispers. Mika doesn’t speak, but the curl of a pinkie finger around his says enough.

Good night, Yuu-chan.

[zenosanalytic]

Discworld: Men at Arms

Pratchett’s titles tend to be puns in one way or another but I really Dig the multiple layers in this one :>

Ok so, Men at Arms:

is a story about how guns affect and reveal people.

About how The Watch(which is to say, being a “Man-at-Arms”) and its rise affects people, Ankh-Morpork as a society, Ankh-Morpork as a political structure, and Ankh-Morpork as an institution.

about brewing inter-communal strife(Dwarves v Trolls) which is necessarily, as they are all citizens of Ankh-Morpork, intra-communal strife too(so a story about “Men”[people] “at arms”[come to armed conflict with each other])

in which the Assassins’ Guild(which is notably bad at unarmed combat and experts at armed combat) and the City Watch(who are defined by their right to carry weapons openly) play major roles.

in which the symbolic and definitional significance of weapons(the Dwarven cultural attachment to axes and trollish attachment to clubs. Carrot and his sword. The Watch and its standard equipment. Angua and her lycanthropy. Detritus and the siege bow he picks up near the end, proximate to his coolant-helm, probably others I’m forgetting) is explored.

Is directly about a series of Men “at” a magical gun’s command.

where a major theme is how the taking of arms by Guard recruits, regardless of their species or sex, makes them “Men”; about both the transcendent power of tribalism to unite people, suppress prejudices, and encourage tolerance, and its more pernicious tendency to erase and subsume individuality and difference within majoritarian norms to accomplish this.

...the above ALSO being a metaphor for Ankh-Morpork itself, which accepts all comers as citizens provided they assimilate to a particular degree, and which primarily deals with its enemies by buying them off, selling them the weapons they have and thereby getting them in hock, buying their weapons out from under them, and aggressively financing their neighbors so they’d never bother attacking in the first place.

where the dissatisfaction of the old, displaced, Ankh-Morpork nobility(literally, people defined by their Coat-of-Arms) is the original source of action.

About how different kinds of people (Pratchett’s, “Good Man” and “Evil Man”) use weapons and the power they grant.

Probably some other stuff I’m forgetting atm.

There are just so many different facets to this pun and I enjoyed all of them u_u

And beside all that, obvsl, is the constant wordplay between(and problemization/deconstruction thereof) the general “men” as humanity or the populous/people, and the specific “men” as human males/maleness. And under it the subtle theme of denied personhood, via the treatment and conception of “the undead”. And how all of these issues particularize in the person of Angua -who is human, wolf, and undead- and her relationship with Carrot who, we learn, hates and harbors prejudices against the undead. And I love the subtle way Pratchett justifies this common, but often elided in the fantasy canon, inclusion of weres as undead through Angua’s resurrection from non-silver-bullet fatal bullet wounds :> :>

I want to backtrack to Carrot for a bit now. In the first book, Carrot was pretty much a Paragon and he still is in this one but we get to see the first evidence that being a Paragon isn’t necessarily the same as being perfect and that what a character is the Paragon of is important keep in mind. His reflexive, instinctive hatred of the undead is the most obvious part of this; Carrot is a Paragon of Heroism and Fantasy Kingship, the undead are traditions enemies of this, Particularly in regard to his Kingship Paragon status. The Undead are symbolic embodiments of corruption and wrongness, while Kings are the embodied symbols of purity and rightness. Kings Cleanse the Land through their Righteousness, Do Justice, Heal, Set Things Right, Inspire the Best in others, and Uphold morality; the Undead Defile the land, spread Corruption, Sicken, Inspire the Worst in others, and Pervert morality. As Kings are the symbolic Cure, Undead are the symbolic Illness, in Fantasy. So, through his Heroic and Kingly prejudice, we see the flaws in Paragonhood, just as we see the first flaws in a character we’d, until then, seen only as flawless. And we get to see some of his other flaws too. Carrot truly believes in Vimes’ ideals, and through his creation of The Watch and the unintentional fait accompli he presents to Vetinari at the end of the book, we see how that very True Belief actively undermines and threatens Vimes’ “live and let live” ideals moderated by a vague and vaguely-considered sense of The Rules. We also see, for the first time, the alienating quality of his selflessness in his statement “personal is not the same as important” and Vimes’ horrified reaction to it. Brought “to Arms” by the conflict of the story and the threat it puts the people and ideals he cares about to, Carrot reveals certain things about his character which threaten his relationships and change the way the audience sees him.

Ok, so maybe that last little bit there is a tad pretentious, but I feel I am Allowed :p Let’s see...... I really enjoyed the worldbuidling re: Trolls as silicon-based beings who eat minerals and need heat-sinks to reach max-processing. The bit about Dwarves and tools, and its repetition across the social classes of Ankh-Morpork as the way culture limits thinking, was both Neat and very elegantly done. I was sorry to see Cuddy go out like that (:T The addition of weapon-nut to Nobby’s ever-growing list of hobbies was handled with appropriate ominous humor :p :p

Ok so the central thing: the Gonne. There’s the obvious punning via archaic-seeming spelling(was gun ever spelt this way? I forget and am Too Lazy to check, currently u_u u_u) to Gone and the finality of guns; how they very much make people Gone, or make Gone capacities even when they don’t kill. The central action of the book also very cleverly flips and deconstructs a common anti-gun control argument of gun-hobbyists against them, as well as the central myth of gun-hobbyist culture.

So the Argument: gun-hobbyists often argue that “guns don’t kill people, people do”, and often don’t bother to leave its inverse implied; arguing that gun-control activists genuinely think guns provide the moral and intellectual choice behind gun violence. Pratchett, rather than denying this disdainful insult, makes it real: he creates a gun that wants nothing more than to kill, and in the ways most likely to sow chaos and its fame to boot, and which uses those who touch it to carry this out. Then he uses that insult, the character of the Gonne, to explode the argument; the Gonne offers easy, final expressions to one’s anger and cruelty, no matter how ill-advised or short-sighted. The character of the wielder still influences its danger(the assassins kill without even meaning to and against their own will under its influence while Vimes can redirect it away from harm and Carrot, a literally supernatural Dwarfish Paragon, Pure of Heart, is unaffected), but the ease it grants to killing makes it a horrible danger inspite of the Will of the Wielder. It is still an evil in-itself, because of how easy it makes it to kill and the erosion of self-control that it, in-itself, creates, almost regardless of the character of the wielder. It’s a really effective and well done satire of one of the gun-hobbyists’ oldest and most asinine arguments, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

EDIT 1: GAH! I forgot to talk about the myth! Ok this should go quickly, though I don’t know how many folks will actually see this correction X| The central myth of gun-hobbyists is of course the Myth of Power. Dirty Harry. John Matrix. Ethan Edwards. Practically every character Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, and John Wayne ever played, really. The myth that, with a gun, one Man(and its a very male myth) can beat an army, destroy all his problems, get everything he wants, and remake the world in his own image. The myth that guns, tools made for killing, create safety not destruction, peace not violence, courage not fear, righteousness not shameful behavior. The myth that they and the violence they allow can redeem failure and win fame; that they can not only save you but make you important. Tackling this myth through the way the Gonne operates and influences the thinking of those who touch it -to a man with a gun, every problem is a target- Pratchett also ties it back to that theme of how culture, in this case gun culture, can influence and limit thinking, though he also turns it around a bit to show how tools/technology can influence thinking and culture, too. And the way he deconstructs it, obvsl, is by having the Gonne compel those who use it, and having the Gonne, itself, crave fame and the expression of its own power, to the point that it murders to ensure that it remains the only firearm on the Disc. Rather than making those who use and touch it Heroes and bringing about the world of their dreams, the Gonne devours them completely, not just the memory of them but even their personality and Will, and leaves them ignominiously dead, rotting in forgotten sewers or killed in the very places(their office, their workshop) where they should be most safe. Rather than protecting and uplifting them, its violence makes them vulnerable and draws violence to them, while reducing them to contemptible, frightened junkies.

Ok, I think that’s it. There’s probably some other stuff I meant to write at one point, possibly about story-structure(the cop retiring via marriage is an old action movie chestnut afterall), but I can’t remember it now so I’ll just end here :p :p :p

G’Night!

[jassi-and-kitka]

Trip to Bath!

Bath, United Kingdom. 2014

I understand why everyone would love to live in Bath. It´s a small city where you can get around by foot and everything is in close proximity. The Georgian architecture, the small streets and The Roman Baths (although you can’t use them but its still worth visiting). Kitka and I enjoyed walking around the cobbled streets a lot.   We never felt in danger or threatened even when people out getting drunk on Friday and unlike other cities in the U.K. there doesn't seem to be a drug problem. We enjoyed the scenes around the Royal Crescent & the Circus. The Roman Baths were interesting even if you couldn’t use them u_u (the cold weather and the warm springs would have been the perfect match) but there is another outdoor spa you can use in the city. It was interesting to learn about its past even though the museum looked small from the outside, it was still very huge on in the inside. Bath is very scenic no matter what street you’re on, like a the stereotypical view of what little England is like from the outside XD. 

Jassi

[taus-inc]

op your tags are insane and i love you for it

Kipps 🤝 Peris: innocent victims of love n-drangle creep