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thewadapan · 2 months ago

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So why did Transformers One bomb?

Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.

It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.

Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.

Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.

If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.

(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)

We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.

By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?

Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:

they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.

See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)

The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.

So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:

I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."

When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."

I. The One True Origin of the Transformers

Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.

Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.

Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.

Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?

Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.

Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.

All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.

But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.

Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.

Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.

So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.

And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.

By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.

And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.

Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.

For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.

The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.

But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.

The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".

Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.

Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.

II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers

Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.

Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.

Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.

Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.

Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.

And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."

So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.

Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.

That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’

Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.

I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.

My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.

I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.

If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.

Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.

What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.

In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:

I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on — sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.

According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?

III. I did not care for The Godfather

At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:

Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".

(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)

Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.

Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".

Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.

It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.

In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?

Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.

(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)

Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.

As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.

There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.

There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.

As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.

The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!

In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.

The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.

Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.

(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)

There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.

Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.

In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:

As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.

To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.

And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.

IV. No politics means no politics

In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.

Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?

I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.

Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:

One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.

(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)

Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":

He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.

The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"

In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.

Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.

Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.

V. Place / Place, Cybertron

I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.

So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.

It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"

For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.

Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".

Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.

The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.

What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.

The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.

Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.

Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in my to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:

I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."

(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)

This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.

The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.

But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.

"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"

Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.

I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!

At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!

The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.

What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.

I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?

For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.

We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!

It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.

For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.

Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.

(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)

In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"

In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.

Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.

I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?

VI. Into nothing

Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.

I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?

Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.

In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskian, or Furmanist.

Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.

It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.

There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.

In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.

What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.

If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.

The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?

Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.

I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.

With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.

Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.

That's all any of this stuff is.

All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.

Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.

To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.

I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.

...

Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.

What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.

Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.

VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit

When Eric Pearson came onto the project,

It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.

And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.

Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.

Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.

I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.

Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.

If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!

Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.

The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.

Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!

I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.

#transformers #transformers one #movie review #essay

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grapebritain · 9 months ago

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Jax is not an npc

I've seen the idea of Jax being an npc being floated around after ep2's release, which while i ADORE this idea in concept (as some parts of it explain certain parts of his character )that doesn't mean that this is the answer as to why Jax is the way he is.

Jax is a self absorbed, sarcastic, and non-serious character who seems to know far more than he actually should so far with what we've seen. He is the only human who has broke the forth wall , not just once, but twice, and has a very performative 'vibe' to him. Like he's on some sort of stage a bit like Cain does. Due to this, and with the plot of episode 2, people have drew the conclusion that this MUST mean Jax is an npc which, eventho it is deffo plausible , there are several reasons why i do not think this is the case, and people are trying to jump to conclusion too quickly to find an explanation to these questions.

1.Pop culture reference

Jax in episode 2 makes an offhaded joke about Charlie and the chocolate factory, a popular piece of media that most people do know about. It seems pretty insignificant but boy is this a really important detail.

With the recent release of other teasers of the next episodes that are yet to come, in terms of copyrighted media showing up in the game, we can see that Cain INTENTIONALLY makes off branded versions of popular parts of our world such as McDonalds and other fast food brands

So for Jax to make a pop culture references, the names would likely have to be inaccurate from the actual piece of media, being...well...off branded versions of them. The fact he literally uses the accurate name "Augustus Gloop" adding an "ed" on the end for comedic effect shows that he HAS seen or heard of the actual piece of media, which would be impossible if he was an npc.

furthermore, say even the offbranded version was due to glitch themselves not being able to use actual brands in the show visually (which is also highly likely), the implication that Cain made an ai that was aware of these sorts of things is almost nonsensical considering that gummigoo didn't know anything outside of the established plot he needed to serve his in game purpose. When another npc doesn't even have a visual memory of his own mother, something closely linked to the established motive of an npc, why would Cain give an ncp knowledge of random pop culture reference for no reason ?

i would say this is a pretty strong point to put the argument forward Jax is not an npc.

2.NPC's immersive feature

this point is a little less strong, but is still a very important one to make.

I think people are forgetting that Gummigoo is intentionally meant to be far more immersive compared to pervious ai. We are going on the basis of Jax being an ncp , based on how intelligent Gummigoo is, which with the timeline we have, would not exactly work out that way.

Obviously, Cain establishing that the ai SHOULD be more immersive, doesn't mean it will be, but if we take into context the episode prior, it does actually seem to be somewhat more advanced in a way than it wasn't before, dialogue being a bit less generic and more fluid . With the consideration this is only Pomni's second adventure, and the ai already seemingly at least, being far better than the last, that could imply that going back a couple of adventures before Pomnis arrival , this ai was much more primitive.

Looking at when Jax arrived could give us some idea of how good the ai was at the time, and with gooseworx establishing jax arriving before zooble (who already seems to have grumpily adjusted to the world) , i would imagine that Jax, if he was an npc, would be far less advanced then he currently is and much more one dimensional as a character to hint at him being an npc....which brings me onto my next point.

3."Jax is violent and impulsive " argument

I've seen the occasional argument that Jax being violent and impulsive could be an argument for him being an npc. He realized he has no purpose, so started being violent and uncaring of the world around him, but this argument completely disregards the fact that...the human characters kind of have that 'reality shattering' moment too. Pomni does, which is why she can relate in the first place to Gummigoo.

All of the human characters have to come to the scary realization that, they are stuck here. Stuck in a fake world. Most of the characters draw closer to each other people that are real because of this as some form of comfort such as Pomni and Ragatha, but Jax is own person, and different people react differently to different situations. Jax just happens to react in a rather emotionally distanced way to the seriousness of the situation.

He seems to be the most emotionally immature character, so it makes complete sense as to why he would react in an immature manner. Not to mention he is the youngest out of all the cast, and may have been even younger when entering the digital circus.

When an emotionally immature, impulsive , frankly not very morally amazing person is told they can basically do whatever they like with little to no repercussions to their actions, what are they going to do? Cause chaos of course, which is exactly what Jax does.

he even more so causes chaos by breaking one of the only rules he's can't break, the whole keeping everything family friendly.

This seems to be his way of coping with the situation and seriousness at hand, brushing it aside and acting impulsively instead because he knows full well he couldn't do this in the real world, it also keep him emotionally distant from everyone else, which seems to be an intentional move by him as he doesn't go to Kaufmo's funeral despite briefly seeming upset about the matter.

He cares in his own weird way, but he refuses to show that to the rest of the cast (unimportant but i wanna add as well, it is common for men to be emotionally closed off due to the idea vulnerability for men esp is a bad thing, which ofc it is not ).

Which also builds up off my pervious point that despite his exterior, Jax isn't one dimensional or flat as a character, which if he was an old ai npc he probably would be 1d, and we wouldn't have this small moment of slight care from him, despite still trying to stay distant.

Final thoughts

So what about the forth wall breaking? him owning keys to all the rooms? Well quite honestly, i don't think we know enough about him or anyone to fully know why Jax is the only one to do this. It could be for some deep lore meaning, or it could be simply he is the comic relief character so is the one to do this more consistently than the rest.

Personally, i DO think it's something deeper, what that deeper thing is yet is something i'm sure will be explored in future episodes, but rn, i think jumping at the first thing is not an amazing idea (eventho it is a super interesting and exciting one).

Just thought i'd share my feelings as this is the only theory i've seen around rn abt my fav stupid purple bunny.

#the amazing digital circus #tadc theory #jax theory #tadc jax #jax npc #jax is not an npc #npc tadc

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xoxobuckybarnes · 7 months ago

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July 2024 Reading List

Complete

Donut Forget Our Love (Rated: T, Words: 1K) by dontcallmebree / @dontcallmebree

Summary: Steve Rogers is snoring into his neck. Again. It’s the third time they’ve fallen into bed in the past month alone, and Bucky’s accepted that he’s got a problem. There’s a reason they broke up. Not that Bucky’s been able to remember why lately, with every happy hour that’s gone a little too happy, Steve inching his way across the room and Bucky unable to resist. Tonight, Bucky wishes he had. Bucky gets a little reminder of what his heart has always wanted: a decent bed, bite-sized donuts, and loving Steve Rogers.

I Am Ash From Your Fire (Rated: E, Words: 177K) by lavenderpanic / @lavenderpanic

Summary: Whether they’re making love or Brock’s punching holes in drywall, he just cares so damn much about Bucky. Bucky doesn’t understand why. He’s terrified someday that Brock will grow indifferent, that’s why he feels a rush of relief every time Brock calls him a stupid fucking bitch or slaps him around for screwing something up. He still cares, that’s all Bucky can ever think.

comic books and coffee cups (Rated: T, Words: 4K) by sparkagrace / @sparkagrace

Summary: Based on the prompt: Bucky Barnes is a comic book writer with a very specific idea for a new story, but he hasn't yet found an artist who will work with him on this project. Enter Steve Rogers.

Under His Protection (Rated: E, Words: 21K) by MelanieKS

Summary: There is a nefarious plot brewing in the White House against the president. After an attempt on his life, President Barnes’ detail can’t be trusted and he’s not sure who he can turn to other than his friend Natasha Romanov. Five years retired, Steve Rogers is asked to pick up his shield one last time to protect the president while S.H.I.E.L.D. works on finding the mastermind behind the plot. It’s unconventional, but the safest, while Steve and the president hide away in a secluded cabin in the middle of the mountains of New York. Attraction sparks. Tension rises. Steve vows to keep his distance and remain professional but his attraction grows by the minute, until he can’t deny it any longer.

Podfic

Podfic: Stay and the night would be enough (Rated: T) by ForeverShippingJohnlock

Summary: Written by perfect_plan. Original summary: Things haven't been going well for Steve; he lost his apartment and his job as well as still trying to cope with the death of his mother. Crashing on his friend's couch soon leads to something more for him and Clint's roommate, who shares more with Steve than they both would have expected.

dance with a ghost (Rated: T) by lightupstars

Summary: “Captain America is haunting me,” Bucky says over a bowl of ramen. His pronouncement is met with a round of silence. “Captain America,” Natasha says. “As in--” “The first Avenger,” Bucky confirms. “Supersoldier and hero of World War II. The fabric of the American conscience.” “But he’s--dead,” Sam says. His look of perplexed concern, ever perplexed and ever concerned, only increases. “You’re aware of that, right?” “I know,” Bucky says. “That’s why I said he’s haunting me.”

WIP

War & Peace and the Redemption of Bucky Barnes (Rated: E, Current Words: 44K) by ThePirateStorm / @fsbc-librarian

Summary: Bucky Barnes is running from his problems. He’s housesitting for his best friend while she’s on her honeymoon - the almost a year prior that he’s been staying in her house doesn’t count - when he’s woken in the middle of the night by an angel and a demon. Okay, maybe they’re not a literal angel and demon, but Steve Rogers *looks* like an angel, and his daughter Charli certainly *acts* like a demon. The father/daughter duo are running from their own problems, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t crash headlong into one another’s lives. Throw in a cursed book for good measure, and it’s about to get a whole lot more interesting.

Gold Must Be Tried By Fire (Rated: M, Current Words: 18K) by lavenderpanic / @lavenderpanic

Summary: The pamphlets about escaping abuse always glossed over this part, and Bucky finally understands why. Nobody would fucking leave if they knew how hard recovery would be. In the midst of a trial that questions every hard-won truth out of Bucky's mouth, can he possibly allow himself to heal- physically and mentally? **Sequel to I Am Ash From Your Fire**

Rereads

Heart of Mine (Rated: E, Words: 133K) by deadto27 / @deadto27

Summary: It's been three years since Bucky pulled Steve from the river. Three years where Bucky has tried to get back to the person he was, to be better, to be recovered. Three years where his motivation for getting well has been Steve Rogers. To get to see him again. But when he finally does, he gets more than he expected. Because he never expected that he’d find Steve with a child. And he really never expected that he’d find Steve with his child. ----- “HYDRA…they were using DNA to try to repeat it,” Steve continues softly. “Your DNA,” he adds, meeting Bucky’s eyes, a solemn look on his face as Bucky suddenly catches on to what Steve’s getting at. His eyes widen in shock as Steve increases his grip just slightly on his knee. “The baby…she’s, well…” Steve seems to struggle for words as Bucky’s heart starts beating faster than ever. “She’s yours.”

#Stucky #Steve and Bucky #Steve Rogers #Bucky Barnes #fanfic #XOXOBUCKYBARNES' Stucky Fic Reading List #july reading list

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seireiteihellbutterfly · 9 months ago

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Sundae Tropes : Three's Company

A/N: Fic 1 of the Sundae Tropes Event! Some 69-ing for our 69 boys!

Sundae: Cookies And Cream With Sprinkles And Brownie Bits With Kensei And Shuhei = Marriage Pact + Threesome + 69

Follow along using #sundaetropes, #300followersevent and #vee writes.

Written for @j-u-u-z-o 🩷 I have to admit, a marriage pact and a threesome had me scratching my head for a bit but the plot kind of took over on it's own ^_^ Event masterlist | Vee's Masterlists

The bright sunlight was blinding as you made your way to your office, not looking forward to the day ahead. After last night’s disaster with your date and drinking your weight in sake, the mere thought of doing anything was daunting. The incessant pounding in your head like drum beats made you feel like there was a marching band in your skull. Sitting at your desk chair, you laid your head down on the wooden surface, wondering if you could catch a nap. Your eyelids start drooping, and you feel your body beginning to transition into a semblance of sleep before you hear footsteps coming your way.

“Good morning rookie!” As high energy as ever, Kensei stomps into your office, his loud, booming voice making your head throb. You groan and cover your ears, trying to hide your face.

“Why’d you do that?” you whine through the gaps between your arms as Kensei leans over your huddled form grinning.

“Brought ya coffee!” You hear a cup being placed near your head and groan softly.

“Don’t want coffee,” you grumble, trying to find an angle to relieve the pounding in your head.

“Tsk tsk tsk…coffee is the best cure for a hangover. Drink up! Can’t have my contract wife incapacitated!”

“Your contract wife would like the day off.” You try to close the gaps between your arms by drawing them in closer. “And how’d you know I was hungover?”

“I could sense your alcoholic ass all the way from your quarters. Your reiatsu really doesn’t hide anything.”

“Creep.”

“Will you be calling me a creep when you end up marrying me someday?”

“Someday…if ever. I still have time to find someone you know.”

“Based on your current dating life, I don’t think you’ll last the 5 years we agreed on before getting married. You’ll be begging me to shorten the time on our marriage pact.”

“How rude. You think I can’t land someone?” You ask indignantly as you raise your head from the dark shelter of your arms only to feel dizzy and cause a nasty throbbing in your skull. You whimper and lay your head back down on the desk. Kensei sighs, then places a large hand at the base of your skull, squeezing, relieving the tension in your body.

A sound of contentment leaves you as he does this, before massaging the back of your neck, then moving down to your shoulders. Typical Kensei. Always so tactile. You straighten up and let out a loud groan of relief before grabbing the cup of coffee and chugging it down.

“He stood me up taicho.” You admit softly as Kensei continues to work on your tight muscles. The throbbing in your head quiets slightly.

“I figured as much.” His hands go back to the base of your skull and you feel your breath catch slightly as he threads his fingers through your hair before massaging your scalp, tugging on sections of your locks, stimulating the circulation back into your body. Little tingles begin in your scalp and creep down the back of your neck, then along your spine, delightfully sensual and tickly.

There were reasons you had agreed on a marriage pact with Kensei, and the most basic one was that he knew how to balance out his love. He doled out tough love when he knew you could do better, but when at a limit he gave way to something a little softer and caring, like right now. There was a connection between you and Kensei that didn’t quite fit into any category, and it transcended beyond being his third seat. You two had an easy friendship and you never hesitated to tell the other anything. It was always unfiltered and raw with him. He had your back and you were fiercely loyal to him. Not just because he was your captain, but because you knew he’d never allow anything to hurt you.

The irony is that drinking is what caused the marriage pact to come into existence in the first place. Talks about how you were already his work wife and that it would be nice to find someone to settle down with eventually. Why not you? You had laughed, slapping him on the shoulder, spilling your drink because surely, he was joking right? He was your captain, the guy you sparred with and accompanied on scouting missions. But he fixed you with those brown eyes, carrying an intensity that hadn’t been there before. “Think about it,” he’d said before finishing his glass and taking you back to your quarters.

Now here you were, marriage pact ready to go if neither of you found someone serious in 5 years. It was a strange thought at first but you got used to it. There was a sort of security in knowing that if all else failed, someone who knew you so well was there to ensure you got to experience marital bliss, something you didn’t realize you had not just wanted, but craved.

“I wouldn't have stood you up you know.” Kensei brings your head in between both his large hands and gives a hard squeeze on both sides making you moan with relief.

“Thank you. That's reassuring. At least if I marry you you won't leave me hanging.”

“Of course not.” You feel a twinge of disappointment as his hands leave your body but don’t complain, feeling your headache lessen. You sip more coffee as Kensei studies you, looking like he wished for more physical contact as well.

A knock on the door breaks up the cozy atmosphere that was building in the office. “Come in,” you call out, and the door is pushed open by Hisagi, looking a little haggard despite how early it was in the morning.

“Morning taicho, third seat,” He says politely before dropping off some files on your desk. “I need you to review these before they can be put away,” he says to you, then frowns at the fatigued look on your face. “Everything all right?”

“All fine,” Kensei answers gruffly, treating Hisagi with rough indifference, something you hadn’t understood. Hisagi rarely warranted half the criticism Kensei threw at him. “Our third seat is a little hungover,” he adds for context.

“Ah.” Hisagi shoots you a sympathetic glance. “I hope it goes away fast.”

“Thank you fukutaicho,” you mumble and take another gulp of caffeine. “I’ll finish these soon.”

“Appreciate it.” Hisagi bows to Kensei and takes his leave.

“The boy is always behind on work,” he remarks, staring at the closed door. You tsk at him.

“We’re all behind on work taicho. You’re too mean to him. He’s your lieutenant after all.”

“Am I? I thought I was just pushing him to be better.”

You snort at his words. “Oh please. You borderline bully him. He only puts up with it because he respects you.”

Kensei considers your words. “But he keeps barging in on me all the time. The office, texting me, it’s a lot.”

“Isn’t that typical though? All lieutenants do that. Captains and lieutenants are attached at the hip. You’re being unkind.”

“Unkind?” Kensei looks genuinely hurt. “Does my contract wife think I’m unkind?”

You giggle at his downtrodden expression. “Just be less harsh on him. It’s not hard.”

“I suppose I could be,” Kensei relents, stroking his chin thoughtfully, “And I guess I should be thankful you don’t mind him barging in on me at all times of the day. After all, if you do marry me, it’ll be like you’re marrying Shuhei as well.”

“Huh?” You stare blankly at him.

“Like you said, captains and lieutenants are attached at the hip. If you were my wife, you’d have to get used to Shuhei barging in on us all the time, no matter what time of day.”

You let his words sink in, and realize it’s not far from the truth. You would have to get used to Hisagi being a constant presence no matter what the circumstances were.

“I guess…you’re right. Marrying you would kind of be like marrying him also.”

“And all things considered, wouldn’t you want to be sure you’re satisfied with all aspects of this possible future marriage with me?”

“What aspects are we talking about?” You ask this cautiously because there seemed to be something he was implying.

“All of them…including sex.”

You choke on your coffee and hastily cover your mouth with your sleeve. Kensei looks calmly at you while you splutter and recover from the initial shock.

“You want us…to sleep together. You and me?”

“Well, you, me, and Shuhei.”

You gape at him, suddenly feeling shy, a blush creeping into your cheeks. The three of you? Having sex? Now that the idea was on the table, you can’t help but imagine how that would be. Hisagi was attractive in a different way than Kensei. Stoic and edgy-looking, but he still exuded raw sexuality. You would’ve been lying if you said you hadn’t thought about Hiasgi before. But he had a major crush on Matsumoto and you didn’t want to get mixed up with someone who had feelings for someone else.

An unexpected shiver runs down your spine at the thought though. Kensei…and Hisagi. Together. In your bed. All over you. You shake your head and try to speak sensibly.

“Taicho…with all due respect. Have you lost your mind?”

Kensei grins at your reaction before responding. “Didn’t you admit to me a threesome was something you hoped to experience at least once in your life?”

“Damn it,” you hiss under your breath. You had to quit drinking with him. Damn bastard remembered everything. The more tipsy he got, somehow the better his memory became.

“I understand sleeping with you. But Hisagi?”

Unbidden, another image of 3 sets of limbs tangled on a bed comes into your mind and you try to push it away again.

“I want my potential future wife to be satisfied. And that includes letting her explore her sexual fantasies. But Shuhei is the only one I’d trust with something like this.”

Your mouth goes dry and you try to laugh it off. “What makes you think Hisagi would even be open to this?”

“He’s not seeing anyone right now. I doubt he's getting laid, the way he keeps fawning over Matsumoto every given second. And why wouldn’t he be interested? A pretty girl like you? He’d better consider himself blessed that I’m being generous and sharing you.”

“I just…hadn’t considered…”

“Sleeping with me before we actually got married?” he finishes shrewdly.

“Exactly! I mean, we’re still captain and subordinate. And I get that if we were dating this would be normal but to do it like this …”

“Are you worried the sex will be bad?” he asks teasingly. “Because I guarantee you it won’t be.”

“No! It’s not that. I’m just-I’m-I-” You take a few deep breaths to calm your nerves, feeling suddenly overwhelmed and embarrassed. Kensei quickly envelopes you in his arms and squeezes tightly.

“Calm down. It’s ok. I only threw out the suggestion because I feel like you should make sure this marriage pact will fulfill everything you’re hoping for, even though we haven’t dated. And there’s no pressure. I promise I won’t let it affect our professional relationship. And you don’t have to sleep with both of us. Or even me if you don’t want to.”

He rocks you back and forth and the motion soothes you. Swallowing, you look up at him. “Promise you won’t be weird? And poor Hisagi…”

“Hisagi will be grateful I’m asking him at all. Don’t worry. No one is going to mention this outside of our personal lives.”

When you still look unconvinced, Kensei rests his cheek on top of your head. “You know I didn’t ask you for a marriage pact just because it’s convenient right?” You had hoped that wasn’t the case, that there was more to it than you being available to him.

“Of course, there’s the most basic reason and that is, we’re comfortable around each other. We just vibe. But I also think you’re beautiful. Sexy. I sometimes wonder what you’ll look like in the throes of passion. So I am not joking when I say I’m putting everything on the table. Because at the end of these 5 years, if you do end up marrying me, I want you to do it knowing I’ll indulge any thought you might have, no matter how unconventional they may seem to you.”

His forearms rest on top of yours. “You never have to worry about it with me.”

Calming down at his words, you lean back against his chiseled chest. “Ok. Yes, a threesome is something I was hoping to experience.”

Kensei grins widely. “I’ll talk to Shuhei. But don’t ever tell him I said I trust him.”

You laugh and nod in agreement.

A few days pass before Kensei brings up the topic with you again, letting you know Hisagi had consented and blushed like a virgin when he was asked.

♡.﹀﹀﹀﹀.♡

“Be gentle with her Shuhei,” Kensei warns as he locks your bedroom door. You could hardly believe this was happening, both of these gorgeous men standing in your room, everyone tingling with the keen knowledge of what was going to happen. You can’t hide your enthusiasm, even though everyone is still fully clothed, you feel moisture gathering between your folds at the idea of what’s to come.

“I will,” Hisagi murmurs before settling next to you on the bed.

Kensei sits on your other side. “Hey, let us take care of you hmm?” he asks. You nod, feeling like your tongue has turned into a lump of clay, unable to form sentences. Kensei tips your face up to his by your chin.

“What’s the safe word?”

“Hollow.”

“Don’t hesitate to use it, ok?” He pets your hair, and you feel like every stroke was setting off a synergy of desire in the pit of your stomach. “We’ll be gentle. Give us direction if you need to.”

“And let yourself relax,” Hisagi adds. “Enjoy this experience. Your first threesome”

You wet your lips. Kensei continues petting your hair before his hands slide down your arms reassuringly, leaning down to give you a soft kiss. Your first kiss with Kensei…you take in the feel of his lips, strong and patient against yours, his tongue, his taste, and feel like you were melting into a puddle of desire on the floor. Kensei, so tough and rugged on the exterior, felt so different now, showing you the kind of tenderness you could expect if you were his wife. You let him take his time, seducing you with gentle persuasion.

Hisagi skims his fingers along the neckline of your yukata, before stringing small kisses down the side of your neck, nibbling the sensitive flesh, sending skitters of electricity down your body, causing your belly to fill with heat. Kensei’s large hands wander lower and undo the sash of your yukata.

You gasp softly as air hits your naked body, nipples already peaked and pebbled from the kisses. You look up shyly at Kensei who’s drinking in your features with hazy eyes.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says huskily, cupping a breast in his palm, kneading the soft flesh, making you pant. A strangled noise of surprise leaves you as Hisagi lowers his head and captures your free nipple with his mouth, suckling gently, the sensation making your body feel like jello, and causing your clit to throb with need.

“Mhm…” you sigh your pleasure as they both work on you, strong and patient, feeling their calloused hands steadily bring up your arousal.

“Like that baby?” Kensei’s deep, husky, voice cuts through the fog in your brain, his hand tantalizingly playing with your breast, massaging the squish of it, the pad of his thumb moving over your nipple in circles.

You manage to nod, then stifle a groan as Kensei lowers his head and swirls the hardened peak into his mouth. The wetness on both your breasts, the different sensations from both of their mouths and tongues was something you hadn’t quite been able to imagine, Kensei going for more sucking and pulling while Hisagi was softer, the tip of his tongue flicking back and forth across your nipple. It felt like your body was being tugged in two different directions, the fantasy of being taken both softly and roughly at the same time coming alive like a fever dream.

Your fingers tangle in both their hair, keeping them latched to your breasts, feeling the blood rush through you, making you shiver from the sensations. Your sex throbs and spasms, and you feel impatient heat gathering in your belly, wanting more.

Kensei leaves your breast to lick and kiss up your body, coming to the slope of your neck which you arch to give him better access, feeling the tempting nibble of his teeth, your fingers curling into the sheets as your grip on reality begins to fade. To your dismay, you feel Shuhei also move away from you, a sound of protest leaving your throat before you realize both of them are starting to lean you back, your body coming in contact with the bed, yukata spreading apart at your sides.

“What an angel,” Shuhei whispers with a mischievous smile, tilting your face up by your chin, before leaning down to give you a kiss, his free hand running leisurely across your body, stroking your abdomen as Kensei tickles your inner thigh, his warm palm coming to rest on your mound, squeezing the fatty flesh as his tongue sweeps across your nipples.

Your body reacts instinctively, hips bucking to provide friction as your clit rubs against the heel of his palm, your noises of satisfaction swallowed by Hisagi’s patient mouth.

“That’s it…nice and easy sweet girl…” Kensei purrs at you while you continue to grind against his hand. He wedges the heel a little more firmly against your folds, your hardened bud now coming into direct contact with his hand as you shamelessly humped to satisfy the craving.

Hisagi licks the shell of your ear, sinking his teeth into the upper curve, making you gasp, before whispering, “Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Yeah…” The word comes out breathlessly as heat and tension start coiling in your belly, your core dripping from all the attention. Hiasgi’s hands come back down to your breasts and begin to massage them, holding your nipples captive and rolling them between his thumbs and forefingers. You feel your clit throb in tandem with the motions as you use Kensei’s hand, the dual stimulation from both of them causing your insides to melt, liquid heat filling your being as your mind becomes an insatiable blob of need.

“Why are you both still dressed?” The question falls from your lips as your core flutters around nothing, the coil in your belly threatening to snap.

The question makes both of them chuckle. “As the lady wishes,” Hisagi says in a gravelly tone, and to your pleasured delight, both of them undress and your eyes feast on the glorious muscles and toned structure of both their bodies, cocks erect and waiting for attention. Your mouth waters and as they settle back down on either side of you, your hands reach out automatically, taking an erection in each, pumping and stroking, your arousal heightening as they both collectively draw in sharp breaths.

“Fuck…impatient were you?” Kensei grins as you play with the heated velvet of his cock, enjoying the girth of it while Hisagi’s was lengthy, your hand taking longer to go up and down his shaft. Both were veiny and throbbing with need. Without thinking, your head dips down to lick Kensei’s leaking tip, tasting the salty precum beading at the opening while continuing to pump Hisagi’s length.

“Shit…” Kensei lets out a growl as Hisagi sucks in a harsh breath. Your tongue swirls around his cockhead, lightly putting the tip of your tongue into the slit, causing Kensei to his and buck his hips. Milky droplets formed and dripped continuously from Hisagi’s dick, and you turn your head to catch them, sampling him before giving him a tiny kitten lick that drew a needy groan from his lips.

“Can’t make up your mind sweetheart?” Kensei asks teasingly as you refuse to let go of him but also don’t back away from Hisagi’s length, taking as much of him as you can into your mouth.

Hisagi grits his teeth as your soft, wet mouth teases his tip before sucking down his length. You feel fingers gathering into your hair, controlling the speed as you bob up and down, a hum of pleasure arising from the back of your throat. Hisagi is seeing stars when you finally let go of him, strings of spit connecting your lips to his cock.

Kensei watches the scene unfold, his eyes darkening with lust; your lovely naked body on display, legs parted wantonly, a little patch of wetness forming on the gusset of your panties. He runs a finger along the line of moisture before hooking his finger into the fabric and pushing it aside to reveal your pussy, arousal seeping from the folds. He uses his thumb again, so wide and textured, placing it on your clit and drawing little figure eights over it.

Distracted, you pull away from Hisagi, moaning at the slick pleasure, your innermost dirty fantasy coming to life, Kensei between your legs, and Hisagi shivering, desperate to feel the hot moisture of your mouth again. Kensei slips his middle finger into your sopping entrance, followed by the ring, before laying his tongue over your clit, laving the little bundle of nerves with controlled precision.

Your moans have a desperate edge to them now, hips bucking against the sinful movements Kensei is making and Hisagi takes advantage of your open mouth to slip his cock back in, thrusting just enough to make your eyes water. You fondle his balls, hanging low and heavy, earning a guttural grunt from him as he struggles not to overwhelm you.

It doesn’t take long before you cum on Kensei’s tongue, your shrill calls muffled by the cock in your mouth, pussy and clit spasming simultaneously in orgasmic relief. Hisagi quickly pulls out and starts palming himself, looking at you with heavy-lidded eyes full of lust, trying to stave off his climax.

Your mind is in a fog, still reeling from orgasm, so you don’t protest as Hisagi and Kensei begin to reposition themselves, until you find yourself laying down on Hiasgi’s body in reverse, your dripping sex now almost touching his face while his cock stands at the perfect angle for you to take it into your mouth.

“Rise up on your knees a little baby,” Hisagi’s voice instructs you as he pats the sides of your legs. In a trance, you listen hypnotically, raising your weight, trying not to feel shy as Hisagi’s fingers spread apart the folds of your pussy like flower petals, reveling in the glaze your pussy has from its recent orgasm, feeling intoxicated by the tang of arousal and need. “You smell so good…” The tip of Hisagi’s nose enters your opening as he inhales and you squirm, embarrassment rising, as he shushes you amusedly.

Kensei’s large hand rests on the curve of your ass, squeezing, before drawing your cheeks apart, looking at the view. “All pink and pretty and nice,” he murmurs. “Shuhei, check her.”

You gasp in surprise as Hisagi inserts his fingers into you, fingers reaching into you and scissoring, your still sensitive pussy jolting with pleasure.

“Ready,” Hisagi confirms, withdrawing and using the gathered moisture to rub at your clit, causing you to buck and bring your pussy right on his face.

“Relax baby,” Kensei runs his hands down your back, shoulders to ass, calming you down. “Don’t be tense…this is all fun, remember?” He presses warm kisses between your shoulder blades and makes his way down, and you sigh, trusting them with your care. Hiasgi laps at your slickened bud delicately, the feeling soft and undemanding. You whimper and then take his cock into your mouth, letting your desires act out for you, enjoying the way Hisgai also moans as you pleasure each other.

You squeak as Kensei adjusts you slightly, grabbing your hips and raising you a little higher so that your weight is on your toes, then before you can understand what is happening, his tip touches your leaking hole and pushes in. He stretches you so deliciously, filling the empty space that had been craving for something to grasp. Your noises of pleasure reverberate against Hisagi’s cock and as Kensei begins to thrust, the tip of his cockhead angling so that it hits your G-spot, you feel the edges of your vision beginning to fade.

So this was what marriage to Kensei would be like, your remaining brain cell thinks to itself, as you lazily lick and suck Hisagis’s dick, while he continues working on your clit. Their combined sensations are overwhelmingly gratifying and you know you wouldn’t last long against both of them.

“Enjoying that cock?” Kensei’s voice teases from above you. “I guess you can’t really tell me which one,” he chuckles before playfully slapping your ass. You giggle against the meat in your mouth and continue bobbing your head, Hisagi groaning against your pussy as he controls himself from cumming. “Almost there?” Kensei asks, taking cues from your movements.

“Mm-hmm,” you manage to mumble, unwilling to leave Hisagi.

“Good…let it happen…” Kensei fucks into you with a consistent rhythm, Hisagi matching his tongue to go at the same pace. Hisagi grits his teeth together, feeling hot and flushed, while Kensei is barely holding back his grunts of pleasure, all three of you driving each other to the end.

As your second orgasm of the night hits, you feel Kensei’s cock twitch and spasm inside you, feel the gush of warm liquid coat your inner walls as he spills his seed into you, and at the same time, Hisagi shoots bullets of sticky cum into your throat. You pull back to swallow, some of it dripping back down on the sides of cock, pooling into his dark hair.

You sigh in relief and rest your cheek on Hisagi’s hip as Kensei pulls out of you.

“How was it?” Kensei moves towards your head and grabs you under the arms, pulling you up the bed and cradling you against his chest as he leans back on the pillows. Hisagi cleans himself off before joining you as well.

“It was really good.” You lay comfortably between both of them, Hisagi gently stroking your arm, Kensei supporting your weight. “Like, amazing.”

Both the men chuckle approvingly. “Glad to hear it third seat.” Hisagi pats your ass with affection, making you blush.

“Hey now Shuhei, don’t just go patting my future wife’s ass without permission now,” Kensei almost barks the words but you can hear the humor in them. “And for future reference, no uncommunicated sex. That goes for both of you,” he adds. “I want to be there every time.”

“Of course taicho,” you agree, and Hiasgi hums in acceptance. You raise your head inquiringly, and Kensei arches an eyebrow.

“Yes?”

“Maybe…we could cut it down from 5 years?”

Kensei’s roaring laugh fills the bedroom and you and Hisagi join in, knowing this won’t be the last time this happens.

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hawkinshistoricalsociety · 24 days ago

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ST5 "overall season plot" brain dump

I’m being driven moderately nuts by how we still do not know the overarching plot of ST5 or like, any confirmed details about it really. Things we’d gotten in past season promo cycles by this point (the ST3 Starcourt Mall/NYE teasers, ST4 character descriptions and the four storyline teasers, IDK about ST2 I wasn’t around for that) I think were much stronger fodder for sussing that part of the puzzle out. which tbf is maybe why they’re withholding them this time around.

But it's just so hard to really speculate without that larger framing, so this has not stopped my getting stuck on this. so I'm dumping a recent version of an attempt to think through that below - partially posting this to keep track of my own “theories” (that’s putting it too strongly lol) but I’d also love to hear what other people think/how you’re putting the kind of scant data we have on this together.

So, framing this as a kind of exploration of: what are those big “overarching season plot” details we’re missing, and what are some possibilities based on current available evidence for answers to those questions about the bigger picture?

(the below noodling contains spoilers for all ST5 spoilers we’ve gotten so far, through official or unofficial channels, so don’t read if you’re avoiding any part of that. if you're not caught up on any of the details cited here, I've been trying to keep track of that in a more detail-oriented way in a "ST5 Timeline" Google doc)

I. What is/are the precipitating event/s that cause the story to pick back up in November 1987?

Some options:

A. Vecna’s reemergence begins after he’s spent 1.5 years regrouping (maybe manifesting for our protags via Will’s Vecna connection-related distress accelerating, though if we know anything about Will it is that he is unlikely to volunteer that info to the group himself). What is Vecna’s grand plan, and how much have our protags figured out since we last saw them (both about the plan, and how to finally take him down)? B. Military “stabilization” of the mega-rift starts to show cracks, probably related to Point A. maybe makes the McCorkle Farm UD entry point possible? C. Something is going on with the kids in Hawkins. Impossible to know at this point if the military’s interest in the elementary school kids is self-initiated or is caused by some kind of supernatural, probably Vecna-related phenomenon, since both military and Vecna seem to have their own separate but surely somehow related agendas wrt the kids. D. Linda Hamilton arrives in Hawkins, probably related to Point C (or maybe she’s been around and the Extended Party is just becoming aware of her/the specific danger she poses, maybe because of Point C) E. Supernatural-caused murder, disappearance, or some other kind of incident, resulting in probably military “forensics” team response, per early extras casting call. Also maybe weird “sickness” of some kind spreading through around Hawkins, considering how much time we seem to spend at the hospital and how Nancy is posted there as a candy striper. F. Supernatural/Vecna targeting of Holly, also probably related to Points A and C, though my current read is this starts up a little later than whatever the real “Ground Zero” launch point for this season is, mid or late ep 1 into ep 2 G. Some new development with Max’s condition? I have no other speculation on this because we've gotten so little on what's up with Max, but seems logical since her situation is probably thee dangling thread from the end of ST4 H. Probably not the precipitating event, but larger town response to whatever the precipitating event/s end/s up being also likely to be a driver, picking up the unresolved ST4 Hellfire Club witch hunt/Satanic Panic storyline

II. What is our protags’ response to this/these precipitating event/s?

A strong possibility is the proposal plan of a plan that the Party brands “The [Dungeon] Crawl." It seems like the enactment of a plan, “crawl” or not, is underway by midseason and has at least has a couple phases with the second phase being at least two-pronged (unsure if El + Hopper prong that splits off at the same time was intentional)

Phase One: “The Turnbow Trap” - they need something from the Turnbow mansion to enact Phase Two. Derek? Some information from a document in the Turnbows' possession? A key? IDK Phase Two: Group A - Upside Down: enter UD via a portal of some kind on the McCorkle Farm. in the UD, visit Lab, Church (Steve, Nancy, Jonathan, Dustin). Steve car's antenna may be installed specifically for this UD trip. Group B - Right Side Up: post up at the McCorkle Farm, access the downtown Hawkins military barracks (where the kids are) via the tunnels, end up going to the Hospital and Lab (Joyce, Will, Mike, Lucas, Erica, Robin, Murray, Erica, probably Vickie) Wildcard - Upside Down x2: Are Hopper and El in the UD part of the plan, or were they forced to split off? either way, they also seem to go to the Lab and the Church, but probably on a separate timeline than Group A (unless they meet up at one and go to the other location together?).

III. What are our protags’ goals with the above plan?

Some options:

Save kids from military custody/possible experimentation

Locate and save Holly

Figure out the Max situation, revive her

Locate and take down Vecna

Solve remaining mysteries about the Upside Down and the Hawkins National Lab, especially as it relates to dealing with Vecna

I think the "sub-goals" to achieve all of these are probably more important for piecing together the big picture, but when I try speculating on those atp it starts to feel like I'm getting a little far afield of responding to the evidence we currently have. so this really basic list is a placeholder.

Appendix: Other important "season big picture" details

that didn't get mentioned anywhere else, woops

WSQK: something more is going on here than just it being the group HQ this season. what is it about a radio station that motivated that choice for our big new season location? (plus the car antennas, Mike keeping a not supercom radio close at hand biking/at school - so much radio equipment all over the place...)

Flashbacks, probably mindscape or vision-y, to Henry's past and Will's 1983 stint in the UD seem to occur throughout the season

#truly have no idea if anyone else will find this useful #i know none of this is 'new' info #i feel like somehow this has to be charted against like #theme. character arcs. etc.#but at least exporting this somewhere feels like it's easier to toggle back and forth between those two aspects of the story #stranger things 5 #st5 speculation #st5 spoilers

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absolutebl · 1 year ago

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This Week in BL - A Lot Ended, Quite Bit Started, I got things to say about it all

Organized, in each category, by ones I'm enjoying most at the top.

Nov 2023 Wk 2

Ongoing Series - Thai

My Dear Gangster Oppa (Thurs iQIYI) 3 of 8 - This is just a great BL. So fun with few frills and paced nicely. Thai talent + Korean story is proving very harmonious for narrative flow. I’m delighted. I love that they don’t shy away from letting Tew be an actual violent criminal who is just gone and mushy for this one geeky cutie. Also I appreciate it when a show hangs a lantern on its own plot failing. In this case, the main character being drunk as a plot devise 2x in subsequent eps.

Twins the series (Fri GaGa) ep 2 of 10 - Love it. Love Spite and his chronic guilt over his younger brother, the golden child. Love that he is driven to repair for a past that no longer exists. Evil mom who cares more for what her son can do than that son, let alone his brother. The volleyball well…. erm. I played varsity (setter) so this is amusing to me but I’m not mad about it.

I agree that this Not Me just sports and pulp.

Last Twilight (Fri YT) 1 of 12 - JimmySea are back and is this... good? Do I like this? I don't have faith, GMMTV has been doing us dirty lately. But I think I like it! Why The Little Prince AGAIN? Ugh.

Middleman’s Love (Fri YT & iQIYI 1 of 8 - Domundi giving us an office comedy hyung romance staring TutorYim (Cutie Pie) with NetJames (Bed Friend) and LeoTai (Friend Forever) providing support. Lets hope they stick to only 8 eps. Buckle up, I got shit talking to type.

I warned ya out the gate that this is a Cheewin comedy, so tonally it could be very OFF, and boy howdy is it EVER off. There's a place this kind of show goes where it's so cringe it's visually rotten and this one went there out that gate. Also, I'm gonna say it because no one else has, Yim is not good in this role. Comedy is HARD to do and Cheewin isn't doing this green actor any favors. He's chewing the scenery like a woodchuck after a diet.

To be fair, Tutor isn't great either, but he's been given less rope to hang himself with. Mai is currently suffering from seme obscurity: the love interest's defining characterization being = tall and handsome. (Which is not characterization... agony... glares at Cdramas.) We will see if he gets a personality, but based on past work form this director and this writer, don't bank on it.

Frankly? I'm not convinced either of them are mature enough as a pair or as actors to carry something this abrasive and to stand up to Cheewin's visual abuse of our eyeballs. I think this is going to be a rocky ride. HOWEVER, because it has tropes I'm good with (as opposed to SCOY) I'm sticking with it for now but this is gonna be ROUGH going for everyone.

Backstory: This used to be a JimmyTommy vehicle before the pair split (also prev title Middle Love). Adapted from a Y-novel. I can actually see Tommy in this role very clearly and I suspect he may have been bettern(and I am more a TutorYim fan as a pair). Also I will likely be referencing SCOY a lot while watching this because SCOY is peak Cheewin nonsense comedy but with an incredibly strong lead pair, so comparisons will be drawn.

Absolute Zero (Weds iQIYI) ep 7 of 12 - Sigh. Linguistic negotiation but for sad reasons? It fascinating but it hurts. Look, the cast is very good I just don’t like the premise.

My Universe (Sun iQIYI) The Camp Fire ep 12 of 24 - Well that was extremely odd. I’m not sure how I feel about it. If it hadn’t had the strange framework and horror component and been just a simple BL story I probably would’ve enjoyed it. Why do the pulps always squander their best pairs? 5/10 New installment (Friends Forever) looks terrible and not BL.

Beyond The Star (Weds iQIYI) qp 1 of 8 - House of Stars meets Boyband. I am not impressed. Thailand just needs to leave everything music related to Korea. I’m enacting a ban. The framework on this is truly awful. The talent is not talented in acting let alone dance or song. I thought about sticking with it a few more eps but i putting in on hold. It’s too wooden even for me.

@heretherebedork I depend on you to report back. This is the kind of thing only you can watch. It’s like Cupid 2023.

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

A Breeze of Love (Korea iQIYI) 1-2 of 8 - previously know as Weather Forecast Love this one popped up in MDL's currently airing, and I was like, what what? Basically: Tsundere insomniac grump and his sunshine jock ex bestie (human sleeping pill) who now hates him. Basketball is involved and I love it.

It ended, are we sad? REVIEWS

Kiseki: Dear to Me (Taiwan Viki & Gaga)

Yes, we sad! Ai Di and his dumb oversized sweaters and flappy flappy sleeves are EVERYTHING.

Final ep? Nice that the elder gays got screen time, more of this please? Sides dominated this finale, matched outfits and all. Also I’m living for the Bless this Mess shirt. Finally Taiwan gave us lots of biting and a counter lift. It’s like they know me!

Quick pitch for KDTM?

The plot is totally ridiculous and slightly unhinged, but that’s normal for Taiwan. It involves all the tropes under a very casual framework of gay mafia gangs + food = love. Absolutely every character is queer. There’s a gum-ball machine of cameos, elder gay rep, great chemistry from all pairs, and a KILLER side couple. As a result Kiseki is a poster child for Taiwanese BL, and I happen to love Taiwanese BL. Bonus? They also managed to END IT WELL, which we cannot expect from Taiwan. 9/10 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Triggers for knife play, child abuse, lingering trauma. I found both platforms did not do a great job on subs, but I will give the edge to Viki for pure usability.

You Are Mine (Taiwan Viki & Gaga)

We are more disappointed than sad.

Far be it from me to extend this show, but we should’ve had 2 episodes of quality supportive boyfriends coping with family drama before the mom-confrontation climax and defense of the ESTABLISHED relationship. Baby's little speach had no power or impact coming where it did in this narrative, even though it was sweet. And while the make-out scenes were charming it mostly jsut felt like we'd squandered this pair. This last ep was good and rewatchable, but a series cannot be judged on its last ep alone.

Finally... could have used some side dishes. My vote? Lesbian secretaries!

Conclusion

I am sorry Taiwan, you know I love you, but I have to say it: this show was a mess of terrible pacing. And not a hot mess, sadly. I should have liked everything about this: it’s an office drama, it’s mature characters, it’s grumpy/sunshine, it’s a strong power dynamic, and it’s Taiwan - which means good chemistry. YAM was all those things and yet… something went horribly wrong with the narrative structure. You tried dears, but not hard enough. 7/10

Bump Up Business (Korea Gaga)

Well, poop. Don’t have them speak English. Also no playing drunk. Meanwhile, all the manipulative gay drama. No kiss of course.

How do I summate this?

An idol group did the best they could with a script tailored to idols but which they were not allowed to fully realize because they are active idols in the same group. Ultimately it felt a bit like OnlyOneOf were just doing one of those Kpop skits for a variety show were two of of them dresses in drag/gay/BL and "ha ha isn't it funny?" I don’t know, it was fine? 6/10

stop wasting my time, Korea

Mr Cinderella 2 (Vietnam YT)

DNF on the advice of several of my BL spies I will not be finishing this. Apparently it pretty much ends sad. Here's an explanation.

It's Airing But...

I Cannot Reach You AKA I Can't Reach You AKA Kimi ni wa Todokanai (Japan Tues Netflix-Japan & ????) 8 eps - in classic JBL fashion, I Cannot Reach You could not be reached. I will try it when I have some time and access to my home computer.

One Room Angel (Japan Gaga) 6 eps - adaptation of Harada’s manga (which I did not like) about a clerk who's stabbed, nearly dies, and returns home to find an angel waiting for him. With only 5 eps and a good chance this won’t end happy, I'm gonna wait and let you tell me how it goes.

WAITING FOR VERDICT OR TO BINGE

What Did You Eat Yesterday Season 2 AKA Kinou Nani Tabeta? Season 2 (Japan Gaga) 10 eps - I find this series more fun to binge, so I'm waiting until it completes its run.

SHADOW (Thai Gaga) 14eps - this is a horror BL with ghosts & paranormal elements in a boarding school setting. I'm not wild about Thai horror (or horror at all). It features Singto (who did paranormal BL He's Coming to Me) opposite Fluke N (who's done a couple horror's before). Also Fiat. Dan suffers from sleep paralysis, and in his dreams he sees a shadow that suffocates him. It gets worse when he transfers schools. I'm holding off on this one and if told it's good I'll binge watch.

Next Week Looks Like This

11/15 Let's Eat Together Aki and Haru AKA Aki wa Haru to Gohan wo (Japan Gaga) - this BL movie is coming to Gaga.

11/16 PLAYBOYY (Thurs ????) 10 eps - trailer here, high heat and it's helmed by Cheewin (shudder) with screenplay by Den (Only Friends) under Copy A Bangkok. It's gonna be a shizz show people. It's predicting Thai style "dark" (War of Y) one of my least favorites. Apparently there is a "plot" but when has Cheewin ever bothered with plot? A university kid who was involved with escorts, sex-trade, porn, online hook-ups, drugs, prostitution, blackmail, revenge, and so forth goes missing. His twin (sigh) and two friends look for him.

11/17 Pit Babe (Fri iQIYI) ep 1 of 14 - high heat teaser here, based on alittlebixth's omegaverse novel #พิษเบ๊บ’ set in the world of car racing (author says show will not be omegaverse). Charlie (fresh face), a young hot nerd, approaches his driver idol (Pavel "my love" 2 Moons 2) to borrow a racing car and win one for the team. Production house is new to BL but behind the Club Friday stuff. Show stars many known actors: Nut (Oxygen), Pop (Ram in La Cuisine), Pon (Phai in Gen Y, we LOVE him), Benz (twins in En of Love: This Is Love Story).

Thailand bring the November heat, I guess?

Upcoming November BL

11/19 Bake Me Please (Sun Gaga) ep 1 of 6 - trailer here, stars Ohm (of OhmFluke) opposite Guide (bestie from IFYLITA) and possibly also Poom (well known, but not for BL). This looks like an actually gay version of Antique Bakery (play it again, BL). Still, I'm intrigued, it looks HELLA pretty.

11/22 7 Days Before Valentine (Weds ????) ep 1 of 10 - trailer here, horror-esk. Adapted from y-novel of the same name, directed by Tu (180 Degree) stars Jet (Why You… Y Me?). When you want your old love again, but fate sends you a reaper instead. All he can do for you is kill people. I'll likely give this a pass and wait to binge if safe.

11/25 The Sign (Sat ????) ep 1 of 10 - trailer here, horror-esk, but with a suspense and adult characters. Special investigators who loved each other in previous lives reunite in new bodies. Stars Billy Patchanon (BillySeng) & Babe Tanatat (new). Includes other SCOY favorites as a special investigation team. I may give this a try because I'm into the non-horror bits.

11/26 The Whisperer (Sun ????) 1 of 10 - trailer here. Thai horror BL that ALSO involves cheating (what joy is mine). He has dimples (My Ride) but I don't think even that gives me the will. Maybe a binge for me.

11/26 Cooking Crush (Sun YT) 1 of 12 - OffGun are back, trailer here. Adapted from the novel “Love Course! เสื้อกาวน์รุกเสื้อกุ๊กรับ” by iJune4S this is about Prem who runs a not-so-popular restaurant with 2 friends. About to go on a cooking competition with a huge reward, Prem gets involved with Ten, a stressed-out med student who wants Prem to teach him to cook.

11/30 For Him (Thurs ????) ep 1 of 10 - high heat trailer, I suspect iQIYI will scoop this one up. From the people who brought us Unforgotten Night (please no) based on a y-novel, man nursing a heartbreak has a one-night stand, but the other boy didn't want it to end. It looks terribly trashy so I'm in! Maybe I'll do a trash watch?

VIP Only (Taiwan) - may be delayed/canceled

Wuju Bakery AKA Space Bakery (Korea) - this one may be DOA

A Breeze of Love (Korea) - I know less than nothing about this.

Nov 2023 line up with screen caps here. Not kept updated.

Original 2023 forthcoming BL master post (see comments, some are inaccurate, NOT KEPT UPDATED).

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

This is in the intro card of My Dear Gangster Oppa, I'm just amusing myself.

Thank you Keseki for givign this to us twice!

Also the tears! So pretty crying.

And, of course, my favorite the biting!

Have I mentioned recently how much I love Taiwanese BL?

(Last week)

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girlfriendsofthegalaxy · 2 months ago

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tuesday again 12/17/2024

exactly eleven months unemployed yaaaaay. this is late partly bc i went into a fugue state with a craft

listening

the genshin album with the song im obsessed with is finally officially out. this is background music in the Flower Feather Clan, who are loosely gaucho-inspired but also ride giant firebirds? sick as shit.

youtube

it reminds me a lot of aaron copland's rodeo suite and his billy the kid ballet, especially the little hoedown passage at the end.

youtube

reading

ripping through more stacks of awful fantasy paperbacks. none of them are bad in an interesting way.

great sex reporting as always from sam cole at 404 media. would strongly encourage people to sign up for their newsletter and make a free account to get past the anti-bot-scraping wall

“If anything, the fact that ‘tradwife’ is a trending porn search term reminds me that the entire concept of the tradwife is just influencer marketing in the first place,” Dahl said. “Most tradwife influencers are actually business owners and the primary breadwinners in their homes, so the term itself is kind of an oxymoron if you think about it. Maybe seeing a bunch of porn labeled "tradwife" will help other people to realize that whether it's an Instagram influencer or a Pornhub creator, tradwifery is just a fantasy after all.”

watching

Tide-Line Blue, a 2005 anime which should feel made especially for me: i love one-season post-apoc anime. it's available on tubi (which is where i found it dicking around for something to watch) but i'm not really sure why it's so difficult to find videos of it on the actual internet.

Tide-Line Blue is set after an environmental disaster later called the "Hammer of Eden" has submerged 90% of the Earth under water and taken six billion lives. The series begins fourteen years after that event with the new and remaining countries being brought together under the New United Nations. However, Gould, a renegade submarine captain wishes to use military force to create peace in the new world order, while Aoi, the secretary-general of the New UN, wishes to use diplomacy, and a boy named Keel finds himself caught up in the middle of it all.

unfortunately this was VERY bad at laying out and explaining the political drama driving the plot. we do not find out Why the rogue submarine captain went rogue until the second to last episode. and not in a teasing raising the stakes way. we spend So much time with this captain, and his decisions feel quite frankly nonsensical a lot of the times without this EXTREMELY important context we do not find out until a halfhearted flashback when he is remembering something. never is this communicated to one of our main POV characters. ever!

i also had to throw my disbelief into the next county bc an astronaut is trapped up there for seven years on a private imaging-based satellite. that man would be dead. it takes the combined powers of many nations and thousands of engineers to keep the ISS at "not currently exploding". and part of that is bc she is very old and only has a little bit of a taste for blood (unlike skylab which actively tried to kill her astronauts at every opportunity) but ONE guy for SEVEN YEARS is still able to make daily transmissions???? that man should be exploded by now. or in organ failure. the human body is not meant to be in space and does not like being in space, as a general rule.

there's a mom that's just. missing. and this is not particularly remarked upon or relevant. i guess she's off doing her own thing? or maybe dead? very unclear. not important but did annoy me.

very pretty pilot episode, and i had a fun time thinking about the ways people survive during massive sea rise, how communications networks without satellites work (i assume there's a lot of bouncing stuff off the moon but the debri cloud around earth looks fucking gnarly in the outer space segments). really do wish this one was better but it is incoherent at best a lot of the time. "eeeee big ship lots of loving shots of instrumentation" only gets me so far

playing

Two Full Years Of Stardew Valley. i picked the beach farm bc i wanted to spend more time fucking around in the mines and uncovering secrets and romancing someone (i have never successfully romanced someone in stardew valley) and then forgot that the farming game does actually want you to do a lot of farming to progress. kind of wish i had not picked the beach farm but i am making a fucking killing selling void and dino mayo and various cheeses. plus my eels are happy?

making

my back finally feels mostly very uncomfortable instead of excruciating, and i certainly overdid it today cleaning but my house was Gross. i also ripped apart my vacuum and cleaned the dust canister and filters bc that shit was Gross.

40+ christmas and new years' and some very overdue postcards are in the mail: canadian pals, my post office would not even take yours and said to hang onto them until after the strike. i am so sorry. also i have way more canadian pals than i thought!

there are two kinds of thrift stores: ones that like to bag a billion small items together and have a huge horrible wall of weird bagged shit, and thrift stores that don't do that. this was loose on a shelf, i had to get a goodwill manager to price it, and they said "i dunno. 2.99?" so i have had a very pleasant evening gluing together this extremely thin laser cut wood in the style of a papercraft. thank you goodwill.

#tuesday again #tuesday again no problem

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she-posts-nerdy-stuff · 11 months ago

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Finally finished the outline of Daughter of the Rain and Snow and I know exactly how the ending is going down almost pretty much (details are blurry, but plot and character arcs are completely outlined and ready to write instead of just bullet points or vague ideas) so out of interest (won’t necessarily stick to it 100% but would still like to know) what would anyone like to see next if you would like to continue reading my stuff?

Explanations below cut

Sequel

I have every intention to write this one, I have characters but thus far not a main plot more of just the premise. Would follow Ahra, Evan, Yara, maybe Vix, and maybe Lilia as our young Dregs and start around when Kaz and Inej left for Ravka since the Dregs was kinda on the verge of collapse whoops. Can’t go into too much detail or they’ll be spoilers for the current fic but there’d be the opportunity for some Aimee and Kiada, and Kanej would still be present but they might not be in focus (again, can’t explain too much or they’ll be spoilers). There might even be some Fiona or some Maya stuff who knows

I really want to write this bc I really want to write Ahra’s story so it’ll probably end up coming around at some point but I realise it might not be the most interesting to y’all when it’s mostly ocs so yeah

Feliks had been more than lenient with Ahra. He’d been the only person who ever gave her a real job - playing her violin in the reception of the White Rose - and when things had predictably gone haywire he’d been good enough to only turn her away, not Evan too. Ahra hadn’t much cared for the job, she loved her violin but she did not enjoy watching the Rose’s clients come and go and she certainly hadn’t cared for having her skin paled and her hair Tailored white for such purposes, but it was easy money and enough to keep them ticking over as all of Evan’s funds petered away on overpriced little medicine bottles. She studied the thin stack of kruge in her hand, thinking of Kaz standing opposite her in the alley by the Slat.

“I don’t need your charity, Brekker,”

“And far be it from me to offer you any,”

Not charity, but she didn’t doubt Dirtyhands had his own purposes in paying her for a job she failed to finish. Still, cash was cash. And medicine was medicine. She tucked it back into her breast pocket and tapped it lightly, slipping round the corner and pulling a bone light from her jacket.

What Evan didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

Helnik

This was an idea I had a looooong time ago and I shared a little snippet scene on here, but then I started writing Daughter of the Rain and Snow and never looked back. I really want to write this one I think it could be pretty cool, it would be relatively short set in between Crooked Kingdom and King of Scars and take place in Ravka; based on a headcanon I have about Nina learning how to use her new power and as a result of it experiencing hallucinations of Matthias being with her that she is fully convinced are real. Following Nina, Zoya, and Genya as they try to navigate this and worry that they shouldn’t let Nina got to Fjerda in this state.

“What time is it?” she mumbled into the cushions.

“A little after seven bells,”

“Saints, how disgusting,”

Nina sighed, in a mixture of content and tiredness. The luxury of the Little Palace was a mostly welcome change from crawling in next to Matthias in the tomb at Black Veil - or even of the hotel room at the Geldrenner. They’d shared a sofa, so close to each other; limbs entangled, chest against her back so she could feel his heart beating. A steady rhythm, no matter what he was feeling. The big bed here was more comfortable, but the closeness felt like an aching absence, as though the few feet between them spanned for miles. She reached out behind her and found something soft that she decided was his arm.

“Come closer,” she whispered, and she imagined the way he’d smile.

He would press her fingers to his lips and she would roll over to face him. She’d reach out and touch his cheek, and he would catch her hands in his.

“Witch,”

“Barbarian,”

“Little Red Bird,” he would say, just before his lips met hers

The sunlight would be warm and soft on their skin as they moved closer, as she felt his heart beating beneath her fingers.

But he hadn’t moved. He hadn’t come closer, or kissed her fingers, or brushed his lips against hers. He had not gently pushed her hand down towards his wrist so their fingers could intertwine.

“Matthias?”

Nina made the mistake of rolling over, and began to scream.

Wesper

There’s a line in Crooked Kingdom where Jesper says if Van Eck really couldn’t cope with Wylan not being able to read he could have told people he was blind, the point being that still would’ve been wrong but that everything he’d resorted to was unnecessary and Wylan shouldn’t feel like it was his fault. So this would be an au where Van Eck did exactly that and Wesper attend Ketterdam university together; Wylan grapples with his father being the worst and falling for Jesper as he fears telling him the truth, Jesper grapples with addiction and wanting to stay at university partly for the sake of falling for Wylan.

Jesper leaned in, pushing one of Wylan’s curls back off his face.

“It’s pity you can’t see how beautiful your eyes are,”

Wylan blushed, letting Jesper run his hand over his cheek and tilt his face up towards his own. Jesper leaned forward but then Wylan squirmed, just slightly, and Jesper tensed as he pulled his hand away.

“And me, of course,” he added, letting his voice take on a teasing lilt to brush past the moment, “It’s a shame you don’t know how gorgeous I am,”

Wylan almost smiled, but he had stepped away.

“I- erm,” he brushed his fingers through the lock of hair Jesper had moved and cleared his throat, “Excuse me,”

And then he was gone.

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brineffxiv · 1 year ago

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Aw hell.

Back up a bit.

So there we were, Venat and I, trying to enter Ktisis Hyperborea in order to track down Hermes, when who should we re-encounter...

Haha! It turns out that despite claiming to not believe my story, Emet-Selch has been (with Hythlodaeus' assistance) investigating the same things Venat and I have been. I am so happy about this. I was literally chanting "Yes yes yes!" When Hythlodaeus explained what they had been up to.

*Ahem*

We have uncovered similar facts and reached the same conclusion: since it seems unlikely that Hermes himself wants to bring about the Final Days, he may yet be recruited to help prevent them.

(ha... ha... in retrospect....)

And then Hythlodaeus laughs at him. I adore these two.

It's too late Emet! You've been contaminated with my friendship (highly contagious) now you'll never be rid of me! 12000+ years in the future you will care about me so much you'll plan for me to succeed after I kill you.

...oh no now I'm crying again...

Keep it together, you've got two whole posts to write to catch up with the plot. No way you're fitting this all in one.

Right. Right.

I find Hermes (and Meteion) in the depths of the Hungering Gardens and convince him to meet with our little group outside.

I tell him what I've told them.

Though reluctant to believe my tale, Hermes agrees to theorize based on his knowledge of dynamis. He concludes much as I have already suspected: that it is likely the varying densities of the people which produced the different effects in each Final Days - the warping of creation magics and the transformations of the people themselves.

But Hermes also points out something new: dynamis is itself only an energy, set in motion by emotion, which must have a source.

It would follow then, that this source... it must be a thinking being, in order to have emotions? Mustn't it? It's not a what. It's a who.

And as Hermes points out, the celestial currents form the outermost layers of the star. If the phenomena appeared first where those were weakest, then...

Someone out in the great expanse is trying to kill us.

Ah. But we have only a moment to reflect on this new horrific revelation, when...

Fuck. Oh, fuck. Hermes, you goddamn idiot.

But no, it's not a new "friend", it's Meteion's sisters reporting in. Meteion proceeds to "suspend" her individual consciousness and connect with the shared one.

Ah.

Oh. No.

Something has gone very very wrong.

Aaaaa!

Meteion is screaming inside my head, and only I can hear her. The rest can tell that something has happened, but they cannot see the truth of it.

And then, quite suddenly, she has disappeared.

Hermes explains that this is an ability Meteion has to avoid confrontation; she alters her aetheric density to blend in with her surroundings.

It's likely that I could hear Meteion's voice just then when the others couldn't because Meteion utilizes dynamis to speak in her mind and my comparatively thin aether left me susceptible to it. This means I'm the best chance we've got to track her down. We split up and search.

Danger music is playing! Danger music is playing! This is not a drill!

Several times I encounter Meteion or her voice and several times she runs away. Disappearing again. I glean from the brief snatches of dialogue that she is fighting her programming to compile and make her report. Something about the data her sisters have transmitted has frightened and upset her, and she does not want to present it to Hermes.

Our search party regroups to find a new plan; I will continue tracking Meteion via her voice, and Emet-Selch will follow, prepared to rain aether upon her to disrupt her vanishing trick. The rest of our party will work to blockade any avenues of escape, a task made easier in that it appears Meteion has fled towards Lethe.

Um. Lethe? The river of forgetting in the underworld? Can we uh... Can we not go into there? I have a bad feeling is all.

I am at once delighted and extremely distressed. The danger music is still playing loud and clear.

The plan works perfectly, for good or ill, and Meteion is cornered. Her voice in my mind begs me to protect everyone. She can no longer flee, and commences her report.

Everywhere Meteion has gone she has found the dead and the dying. Her dispassionate voice continues behind our mounting horror.

Emet-Selch points out the obvious problem in the mission Hermes tasked Meteion with: he did not account for a negative result. The premise of Hermes' question - what others live for, what gives their lives meaning - is flawed, if Meteion encounters only those who are dead or do not wish to live.

Venat orders Meteion to cease her report, suspend her mission, and return home. But Meteion is not listening. Emet-Selch determines to take Meteion back to Amaurot, as she will be needed in order to retrieve all of her sisters.

Hermes is still stunned from the revelation of both the answers to his questions and the astounding oversight in his instructions to Meteion. He kneels in front of her and seems about to acquiesce to Emet-Selch's demand, but...

Memories of Meteion and his promises to her fill Hermes' mind, and he resolves to accept the answers in her report, whatever they are.

Suddenly he transforms. Declaring that he will not allow Meteion to be taken from him until she has delivered her full report, he takes her in his arms and flies off towards Ktisis Hyperboreia.

We chase after them as quick as we can, but arriving at Ktisis we find a crowd of confused researchers outside. An alarum is sounding and the facility has been evacuated and put into a state of alert - a field of dampening magics is now in place effecting any who aren't Ktisis researchers.

Nonetheless, we must enter the facility.

OMG OMG OMG

(Of course Emet is a Dark Knight. He fights with love! In this essay I will...)

This dungeon is a downright delight. All the little bits of commentary and characterization!! HHHhhh!!!

Also I somehow managed to get Venat killed by double stacking a mechanic on her during Hermes' fight and Hythlodaeus res'd her. Hythlodaeus, my man, you are a Bard with a resurrection spell: you have got to stop saying how bad at everything you are because you are clearly not.

Yes, Hermes, you are indeed a mad, desperate fool, but you are a mad, desperate fool in serious need of therapy and someone to talk to. Your problems, to me, seem to stem from the fact that you feel so alone. Your compassion is hampered by the fact that you're entirely too caught up in your own head, and unfortunately, you do not seem to be much of an intellectual. You need friends, people you can share your thoughts and feelings with, and who you can bounce ideas off of so you don't send your emotionally fueled, vulnerable bird-daughter out into space with no means to shield herself from negative feelings. Bad idea, that. Also you need to calm the fuck down.

Together, we defeat Hermes, who returns to his humanoid form.

Emet-Selch declares he is taking both Meteion and Hermes into custody on behalf of the Convocation. As Emet moves to do so, Hermes turns to Meteion and apologizes to her, for being unable to hear out her full report. Hermes has just time enough to ask one final question of Meteion: was there happiness to be found in those stars?

Meteion's answer is long and features examples of failed civilizations that appear to hit close to home for each of our ancients. Those probably deserve closer examination, but that tangent got three paragraphs long before I realized there really wasn't time for it, because as she's giving us this answer Meteion is beginning to leak the black smoke that signals dynamis corruption.

A- Ah. AH. Oh. It's not. It's.

It's Meteion.

The thing out there that's trying to kill us.

It's Meteion. The Meteia. Her sisters.

They are the source of the emotions behind the Final Days.

And Hermes...

You. YOU. You...selfish monster. You bloody hypocrite!

"If man can learn to value all life and retain his will to live he will surely find a way to avert his demise"

It's not enough that you throw your precious creations at us to slow our advance through Ktisis, no, in making your judgement on man you in turn curse every life upon this star to share our fate. Or, have you not considered the method by which you sentence us!? Perhaps you are too distracted by your own despair to truly hear what she is saying: Meteion is bringing death to the star itself, not selectively killing off Man. You know this from my own account of what the Final Days will bring.

You're just like the rest of us; how cheap other lives become in the presence of Man, whether you seek to better us or to destroy us. I couldn't see, couldn't fathom, how you could be the Fandaniel I met in the future. But you've been him all along, haven't you? When push comes to shove you crumple under despair and it's not enough to take your own life, no, you'll make everyone suffer with you. Everyone must feel your pain.

Hermes causes the Final Days. In full knowledge of what he will bring, the pain and the suffering. He knows, and he chooses this. Unlike Meteion, who has become corrupted, unlike the Convocation, who will never know against what they struggle, Hermes stares evil in the face and embraces it. A mental breakdown will not absolve you Hermes, in this moment you damn yourself.

No. NO.

I forgot about that thing!

Hermes orders Kairos to rewrite the memories of all within Ktisis Hyperborea, beginning at the point of Emet-Selch's arrival in Elpis. Our memories are to be replaced with a vague recollection of Meteion and her sisters' shared consciousness becoming unstable and exploding, triggering Kairos.

Kairos begins counting down.

A lot of things happen, very quickly, all at once.

With his back to us, Hermes bids Meteion fly to the far edge of the universe where none can reach her.

Venat breaks her bonds and launches herself at Meteion, intent on stopping her, but Hermes blocks the blow and Meteion leaps into the air.

The break in Hermes' concentration appears to have freed the rest of us from our chains, and as Emet-Selch summons his weapon to challenge Hermes, Venat leaps aboard Argos in pursuit of Meteion. As the two shoot skyward, Hythlodaeus leads me to the edge of the platform. He tells me that here, this is their fight to wage, but that I must take the knowledge I have gained here back to my time, to my own battle.

Meteion is rapidly approaching the bounds of the star, with Venat in close pursuit. Just before Venat can catch her, Meteion shapeshifts into an actual bird (Hey! My friend has that minion! What!?) and speeds away into space, but not before Venat manages to tag her with a spell.

Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus sacrifice themselves to allow Venat and I to escape with our memories intact. Kairos completes its final process as we soar above their heads.

In the final few seconds left to us, Emet-Selch proclaims that he still doesn't believe my story, but, if it must be said, to not squander the legacy he leaves to me. In futility I reach for him, feeling the weight of our history falling into place.

Honestly, I could barely manage to take screencaps of this part I was crying so hard.

But I caught his smile.

...

Outside again, Venat collapses on the grass, exhausted both physically and mentally by what we've just been through.

The spell Venat tagged Meteion with is a tracking spell, one with which we can track her. Though she is already unimaginably distant and beyond our current reach.

Venat uses Argos to check on our friends, now exiting Ktisis Hyperborea, with Hermes in tow.

As expected, they have no memories of the events that Hermes contrived to have us forget, and Hermes himself appears devastated at the loss of Meteion.

Wait, what? No. No no no no! You've just seen, literally just seen, that even when Emet-Selch believes something to be completely ludicrous he will do his due diligence to investigate it. Tell him. Tell them, the Convocation. Even if they don't believe you at least let them know about dynamis, so they can recognize it when the Final Days begins! We cannot reach Meteion where she is now, but you have time. Time to work to stabilize the aether currents. Time to find an alternative solution so that when the Final Days arrive it's not necessary to summon Zodiark. Don't you start this again. This information control.

Leaving aside her asinine view that public knowledge of the contents of Meteion's report would lead to some sort of further catastrophe... Venat is against telling the Convocation the truth because of her fears of what Hermes would do if he learned the truth?? Venat, have you lost your mind? Hermes is one man. The only reason he was able to do what he already did was because we had the deck stacked against us, we confronted him in his seat of power with our own abilities severely limited. It was a very specific set of circumstances!! Outside of these exact conditions what he did would not have worked! Hermes' greatest weapon is our ignorance, that's why he contrived to have us forget in the first place. You are wasting the opportunity our friends sacrificed all to provide us with!

You already know the key thing that Hermes will contribute to resolving the coming crisis! The knowledge of celestial currents! Share this knowledge and you will have no need of him!!

It needn't be senseless and seemingly inevitable at all if you would bloody well tell people! Hope is so much stronger when built on a foundation of knowledge. We cannot stop the Final Days from coming, but you can yet mitigate it. All needn't be lost. You can yet choose to do something different. I beg you, use this time to find a different path.

Please Venat, please do not let your future become my past.

#ffxiv liveblog #rhesh'a tag #meteion #hermes #venat #hydaelyn #emet-selch #hythlodaeus #ktisis hyperborea #I struggled with this post for literal MONTHS #this one and the next #I'm still not happy with it #i should have split it into two so I could add more pictures #for one thing #but it needs to go

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tookishcombeferre · 10 days ago

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Full disclosure I think this has sat half-edited in my drafts for like a week at least.

But, I'm so happy I took my time on it. I think the beats of the chapter hit nicely. The foreshadowing for 4 chapters down the road is doing what I want it to do. So, I just wanted to make sure things were doing what I needed them to before I posted it.

For tumblr folks, I can write a bit of an extended author note. Which is always fun.

About the plot chasm: In the first iteration of this story, there was going to be an entire espionage sublot that involved Hexley Hall. However, in order to spark that, something really devastatingly sad had to happen. I didn't like that. So, after about five minutes of thinking about it, I scrapped it. However, I REALLY wanted my espionage subplot back because going full Mission Impossible into Hexley Hall just seemed like too fun of an opportunity to pass up. Also, the magic involved in that subplot still existed in the plot I currently was writing, and I suddenly realized I had no plans to resolve that. Therefore, I decided, I'm filling my plot chasm with an appearance from Greylock near the final climax of the story. Not revealing anymore details about that. But, he's well more involved now that I'd initially planned on him being because I had a plot chasm the size of the Grand Canyon that only Greylock could solve. As for the potential one-shot: I've been doing a lot of of work on lore for the Tri-Kindgoms and the Minor Kingdoms for this story and for its prequel. Specifically, I've been developing lore for Corinthia (which is where I hc that Winifred came from based on her design.) I was thinking about writing something set during the ep. Mystic Meadows set from her perspective that has something to do with the lore of that Kingdom and her powers of minor divination. Not sure if I'll do it, but if folks are interested, I'd consider writing it. Some of the stuff I'm thinking about putting in the one-shot are going to come up in the fic, some of it might not? I dunno. (I gave Cedric and Cordelia middle names in my head, and it's my personal opinion first name was Goodwyn's choice second name was Winifred's. So, this would touch on that.) Other notes: I really don't have much other than what I put in the author's note. I often write in "Acts" like a play. I'd say, as it stands, this story has approximately 3. Act 1 was for exposition. Act 2 is about relationships. Act 3 will be about magic and then will also resolve the whole story. This chapter is kind of the transition point that sets up that transition between exposition and the 2 different longer acts that each have their own climaxes and resolutions. That's not to say you won't get details about magic AT ALL in this next part, you will. But, the primary focus in this next section is on relationships, and all the lore tidbits you get are at the service of fostering connections between characters. As for things that are coming in terms of stuff getting "dark," this will probably come up again in a later author's note, but there's a scene I'm writing that might just hit me different because the feelings in the scene keep hitting a nerve based on something that happened to me a little over a year ago. So, like, do *I* think it's dark because it hits in a personal place, or is it actually dark? I always err on the side of caution in those matters. So, like I said, just pay attention to the TW's and you should be fine. So, yeah, that's what I've got. Cheers, Pip 💚💜

#cedric the sorcerer #king roland ii #queen miranda #baileywick #sofia the first #sofia the fandom #mentions of #greylock the grand #in later chapters #i just really like talking about craft #pip writes things #pip does life

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steddieunderdogfics · 10 months ago

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This week’s writer spotlight feature is: foresthearts! @kiaramori has 11 fics in the Stranger Things fandom and 7 of them are in the Steddie tag!

Our anonymous nominator recommends the following works by @kiaramori:

Suspended Bridges

Consensual Catfishing

Just Because You've Done It Before Doesn't Mean You'll Do It Better

In My Head (I See a Supercut of Us)

finding a cozy place in you

I read her first Steddie fic (Suspended Bridges) as it was updating and I fell in love!! The world building and plot in that fic, compared with the writing make it absolutely irresistible. I've been reading all of her fics since then and there have been no misses! Every single one is incredible. Can't recommend them enough ❤️❤️ -- anonymous

Below the cut, foresthearts answered some questions about their writing process and some of their recommended work!

Why do you write Steddie?

I heard that a lot of times when people ship things, it’s a character they project onto with a character they’re attracted to. I find that I feel both things towards Steddie: I can somewhat project onto both of them to a degree, and then I also find them both pretty attractive. So it’s the best of both worlds (lol). I also think that both Steve and Eddie are at this really cool point in their life. After high school there’s a lot of self-discovery. Finding your own independence, figuring out who you are, deconstructing the messages you were raised with, finding your path…I think that’s a really cool time to write about.

What’s your favorite trope to READ?

One of my favorite tropes for this pairing is Kas!Eddie. I really like fics where Eddie is a vampire, they’re great. Another favorite trope with these two is idiots-to-lovers. I love the way both these guys can be dumbasses for different reasons.

What’s your favorite trope to WRITE?

I think miscommunication (in a playful way, not so much an angsty way) is a favorite for me. Especially oblivious!Steve. Anything I can do to maneuver Steve into a slutty little outfit and have Eddie thirsting over him, I love it. Especially when Steve has no clue Eddie is thirsting over him. I think I have that in almost every single fic I write.

What’s your favorite Steddie fic?

I have so many, it’s hard to list just one. “Sub-culture” by palmviolet was the first Steddie fic I read, so it has a special place in my heart. I’d also say “Rock of Ages” by BoudicaMuse and “You’re Divine” by OonionChiver. One I’m reading currently is called “House of Pain” by mynameis152. It features Steve and Eddie in a group home, and I really like the exploration of both of their characters.

Is there a trope you’re excited to explore in a future work but haven’t yet?

I have a fic I’ve half-written with Merman!Eddie and Grad Student in Marine Biology!Steve (extremely loosely based off the chinese novel Desharow Merman). I think that’s one I’d love to explore in more depth.

What is your writing process like?

My process usually starts with daydreaming up a certain scene. Then, I’ll kind of expand it from there. Sometimes, I’ll take notes or write short outlines at night to get my thoughts down. Then, I’ll usually write a first draft. Something that’s pretty stream-of-consciousness. I don’t worry about it sounding good. Then I’ll delete most of my first draft and start over with a second, keeping only the parts I like the most.

Do you have any writing quirks?

I’m not sure if other people do this, but I think a quirk of mine is how much I’ve come to enjoy rewriting things. It’s not unusual for me to write half a chapter, delete the whole thing, and then start over again. I find that I typically like the second draft a lot better than the first. When I was younger, it was such a struggle to delete things and start over. It felt like I was erasing all my hard work. But now, I just see it as part of the process.

Do you prefer posting when you’ve finished writing or on a schedule?

This is a funny question for me because my favorite way to do things was definitely how I did Suspended Bridges. I had about 80% of the plot written before I posted anything, and as I posted each chapter, I could comfortably go back and edit each chapter/add foreshadowing/add substance to the fic before posting it. But I haven’t done it that way since then; now I pretty much post things as I write them.

Which fic are you most proud of?

I think I’m most proud of Suspended Bridges, partially because it’s the longest fic I’ve ever written, so I’m pretty proud of the work that went into it. I also am pretty proud of Just Because You’ve Done it Before, Doesn’t Mean You’ll Do It Better. It’s my most recent one, and I can feel myself growing as a writer as I write it.

How did you get the idea for Suspended Bridges?

Suspended Bridges is really an amalgamation of a lot of different pieces of inspiration. I think at the time, there weren’t a ton of omegaverse fics out for the pairing. I had a lot of omegaverse headcanons for the characters and how they would fit into an alternate season four. Since there weren’t a lot of fics out at the time, I figured if I wanted something that was so specific (canon divergence, Steve being a secret omega, life-saving mating bonds, etc) then I was going to have to write it myself.

When writing Suspended Bridges, what was something you didn’t expect?

I’d have to say 1. the writing process, and 2. the reception. Firstly, it was a really unique fic for me in that it was so easy to write. It felt like the words just flowed out of me. I wrote the first 60,000 words of it largely on my phone while on vacation. I just couldn’t stop writing. It was more than I’d ever written in one sitting before. Secondly, I was not expecting the reception it got at all. It is far and away the most popular thing I’d ever written, and I was so floored at the amazingly kind comments people wrote and the way it was able to resonate with so many people.

What inspired Just Because You've Done It Before Doesn't Mean You'll Do It Better?

I really like Time Travel Fix-Its, they’re one of my favorite types of fics. I watched this clip where a comedian was talking about how if he went back in time, he’d be effectively useless. And I thought to myself, “what would it be like to have someone go back in time and kind of mess things up even more?” which is what inspired this fic. Steve’s back in season 1, trying to change the past so that things can go better…but it’s a harder job than he expects. There’s a lot that he doesn’t know, and his assumptions about the world can often cloud his judgment.

What was your favorite part to write from Consensual Catfishing?

I think my favorite part was just all the little internet references. Consensual Catfishing was really fun to write because it was a bit of a love letter to my own fandom experiences. My favorite part might’ve been in chapter 1 when we see the clip of the 1DxY/N fic parody. I was laughing pretty hard as I wrote that. I also just liked all the little clips of Hellfire’s DnD podcast. I really enjoyed writing their friendship.

How do/did you feel writing In My Head (I See a Supercut of Us)?

Uh…horny? Haha Supercut was one of the most explicit fics I’d written and so sometimes I would kind of post it while blushing bright red haha. It was fun, though. I think comedy is a bit of a niche for me. I really like to write stuff that makes me laugh, and Supercut was definitely that. Steve’s first fantasy he gets dragged into cracks me up every time.

What was the most difficult part of writing finding a cozy place in you?

I think the hardest part was just making it short. I suck at writing one-shots, I typically like leaning into the conflict of the story and making some elaborate worldbuilding. But this one I wanted to be soft and sweet, to feel a bit like curling up on the sofa with a warm cup of tea. It was a different vibe than I usually write, so it definitely stretched me.

Do you have a favorite scene and/or line from any of your fics?

I think one of my favorite scenes is in Suspended Bridges, when I rewrote the fight against Vecna. There were a lot of powerful moments: Max, Dustin and El all standing up to Vecna at various moments, Steve playing Dustin’s song to stop his possession….then the life-saving bond right after that. That was definitely a highlight for me.

Do you have any upcoming projects or fics you’d like to share/promote?

Right now I’m mainly looking at my current projects, rather than any future ones. If there’s one I’d promote, it would be “Just Because You’ve Done it Before, Doesn’t Mean You’ll Do It Better” It’s an omegaverse time-travel fic, where a gruff alpha Steve goes back into his season 1 (unpresented) body. He wants to change the past, save Barb, and get Nancy back, but there’s a lot he doesn’t know. And things get pretty off the rails when he presents as an omega in the new timeline.

Thank you to our author, foresthearts, and our anonymous nominator! See more of @kiaramori works featured on our page throughout the day!

Writer’s Spotlight is every Wednesday! Want to nominate an author? You can nominate them here!

#writer's spotlight #writer's wednesday #ao3 writer #steddie writers #steddie #steddie fic recs #steve harrington #eddie munson #steve x eddie #stranger things

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ashleyh713fanfics · 11 months ago

Text

Dazai X Odasaku!Sister Ch9

Chapter 9: "You Are Not A Good Man"

Summary: Dazai fights between the darkness of what he has always known and what Odasaku wanted for him. Oda's sister finally meets Chuuya, our favorite angry ginger.

Warning: pm! fifteen year old dazai, Dazai self destructing, Odasaku death mentions, Dazai torturing himself and everyone around him, manipulative behavior from both sides, Mori mentions and grooming themes, underage drinking, talks of suicide, pm! fiftten year old Chuuya being a good boy. I gave Oda's sister a name but you can imagine it as y/n.

(This is chapter nine of my fanfic "Timeless" which is now on A03. It carries on from the three part intro I posted a couple days ago. I'll link it below to fully understand the story. Oda's death has been moved up to when Dazai is fifteen for plot purposes. Asagao's ability is to stop time for up to six seconds.)

Three Part Intro Here: (just cause the first chapter is so long)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

A03 Version Here:

Word count: 7k total

Moving down the familiar port mafia base, Dazai shoved his hands inside his pocket begrudgingly, his feet shuffling as he thought about the annoying conversation he was probably going to have.

Yet the one thing that occupied his mind the most was the red haired dork he had left behind.

And yeah, the last thing he probably should’ve done was leave Oda’s sister unattended in a port mafia owned building, knowing that she had a habit of not following directions and staying put. She had run away from Ango three weeks ago after all, what was to stop her from doing the same thing here?

It was no secret that she liked to cause trouble, in more ways than one.

But unlike the agent, Dazai didn’t underestimate her. Yes, leaving her alone wasn’t preferable but he also knew that she was fully capable of handling herself if someone did decide to step out of line and mess with her. Hell, she could probably outsmart and kick the asses of every incompetent subordinate in the building if she wanted.

The truth was, she didn’t need his protection, not in the way that Ango thought she did. Asagao was calculating when she wanted to be, even if she was limited by the effects of alcohol currently. She was still a force to be reckoned with and the boy wasn’t worried in the slightest at the fact that he had just left her in a den of wolves.

And in some sort of way, the boy looked at this little opportunity as a kind of test, wanting to see just how the girl would react to his way of life. Most people wouldn’t have been able to handle his port mafia lifestyle but Asagao, he knew that she could.

And not only that, he knew that she could thrive in it if given the opportunity.

Was it wrong to think that though? Was it fucked up to hope that she would be in danger while he was gone just so he could see the full extend of her capabilities? That was probably not something a good person was supposed to do, but what could he say? The situation was too perfect to pass up.

Humming to himself at the thought, Dazai then frowned at the shift in air only to vaguely feel a burst of air approach from his left, causing the boy to quickly duck in order to just merely miss a kick in his direction. “You piece of shit, there you are! I’m gonna kill you!”

Already groaning at the sound of his voice, the brown haired mafioso simply closed his eyes before turning in order to meet a very familiar head of ginger

Ah, right on cue. “Aww Chuuuuya, did you miss me that much? And thanks for the offer but dying by your hand doesn’t really interest me at all.”

Watching Chuuya shake his head in exasperation, the boy grumbled back, clearly bursting at the seams from unkempt anger the entire day. “Shut up! You left me alone to take down those losers by myself. Do you know how outnumbered I was because you decided to ditch?!”

Dazai only raised an eye though, mocking his pathetic partners immediately.. “Oh boo hoo, I thought the famous gravity manipulator could handle a few measly thugs, but it looks like you are more incompetent than I thought if you’re complaining about this much. Pity, I thought you were at least a little useful to me..”

The boy then shrugged his shoulders only for his partners to immediately wrap his gloved hand around Dazai’s jacket in order to shake him around as usual. “Screw you, I did take down all those idiots by myself! They didn’t stand a chance!”

Dazai then replied halfheartedly, his finger in his ears in order to block out the ringing from Chuuya’s shouting. “Then what’s the problem? The job was done, wasn’t it? Unless you just like yelling to hear yourself talk?”

That only seemed to make the hot headed mafioso even more angry though, his fingers tightening on his partner's jacket before yelling even louder than before. “The problem is that you ditched for nothing just to make me look like an idiot!”

Scoffing in response, Dazai smirked. “Oh Chuuya, you don't need my help for that, you do that to yourself..”

Then the bandaged boy simply lifted his hands out in defense before smiling in wistful memory of today's events. “And if you must know, I was very busy. I told you, I promised a lovely young lady a good time. What kind of man would I be to deny such a wonderful request?”

Dazai then thought back to the adorably drunk Asagao that was waiting for him back at his apartment. And though he loved pissing off Chuuya, tonight this was the last place he wanted to be.

Closing his eyes in exasperation, Chuuya then caught the silence in his idiot partner's gloat before forcing himself to let go of the boy with a grumble. “Listen, I don’t care about what kind of fucked up disgusting shit you do in your free time or what kind of brain damaged girls you manipulate for your own selfish whims. Just know that if you pull that shit again, you’re gonna regret it.”

Dazai only raised an eye in amusement though. Calling Asagao brain damaged, what a way with words he had. It’s like he was implying that he was forcing her to date him. If only Chuuya knew just how wrong he was, about how opposite he had everything.

How would he react to knowing that Asagao was the one who pushed him into this relationship? That for once, it wasn’t the demon that had made the contract but rather the angel.

So much so, the mafioso felt his lips curve upwards before a short chuckle escaped his lips at the idea, causing Chuuya’s head to turn in angry confusion. “What? What the hell are you laughing about, mackerel? What’s so damn funny?”

Shrugging his shoulders in response, the boy then forced his lips closed before shaking the thought away. Nah, this slug didn’t deserve to know about her, at least not yet. “Oooh it’s nothing. But really, you’re so scary Chuuuya. I’m practically shaking from fear..”

Then all at once, he watched the red haired kid start to get wound up again, his words practically seething through his teeth in order to point a finger in his direction. “I mean it, dickhead! I’m watching you..”

Dazai only rolled his eyes though, responding in a millisecond. “How can you watch anything? You can't even see that high..”

And just like that, the momentary calm was broken as Dazai watched Chuuya’s control completely snap, much to his satisfaction. “Fucking basard..!”

Yet that’s when a new voice seemed to enter the space, stunning the two bickering children immediately as he strolled up behind them rather unbothered. “Dazai, there you are.”

Widening his eyes, Chuuya then turned to the voice before immediately falling to his knees in a sign of respect as Dazai simply remained silent. “Boss..”

Mori simply nodded his head in return, unbothered by the bickering he had just witnessed. “Ah, Chuuya, you’re here too. Seems like you two are just as explosive as ever.”

Crossing his arms over his chest in a huff, Dazai frowned, knowing that the reason he was stuck with this little brat was because of the boss in the first place. “It’s your fault for making me deal with something so unpleasant all the time.”

The port mafia boss didn’t seem bothered in the slightest thought, his lips giving a cruel short chuckle before seemingly getting right to business. “Yes, well I suppose you’re right. Now Chuuya, if you would excuse us. I must speak to Dazai alone.”

Almost immediately, Chuuya responded, his body snapping back up before giving another small bow of his head in response. Whatever the boss wanted, he would gladly do.

Besides, it finally got him away from the bandaged bane of his existence, and that was a blessing in itself. “Yes boss, of course..”

The boy then turned around only for Dazai’s mocking gaze to follow his steps before calling back to him all at once, almost like he wanted the last victory. “See you, Chuuuuya. Maybe the next time we meet you’ll be able to reach the top shelf! I highly doubt it though, petite mafia!”

All at once, Chuuya felt his eyes twitch, his fingers curving through the leather of his gloves in order to force his feet to continue to move and obey their boss’s wishes. But that didn’t stop him from muttering cruel obscenities inside his head all the same.

Stupid annoying little prick, picking on my size like that. He’s lucky the boss is here or else he’d be dead! God, I hate him so fucking much!! Why did I have to be stuck with a guy like him?!

And even though his threats were unsaid, Dazai still gained a sense of satisfaction from them, his lips twisting into silent victory as he watched his favorite little toy stomp away.

------

Mori led the boy straight to his office as Dazai watched him descend into his usual chair, virtually unbothered in order to turn towards his favorite little executive with his usual calm and collected smile. “Now Dazai, could you please share with me why you were absent from the job I assigned to you and Chuuya today?”

And although his smile was seemingly unbothered, Dazai sensed the threatening aura that always laid beneath. Too bad for him though, the boy was never shaken by his attempts of intimation.

Because of that, Dazai simply shrugged his shoulders, his own lips showing hidden intent, like he was up for the challenge. “Easy, cause it was boring and I didn’t wanna.”

The port mafia boss only frowned though, his expression dropping to a disappointed pout in order to lace his fingers under his chin.

Perhaps to anyone else his response would’ve been seen as unacceptable, but Mori already knew Dazai’s cruel mannerisms like the back of his hand. “Now that’s not very nice. I thought we had an understanding between each other when I offered you the executive position.”

His voice came out scolding, like you would do to an unruly child but the executive knew better to take his words at face value and think it was that simple. Nothing about Mori was simple after all, he had learned that the day they had first met.

Because of that, the bandaged menace called him out on it, Dazai’s fingers crossing around his own arms with a huff. “Oh please, we both know the real reason why you offered me that job. It was so you could keep an eye on me and protect your dirty little secret.”

And for a moment, Mori paused, seemingly taking in his answer before his fingers dropped from his chin with a simple nod. “Right you are, Dazai. You are the only one that knows the truth after all. That I killed the precious boss and took his place.”

Normally the man wouldn’t have ever admitted such a thing but he knew it was pointless to continue the charade, especially since it was Dazai that had figured out his true intentions long ago.

Why he had given him the position of executive, why he held the boy so highly, it wasn’t without reason.

Dazai only nodded back though, his eyes rolling in exasperation. “And I’m your accomplice for it all, I was the only witness to the previous boss’s demise. I know I know. I get it already. If you’re really that worried about it then you should just silence me permanently and get it over with.”

It was something that had tied the two together long ago. Dazai could still remember it like it was yesterday, the day his tiny little eyes accidentally caught the sharp metal scalpel as it slid across the previous port mafia boss’s throat.

After the event it was concluded that the old boss’s will was for Mori to take over but only he and Mori knew the truth, that the doctor had lied to the entire place in order to take the boss’s position.

And since that day Mori had regarded the two of them as partners in crime, always reminding the boy of his place in all of this over and over again like a broken record.

It was almost like he was worried that Dazai would ruin everything with just the slip of a tongue. Instead he used that little secret to try and tie him down to his side.

Mori simply waved the idea away though, almost like he had already read the boy’s mind. “Don’t be silly. There would be no benefit to kill you like that. If I really wanted you dead then it would already be done. I’ve already stopped multiple of your suicide attempts in the past year, I’m not going to let all that taxing work go to waste.”

You see, that was one thing the port mafia boss had figured out fairly quickly. For as much as he wanted all the loose ends of his little evil deed erased, the man knew it wasn’t that simple.

In a sick way, he needed Dazai, he needed him to keep their little lie going because with the boy gone, the old boss’s members would suspect him of the murder.

But that was easier said than done. When he had proposed his little plan Mori thought he was tying himself to a sad pathetic weak and stupid suicidal kid that he could manipulate to his own hand.

Yet almost instantly the doctor realized he had made a mistake, a grave miscalculation on his part.

For you see, Mori had learned very quickly that a monster like Dazai couldn’t be tied down. He couldn’t be manipulated as easily as he first thought. And now by putting himself in this deal he had also undoubtedly tied himself to an evil even he himself couldn’t predict.

But then again, that also made everything all the more enticing.

Dazai only pouted his lips though, not liking his annoying response. He knew that the guy had stopped his fair share of attempts and the boy still wasn’t happy about it. “Boo. You’re no fun, Mori.”

Mori waved his childish manner away though, his eyes planning in clear calculation in order to go for the nearby teapot that was just out of reach. “Everything I’ve done has been for the benefit of this organization. I will always do what I think is best for the port mafia, and that includes the assassination of the precious boss. A change of power was necessary, and when the time comes for another change, I will allow the transition wholeheartedly.”

The bandaged boy then watched as the boss tipped over the pot into his cup as Dazai truly thought about the meaning of his words. Was he saying what he thought he was? Was the guy really that dedicated to the mafia?

Narrowing his eyes, the boy questioned curiously. “So you’re saying that you’ll allow someone to murder you in cold blood and take your position just like you did with the old boss?”

It was an interesting idea, being aware of your own humanity and your own imminent demise. Was that how Mori lived his life, knowing it was a fleeting moment, that he was just a small chess piece in the grand scheme of the port mafia’s legacy?

Mori then closed his eyes, thinking about Dazai’s accusation before simply putting the teapot down onto the table in order to turn back towards the clueless boy with a knowing look. “Precisely. But only if it is someone worthy enough to do so. Everything has a time and a place, and when that moment arrives, my executioner will be hand picked by my own design.”

The air was silent then but the boy could feel his skin prick with devious unknown intent as Mori stared through Dazai’s nonexistent soul for what seemed like forever.

And though the kid was curious about his plan in all of this, the only thing that could stick in his mind was one perplexing thing. For someone so against suicide, you sure have thought a lot about your own death. What a hypocrite you are, old man.

Yet before he could truly stew on the matter, Mori waved the idea away in order to change the subject completely, or so the boy thought at the time. “Now, onto other matters. How are you holding up? I’m sure Oda Sakunosuke’s tragic death has taken quite a toll on you. It truly was an unfortunate event after all.”

At the sound of Oda’s name, Dazai then felt his entire body tense without permission, the words dying in his own throat all at once. Just the mere mention of his old friend was enough to make him internally unravel.

And he suspected that was the point, that’s why Mori had brought him up. To gain a reaction, to put him in his place and take control of the conversation for the first time since their meeting. Dazai hated it, he hated the kind of power anyone had on him with just one simple name.

So much so, the kid’s words came out bitter, not wanting to talk about this. “Why does it even matter to you? You don’t care that he’s gone. He was a low level lackey in the port mafia. Odasaku had no value to you.”

Dazai knew that was the truth, Mori didn’t care. Because of Odasaku’s morals and his refusal to kill, his position in the mafia was bottom tier at best. He was the equivalent to an errant dog, doing odd jobs here and there. He meant nothing to the organization and therefore he meant nothing to Mori.

That’s right, the boss was only bringing him up to get under Dazai’s skin, to make him squirm and act out. There was no other reason for it then to shove his own weakness straight into his face.

Mori took the boy’s reply with a collective air though, almost like he knew the kind of response he would get. “That may be true, but he certainly had value to you, did he not?”

And he did, to the boy, Odasaku was the most valuable person and thing to have ever existed. He was the closest thing to a friend or a family he had ever had. No one would be able to understand that, not even Oda’s own little sister.

Feeling his own lips screw shut in order to hide an emotional reply, Dazai shoved his hands into his pockets with silent despair. He didn’t want to pour his non-existent heart out to Mori but he also didn’t want to lie and tell the man that Odasaku was insignificant.

Because he wasn’t, he would never be.

Mori eyed the reaction silently as well, his expression unchanging before finally looking away from the boy in order to stare down in silent thought. “I must say, you are taking everything quite well, better than I expected.”

There was something different in the man’s tone then, something that Dazai couldn’t quite pick out. It was like there was something else laced in that sentence, something that sounded like..disappointment?

But why would Mori be disappointed in his reaction to all of this?

Wanting to dig deeper, Dazai frowned. “And what did you expect?”

Mori then snapped his gaze back up before speaking distantly, like he was listing off some sort of checklist in his mind. “I expected that I’d be saving you from another suicide attempt, that I’d find you in some sort of ditch alone and broken beyond belief. That’s usually how people grieve the deaths of important friends and family.”

And for a moment, Dazai paused. Was that what he was supposed to be doing? Was that the proper response to grieve someone’s death? He didn’t know, considering the boy wasn’t anything resembling normal.

He was already broken beyond belief though, even before Odasaku’s death. He had always been a sad amalgamation of what he should’ve been. How could you break what was already broken? How could the shattered be even more shattered? Perhaps it wasn’t possible.

Perhaps he was too numb to feel any of that.

But even Dazai knew that was a lie, that for a split second while holding his best friend’s dying body he had felt something. It had been what Mori had described for a split second. Grief, devastation, self-destruction, they twisted into him even more than before.

He felt the painstaking loneliness stuck to his skin whenever he tried to move around Odasaku’s apartment, he felt the numb pointless burn of the alcohol when he only poured one drink instead of two. Such human emotions, in those small moments Dazai knew what they were, even if he didn't want to admit it.

Yet if that was the case, why hadn’t he crumbled under it all? Why wasn’t his body succumbing to the pain of the loss? That’s what Mori expected, that’s what should’ve been the logical conclusion. Why hadn’t he given up all together and tried to kill himself again?

Then all at once, the boy had his answer.

Asagao.

Oda’s little sister, she was the reason he was just barely hanging on these last few weeks. She had fed him letters, memories and moments that were so new to the boy that it felt like Odasaku hadn’t disappeared from this world entirely.

Whether on purpose or not, she had given delusions to keep going, to wake up just in order to read another entry from his best friend’s fingers. Those letters, they meant everything to him. They were his lifeline, the boy depending on them just like Asagao did for her entire life.

And yes they were fleeting, they were just temporary spells in the end. He knew that, he knew that one day there would be no more words to read and Dazai would have to face that.

But not today, he didn’t have to do that today.

He wondered if she knew that, if she knew just how important Odasaku’s writing was to him? That they were just barely keeping him afloat even now?

And Asagao also, just her very presence filled a void that Dazai thought would never be filled again. Her living, breathing body, her tangible touchable skin, they filled his grief filled soul with a shaky wavering peace he knew wouldn’t last.

She wasn’t the real thing, but she was close enough to Odasaku for him to keep trying. To be a good man, a good person. That’s what both siblings wished, what they believed for him.

And he wanted to do that, for them.

Just then, Dazai’s internal thoughts were shattered as he heard Mori’s soft chuckle, the sound filling up the entire room in order for the man to sigh. “Then again, it should be expected that your reaction to grief and death would be different, considering you have always been different, Dazai.”

Not fully understanding, the boy then allowed him to continue, his voice coming out in a cruel edge. “Anyone else would look at you and see a child but you and I both know that’s never been the truth, not really. Not after all the blood and death you’ve shed over the years. Such an innocent yet simple term could never fit you.”

Sure, by looks and hypotheticals Dazai was a fifteen year old boy but Mori knew that was no excuse to underestimate him. The boy was young, yes, but he had already seen far more evil and monstrosities than an old man. Each experience had twisted and changed him into something more complex than just a sniveling child.

And Dazai agreed in a sense. He knew he wasn’t normal, he wasn’t like the happy and carefree Odasaku or Asagao. He never fit inside that box but in those moments with them the boy liked to pretend, to wish for another outcome then just the demon that resided in his heart.

This hopeful and trying side of him that he had displayed tonight with Asa, that wasn’t like him. He had never tried to be kind before, to give anyone anything like he had given her Bar Lupin.

And though it was selfish, Asa told him that it didn’t matter. That just the very act of trying was enough for her. It was so tiny so minuscule and yet Dazai wondered if that was truly enough? Could he really honor Oda like this? He wasn’t sure.

But the fact that he hadn’t completely disregarded the idea, that he hadn’t given up yet was new. It felt almost human in a way, his desire to keep going and prove to Odasaku and Asagao that their words about him being a good man could be true.

He would pretend, he would imagine himself as something more than a monster.

And maybe if he pretended hard enough, then someday it could be real.

Realizing he needed to say something, Dazai then turned his head, curious to hear what a man like Mori would have to say on the topic. “If I’m not a kid than what am I?”

The boss had his answer immediately, seemingly countering the boy’s delusions with sharp truth. “Why, the demon prodigy of course. It’s what you've always been. Anyone else would be foolish to think otherwise.”

It was like he was calling Dazai out with his words, like he was trying to shut down his silly little “pretending plan” but even still, the executive couldn’t abandon it. He didn’t want Mori to be right in any sense, but especially for this.

Leaning back into his chair, Mori then smiled once more, the corners not reaching to the edge of his face before carrying on his thoughts. “Speaking of which, I’m in need of your help. Chuuya successfully completed today’s raid and we were able to capture one of their colleagues. The thing is, it seems like he needs a little more..persuasion..to tell us the rest of his plans..”

Dazai knew what he meant immediately. Torture. He wanted him to be the demon prodigy and torture this guy for information.

And normally he would’ve jumped at the chance to play around with some pathetic enemies but Asagao was still waiting for him and he knew this job wasn’t going to be an easy one. “I see, and you want me to do it?”

Mori only nodded his head though, pushing his fingers back under his chin with a hum.“Think of it as your makeup assignment for missing the mission.”

Oh, so that’s how he was playing it. He was blackmailing him for missing that stupid boring raid by asking this. And Dazai knew that if he refused then Mori probably would look into the reason on why he missed the raid in the first place.

And that would lead him back to the pretty little redhead that was in his apartment right now. Long story short, if he didn’t do this job, then there was a risk that Odasaku’s sister would be found out.

He was giving him this option as a way out, as an alternative instead of digging into his life. And though the boy wanted so badly to counteract his little game, the risk was too great. Oda would be horrified if Asagao ended up in the port mafia.

Because of that, Dazai simply took his hands out of his pockets before smiling back in challenge, just to push his buttons. He couldn’t be too eager about this either, or else it would raise suspicion. “And if I say I don’t wanna?”

Mori seemed to find amusement in the question though, his eyes narrowing in victory before reading his favorite port mafia executive immediately.

“Oh, I think we both know that’s a lie.”

-----

Stomping his feet in pure lingering frustration, Chuuya made his way back to his place, still muttering under his breath because of the dipshit encounter with his least favorite person in the entire world. Fucking Dazai, always putting him a bad mood like this.

What was that guy's problem anyways, always pissing him off like this? It’s like he enjoyed it or some shit. Hell, he probably did, that little asshole would.

Thinking back to their unpleasant conversation, the boy then turned the corner before shaking his head with a new list of obscenities.

Just what was that guy saying anyways? There was no way he was out with a girl all this time. What kind of brain dead freak would ever hang out with him anyways? Nah, he was bullshitting him, he had to be.

Chuuya then turned back around in order to put his arms up in a huff only to feel his hand connect with something solid on accident as a small female groan was heard to his left. What the hell was that?

Yet that’s when the boy’s eyes widened as he caught the sight of a hunched over figure in front of him, the strangers hands covering their face as Chuuya felt his stomach dropped in guilt. Ah, shit, when did she get there!? He didn’t mean to hit her like that!

Panicking almost immediately, Chuuya hunched over, his hands moving in all sorts of directions before speaking at a million miles a minute. “S-Shit, are you okay? You came out of nowhere. I didn’t see you.”

The mystery girl only waved her only free hand away though, seemingly unbothered that the ginger had almost knocked her out. “It’s okay, don’t worry about it. This happens a lot..”

At that, Chuuya felt him raise an eye. “You getting hit in the face happens a lot?”

What the hell did that even mean? Why wasn’t this chick yelling at him like he deserved? He had just hit her, unintentionally or not he was still in the wrong.

She only seemed to laugh though, finding humor in the sentence in order to lower her hand a little bit so he could see her large round framed glasses on her face. “Yeah ha ha..I don’t have the best eyesight…”

And though the glasses were surprising, it didn’t change the facts. The way she was still holding her face was concerning itself. “Still, it’s my fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going. Are you sure you’re okay?”

That’s when the girl simply nodded her head in order to put her hands out in defense with a goofy little smile of reassurance.“Yeah, of course. Look, I’m perfectly fine! No need to worry!”

Yet just as soon as she said that, Chuuya watched a thin line of blood trail down from her nose in response, his eyes hollowing in horror as she simply touched the sight with a nervous laugh. “Ah..ha ha..would you look at that..”

All at once, alarm bells started to go off in the boy’s head, running through every horrible possibility. He did hit her pretty hard, what if he broke her nose or gave her a concussion? Oh, he hoped not. Then he’d feel even worse than before!

Reaching his hands forward, Chuuya’s fingers then swept under the blood in a panic, ridding himself from the sight only for more to take its place. Oh, this was bad. “Ah, damn it. You’re bleeding!”

The glasses girl only shrugged though, still giving him that goofy unbothered smile in order to reply softly. “Just a little, it’s..”

Yet Chuuya was done hearing her downplay the situation, the boy simply grabbing onto her hand in order to pull her off the ground with a frustrated huff. “Is your brain broken? Come here already..!”

With the way she was acting he was sure that she had a concussion of some kind. No one would ever act this calm about this mistake, especially here in a port mafia owned building.

Dragging her over to the lobby bathroom, Chuuya quickly threw open the door before pointing to the fancy plush waiting area sofa with hastily command. “Sit.”

She complied a second later with the boy practically pushing her shoulders down in a rush only for her to put her hands up in reply. “Hey, I promise. I swear I’m okay. You don’t have to..”

Yet that’s when her words were cut off immediately by Chuuya’s hand, his thumb and forefingers latching against her nostrils in order to make her dip towards him with annoyance. “Lean forward and don’t move. The bleeding should stop in fifteen minutes or so.”

It was a trick he had learned from an early age while in the sheep. A lot of the younger members would get nosebleeds fairly easily so this was basically secondhand nature to the boy.

And it seemed like the mystery girl knew that as well, her voice coming out rather nasally and strange considering his hold on her. “You’re really nice.”

Chuuya couldn't help but scoff though. “Did you forget that I caused all this?”

She only pouted her lips in response though, not at all bothered by the truth. “You didn’t mean to though. You said it yourself. Besides, it’s kind of my fault too. I’m not the best with new places. It was bound to happen.”

Shaking his head in exasperation for her answer, the boy then caught something else in her sentence. “Speaking of which, who are you? You port mafia?”

He had never met this girl before after all, and though he was fairly new to the port mafia himself he knew he would’ve remembered her. She was too odd not to.

And not only that, she seemed way too nice to be in a dark place like this. A little naive and stupid also. Definitely not good traits to have in the mafia. Which either meant she was new or she didn’t belong here at all.

A moment later, he had his answer, the girl giggling to herself in a cutesy manner before smiling back. “Me? Oh no, not at all. I’m just visiting Osu.”

And because she didn’t use Dazai’s last name, Chuuya had no idea who that was, his head lifting in confusion. “....Osu?”

She then attempted to nod under his fingers, beaming with child-like excitement. “Yeah! I’m gonna surprise him with a sleepover! Ah, I really hope he likes it. I want to make him just as happy as he makes me.”

Her feet then began to kick happily underneath him with hidden joy as Chuuya couldn’t help but wonder who this guy really was. Sleepovers seemed kind of childish for the port mafia but then again she seemed so happy about it. He hoped it went well for her.

Feeling her tilt her head up without permission, the red haired girl then added. “And what about you Mr. Ginger? I take it that you're port mafia.”

It was a conclusion that was fairly obvious given the place that they were in. So much so, Chuuya barely gave much thought to her clever deduction in order to latch his fingers even tighter around her nose in order to pull her head back down. “Yeah I am, so you better listen to me and quit moving or else..”

She took in his threat immediately before another apologetic smile crossed her fingers. This guy was really serious, huh? “Okay okay sorry.”

Then all at once, Chuuya felt his shoulders relax, the anger dissipating only for that same heavy guilt to sink in. “I’m sorry too, for hittin you like this. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

This girl wasn’t even a port mafia, she was just some guy's girlfriend or something. She had probably never even seen blood in her life and he had done something so horrible to her. A thousand apologies would never be enough.

She only batted her eyes though, still not angry or spiteful in the slightest. “What were you thinking about?”

Almost immediately, her words brought back the annoyances of the night, Chuuya still hearing Dazai’s ear grating insults in his ears. “Just an annoying bandaged dumb ass I have to work with. He pisses me off, that’s all.”

What Chuuya didn’t notice though, was the way Asagao perked up at the sound of his description, her voice coming out rather curious and coaxing. “Bandaged dumb ass?”

Nodding his head in fury, Chuuya then grumbled to himself before forcing the distaste down his throat. “Yeah, but it’s not something you gotta worry about. That guys not worth anyone's time, especially yours.”

God, he knew that Dazai would’ve eaten this poor girl alive if he was here. She was too good for everyone in this place but especially for a monster like him. He would crush her innocent little soul into nothing.

If only he knew, right?

But naive little Chuuya didn’t know, his lips fixed into a frown only for the female stranger to say something rather out of pocket. “Sounds like you two are close..”

Close? What kind of joke was that? Yeah, the boy guessed he was close to Dazai in some capacity but not any he wanted to be. They were partners, forced to be stuck together. That’s it. Just what was this girl saying, what was she inferring from his words?

She didn’t think that two were…friends…right?

Because that was disgusting.

And he wanted her to know that. “Close?! You gotta be fucking kidding me, I hate that guy. I’m just forced to work with him, that's all. Calling me a dog all the damn time.”

Seriously, just what was this girl thinking? The day he actually became close to a guy like Dazai would be his last fucking day of earth.

Yet there was something in his sentence, something at the end that caused Asagao’s head to tilt back up against his hand as her lips parted open in some sort of delicious realization. Oh, so this is your dog, Samu. I can see why you love him.

And for a moment, Chuuya paused, sensing something different in the air.

Just why was this innocent girl looking at him so deviously, like a predator finding a new prey? It kind of creeped him out, like a horrible case of deja vu. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Yet just as quickly as it appeared, it disappeared, the girl’s head tilting back down in order to kick her legs back and forth with some sort of hidden delight. “Oooh nothing. Just thinking, that’s all.”

The way she said that, it sounded so similar to Dazai that he couldn’t help but cringe, pushing his fingers away from her nose all at once.

But that was silly, that bastard was just getting in his head. The two couldn't be alike. She was too nice to be that twisted.

Shaking the idea away, the ginger haired boy then took a step back before running his hands under the sink next to him with a huff. “Right..well that should be good enough for now. When you get back to Osu or whatever, make sure he takes care of you.”

Then he watched as the red haired girl seemingly hopped to her feet before giving him a small smile in return. “Thanks..”

Her tone was open ended, like she was looking for his name. And because he didn’t see the harm in it, the boy compiled. “Chuuya.”

Nodding once, the girl then pulled her hand out of her pocket for him to shake before repeating the gesture. “Asagao.”

He took her hand reluctantly, shaking back and forth before the two kids made their way out of the bathroom only for Chuuya’s head to ring with concern. She wasn’t seriously going to wander around by herself, right? That was a horrible idea.

Pushing his hand to her shoulder, the boy then reeled her back in question. “You know, this isn’t the kind place you should be walking around alone..”

Yet the girl simply put her hand up before laughing at his worry, almost like the thought hadn’t crossed her mind. “Oh, it’s okay! I’m not alone, I’ve been getting some help. And here they are now. Did you find everything I asked for boys?”

Then Asa simply lifted her hand up before waving a group of scary suited men over to her, their hands full of various pillows, snacks and other items that Chuuya assumed were for her supposed “sleepover” plan. “Yes miss.”

He couldn’t help but gawk at the sight though, seeing the small cute girl sandwich herself between them before patting their shoulders without a care in a world. “Perfect, now let’s go! We don’t have much time.”

Just who was this girl? And how had she commanded this group of mafia guys to do her bidding? There was no way, right?

Yet before he could come up with an answer he heard Asagao call back to him, her hand waving as she beamed joyfully from a distance. “Thanks again Chu Chu!”

Almost immediately he felt his lips twist in annoyance for the nickname, knowing that’s not what he said when he introduced himself. “That’s not..”

Although before he could finish the sentence, she was gone, leaving him to wonder just what kind of hurricane he had unknowingly got himself into.

“...my name..”

-----

Feeling his own feet carry him down the dingy steps, Dazai soon found himself back in the port mafia basement, his fingers lingering over the knives in order for his dull lifeless eyes to pick up the blade like a cruel cold welcome.

He had picked up these weapons hundreds of times before and this was no different. It was like muscle memory at this point and the boy fully knew what was coming next.

Dazai then seemingly slipped into his own internal thoughts, the warm lights of Bar Lupin and the soft blush that crossed Asagao’s face just a few hours prior. Such things were so lively, so real that he had almost forgotten the damp lonely feeling of where he originated from.

In Odasaku’s apartment, in the presence of Asagao he could block out the evil inside him, he could ignore the pull to destroy and to trample, but not here. Just by the shift of the air he knew that here there could only be darkness and corruption.

He couldn’t be a good man here, it was impossible to be.

But perhaps that was the point, that’s why Mori had brought him here. Because he was getting too comfortable, he was beginning to delude himself from reality. He had told himself that he could change, that he could be more than a monster.

And the boy still wanted that to be true, for Odasaku and Asagao both.

Pushing open the rushy hinges, Dazai then made his way to the shackled prisoner before him in order to immediately dig his knife into the man’s shoulder and twist and blade in muscle memory as he cried out in agony.

And as he felt the familiar sickening joy course through every single one of his muscles, the boy knew that it was wrong. That he shouldn’t have felt such satisfaction in making this man squirm. That’s not what a good person was supposed to do.

Yet he did, his body, his fingers, his muscles all twitched in satisfaction with the only thing that had accompanied him since he was a child. It was familiar, pulling him further away from his original goals by the second.

Simply because this was what this fucked up world had made him to be.

That’s right, he was the demon prodigy, he was shaped and misformed to be this way, a perfect monster of the port mafia. If Asagao saw him then he would think so also. She would take back her belief in him.

And though he tried to keep that fragile hope of change, with every stab and scream he physically felt it begin to slip away from him. This isn’t what Odasaku would’ve wanted, it’s not what Asagao thought he was..but this was all he had..

As a boy, as a child, Dazai was never given love, he never knew a gentle touch or a kind word. He didn’t grow up with normalcy or any sort of mundane. He went to bed with murder woke up with blood on his fingers and the sound of deafening screams.

Sometimes his own, sometimes not. But the fact remained clear as day even so..

This was what he was good at, whether Dazai liked it or not.

And that only showed just how different he truly was to Oda’s precious little sister. The things that Asagao had lived through were great but she had gotten away where he couldn’t. She could see more than his pathetic little world.

She was free where he would never be.

Another stab, another trail of blood seeped across his fingers only for a dark mocking voice to fill his ears and drown out his victims screams, his own thoughts and guilt corrupting him to insanity.

You are dishonoring his memory.

He knew that. He knew that so well, that by doing this, by torturing this guy he was going against everything that Odaskau wished for him. But he didn’t know any different, he couldn’t know any different. He wasn’t worth anything else but this.

You are making his little sister's words useless.

Damn it, he knew that also, okay?! A haunting memory, a foolish statement, that’s all it was. She called him a good man but what he was doing was in no way the truth. He knew she’d be disappointed like this, seeing him bathed in blood, torturing this man because of own inability to change.

Fuck, he hated it, he hated himself for being so incompetent.

What did she possibly see in him? Why did she call him precious? He wasn’t precious, he was a joke. A pathetic unfunny fucking joke. Didn’t she see how he was crumbling, how much of a failure he truly was?

Gritting his teeth against his own chaos, Dazai’s own demons tormented him once more.

You are not a good man.

And as his bloodied knife raised into the air once more, the demon prodigy knew the truth, his mind screaming it like a death sentence.

No, I’m not. I’m sorry.

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