#this is weirdly len and i'm yelling

[perexcri]

Yelling screaming hitting my computer devours this chapter whole. Flowers for Mike!! As he deserves !! And glowing flowers for you back💕💐💐💐💐, and also 🥰🥰🥰 for making me think of them as their reincarnated selves am screaming and also I am settling that firmly as canon in my brain.

““I know how Wheeler is. Make sure you surface for air every now and then.”

And as Will walks in a daze out of their house, as he turns on the Pinto and shifts it into gear, he decides that, while seeing Jim Hopper in his disheveled pajama state isn’t entirely too odd, Jim Hopper telling him to not let Mike Wheeler make out with him for too long definitely makes the top ten.

Possibly above that one time he coughed up a slug.”

Leah. Leah, When I tell you I Cackled, rndjwxisid. Love supportive dads in this house making their kids weirded out by their support. Hopper is probably just like, yep that kid is gonna be my son-in-law

Was about to give Ted Wheeler some props for the same thing (nejxieduejd Love that he’s just like. Okay Byler is happening, I am Okay w this), but I can and Will fist fight him into the next century over him making Mike feel bad about his hair.

Also!!!! That whole bit where Will’s imagining the far off future of 2009. Good shit good shit am eating it up like a tasty treat. (God,,,,,2009, I was like 10 or 11, and Mike and Will would be,,like almost forty. I simultaneously feel weirdly young and also Old bc 2009 was 14 years ago holy shit lol)

I just. Adore that both of their families are happy/cool w them dating . Bc they Deserve their happiness atp.

“he sees a harsh crease form between Holly’s eyes, and she looks like she’s close to aiming a forceful kick somewhere below his gut” cackling dhdidisf Holly Wheeler is amazing and also my daughter now. Drawings as gifts is so!! This family!!! dbdjciwxiwxissd brb sobbing

“Against his pale skin and dark blue flannel, the flowers almost seem to pulse with light, shining from the warmth of the sun in crackling scarlets and oranges, soothing purples, crisp whites.” Screams and screams and screams and scr— 💐

Sobs into my hands, they’re so in love and they’re on their first date🥹🥹

(Writing fic at work is Such a mood. Also are you enjoying your new job? :D am very happy for u)

Vee i knew you would understand 😌 if it means anything, as far as i'm concerned, i'm considering this fic to be them reincarnated. idk this fic has been enjoyable and fun to write, but i think i only like it? but i love aftry, so thinking about this Mike and Will as being the aftry Mike and Will reincarnated makes me more excited about this fic. is that mean to say? idk. i guess you can't love everything you make all in the same way, and i know i definitely have stronger feelings for aftry than this one. it's still been fun to write, though!!

HAHAHAH i'm glad the Hopper comment could make you laugh. it and the Ted scene were fun to write for me just because of my own experience with friends' dads? i've been in a single-mother household for most of my life, so sometimes it makes it awkward to interact with other people's dads, just because it's like i don't know how to act around them and they don't know how to act around me. it was just fun to sprinkle my own experience in with all of this, especially because Jonathan and Will are my ultimate st projection characters

yeah writing Ted as being passive about the whole Byler thing 😩 he's like "yeah sure whatever. just as long as you aren't eating all of our food idc." Ted seems too uninvolved to have the energy to be actively homophobic (at least through a comedic lens). i think through a more serious lens he definitely could be/is. idk. this fic's lighter, so i made it in the universe where there isn't a lot of homophobic rhetoric to deal with :')

oh believe me - writing Will imagining 2009 put me in a bit of my own crisis 🙃 i'm one of those people who still thinks the 80s was only 20 years ago, so having a character in the 80s imagine life in the 2000s being written by somebody in the 2020s made my brain hurt

ahh yeah Holly!! i don't think i've ever really written with her before. idk!! i thought it was fun!! i'm an older sister, so idk how younger sisters are "supposed" to act, but i figured the brother/sister dynamic would largely remain the same, and my brother and i definitely used to get into kicking/hitting fights with each other a lot lol. it was also just fun to imagine them being brats to each other, because while siblings do have their sweet moments, i feel like a lot of the time there are more moments Like That. or maybe that's just how i was raised idk (my family's love language is sarcasm, in case you were wondering 😩)

AHHH thanks for asking about the job!! yeah it's going good so far!! i think it'll be a nice change of pace for me, and i'm really excited about it :D

thanks as always for your lovely words Vee i am biting them (affectionate) 💜💜💜

[sephirthoughts]

First of all, @rosy-crow I love all your analysis so much I want to yell YES THIS! at basically every point. Anyway, I started writing a response and it got completely out of control, so here are my ramblings.

Let me preface this by saying that purely from a storyteller’s perspective, I really like Glenn. What a fantastic character. He’s an interesting, compelling, three-dimensional character his own right, with his own life and problems and motives, and he gets done so dirty by the franchise, by compressing his story with Sephiroth into a mobile gacha game (the games-as-service model is a cancerous blight on society but that’s a different discussion). 

When I say I talk a lot of shit about Glenn I mean I like to pretend to be anti-Glenn, because most of what I see posted about him is so overwhelmingly positive, it looks like he’s being proposed for canonization as a saint, and that’s not my experience of him as a character. To me, he’s not a hero, he’s not a selfless icon of nontoxic masculinity that should have taken little lost cub Sephiroth and raised him as his own son (this is meant tongue in cheek don’t burn me at the stake 😂). 

Glenn is a total mess, and in the end, he winds up being yet another destructive influence on Sephiroth. But I still love Glenn. Because none of that is his fault. Do I think he kinda sucks as a human? Hell yeah. Do I blame him for kinda sucking? Hell no. Would the story be better if he did not suck? Well, no, because there would be no story because he’d have saved Sephiroth and there would be no game series.

Glenn is technically the adult in the situation…but is he? When he meets Sephiroth, Glenn is 23 years old. TWENTY-THREE. He’s legally an adult, sure, but he’s not a stable, matured person who’s been through ten years of therapy and now knows how to properly contextualize their own trauma and use that hard-won experience as a lens through which to wisely and compassionately perceive others. He’s a barely-not-child who is trying to scrape together an existence and chose a terrible, terrible way to do it. 

If I was faced with the situation Glenn finds himself in when I was a 23-year-old trauma ball with anger and impulse control issues who grew up dirt poor and joined the military because I was in desperate financial circumstances and it was the only way I could make something of myself (that’s all real I relate to Glenn on a weirdly personal level) I’d have fucked it up at least as bad, if not worse. 

So what makes my brain go "ugh fuck Glenn" even though I don’t actually feel that way about him? It’s not a reaction to Glenn, the character, it’s my brain’s response cognitive dissonance when I see him being labeled as an overwhelmingly positive influence in Sephiroth’s life, because that’s not the feeling I personally got from the story. 

I think @rosycrow hit the nail right on the head with this: 

"Glenn was far from perfect, but he did more for that kid than anyone else had ever done, apparently. Sephiroth needed so much more, he needed them to stay, but the story demands tragedy, so there is conveniently placed ignorance, carelessness, abrasiveness, and lack of communication."

I'm not mad at Glenn, I'm mad at the story. He has such a great arc and all this character development during the mission makes sense, and shows that he has a good heart, despite being a brash young hothead. But because the story is already told, he can’t be allowed to actually be a positive influence on Sephiroth. Cause then who burns down Nibelheim? 

I’m not saying meeting Glenn wasn’t a positive experience for Sephiroth—it was unquestionably a hugely significant experience in his life. Sephiroth made his first friends, he learned to interact with humans, he opened up about not wanting to be what Shinra is making him into, Glenn hugged him more than once! He's certainly never had those experiences before and he thinks fondly of those people for the rest of his fucked up life. But did it have lasting positive influence on him? No.

Unfortunately, for all Glenn’s three-dimensional writing and character development, he can’t contradict the story demanding tragedy, and thus reducing all his positive influence on sephiroth to…yet another adult in Sephiroth’s life who completely failed him (as @saintcarlyon said, and I heartily agree, every adult in Sephiroth’s life failed him).

Glenn becomes yet another adult who has compassion for him till he stops functioning 'properly'. Who sees what is happening to him and does exactly nothing about it. Who has no intention of understanding his motives and blindly punishes his perceived bad behavior, by doing something in a fit of emotional overreaction that is downright malicious and horribly cruel (yes the locket thing). And Glenn, for all his good intentions and personal development, hurts and abandons Sephiroth, in the end. 

Is it Glenn’s fault he failed Sephiroth? No. He is an also an emotionally stunted trauma-ball, who is in no way equipped to deal with the massive and systemic eldritch-horror of a situation baby Sephiroth is in. He has neither the emotional maturity, nor the power, to do anything lastingly meaningful, because he's just a barely-not-kid, and only one tiny powerless cog in the giant Shinra machine. 

It's exactly because Glenn’s character is so realistic and imperfect that I really like him and have sympathy for him. I personally love when characters are deeply flawed and those flaws run up against other characters’ flaws within a situation to cause huge problems (that's what a plot is). However, it is also because of those flaws (and the way the games consistently shortchange their own storytelling) that the net effect he has on Sephiroth (whether Sephiroth winds up blaming him or holding a grudge or not), is not positive. 

At best, it’s a no-fault train wreck. Glenn's powerlessness and his personal flaws collide with Sephiroth's abuse trauma, within their highly tense and complicated situation, and this only winds up (unintentionally) confirming to Sephiroth yet again, that what is happening to him and the way he is treated is somehow deserved or acceptable. Because if it wasn’t, then people who were kind to him and became his friends surely would have helped him, right? Right…? 😭

DISCLAIMER: this is all my opinion and is subject to complete and total change, and also i won't be mad at anyone for disagreeing cause having very strong opinions about it just means we all care a lot about the same thing and we should be friends

i've talked a lot of shit about Glenn but the poor guy. he was literally just doing his job. he took one mission with a supposedly big reward attached, only to have it fail spectacularly, through no fault of his own, and also wind up ruining his literal entire life. and then getting him a bullet sandwich courtesy of rufus shinra, to top it all off, like.

bruh.

[ironychan]

When I got my optician's license, as a joke my mom gave me a jar of plastic eyeballs. I've been keeping it in the contact lens room at work.

The other day a co-worker noticed it looked weirdly empty. I thought so too but I'd never counted the eyeballs so I wasn't sure.

Today I caught another co-worker giving them away like party favours. I lost it and yelled at him in front of six people. He said he thought they belonged to the store, and offered to buy me more. I told him I don't want stupid plastic eyeballs that weren't given to me by my mother. I told him I was taking my work shoes home so he wouldn't give those away, too. I'm so angry I'm having heart palpitations. I don't know if I'm gonna scream, cry, or throw up.