#titles SUCK MAN

[seaofolives]

🎭 #torokatober2024 day 28/31: colony 🎻

“Cabin crew, prepare for landing.”

The captain’s voice mumbling through the speakers causes Trowa to wake up with a small start. Blinking several times, he sits up, stretches his shoulders back, then looks out the window.

It’s always a relief to see X-18999 still afloat in the black sea of Outer Space. Though, this would be the first time he’s seeing it with the pulsating red lights of the new extraterrestrial reception towers scattered around its hull. Another one of Winner Corporation’s quality-of-life improvements.

Trowa chuckles. Just seeing Quatre’s latest contribution to society already makes him feel like he’s home.

find the list of prompts here!

[uncleardyn]

(alan wake-gravity falls crossover) 12 year old girl and her new best friend, the sopping wet sad dog of a writer she found face down on the front lawn

[sundial-bee-scribbles]

🖤🩶🤍💜

[okitanoniisan]

no one can reach my level of petty hating about the stupid english title

[lagomorphics]

i really need to get around to naming my fic wips because im 5k words deep into a fic currently. just titled "i hate it when girls turn into a virus"

i also have various 1k - 2k wips that are some variation of "im getting scared" which isnt really helpful. because i dont know what each one is until i click into it

[slightly-nerdy-rambles]

Curious, what's the fic "It’s Real and It’s True and It’s Just Me and You" about? Title makes me think it's about Kim and Ron at prom/after prom

That's a good guess, but not really! (I do have plans for prom to figure into it, but that's only part of the fic.) It's actually a Soulmate AU, pretty much the only one I have planned because the soulmate sign or whatever it's called that I plan to use is one I find really ripe for shenanigans. It's... I think called a "Body Art" AU? The one where anything that's drawn or written on a person's skin also shows up on their soulmate's skin.

Basically, the idea is that Kim and Ron end up manifesting the soulmate connection thing early in their Junior year and freak out because they're still in the "the thought of us dating is weird/scary and I don't want to admit I like you like that" stage. I want to play with the concept a bit so that soulmates don't always get together romantically, just most of the time (and most people don't even have soulmates), so they kind of try to convince themselves and everyone else that it's just like, friendship-soulmates or something. And then they start using the artist bond thing creatively to do stuff like send discreet messages to each other on missions while also slowly realizing that oops maybe it is romantic after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, I just think it's a fun concept! Thank you for the ask!

[batsplat]

from the stuff i’ve heard marc’s former honda teammates (dani jorge and pol in their media careers but joan also i guess) say about him now that they’re racing is generally quite positive, both on a professional/riding level but also seemingly on a personal level? i’m wondering what you make of that given that, yeah, marc doesn’t seem like a very good teammate (unless you’re alex who i’ve left off this list). like MARC wants to separate on and off track stuff and it seems like all of these guys are willing too at least in retrospect, so he can’t have truly burned bridges with them. do you have any thoughts on that

(x, x) most riders are quite good at not burning bridges with each other! it's not like marc's competitors don't know that this stuff is kinda part of the game. I mean, all of marc's past teammates were also trying to assert themselves within the internal hierarchy... you can say that certain teammates engage in 'worse' behaviour than others, but, like, these people do understand they're supposed to be fighting each other! a baseline degree of nastiness is factored in and will be accepted to a greater or lesser extent by your rivals - especially when it comes to asserting yourself in intra-team power struggles. you might hate the other guy in the moment, but generally speaking once the active part of the rivalry is done with... you will probably get over it. marc's fellow riders are aware of how ultra-competitive marc is - and to a certain point they do respect it, not least because they're aware that this is part of the reason why marc has ended up with all those titles. it's like dani said, right, it's marc's strong suit. and in general, you do have to say that there's relatively few teammate pairings that devolve to the level of toxicity that it completely destroys the interpersonal relationship. you might need some level of preexisting animosity... most of the purely competitive sins can be healed with a little time

on the 'separating on-track and off-track' thing... well. this is kind of a question of how you define these things, you can say that marc generally speaking isn't going to massively hold grudges over isolated on-track incidents or whatever... but he doesn't just leave his fighting to the track, and personally I've also never felt he can entirely separate these things out in his mind. can you really say his professional and private relationships with other riders are completely detached from one another? mostly, he's opted to be pretty disengaged from his fellow riders as a collective, and obviously that's a good way to not take things too personally... it's all part of the game, isn't it? sometimes it's good to go with the straightforward approach: marc tells you he will make your life hell, he does indeed make your life hell, and then you both move on with your lives and can maybe actually have a pretty amiable relationship with him in years to come. he's not really defying your expectations at any point here, is he now? it's still a question for each of them as individuals as to whether they think that kind of behaviour is above board and acceptable or not... but everyone by now knows that marc plays these games, so it's not like they're going in blind

and it's not like other former teammates are constantly badmouthing each other. I mean... look, let's just cut to the chase here and bring in valentino as our reference point (as he is for the sport as a whole, which by the way does also help create a certain baseline of acceptability for marc's antics - maybe goated riders are just supposed to be dicks who knows). vale's premier class teammates were 1) nobody (2000-01), 2) tohru ukawa (2002), 3) nicky hayden (2003; 2011-12), 4) carlos checa (2004), 5) colin edwards (2005-2007), 6) jorge lorenzo (2008-10; 2013-16), 7) maverick vinales (2017-20), 8) franco morbidelli (2021), and 9) andrea dovizioso (2021). of these eight men (let's just exclude 'nobody' for now), do you know how many had serious complaints at any point about valentino as a teammate? that's right, it's one guy. one. some of valentino's other teammates, like hayden, checa and edwards, were even quite actively positive about their whole experience. this is the thing - you do need some specific circumstances for teammate rivalries to escalate from 'being kinda bitchy every other month' to 'actively fantasising about stabbing each other'. not accounting for natural interpersonal animosity, let's list some circumstantial factors that you need to get a bridge-burning-worthy level of feud:

you need a competitive bike. it is possible to beef about development direction when you're in the trenches (cf late 2010's yamaha, 2020's honda)... but generally speaking this is going to be quite low-level petty stuff, not actual war

you also need something that approaches competitiveness between teammates. if one teammate is unquestionably stronger than the other one, then it is very unlikely that you are going to get any open hostilities. the tension comes when the two sides are close enough to each other for the internal hierarchy to actually be a contentious issue (this is also basic self preservation... if you're the far weaker teammate then you do not want to make the situation troublesome, because then you will be the one to be fired)

following on from those first two things... well, it doesn't hurt to have a title fight in the mix. there are also other ways you can generate competitive stakes, like, for instance, if you and your teammate know that one of you will be out of a job soon. basically, it helps to have something to squabble over

it is maybe easy to forget how rare it is this century for teammates to be fighting directly for a title, let alone over the course of multiple seasons. only two 1-2's since the year 2000 and they're both for the factory yamaha's (though 2006, 2011-13 and 2017 did all prominently feature two factory hondas). which means that for valentino, the prerequisites were met just the once in his premier class career... and yes, the results were pretty memorable, but (topic! for! another! post!) it's worth pointing out that even that relationship was pretty much 'fine' whenever there was a sizeable disparity between the two of them performance-wise (2008 and 2013 are the most clear cut examples). I think the way I'd frame it with marc is that he has a bunch of mildly dubious strategies up his sleeve to assert himself within the team, which don't really deviate that far from what you'd expect from a rider of marc's calibre and only need to be escalated under specific circumstances. that doesn't mean he doesn't have the potential to be ruthless, but up until now it's mostly been a fairly 'acceptable' level of ruthlessness on the intra-team level... and not something that is likely to make other riders actually hate him

taking marc's teammates one by one... dani was the closest to meeting the bridge-burning prerequisites, though he was only a title rival in marc's rookie season. and marc did go further with him than he did with anyone else, and dani has made some pointed comments about marc's style as a teammate... but yes, he is fonder of marc these days. partly I'd just emphasise again that this is a fairly natural progression when you've stopped directly competing for long enough, and partly it's also just a question of individual personality - dani's not massively into holding grudges. then there's jorge, who... I mean, they might as well not have been teammates, given that jorge was either too slow or too injured to even be sharing any track space with marc. you have to put that one down primarily to circumstance, seeing as jorge's own track record on the teammate front isn't exactly spotless. marc and jorge beefing in 2019 would have been pretty dumb and also a massive waste of everyone's time in a year in which marc singlehandedly won the team's championship. even those two needed more to get things going

moving on to the dark years, pol and marc had an extremely stop-and-start partnership on a honda that was generally pretty uncompetitive... so the only stuff they could get ever so mildly irritable about were riveting incidents like 'marc saying pol wasn't the biggest championship threat' (neither of them were) or 'pol saying he'd copy marc's set up' (which proved entirely useless). not exactly title decider territory, is it now, and marc very much had pol covered as a challenger throughout their partnership. also, those two do have a longer history! they've known each other since they were kids and hold a pretty significant place in each other's careers. now that pol's more or less retired, it's natural there'll be quite a lot of sentimentality there - which will paper over any small cracks that appeared during those two years. and joan was a one year teammate at a time in which the bike was consistently close to offing them both. they only managed to start a sunday race together as teammates on thirteen occasions. it would take some serious effort to engineer a feud with that little opportunity, and, really, why on earth would you bother. maybe if honda had gone for rinsy rather than joan for the factory seat, it could've been a bit more prickly, but it's unlikely that it would have escalated beyond that

this is the thing, right, the only one of these partnerships that would have been worth burning bridges over was dani, and even there marc pretty much had him handled after the first season. in general, marc has been pretty clear on how he's not interested in making friends with the other side of the garage while the teammate relationship is ongoing... which is fine! there's some prominent-ish teammate pairings that are actually good friends, some teammate pairings where one of them is actively helping out and advising the other one, but some riders prefer to just keep their distance. it would have been a little silly of marc to start a feud with a teammate who is galaxies away from being a competitive threat, let alone a title rival, but generally it is possible to toe the line between 'attempting to suppress your internal rivals enough to stop them from becoming a problem for you' and 'taking radical enough action to make your internal rivals despise you'

especially in the post-dani era, marc never really had any need to push things too far... and, let's face it, how many of your teammate relationships end up with burnt bridges is also quite frankly a question of luck and circumstance. do you want to guess which top rider on paper has the worst track record this century with premier class teammate feuds, in terms of a) how many they've had, and b) how little public reconciliation there has been since the end of the rivalry?

yes, that's right, it's the first name that comes to mind when you're thinking of toxic and conflict-prone riders: andrea dovizioso. that old devil, constantly causing trouble. just couldn't stop undermining his poor, innocent teammates. can somebody please stop this ruthless bully before it's too late

I think you get the point. I would personally suggest that dovi is not in fact the worst teammate it is possible to have in a motogp top team. he just happened to find himself in a situation where he was teammates with two separate guys he did not click with at all, in situations that involved a pairing of riders who were (or had the potential to be) competitive with each other, as well as some proper stakes attached to the rivalry. in general, situational factors are going to determine this stuff more than anything else... and marc more often than not does have a reasonably good feel for picking his battles. he's flirted with the line, but he's mostly avoided crossing it. he hasn't had to

[moe-broey]

Puts Moe in a situation about it

[francy-sketches]

same energy. to me

[ultimateumbreon33]

every time i have a favorite professor, they leave the next year… even with tenure…

[aenslem]

aslkjdlasjf THIS GD SHOW, argh. i just finished season one, which i thought was a good idea, you know, finish the season before taking a break. *facepalms* i have those annoying things to do again (stupid household chores, every gd day you gotta do things), so it'll be a few hours before i can watch more, but i should be able to watch at least one or two more episodes today, so HOPEFULLY things will be a bit more resolved by tonight x'D

you were so right, there is so much happening, and i think EVERYONE on that gd ship needs a few years vacation after all this x'D

"married divorced remarried and divorced again and still having feelings for each other" asljdalksjda that is so correct, they are just that x'D

it's so fun, they're like "i don't trust him" pretty much all the time, and then Rush is like "so i had a dream" and Young is like "ok, i'll call General O'Neill" and they keep relying on each other so much right now, it's great, and Young risking the whole gd ship to save Rush, after having tried to kill him, what, twice already? amazing ❤

ah, yes, fanfiction ❤ it's so good at casting light on things from different angles, i love that, seeing characters and their motivations from all kinds of different point of views. though, you gif makers do that too and i love it, it's so great to look at different gif makers in the same fandoms and see how you focus different things.

right now i'm pretty exclusively reading McShep fics, but we'll see how that looks once i'm done with sgu x'D if you have any recs, please feel free to share!

btw, i've been trying to remember why i followed you from the start, and i'm pretty sure it's Star Trek, and specifically Spones, which, ALL MY LOVE! but i also want to mention how much i love following someone who gifs a lot of women, i love having more women on my dash! i never finished OUaT back in the days, but all your Regina and Swan Queen gifs are making me want to, and your Michelle Gomez gifs, waah, i do not want to watch CAoS! 😭 but you are kicking me in the butt about finishing Doctor Who too with your gifs of her (i sadly miss most of them though since i have it blacklisted for spoilers), i had no idea she was in it but man did that make me want to watch it when i found out!

okay, sorry that this got so long, even when i'm trying to keep things brief i end up being very wordy. so many things to say!

anyway, i'm gonna go do the things now, the sooner i get them done the sooner i can watch more sgu =D oh, wait, no, you posted something from 1x18 last night! i didn't look at it since i hadn't watched it yet, so i'm gonna go do that first! =D ❤

/Rodney anon

Oh don't be sorry , you can get wordy in my inbox whenever you like :3

You're fast! but why am I surprised, I finished 7 seasons of OUaT in a month lmao.

Well, imagine how it was for those who were watching sgu when it was actually airing, they did not have a chance to go and watch s2 right after s1, and you can :D so other things are not as bad as break between seasons of the show, but yeah, there's always things to do, sucks

askjhdaksjhd 'i just had a very interesting dream' scene is so good, and it so much better when you take it out of context lmao

well, they have to work together, they don't have a choice. you know how things were when he left rush on that planet, eli is smart, and eli was also right

but eli is still not good enough to do all the work, so no matter how much they don't trust each other, they have to work things out and work together and then finally going towards trust and comradery

well, at least they will try lmao

SPONES!!!!!!! SPOOOONEES! they are everything to me!!!!!

well, if you finish ouat and start caos... I am so sorry in advance lmao

I am not sure I can even explain what mess of the shows are those two, I have similar feelings towards both shows, I love the cast, I love some characters, I love women there, I hate the writers :D

Michelle is stunning in caos, there's also Miranda Otto, and they are like my moms, I love them, this show is worth watching just to look at them, but there's also... the rest of the show and plot asjkhdakjdh

same goes for ouat tbh, some characters are great and actors are doing such a good job and then there's whatever was happening in the show, but it;s still fun if you don't take it all seriously.

you will facepalm a lot and you will have an urge to rip your hair out sometimes, but if you try caos, I will give you two good reasons for it

that's it, think about it

okay, but you definitely need to watch doctor who, WATCH DOCTOR WHO!

[courfee]

And in a blinding moment of clarity, with his sister lying dead and his brother sobbing over her frail body, Albus lost all sense of love he had ever held for the other man. With the shovel he had used to dig up what was left of the youngest Peverell, he now caved another hole deep, deep into the chest of his lover. Until he, too, lay there, bones over bones, blood as deep red as the letters in the book in his now cold hands. And when Albus turned the stone over his remains, Gellert’s ghost appeared, laughing and laughing and laughing, until in a flash that shook the layers the world was made of and rippled the folds of the universe Albus got dragged away from all the people that once loved him.

a glimpse into the worldbuilding of the fic i'm writing. this isn't part of the fic (at least i don't think it will be) this genuinely only exists because i apparently can only think when i'm writing, but it was fun so here goes