#to be clear there are still problems but I thoroughly enjoyed myself this episode

[sylvancastor]

Okay am I going crazy or was that episode SIGNIFICANTLY better than the past four? Characters had their own motivations and disagreements and we saw a multitude of reactions to Rhaenys's death and it actually got the weight it deserved? We finally got to explore the dynamics on the Black side and that last scene with Rhaenyra and Jace was excellent.

We didn't get to see as much of the Greens, but what we did get to see was great. The eerie vocalizations when Aemond is standing in front of the Iron Throne and the pan back to Helaena asking him if it was worth it? And the scene of Aegon whispering "Mummy" after Alicent had walked away truly broke my heart.

I felt like I was watching the first season of House of the Dragon again where each episode kept me on the edge of my seat enjoying the character interactions and the interplay between the characters. It does beg the question that if the writers are capable of writing a decent episode what in the world occurred with the first four episodes, but I hope this starts a trend for the back half of the season to outshine the lackluster (in my opinion) opening episodes.

[elwenyere]

Helps to Relieve My Mind

Hello fam! I wrote my first little Sambucky ficlet today in an effort to tide myself over until Friday’s new episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. If such a thing would help tide you over as well, please feel free to give it a read. I very much hope you enjoy! <3

Tags: Sam/Bucky, 1.8k words, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Getting Together

CW: descriptions of falling and panic attacks

Read it on AO3

“Is it too late to go back to therapy?” Bucky called over the comms.

It had been less than forty-eight hours since he and Sam had decided to ditch Walker and go after the Flag-Smashers on their own, and they were already getting their asses handed to them again. They’d gotten side-tracked on their way to see Zemo by a tip from Torres: a group of hijackers matching the description of the missing super-soldiers had been spotted loading up a cargo plane with medical supplies in Kiev. Bucky and Sam had showed up just as the Flag-Smashers were readying for takeoff, and when Sam had flown straight through a rain of gunfire and into the open cargo bay door, Bucky had had no choice but to follow, cursing under his breath as he ran to catch the taxiing plane. 

He’d managed to haul himself inside just as the wheels left the ground, only to have his back slammed into the metal wall of the cargo hold a minute later, a serum-enhanced fist clutched tightly around his throat.

“You could always change your mind about following me,” Sam offered, a rhythmic series of thumps and clangs from the other end of the bay revealing that he was dealing with problems of his own. “I bet you could even get another ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card if you agreed to up with -”

“Don’t say it,” Bucky growled, grabbing the wrist of the soldier holding him against the wall and twisting it viciously.

“- John ‘Wingman’ Walker and his partner,  Battlestar,” Sam finished, the grin somehow audible in his voice.

“You’re just lucky all my other options suck even worse than this,” Bucky muttered, taking a deep breath and bum-rushing the man in front of him.

“Yeah, ‘lucky’ is definitely how I’ve felt every day since you ripped the steering wheel out of my damn car in the middle of the highway,” Sam retorted. Bucky could hear the sounds of bullets ricocheting off metal, and he glanced over to watch Sam reemerge from behind a stack of crates.

“Even the Winter Soldier has some fond memories,” Bucky reflected, ducking a roundhouse kick from the redhead who’d booted him out of the truck in Germany and then sweeping his arm back to catch her solidly across the jaw. 

He’d just turned to reassess their situation when he saw one of the soldiers poised by a lever on the side of the wall.

“Shit!” he yelled. “Sam!”

And then an explosion of air knocked him off his feet, and he felt himself yanked backward, scrabbling for purchase on the floor of the aircraft as he slid toward the open door. Unfortunately, it was his fleshy hand that finally found it. Just as he was about to run out of room, he wrapped his fingers around the lip of the lowered door and then let out an involuntary grunt of pain when his full weight caught against the hold, his legs whipping behind him in the open air.

“Shit,” he swore again, trying to strengthen his grip so that he could risk making a grab for the door with his metal hand.

“Bucky!” Sam yelled, and for some reason the change in his tone sent Bucky’s heart rate rabbiting even faster than the scramble across the floor. “Hang on! I’m on my way!”

A metal crate went flying over Bucky’s head, and he winced automatically, sending a jolt of pressure through the fingers clinging to the plane. And because he was always aware of Sam’s position in the fight, he knew there was no way he was going to make it in time.

“Sam, you should know -” 

His words were cut off when the plane banked abruptly to the left. Bucky’s legs jerked sideways, his hand spasmed, and then he was falling through the air.

It was different than the last time. He could still hear what sounded like screaming - either a voice calling his name or the air hurtling past him, rushing away from him and refusing to bear his weight. He could still feel the terror claw up his throat and curl into the back of his mind, covering his thoughts with a white, electric blanket. But this time he knew what it would feel like when he hit the ground. He could already feel the rocks cracking through bones and tearing at the sinews of his arms, and all he could do was grit his teeth and hope to wake up somewhere better than he had before.

He twisted in the air so he could see the end coming, every muscle in his body wrenching tight in anticipation. But then he felt a hand curl around the back of his head, and a weight slammed into him from the wrong direction, shifting his momentum abruptly to the side. Before he knew it, there was soft grass under his knees, pressing up against him and holding him still.

“I got you,” Sam said, his arms still wrapped tightly around Bucky’s back. “I got you.”

Bucky felt like he was sucking air through a straw, his head dizzy with a flood of adrenaline as he clung to the fabric of Sam’s uniform and curled up against his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut to stop the vertigo, but in the darkness all he could picture was an avalanche of snow and ice and unforgiving rock, and a second later he opened his eyes again with a gasp. His muscles were still screaming with the effort of bracing for collision, and he struggled to even out his breathing, willing himself to concentrate on the weight of Sam's arms around him, grounding him.

As the haze gradually began to clear, Bucky became aware that Sam was still repeating the same words, his cheek pressed against the top of Bucky’s head. But the tone of Sam’s voice seemed to have shifted, so that what had started as a reassurance now sounded like a kind of desperate chant.

“I got you,” he repeated, his own breathing coming sharp and fast. “I got you.”

Suddenly Bucky remembered the photo in Sam’s wallet when he paid for drinks in Germany, the story Steve had told him as they sat on a hill in Wakanda.

Fuck.

“Sam,” Bucky whispered. 

Sam’s arms tightened almost convulsively, and Bucky reached out to rest his hands gently on Sam’s lower back. 

“Hey, Sam. I’m okay,” Bucky continued, listening to Sam’s breathing slow down. “I’m here. I’m okay. You caught me.”

Sam straightened up slightly, one of his hands moving to cradle Bucky’s head as he'd done during the fall, and Bucky pressed his forehead against Sam’s.

“You caught me,” he repeated, and this time it sounded like a brand new idea. Sam had caught him. Bucky had lost his grip, and Sam had been there to cushion the fall.

“I’ve been trying to catch you, you idiot,” Sam replied, shaking his head with a faint echo of exasperation. “Do you have any idea how scary it is to think you might not let me?”

He gave the back of Bucky’s neck a gentle squeeze, one thumb sweeping up into Bucky’s hair, and for the first time in decades, Bucky’s body responded to an instinct that hadn’t been carved into his brain with a knife: he leaned in and pressed a kiss to the corner of Sam’s lips, sighing at the warmth of Sam’s skin against his.

A moment later he froze, pulling away with exaggerated slowness and wiping all traces of expression carefully from his face. Sam was staring back at him, wide-eyed, and for a second Bucky felt like he was in free fall again, his stomach heaving as he plummeted through space.

“That was - uh,” he tried to explain. “Sam -”

But before he got another word out, Sam had hauled him in by the back of his neck and was kissing him thoroughly, his mouth soft but hungry against Bucky’s, and something hot leapt through Bucky’s chest that seared deeper than any of the afterimages or second-hand shocks that had passed for getting his life back.

When they finally broke apart, it was because Sam had started laughing.

“Seriously, man?” Bucky protested, a small smile tugging at the corner of his own lips. “I know I’m out of practice, but if you make a crack about being cryogenically frozen, I swear to God.”

“I was going to say that if the kind of healing you’ve been looking for is less Sigmund Freud and more Marvin Gaye, you could have just called me back,” Sam retorted, giving Bucky a grin and a playful shove on the shoulder. “It would have been the world’s easiest alley oop. Lord knows I was giving you more assists than John Stockton gave the Mailman - and that is a crack about being in deep freeze, by the way. You could be understanding that reference right now if you hadn’t been ghosting me instead.”

Bucky scanned Sam’s face, drinking in the warmth and openness that he had always found infuriatingly, impossibly brave.

“You’re the only number in my phone other than my shrink,” Bucky explained finally.

Sam tilted his head, his eyebrows raised significantly.

“That’s kind of my point, Bucky.”

“No, I’m trying to tell you that’s why I couldn’t call,” Bucky continued. “I have a list of people I’ve hurt in the past that’s so long I can’t even see the end of it. But when I turn to the list of people who are here for me now?” He held up a single finger and then jabbed it toward Sam’s chest. “You’re it. Just one. So if I take a chance, and I fuck that up -” He shook his head ruefully. “Well, let’s just say it felt safer to imagine you might still be out there than to know for sure that you weren’t.”

Sam’s face softened, and he opened his mouth to reply, but Bucky waved him off.

“And that was total bullshit: I know,” he said quickly. “More importantly, it was selfish. What you said yesterday about me not understanding what you were going through - you were right. I never once asked how you were doing. I guess I was in such bad shape to help anyone that it was easier for me to believe you didn’t need any help.” 

Sam regarded him thoughtfully.

“Therapy, huh?” 

“God, it’s the worst.”

He gave Sam a smile, this one feeling a little less like a mask someone else had drawn. Sam smiled back, reaching up to trace the edge of Bucky’s lips lightly with his thumb.

“One of those things you might not understand about me is that I’m not very good at needing people either,” he said, dropping his hand to rest on Bucky’s metal shoulder. “But I think I’m going to need you on this, Bucky.”

“Yeah, well, that’s probably true,” Bucky agreed. “Seeing as you just let the Flag-Smashers get away again.”

“Maybe next time you could try to stay inside the vehicle,” Sam suggested. His tone was light, but the squeeze he gave Bucky’s shoulder telegraphed some of the fear still clinging to the lines of his face.

“You’ll catch me,” Bucky shrugged, trying for casual assurance and landing closer than he would have thought possible.

“Always,” Sam promised.

[dialovers-translations]

DIABOLIK LOVERS MORE, BLOOD OFFICIAL VISUAL FANBOOK ー Interview Vol. 2 feat. Nao Nakamura

Source: DIABOLIK LOVERS MORE, BLOOD Official Visual Fanbook

Release date: 2013

Huge thank you to @keithvalentinex​ for providing the raw scans!

SECTION 1: Q&A

Q1. When was the series’ sequel decided on?

A: Around the time the first game ‘DIABOLIK LOVERS’ was released in stores. We were fortunate enough to have already received news of an anime adaption at the time, so at some point we played with the idea of creating a fan disc to go along with it. However, if possible we wanted to hype up the series even more in anticipation of the anime’s release, which is how the production of a  ‘DIABOLIK LOVERS MORE, BLOOD’ series came to realisation.

Q2. Did you plan on introducing a set of 4 new characters during the early phases of development?

A: The initial draft we received from Rejet-sama mentioned four characters. We figured that with that amount, we could pack it into one game and create an equal amount of content as we did for the Sakamaki’s, so we proceeded with said idea. At one of the first brainstorm sessions, we casually dropped the idea of creating a game with 6 Do-M characters... (lol) However, that would stray too far away from the core concept behind ‘DIABOLIK LOVERS’, so it obviously got rejected. (lol)

Q3. How did you go about writing the characters’ dialogue and actions?

A: I believe that the previous installment can be regarded rather groundbreaking within the genre of otome games. However, the boys coming across as too strong to the point where it would prevent someone from delving deeper into their character is something we reflected upon. We wanted to make up for that this time and created this game with the intend of exploring them even further.

Q4. What did you struggle the most with while writing the script?

A: This doesn’t apply solely to the script, but the fact there are so many romanceable characters in this game is what made it so difficult. However, we did not want there to be a difference in quality between the different characters’ routes. Despite our strong wish to please the playerbase, it made the distribution of time very difficult. The writers would first pen down the script, then Rejet-san would do the proofreading and make adjustments and then pass it on to us. However, reading a script while playing a game or simply reading it on paper is still different, so we were making minute changes down to the very last minute of development. We ran through the same process for the last game, but this time around, the total amount of content was just very large. We once again felt the struggle of putting in so many characters to choose from. However, we did this to create an even better game, so it was worth the struggle. 

Q5. Which character caused you the most problems while writing the script?

A: All of the Sakamaki’s. The four Mukami brothers who make their appearance in this installment may be Vampires, but they were once human just like the heroine, so in terms of emotions, they tend to sympathize with her more. As a result, it only makes the Sakamaki’s seem even more like they are the villains of the story. While this may seem obvious given their original setting of being both ‘Vampires’ and ‘extreme sadists’, it makes it very easy for the otome game element as well as the feelings they end up developing for the heroine to be lost, in which case they would no longer be the six brothers we wanted to deliver. Therefore, it was very difficult to convey to the player that the love they harbor for the heroine eventually makes them change, while still preserving the sadistic tendencies which stem from their nature as Vampires at the same time. The player base has spent quite a bit of time interacting with these brothers, and I am sure it was not always easy, but I hope said message was delivered to those who played our game.

Q6. Is there a character who underwent drastic changes compared to the last game?

A: All of them are still the same at the core, so my impression of them did not change depending on the scenario. I believe minor changes were done to the way some of the characters are drawn, but personally I perceive each character as a mix of both their previous and current representation. 

Q7. In this game, each section is divided into a ‘Situation Part’ and ‘Story Part’. Could you explain your intentions behind this?

A: When collecting feedback on the previous game, we received many complaints about the different chapters feeling inconsistent and all over the place. However, we always intended ‘DIABOLIK LOVERS’ to be a game in which the player gets to enjoy these different kind of ‘situations’, so without losing this part of the enjoyment, we figured we had to make the plot progression easier to grasp, which is how the current structure was implementend. To make it even more clear to the player, we divided it into two sections and gave each of them a title, changing the names as well. 

Q8. What are parts which have greatly improved or parts you want us to focus on in comparison to the first game?

A: To ensure the player gets to enjoy the development in the heroine and characters’ thoughts and feelings, we applied small adjustments till the very last second. We hope that the people playing the game will take notice of this as well. 

Q9. Why do you think the series has received such a great amount of support?

A: I believe the impact of the ‘Do-S Vampire’ concept, Satoi-san’s eye-catching illustrations and the charm of the cast who voices the characters all play a big part in this. Furthermore, I also believe that the simultaenous announcement of both drama CDs and a game which took place during the early stages of development had a large influence as well. We were able to make a smooth transition from the release of the CDs to the release of the games, which made it easier for the fans to follow along with the franchise. We truly are grateful for that!

Q10. Were there any ideas you wanted to incorporate in this game, but were unable to do in the end?

A: This game features the same selection segment as the previous one in which scenario’s 1 ~ 6 raise your love meter, while scenarios 7 ~ 10 raise the SM meter. However, we implemented the distinction between the ‘situation part’ and ‘story part’ this time, so it might have actually been even more enjoyable if the situation part raises the SM meter instead...I think. Those kind of features may vary depending on the vision of the director and staff members, so I would like to use this experience to think of various possible routes for future installments, as well as to settle on an end product which is fitting for the franchise. Furthermore, this may seem like a task without an end but I believe that the voicing plays a big factor in delivering the story. It is a vital element of conveying the message you want to tell, in a way that whether or not the player understands the plot is often highly dependent on the voice work. Every time I find myself wanting to perfect this, but it is difficult to supervise all of it just by myself...However, there’s always next time, so I’d love to squeeze in the time to thoroughly check this!

Q11. Do you have any more games planned for the series at present? Would you personally like to create more sequels?

A: We do not as of now, but if there is a strong demand for it, we might just be able to develop another game. Personally I would like to make a stereotypical ‘fandisc’ but the very first thing that comes to mind with those is a 'sweet, romantic story’ so I do struggle a little envisioning how that would play out with a cast made out of nothing but intense characters. 

Q12. Please leave a message for the fans.

A: Thanks to the support we have received from all of you, we were able to create so much content for this franchise. I put my heart and soul into this game, so I sincerely hope that many people will enjoy it. Your impressions and encouraging messages are a great motivator as well, so I am eagerly awaiting those! The series may deliver new installments in the future, and to ensure that you all can continue to enjoy ‘DIABOLIK LOVERS’, we will continue to try our hardest together with Rejet-san, so we’d be happy if you could send us your heartfelt support. 

SECTION 2: THEIR FAVORITE EPISODES

Sakamaki brothers: The final few chapters of Ayato’s route left a strong impression on me. I couldn’t help but wonder if somebody could truly be that stubborn and in denial about their own feelings, insistent on calling the girl they love ‘a prey’ till the very end. I felt so frustrated when the heroine’s feelings just wouldn’t get through to him, tears welled up in my eyes. 

Mukami brothers: The part which gave me the most goosebumps during the development stages has to be Ruki’s Manservant Ending. Takagi Sakurai-san did a magnificant job portraying his silent madness, it was truly wonderful. Second place would be Azusa’s brute ending, even though I knew how the story would go, I still ended up feeling a little depressed by it, so please be careful when you play this scenario...

SECTION 3: NAO NAKAMURA CHOOSES ー SITUATION-DEPENDENT CHARACTER SELECT

Who would you choose in these situations? What’s the developer’s opinion?

S1. To sleep together with?

Best: Subaru, I feel like he has a good sleeping posture.

Worst: Subaru, he might not move around much in his sleep, but it’d still be uncomfortable and narrow in that coffin, huh? 

S2. To go on a trip together with?

Best: Shuu, I’m sure he’d just loaf around the lodge all day, so I get to enjoy the trip in whichever way I want!

Worst: Laito, I’d rather keep my distance from him. 

S3. To eat together with?

Best: Kou because I’m sure he’d happily gobble it up.

Worst: Kanato, I feel like the food would be lacking in nutrients.

S4. To study with?

Best: Ruki, I think he’d do a good job explaining everything accurately.

Worst: ???, honestly all of them...

S5. To go on a date with?

Best: Yuma, I actually think he would make for a great boyfriend.

Worst: Shuu, because everything would be a chore to him...

S6. To play a video game with?

Best: Ayato, he just seems like the type of guy you can always have fun and make some ruckus with.

Worst: Reiji, he seems super fussy.

S7. To play sports with?

Best: Shuu, I don’t really like exercising so...I’ll go with the person who seems unlikely to exercise in the first place.

Worst: Ayato, I don’t like exercise after all...

S8. To go on a drive with?

Best: Ruki, I’m positive he would look handsome behind the wheel.

Worst: Azusa, it’d be bad if his bandages were to get stuck around the steering wheel or the gear stick...

[traumatized-motherfuckers]

CPTSD and Core Beliefs (Your lens, built on traumatic fuckery)

Alright, so you know I have this Patreon thing that I try to make worth your while in return for your economical help. One of the benefits is the good ole’ monthly ask me anything. And I love it. Because the questions are great. And they push me to dig into topics that I was procrastinating. This month’s AMA is a particularly good one! A question that needs to be addressed, anyways. So it’s perfect. Let’s aim for two birds with one stone.

Our good friend Cassie - you know her by now - asks, how do you identify core beliefs and start to change them? Which is a very simple and very complicated question.

  So, to take a step backwards, what she talkin’ bout?

  Well, one of the internal issues that complex trauma sufferers have to rectify is their belief system. Between our core beliefs and our inner critic, we have a lot going on in between our ears to keep us downtrodden and destitute.

  We’re talking about what I call Fucked Up Core Beliefs here… which are your trauma-born core beliefs. Again, called FUCBs because when you discover them, you’ll likely whisper to yourself, “wow, that’s actually really fucked up.” These sentiments are like the lenses that you surgically stitched onto your face several decades ago in response to your upbringing, as your little mammal brain tried to understand its place in the global hierarchy and how to be chill about it.

 The framework you built from your early development and beyond, that all information still filters through today - both on the way in and on the way out of your head. The words that stream through your brain consciously or subconsciously to shape the ways you appraise… everything. Yourself, your life, your past, your future, other people, and everything that happens in between.

  So, essentially, talking about the ways you interpret your existence and the collected pool of knowledge from where you make decisions, and therefore the ways you act. If this is starting to sound like a big deal - it is!

But it don’t come with a big flashing sign. The Challenge

These beliefs are challenging to figure out because:

  One, they were adapted early on in your life in an effort to understand the circumstances around you or directly downloaded from the sentiments expressed in your environment. When you were first establishing your perspective of the universe and trying to figure out how to navigate it based on the clues presented.

  Plus, the harder part is… because of the early adoption, you’ve already accepted the idea for so long that it doesn’t even seem like a “belief” to you - you’re not choosing it and it’s probably not apparent to you - it’s just the secret narrative running in your head that corrupts all later data. Not cognitive thoughts that you’re directing on purpose. You probably don’t have recollections of the time before you believed such and such to question what you believe - these ideas are solidified in your head with as much certainty as the alphabet.

  So, you might believe you’re a worthless piece of shit as a function of the neglect and abuse you experienced, a way to explain the mistreatment to yourself from a young age… OR you might believe you’re a worthless piece of shit because mom, dad, sister, and society directly told you so. But either way, many years down the line, it’s difficult to pinpoint either of these originating factors as memories fade or to even question the validity of the thought… or to even notice the thought.

  Two, if your family of origin was always repeating the same sort of thoughts and you later associate with people who make you comfortable to be around (i.e. probably have some similar views of the world), you have nothing to compare your beliefs to.

  Your environment teaches you what’s normal. There’s no reference for what is and isn’t healthy, fair, or functional if everyone is drinking the same kool aid. And, unfortunately, in traumatic environments, folks seem to congregate around the fucked up beliefs to protect them with a mutual unspoken agreement. Accept the accepted narrative of the group or be outcast. The same story is replayed on repeat from all ends of your social circle, so why would you even begin to think there’s another way to look at things?

So, if mom, dad, cousin, uncle, grandma, neighbor, peer, teacher, and media are all telling you the same reality exists, how would you ever even begin to have the wherewithal to think otherwise? The thought probably never crosses your mind. The sky is blue, grass is green, and the world is a miserable place where everyone is trying to take advantage of you.

  Three, again, I cannot over-express how insidious, subtle, and generalized these things can be. Fucked up core beliefs affect how you see and process everything. Again, like lenses or an instagram filter permanently applied to your corneas. So, there’s not necessarily one life-effect linked to one-FUCB for easy detection or one event that will cause a clear-as-day defined belief to come shooting to the top of the pile. More like, you very slowly realize you have an unhealthy view or twenty about yourself and the world that have sorrrrrtof impacted every single area of your life now that you spend years considering it.

  Thinking you’re a worthless piece of shit, for instance, has led to you taking low-level jobs with chaotic schedules, living with an abusive partner, and settling for living in the same environment with the same behavioral patterns that you’ve known your entire life. It’s also allowed you to give up exercise, eating right, staying sober, and trying to make any life-improvements. Why bother spit polishing shit? And here you are, wondering why you feel awful about yourself and don’t enjoy anything you’ve created in your life.

  But. It’s not that simple to sort out, or else we would have done it already. You probably haven’t ever purposely considered how commonly this impression is operating below the surface of your actions. Realizing that the belief “I’m a worthless piece of shit who deserves nothing” and trying to change it would be like pulling out the wrong Janga block - everything it has been supporting suddenly comes tumbling down and you’re left with a real fucking mess to rebuild from the bottom up. And, to top it all off, no one ever even taught you how to create a sturdier structure in the first place.

  Fourthly, from some of my own learnings, I’ve come to the conclusion that the core belief, itself, doesn’t even have to present itself at any point to be making a difference in your life. They are so deeply ingrained in my brain that my thought center just naturally uses them as a jumping off point, without even directly touching on the words that might ping my brain as unusual. Just like we can subtly detect risks in our environment that set off our warning bells without ever creating a conscious thought to go with the arousal, I feel like I can apply a core belief to my world without ever noticing the accompanying stream of consciousness.

Sometimes I feel like fucked up core beliefs have become so accepted over time that they’re feelings more than cognitions. As if they’ve become so reflexive through repetition that you have muscle memory - an intuitive response that bypasses your logical brain recognition threshold and jumpstarts shittily-related thoughts… and those will actually register on your thinking scale. But at that point, you accept the novel-feeling thought and never note that it was actually spawned by a very old recording.

  Which is to say, you might have to work on identifying your fucked up core feelings before you can get to the thought deeply buried underneath. Taking a meta break from the episode to tell you, I’ve never thought about that so thoroughly before. But Fucked Up Core Feelings definitely sounds like a solid description of my world. I guess we also have FUCFs to go with our FUCBs from now on. Anyways.

  With all of this in mind, I’m sure you can start to see why these fucked up core beliefs are a big problem. Hell, if you’ve listened to this podcast for more than a few episodes, you’ve definitely heard that I’m still challenged by my own. Like, when I say that I’m freaking out because no one should listen to me and I feel like an imposter - I believe that I’m not good enough to share information with people. That I’m too flawed to even express myself. This is a problem for, say, podcasting. Or, living. And I have to fight it all the time.

  Long story short.

  Your core beliefs are sneaky, they can be comprehensive, and they are hardwired into your brain as your default system for analyzing everything on the planet. Again, kind of like looking for goggles strapped to your face, but in reality you had lasik surgery about 30 years ago.

  So, if you aren’t constantly on the lookout for core beliefs and actively working against your pre-programmed ways of assessing yourself and the world around you… they will get out of control, cause a fair amount of avoidance and defeat, and set you back several steps in your mental health management… plus, potentially your entire life, if you make any big decisions out of this unhealthy mindset. Which you will, because that’s how the brain works. I’m almost certain that you have some experience with this already.

If you ever think things like: The world is a dangerous placePeople are cruelI’m not good enough I’m not smart enoughI’m not enoughI’m brokenOther people don’t like meThere’s something wrong with my personalityI’m not allowed to… (live like others, have nice things, be happy)I’m not one of those people who… (has money, has good luck, gets what they want)Shit is just harder for meNothing ever works outLife is always hardI can’t.

Then you’ve had some fucked up core beliefs floating around in your head.

 These are some super broad ones for the sake of demonstration, so don’t disregard highly specific beliefs that might relate to your particular circumstances or upbringing.

  If you haven’t ever noticed yourself thinking these big shitty picture things… check again in all your deepest nooks and crannies. I think a lot of us TMFRs operate from some version of the narratives above - plus, much worse. Like I keep saying, these beliefs might not be in your conscious thoughts, so much as they’re directing the show from behind the curtain.

How do we pull it back? Discover the beliefs ........

Keep reading or listen up at t-mfrs.com

https://www.t-mfrs.com/podcast/episode/532f2b1c/core-beliefs

[vtforpedro]

LONG POST, medical update. ptsd, suicide TW: I’m really tired. I feel like I’ve been saying that for a year but I am exhausted. mind, body and soul exhausted my head got better after I lost the water weight my chemo pill was packing on (I was 15lbs lighter than the three weeks previously. so it was pretty bad lol) but now it’s getting bad again. it never gets to the point of relief, but it gets manageable and now it’s becoming unmanageable again. it’s not water weight but it might be cause I’ve put on a couple pounds over the holidays (just barely a couple pounds, I’m eating much lighter in general) anyway I don’t see the point of being scared to name what it is my neurosurgeon and I believe this is anymore. my psychiatrist thinks it makes sense, my pcp, even the ER doctor I saw on dec. 2nd lol but I am 99.9% sure this is what I have and it does makes sense but every fucking time I think about it for a while it makes me so angry. so so so angry y’all. I wish I could sit every single medical professional I interacted with over the last year or so who didn’t believe me and tell them it’s all been real, they failed me to such a degree I have ptsd and anger problems that I’m going to need therapy for, and tell them to learn how to be better providers. blegh so I saw my neurosurgeon (one of the best in the country) for the first time in april. his thoughts? anxiety with muscle tension in my back and neck that led to tension in my head. as in the muscles around my bones, not inside of my skull. didn’t listen to me or believe me, thought all my crazy symptoms were just anxiety and possibly the chiari malformation but there’s no treatment for that beyond surgery and mine is so mild no one wants to go that route (me most of all lmao) I put off seeing him again because I saw different neurologists and my PCP over the months who basically all said the same thing. like my PCP believed me and gave me referrals to the neuros, but one told me to ‘stop worrying about this and just enjoy life’ and the other sat with me for an hour, the first half of which she was all on board the ‘anxiety is fucking with you, none of this is real’ train until I had to tell her to LISTEN TO MY SYMPTOMS firmly enough that she did. she went the opposite way then and said yeah ok something ‘mechanical’ is happening, you need to go back to a neurosurgeon. turned out she loves the neurosurgeon I saw in april (worship the ground he walks on, were her words) but told me maybe I still needed a second opinion. she did also mention that I’ve been living with this for so long that I’m ‘married to it now’ which still implies I’m making it worse than it actually is but :) whatever, she couldn’t think of what it could be decided to just go back to that neurosurgeon and tell him the physical therapy he prescribed in april I had to stop because it made things worse. his PA tried to prescribe me more PT on the phone before I firmly told her I needed to SPEAK with him face to face because my quality of life is gone, because I get close to killing myself weekly because of how bad this is and nothing has improved since april. only gotten worse. so I had my appt with him in late October I think? I explained all of my symptoms (again) and told him how nothing has changed, things have gotten worse, when I do x y z I have an episode, etc etc. he said he still doesn’t think it’s the chiari but he said it *might* be IIH idiopathic intracranial hypertension first time I’ve ever heard of it and even though it was over 11 months into this, it might just save my life now that I have idiopathic = we don’t fucking know why this happens, intracranial = HAPPENING IN MY SKULL AND BRAIN, hypertension = technically high blood pressure, but for here just high pressure cause my BP is good it is rare, it is unknown why people get it and why others don’t, it is most common in women of child bearing age who are obese. the thought is that the weight on the body causes the brain to very slightly inflate, decreasing spinal fluid flow and increasing pressure in the brain, sometimes CAUSING a chiari malformation to appear, which can cause other symptoms on top of IIH it used to be called pseudotumor cerebri because IIH makes the brain behave like it has a tumor while no tumor is actually present (which means normal MRI/CT scans and the main reason everyone told me I was faking it) I gained 80lbs in less than two years due to severe depression and ptsd. I’ve been at the same weight for almost two years now and was at that weight in Feb 2019 before things started happening in Dec 2019. sometimes it does just come on one day. it can be chronic, it can randomly go into remission and come back, and they have no idea why it even happens. it’s rare enough that no neurologist I saw could even think of it. rare enough that one of the best neurosurgeons in the country didn’t think of it until he decided he believed me lol he leans even more heavily into this because I gained weight so quickly (one of the hallmarks of getting IIH) and I had not a single symptom like it before the weight gain I don’t trust anything or anyone right now and I am extremely pessimistic and have no hope. but the one thing that’s given me a little hope, that’s made me believe this is what I have, is the fucking wikipedia page on IIH. it lists one specific symptom that I’ve seen nowhere else (and is EXTREMELY specific lmao) that I have and that everyone thought I was crazy explaining. beyond destroying your quality of life, the one thing IIH can do is cause permanent blindness. I’ve had a fuck ton of problems with my vision since this all started happening. one of the worst is that if I’m in the middle of an episode and I look up or to the left, it makes it h u r t and makes the episode worse. which is on the wikipedia page! which explains why I couldn’t fucking do EMDR therapy which involves rapid eye movement from side to side :) :) :) even my therapist was thinking this was all in my head and I was just letting my anxiety tell me EMDR would send my head into an episode instead of it actually happening lmaaaao god I am so angry y’all my mom and my uncle The Doctor wanted to commit me in March/April. I had an entire ER nurses station mock me for ten minutes for coming in repeatedly and having bizarre symptoms that, because they were unexplained, they thought I was faking. they belittled me when talking to me. one put the tv remote (no tv in the room) instead of the call button in my hand when I was too out of it to notice. the ER doctor that day told me I was making up a story, none of this was real, and to continue seeing my psychiatrist. I went home that day, told my mom I was fine for her to go back to work (she was angry with me and wanted me to go to a psychiatric hospital), took a shower and planned on swallowing a bottle of pills. I was in agony, utter agony, every single day multiple times a day I thought I was going to die, and it was being made clear to me that no one, not even my mom, believed me. I told my best friend and she talked me out of it, but I came very close and I will forever be heartbroken and angry beyond belief about this (my mom came around not long after this after seeing that this wasn’t going away and has thoroughly apologized for wanting to commit me. she has been helping me every single day since this started even tho she thought it was anxiety. I’m angry but I don’t hold it against her, not after the incredible sacrifices she’s made for me for a year) so yeah. every bizarre symptom, every agonizing thing I go through, the weird discomfort, pain and burning, vision problems, etc etc, all explained by IIH. the very specific ‘looking in a certain direction makes it worse’ has been there since day one. it’s because pressure has increased on the nerve behind my eyes so looking in a certain way aggravates the affected nerve further gaining all that water weight and having my head get so so so severe, enough to send me to the ER again, made me also think this was a real possibility and the ER doc agreed that the fluid retention was making pressure in my brain even more severe and it did ease quite a lot once that was all gone, another reason I believe this is IIH if you read up on IIH or read stories by people with it, it is life altering, debilitating, and agonizing to live with. most people will also have the same story of doctors not believing them and saying it was anxiety before getting this diagnosis the good thing? there’s a cure and while some people may need additional help later on, it works for most people. and it is, very simply, losing weight. 10-20% of body weight (some places say relief can start at just 3%) seems to completely cure it for most people because the brain is no longer inflated and because of that, any chiari malformation (cerebral tonsils sitting in the spinal cord opening) will actually go away, because it makes room in the skull for the tonsils to go back to their normal place I have some trouble knowing that I am partially at fault for gaining weight like I did, but my mom keeps telling me it’s so rare and how could I have possibly known and it was after severe trauma so. trying to deal with that too lol but yeah! weight loss journey. my chemo pill, if you read my last update, completely fucked me up for a while (including the fuckin weight gain despite a low calorie, low fat diet since like nov 1st) so it’s made it hard to lose weight. but now that I’m off of that pill, I’m down 7lbs and I will continue to lose. I have never been more motivated in my life to lose weight lmao and I’ve successfully done it before! I can’t exercise but my neurosurgeon said as the weight comes off and my symptoms start getting better, I will probably be able to incorporate more movement in my life. I can’t even walk around my apt for too long right now cause it builds pressure in my brain. it fucking sucks because this is something they don’t understand, it’s really only diagnosed if everything else has been ruled out (and with a lumbar puncture, but I am too fucking traumatized to have that done. but if I showed high pressure with no reason for it, it would be an ‘official’ IIH diagnosis). but I’m choosing not to do the LP because if I start to have my symptoms relieved as I lose weight, it’s pretty obvious that’s what this has been from the start my brain thinks it has a brain tumor and is going absolutely batshit insane and no matter how much I tried to get people to believe me, it took 11 months to get there. I will carry this with me for the rest of my life and once covid eases, I’m finding a good trauma therapist and working through this if my symptoms DON’T ease, we’ll talk brain surgery. but I think this is what I have and I think I’ll be okay when I lose enough weight (and I’ll feel better all around lol) anyway I’ve had an extremely bad couple of months and I wanted to get this off my chest, sorry it’s so long. if you can please, please, please cross your fingers for me and wish me luck that this is what it is and that over the next handful of months I lose the weight and get my life back, I will appreciate it more than I can say I’m going to thank all of you ahead of time because I lack spoons to reply right now and I also want to thank you all for your support over this last year and never doubting me. for always offering me words of encouragement and for being angry on my behalf. thank you thank you thank you I love you all <3

[pastpatientlywaitingforimagines]

Andromeda |  Spencer Reid x Reader

WC: 1865

Warnings: SPOILERS FOR 03x05 AND THE SECOND HALF OF SEASON 12, prison Reid, mentions of trauma/anxiety/therapy.

A/N: Remember this post?  I was talking about this fic. Anyways, the concept of both Spencer and Reader being groomed for the BAU was one that intrigued me so I wrote this. One day I’ll get tired of writing for this universe but today is not that day. Enjoy!

GALAXY MASTERLIST��(not needed to understand the plot but there’s similar content here if you liked this fic!)

You had seen a lot of bad things in your life, but hands down the worst thing you had ever seen was Spencer Reid sitting on the other side of the partition in the prison visiting room. As always your proximity to the doctor cleared your head and relaxed you in a way you hadn’t felt in weeks, but due to the circumstances you knew it was only because he was alive.

“I don’t like this,” you wasted no time making your feelings known.

“I know, me neither,” even though he was alive, you could tell your friend was in rough shape, “how are you doing?”

You breathed a laugh, “I should be asking you that.”

“I’m the same as I was when Garcia visited last week, and we both know she called you as soon as she left here.”

He was right, Penelope had filled you in on everything he had said when she had gone for her visit the week prior.

“Have you gone back to work yet?”

“Yeah, but I’m still not allowed in the field. My therapist keeps telling Emily I’m compromised,” you rolled your eyes, “I think being back in the field would help me compartmentalize better than doing paperwork in Penelope’s office.”

“What have you been doing outside of work?”

“Has my therapist talked to you too? Yeesh,” you rolled your eyes again, causing Spencer to crack a smile, “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Luke, he reminds me of some of the guys from my Platoon. He lets me watch Roxy when the team is traveling, and we go to a veteran’s support group every Tuesday. I don’t think he actually needs the support but he definitely knows I don’t go if he’s not there.”

Spencer sighed, “support groups are good, is it helping?”

“I don’t know,” you shrugged, “I already did the work to cope with my time in the military years ago. The problem isn’t my military trauma, the problem is that my best friend is in prison and the constant anxiety is dredging up old wounds.”

Your eyes narrowed, aware that he was definitely doing a light psych eval of you in that brain of his. You half expected him to start spouting exactly what was happening in your brain that was causing the increased frequency of your episodes, but it never came.

“Will you keep going, for me?”

“Sure, but only because you asked. And if Luke says anything about it you can’t tell him I don’t think it’s working.”

“Deal,” the light banter was the most normal thing that had happened to you since bringing Spencer home from Mexico.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“I know you’re a super genius and everything, but do you ever feel like you weren’t cut out for the BAU even though you were groomed for it?”  

“Yeah, I had to get waived on every physical part of training and failed my gun certification an embarrassing number of times even after I was hired. I wouldn’t have gotten the job if Gideon didn’t do some serious vouching for me. Do you… do you feel like that?” You thought it was ironic that Spencer was concerned for you when he was the one in jail.

“Out of everyone in my class at the Academy, Rossi and Hotch picked me. There were at least four other agents that were better at profiling than I was, I was not the obvious choice. My entire career has been defined by joining the BAU and yet I still get hit with some serious imposter syndrome, especially since you’ve been gone. Sometimes I wonder where I would have ended up if I hadn’t been picked, what kind of agent I’d be.”

“You would have ended up with the Hostage Rescue Team,” you knew Spencer was a know-it-all, but you were surprised at his confidence and quick response.

“How do you figure?” you questioned, watching the tips of his ears turn red as he blushed.

“Garcia and I overheard Hotch and Rossi talking about you when they came back from recruiting. We did some… ‘spelunking’ and found your file.”

“Anything juicy in there?” you teased, thoroughly amused at the image of Spencer and Penelope huddled around her desk investigating you.

“No. It said you were ex-military and had been psychologically discharged. We didn’t dig deeper into that, but I could see signs of anxiety the first time I met you so it wasn’t really going to be a secret anyways.”

“Fair, so how did you know about Hostage Rescue?”

“There was a note from their unit chief that they wanted you. It makes sense, you passed the field tests in the Academy with flying colors and you’re exceptional in the field. You would do really well on a tactical team.”

“In theory, until I have a panic attack and get thirty people killed,” you joked, “they probably asked Hotch to take me because I’d have the smallest chance of being a liability in the BAU.”

“Actually, Hotch said he liked how you had approached the exercise they had given you.”

You remembered that day like it was yesterday, Hotch and Rossi had come into your class with the bare bones of a case: an abducted child in a mall a week following a prior abduction of a similar nature. As a collective you had to solve the case, asking the right questions to get the information you needed from the two Supervisory Special Agents.

Your previously mentioned classmates that had a knack for profiling were quick to build a few theories and get a bit more information, including a glimpse of the girl on a security camera, but there were still a lot of missing pieces. Something about the whole thing felt off to you, so you finally spoke up.

“What if it was someone in her family?” Your classmates looked at you in confusion, a few of them jumping up to reiterate the evidence against your suggestion. “I see your point, and I’ll support the group if you still think I’m wrong, but hear me out. There’s evidence of the abduction being personal. I don’t think it’s related to the prior case at all.”

“The family has been with us the whole time,” one of your classmates argued.

“The father?” someone else suggested.

“No, not him,” your brain was working hard, “I think it was the aunt, Susan.”

“Well done, Agent,” you heard Agent Hotchner over the clamor of the room at your suggestion.

“Do you want to back up your theory?” Rossi asked once your classmates had settled down.

“Her husband shows signs of grooming Katie: he knows more about his niece than he does his own kid. If his wife noticed, she might be trying to protect her family. She was probably ashamed that her husband was a pedophile, her son had a record, and her marriage was falling apart. Susan already said she worked retail in a mall, even if she didn’t work at this mall she’d at least have knowledge of how malls work and where she could hide a body. The abduction from the previous week would have given her something to pin Katie’s disappearance on, and Katie would have trusted her enough to go somewhere without an obvious struggle.”

“Bingo, Agent…?” Rossi looked at you for your name.

“(y/l/n),” you offered.

“Susan took her own pain out on Katie. Our agents were able to recover Katie’s body and resuscitate her, and both Susan and her husband were brought into custody.”

Later, as class was dismissed, you were approached by the two men.

“What was it that made you look deeper into the family as suspects?” Hotch had asked.

“I just had a feeling, sir,” you told him honestly.

“What kind of feeling?” Rossi seemed genuinely interested in what you were saying.

“A gut feeling. I know we’re supposed to use the facts, and all the facts were presenting themselves as becoming a serial abduction, but it just didn’t feel right to me. When I started exploring other possibilities the relevant evidence jumped right out.”

“Sometimes we get cases with barely enough information to make decisions from. Following instincts can lead to breakthroughs that solve the whole case. Keep up the good work,” Hotch shook your hand before walking away with Rossi right behind him.

“Yeah, I went out on a limb with that one. I’ll tell you about it later,” you shook your head, knowing you didn’t have enough time to tell Spencer the whole story. He was quiet for a minute, glancing around the room before he spoke again.

“If I can’t get out of here, I think you should look into transferring to Hostage Rescue.”

“You’re not serious, are you? You’re getting out of here. I’m seeing to it personally,” you said it like it was a fact. His face told you he wasn’t kidding.

“Let me ask you this- if I’m found guilty at my trial, how are you going to take it?”

You wanted to tell him you would be fine and continue to fight for his freedom, but you both knew there was a reason your therapist wasn’t clearing you for field work that would only get worse if your best friend had to serve upwards of 25 years in jail.

The BAU without Spencer Reid just wouldn’t be the same BAU you fell in love with when Hotch and Rossi had hired you all those years ago.

“Do you really think the brass would approve a transfer to an anti-terrorism tactical unit when I can’t even get cleared for field work now?” you countered.  

“I do. Your coping mechanisms are well developed. If you separate yourself from the BAU… and me… I think you could pass their psych eval just fine. And everyone knows your tactical skills are off the charts, even after you’ve taken time off.”

“You’re not a very good genius if you think you can get rid of me that easily,” you were quick to point out, “even if I did transfer, I’d still be here as much as possible. Penelope wouldn’t let me cut myself off that easily from the rest of the team either.”

“Just think about it, please.”

You sighed, “I’ll think about it, but I’m still holding out that we’re proving your innocence and you and I will be back to our shenanigans in no time.”

“I’m looking forward to it. How’s my mom doing?”

“She’s been ok, I visit every day and JJ usually comes with me. Cassie’s been really great for her,” you told him.

“Good, will you tell her I-“

“Prisoners line up!” a guard yelled.

“Will you tell her I love her?” Spencer said quickly as he stood. You nodded, watching as he lined up with the other inmates and walked away.

As you left the prison you told yourself you were never getting used to this, and you were going to start working double time on proving Spencer’s innocence. There was no family like your BAU family, and whoever had framed Spencer was not going to destroy that so easily.

[duhragonball]

‘21

Amidst all the popular hype for seeing the end of 2020, it didn’t hit me until about lunchtime what the real highlight is that I’ve been waiting for: For the first time since 1999, the year finally ends in “numberty-number” again.    It low-key irritated me that we had to call it “two thousand three” and I was relieved when “twenty-thirteen” caught on, but it still wasn’t right because it was too short, and now we’re back in the sweet spot, and I should be safely dead by 2100, so that’s one less thing I gotta deal with.

Really, even “numberty hundred” rings true to me.    “Nineteen hundred” sounds like a year.    “Twenty-one-oh-six” sounds like a futur-y year, which is even cooler.   So did “Two thousand five”, until I was actually living in it, and it sounds even worse now that it was a long time ago and adults will talk about their childhood happening in that year.    Daniel Witwicky would be old enough to get married and grow a fancier beard than me.    That’s nuts.    My point is that, honestly, it’s the year 3000-3019 that I have to worry about, so if I ever decide to go vampire, those will be the years I hide in the ocean or force society to reset the calendar, whichever’s easier.  

I spent New Year’s Eve finishing Superliminal, which I bought on Steam after I watched Vegeta play it on YouTube.  It has a similar look and feel to the Stanley Parable, so if you liked one you’d probably enjoy the other, although Superliminal has a different theme.  I kept hoping I’d find some secret passage that I wasn’t supposed to take, and a narrator would scold me for finding the “Chickenbutt Ending”, but it doesn’t work that way.    Superliminal’s all about puzzles and awesome visuals, but it does have the same soothing design aesthetics as TSP.   Honestly, I enjoyed just wandering around in Stanley’s office, and Superliminal does the same thing with a hotel and several other settings.   It’s nice.

This got me thinking about how I kind of did everything there was to do in The Stanley Parable, and I sort of wished they would add new stuff to the game, but I’m not sure there would be much point to that.    I could play the older version, but it presents the same message, just with different assets.   The Boss’s Office would look different, but it’d be the same game.   And this got me thinking about various “secret chapters” in pop culture.  Secrets behind the cut.

I first heard about this idea in the 2000′s, when fans invented this notion that there was a secret chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.    I read a website that tried to explain the concept, and of course it lauded J.K. Rowling with all this gushing praise for working an Easter egg into the book, a literary work of “well, magic.”  

That pretty well sums up my distaste for Harry Potter, by the way.    These days, JKR has thoroughly crapped all over her reputation and legacy, but in the 2000′s it felt like half the planet was in a mad rush to canonize her as a writing goddess, to the point where fans were congratulating her for writing secret chapters that didn’t actually exist.   The idea was based on lore from the books about Neville Longbottom’s parents.    They were patients in a mental hospital, and he’d go to visit them, and they would give him bubble gum wrappers, intended to demonstrate how far remove they’ve become from reality.   The secret chapter lies in those wrappers, which all read “Droobles Best Blowing Gum” or some such.    What if Neville’s parents were only pretending to be mentally ill, so as to throw off their enemies?   Naturally, they would want to stay in contact with their son, so the bubble gum wrappers would have to contain coded messages.    Said code involves unscrambling the letters on the wrappers to make new words, like “goblin” or “sword” or “Muggle” or “Dumbledore”.    The problem is that you can also use it to make other words like “booger” or “drool” or “booobbiess.”   Play with it enough, and you can make the code say anything you want it to say, which means it’s no code at all.   

But the idea was that the not-yet-published sixth HP book would reveal all of this gum wrapper nonsense, and Neville would decode the messages and discover all of his parents’ super-cool adventures.   I’m not sure why we needed a secret chapter if Book 6 was going to explain all of this anyway in several not-secret chapters, but that was the whole point.   Fans didn’t have Book 6 yet, and they were so desperate to read it that they started trying to extrapolate what would happen next based on “clues” from the previous five.    That’s like trying to figure out what Majin Buu looks like by watching the Androids Saga.   I guess some wiseguy would have guessed that he’d resemble #19, but that’d just be blind luck.  

And when you get down to it, this whole secret chapter business is really just a conspiracy.   This is literally how Qanon works.   Some anonymous jackass posted vague “hints” on an imageboard, and people went goofy trying to interpret them and figure out what would happen in the future.   They call it “research” because they spend a ton of time on this, but there’s no basis to any of it.    It took me a few minutes to figure out that you can spell “Muggle” with the words in “Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum”, but that’s not research and it doesn’t prove anything.   But all these guys keep looking for “Hilary Clinton goes to jail next week” and lo and behold that’s all they ever find.   

In the same vein, the gum wrapper thing was really a complaint disguised as a conspiracy, disguised as a “magical secret chapter”.   At least a few fans wanted to see more Neville in their Harry Potter books, they wanted Neville’s parents, or someone like them, to have cool spy adventures or whatever else.   The point is, they clearly weren’t getting what they wanted out of the printed works, but they didn’t want to turn against their Dear Beloved Author, so they started casting about for an alternative reality, one where J.K. Rowling wrote a cooler story and hid it in the pages of the one that actually went to press.    So instead of just saying “Hey, Order of the Phoenix was kind of a letdown, I hope there’s more ninjas in the next book,” they said “Rowling is a genius because I wanted ninjas and she’s definitely going to give them to me, I have the gum wrappers to prove it.”

The same thing happened all over again when the BBC Sherlock show took a turn for the nonsensical.    I don’t know from BBC Sherlock, but I watched the fascinating video critique by Hbomberguy, and it sounds like the show did tons of plot twists until it stopped making sense altogether in the fourth season.    If you skip to 1:09:00 in the video, you’ll hear about fan theories that suggested that season four was supposed to be crappy, as part of a secret meta-narrative plan that would be paid off in a secret, unannounced episode that would not only explain everything, but retroactively justify the crappy episodes that came before.    But it’s been a few years and it never came to pass, so I think we can call this myth busted. 

Most recently, I think we’ve all seen a lot of talk about the final season of Supernatural, where I guess Destiel sort of became canon but only one guy does the love confession and the other doesn’t respond.   But I guess he does say “I love you too”  in the Spanish dub, which means the English language version was edited for whatever reason.    It’s not exactly a secret episode, but the implication is that there’s more to this than what made it to the screen.    So the questions turn to what the screenplay said, what the writers and actors wanted to do, etc. etc.    My general impression is that SPN fans are a bit more used to crushing disappointment, so they’re not quite as delusional about this show being unquestionable genius, like Sherlock and Harry Potter.     Maybe this is an Anglophile thing?   Like, if you suck at something with a British accent, people will accept it more unconditionally?   

I had seen something on Twitter about how there should have been a secret Seinfeld episode in the 90′s.    Someone suggested it at the time, they tape a whole episode, then wait until 2020 to air it, because by then it would be worth a fortune.    But they didn’t do it, because it costs a lot of money to make a TV episode, and if you don’t air the show right away, you aren’t making that money back any time soon.    Yeah, you might recoup a fortune someday, but Seinfeld was making a ton of money then.    It exposes the fannish nature of the idea.    A fan would love to discover a cool secret chapter, but a content creator isn’t necessarily keen on making a cool thing and then hiding it where few people would find it.  

I thought about doing this myself recently.   Maybe Supernatural gave me the bug, but I thought “I’m writing this big-ass story, so what if I wrote me a secret chapter for it?   Wouldn’t that be cool?”     But no, it wouldn’t be cool, because it’d be the same work as writing a regular chapter, and the same stress I feel when I hold off on publishing it.    Except I’d just never publish it, I’d put it in some secret hole on the internet and hope that some superfan who might not even exist can decode whatever clues I leave.  

I mean, it’d be awesome if it got discovered and everyone loved it.    “Hey, I found this hidden chapter!   Mike’s done it again!”   And I could bask in the glory.   But what if no one finds it?  Then I just wasted my time, right?   I want people to read my work.   My monkey brain needs the sweet, sweet validation of those kudos and comments, folks.   Once I realized that, I understood why no one else would want to do a secret chapter either.    Easter eggs are one thing, but the bigger bonus features they put on DVDs were pretty easy to find, and with good reason.

I think that’s what made the Stanley Parable so appealing to play, because it teases you with the idea that you can “break” the game and find some extra content that you weren’t supposed to see, but as you go exploring all those hidden areas, it gradually becomes clear that this is just part of the game; you were meant to find all these things, and that’s why they were put here.      It’s hidden, but he secret aspect of it is just pretend.   

I suppose that what I like about games like TSP and Superliminal is the illusion of secrets more than the secrets themselves.    I like roaming through the hallways, having no idea what I might find ahead.    I kind of wish I could open all the doors, and not just the ones the game designers put stuff behind, but the reality is that there’s nothing on the other side.    I used a cheat code once  to explore the unused doors in TSP and it’s just a bright white field on the other side.   Interesting to look at, but not much of a reveal.   Honestly, the doors themselves are more appealing than anything that could lay behind them.  

And that’s probably what makes secrets so fun.   They could be almost anything, but once you open the present, the number of possibilities drops to one.   If they had ever made that Secret BBC Sherlock Episode, I doubt it would have lived up to expectations, but fans could amuse themselves by imagining what could have been in it.    In the end, though, things usually don’t justify the hype.  For every Undertaker debut at Survivor Series 1990, there’s a Gobbledygooker debut at Survivor Series 1990.   It’s impossible to manufacture a secret with a guaranteed payoff.   

[itsclydebitches]

RWBY Recaps: “The Enemy of Trust”

Welcome to the finale, folks! A quick fun fact for you all. Total length of RWBY Recaps Volume 7 is:

68,611 words, or 115 pages single spaced. Yeesh. No wonder I never got anything else done on Saturdays.

Overall thoughts on the finale? There are pieces embedded in this episode that I really liked. Meaning, all these conflicts and reveals could be seen as truly wonderful bits of storytelling... provided you ignore the horrible, messy context it’s all situated in. For example, I greatly enjoyed that fight with Neo... provided I ignore the stupidity that was the group keeping the relic in the first place. I love the idea of Penny becoming the Winter Maiden... it’s just too bad there wasn’t any setup for that in the form of Penny’s emotional growth, either by re-bonding with Ruby or by something amounting from that frame job. I adore that Ozpin is finally back!! ...So I guess I just have to ignore how he pretty much only existed as thematic exposition and that his bad treatment by the writers hangs over his return. It’s all very “Could have been good if the rest hadn’t been so astoundingly bad.”

First though, before the plot, I wanted to dip by toe into some of the questions we went into this volume with and some of the primary ones that sprung up along the way. Simple answers are attached.

Will the group’s dangerous attitude be addressed along with the introduced hypocrisy in regards to secret keeping? Ha! Not at all. Everything was thoroughly reinforced and last we saw the group---besides generic airship shots---they were triumphantly defeating Ironwood’s evil Ace Ops. So that’s that on that.

Will Ozpin come back and will there be reconciliation with the group? Yes! But also no! Why have a volume tackling with the biggest personal conflict the group has ever faced when you could instead just have another “Ozpin speaks a handful of words during a life-and-death situation”? Yes, yes he gets that massive monologue. We’ll get to that, but suffice to say it doesn’t exactly accomplish anything. Just hammers home how desperate I am to have his character back that I’ll take anything they’re willing to give me.

How will the group handle the death of Adam---one of the most significant deaths to date next to Pyrrha’s---and how will the reveal of his brand impact Weiss and her time at home? It won’t. Blake and Yang vaguely reference him once and that’s it. Apparently killing your abuser in self-defense creates no lasting trauma we should deal with and major reveals from villains straight up don’t matter.

What will the story do with their new character Maria? Uh, nothing. She exists off screen for the entire volume, only popping up in the last second to (maybe?) help Pietro get the scrolls working again. Oh, and she’s stolen another airship.

How will Qrow’s alcoholism continue to impact the group and how will he learn to start managing his addiction? No idea because that happened off screen. And then was presumably erased when Clover died.

Will the group ever discuss the hopelessness attached to their mission and come to the realization that their fight is worthwhile even though they can’t kill Salem? Sort of...? Because yeah they come to that realization but, again, it happens off screen. More significantly, it happens so well, apparently, that the group is now willing to feed Ironwood’s own false hope (like the fandom claims Ozpin did to them) and will be able to stand in front of Salem herself and announce that she’s totally beatable. And we’re going to risk a whole Kingdom on that came-out-of-nowhere confidence.

What does the Staff of Creation do and how will our characters potentially use it in their plans against Salem? We learn that the staff keeps Atlas afloat and it’s definitely a part of Ironwood’s plans, so there’s that.

How will Ruby continue to train and improve her Silver Eye powers? In the messiest and most contradictory manner possible. We’re shown twice in the last three episodes that she can’t get them to work and then suddenly they’re working again when the plot wants Cinder to skedaddle because there’s five minutes of the episode left. Like Qrow’s semblance, Ruby’s eyes are based on a switch that the writers turn on or off depending on their whim.

What will this volume tell us about Nora given all the hype surrounding the importance of her character this season? Nothing, really. All Nora does is solidify her relationship with Ren in a non-consenting manner and yell at Ironwood about Mantle while helping to orchestrate the city’s lack of resources. Even ignoring the issues inherent in these scenes, what we “learned” about Nora this volume is that she loves Ren, is protective of those who come from a similar background as she does, and will run to hug Oscar when given the chance. So...nothing. 

Now the reason I provided this long-ass introduction is so that a) we can remember what we actually hoped/expected the volume to accomplish now that we’ve reached the end (RWBY introduces so many things that viewers---myself included---outright forget that we were supposed to tackle certain plot points or character beats) and b) to demonstrate just some of the writing problems that are impacting this finale. This is what I mean when I say that this finale could have been really solid if not for... all of that. And “that” is just a small sampling of the issues we’ve built up over the last two years. 

But on to the actual plot.

We open on Jaune yelling, “Give up!” at Neo, which isn’t a heavy-handed reflection of the entire RWBYJNR group or anything. As said though, I did really enjoy the choreography of this fight. Oscar gets that excellent moment where he catches the relic with his cane, as well as when he grabs hold of Neo’s legs to keep her from fleeing. Jaune manages to protect them with two different kinds of shields now embedded in his shield. It’s a shield-shield. And Neo herself is always a joy to watch, demonstrating so much personality as she teases her way through each attack. I was thinking throughout this scene that I’d love to see her and Tyrian fighting together. That would be an excellent blend of insane/arrogant enjoyment.

The problem is that Neo is just having such an easy time of it. Which, I should be clear, is what I wanted based on the logic of the situation. Neo should be able to kick their asses with relative ease. The only reason why this is an issue is because it severely complicates what we saw last episode. How was Oscar able to survive her attack for however long? How was he able to land such a solid punch when now Ren and Nora fly at her with the same kind of obviousness and Neo deflects them with ease? I’m thrilled that the finale gave us such a long moment with Oscar, but the series as a whole still has a problem with relegating most of his development off screen. Seeing the comparatively vulnerable farm boy face off against one of our strongest villains should have been a focus last episode, not something that happens in the ether of, “Well I guess all that worked out somehow despite Neo kicking their asses here.” It’s an issue of consistency and convenience primarily. The show seems to have the characters on a very malleable power scale nowadays. Oscar isn’t strong enough to help with the geist, but he’s strong enough to land the first solid hit on Neo. Team RWBY is strong enough to take out the most elite group of huntsmen in Atlas, but Team JNR isn’t strong enough to take out a single villain four to one. It makes it harder to invest in anyone or anything because we’re always on shaky ground. The viewers never know when the writing will obey the rules it has set up or chuck them away on a whim.

The fight is interrupted though when the guards spot them. Did Ruby mention that they were being arrested in her announcement? Did Ironwood announce that before or after Ruby called? I honestly can’t remember and right now I’m too lazy to check. I was just a little surprised that Jaune immediately knew to run from the guards, rather than going, “Hey, crazy woman attacking us please help.” But eh, I’m happy enough to chalk that up to either my own shaky memory or a small connection lost. RWBY has way bigger problems than details like, “How did so-and-so know about such-and-such?” Not unless that information holds way more weight.

So they flee and we actually get to see some reaction to fighting for once. Oscar in particular is clearly exhausted and his clothes are done-in from the battle. Later, while hiding in the training room, all four of them will be leaning against the wall, heaving after facing Neo. Again, this is good. This is how newly-minted huntsmen should be reacting to fighting people way beyond their skill level. It’s only a problem when we compare these details to what we got last week with Team RWBY. Showing JNOR’s exhaustion from a quick bout with Neo no way aligns with RWBY’s perky, totally fine, no auras broken and no tiredness characterization after facing off against four Ace Ops for a significantly longer period.

So there’s some serious plot armor at work there. It became even more clear this episode that Team RWBY won because Team RWBY always gets what they want, not because it makes any sense in-world. But we’ll have to deal with any other consequences of that next volume because they’re barely in the rest of this episode. Instead, we return to the Winter, Penny, and Cinder fight where Cinder casually tosses Penny aside with her grimm arm. She’s briefly held back by Winter’s summoned birds, but that’s hardly going to faze her in the grand scheme of things. In fact, Cinder still has enough energy and confidence to start some philosophizing while she fights. She tells Winter that she may think “hoarding power means you’ll keep it forever, but it just makes the rest of us hungrier.” Self-fulfilling words from the woman hell-bent on acquiring and hoarding all the Maiden powers? As absurd as Cinder’s beliefs are, that “And I refuse to starve” line was pretty badass. On the whole I think she’s a boring villain, but every once in a blue moon Cinder will have a cool moment before she becomes irrelevant again.

The fight continues as Penny returns to the fray and it sounded to me that she was making more noise during this fight than normal. Granted, we’ve rarely seen Penny engage in an all-out brawl that lasts for more than a few seconds, but the additions certainly help with where she’s heading this episode. Particularly moments such as when they’re outside and Cinder’s sword blows up in Penny’s face, causing her to outright scream. It’s a very human sound, setting up the reveal that yes, an android is human enough to take on the Maiden powers. And if you go by some fan theories, “woman enough” (for lack of a better term) given that her aura is a man’s, Pietro’s. Penny is a girl regardless of starting out with male aura, leading to some wonderful and interesting takes on her as a trans character. Now I’m not giving that praise to Rooster Teeth---this isn’t them giving us representation---rather, I’m praising the fandom’s ingenuity and ability to adopt characters into their own communities. You don’t need “evidence” to headcanon transness, but having a girl born of a man’s aura go on to acquire woman-only power can definitely help. 

Granted, Penny’s vocalizing here is just a tiny detail that I’m choosing to apply positively to an outcome. I nevertheless stand by my early belief that Penny simply didn’t have the development needed to land her in the Maiden position. Having her grapple with her own death, Ruby her resurrection, and the loss of Mantle’s support would have achieved that. It’s clear now why Rooster Teeth brought her back, but that doesn’t mean they’ve treated her character well for the last twelve episodes. Instead, in true RWBY fashion, a lot was introduced with no followup.

As said though, they take things outside to give us a decently cool battle between three characters who can fly. While in the air though Winter’s aura is broken and she starts to plummet. Obviously Penny catches her, to which Winter replies, “What are you doing? My life doesn’t matter!”

Sometimes I wonder if Rooster Teeth bothers to think about the dialogue they put in characters’ mouths. I mean seriously? Winter is not stupid. Nor is she so hard that---as the episode hammers home---she wouldn’t experience fear. So:

Anyone is going to be happy about being caught from a 100% deadly fall. In a situation like this survival instinct trumps responsibility. Even if it didn’t “responsibility” doesn’t make any sense here because:

They’re not giving up on the Maiden. Penny isn’t making a decision here that requires forever and always choosing Winter over Fria. They’re gonna turn right around and continue the fight

Seriously, it takes a few seconds to catch her. This isn’t that big a deal

The fight thus far has clearly proven that they need all the help they can get. Penny can’t take Cinder on her own and indeed, even with her aura broken Winter manages to be incalculably helpful

Fria still has her powers, which she’s about to demonstrate. Does Winter really not realize that Fria is still pretty capable of defending herself?

In short, this line is stupid. More than just stupid it’s twisting a character to get them to fit with the volume’s badly imposed theme. Oh look Winter cares sooooo much about her orders that she would needlessly die for them. Penny must teach her the value of her own life and how “blindly” obeying Ironwood is a big, bad thing. Come on. Lines like these---Harriet claiming the Ace Ops aren’t friends even though they clearly are, Qrow blaming Ironwood for Clover’s death when he’s not even there, Yang sniping at Elm about how she can’t think for herself---only serve to say Protagonists Good; Ironwood Bad. Rooster Teeth really loves to introduce justified and sympathetic characters, only to have other characters go OOC to backtrack on that verbally. Ignore what you’ve seen and just believe the nonsense words that never would have come out of this character’s mouth otherwise. And yes, that includes Yang and her comment to Elm. She is by far the most loyal character, considering that she’s canonically done things she did not want (following Ozpin) purely because Ruby was doing it. If the story had any sense embedded in it Yang would be the one who understood where the Ace Ops were coming from in their devotion to Ironwood, or at the very least the narrative would call her out on her hypocricy. As it is, the story functions around the “fact” that following Ruby is just intrinsically good. No matter what Ruby herself might do and how it does or does not compare to others’ actions. She’s the hero, always. In the same way, having Winter spout such a nonsense line works only to say, “See? Following Ironwood destroys all your self-wroth. Following Ruby? Like Penny does? You learn the value of friendship!” Never-mind that the first thing Ironwood does this episode is congratulate and apologize to Winter when he thinks he’s coming down into the vault...

Enjoyable pieces aside, I’m obviously still salty, but we’ll get to Ironwood in a minute. For now, Oscar is seriously dragging behind JNR and manages to get separated. He’s hidden from the guards by “Nora” who is, obviously Neo. Within the span of a second she’s gotten the relic and will keep it until she hands it over to Cinder.

Congratulations, team! Not only did you allow Ironwood to harm Mantle for weeks on end when you knew his plan was doomed to fail, you’ve also lost the relic you came to secure in the first place, thoroughly betrayed the one powerful ally you had in this war (just like you did Ozpin), have destroyed any hope of escape as---surprise!---Salem actually showed up, and you took out the one elite team who might have helped you fight her. Oh, and Qrow, you got arrested in the end anyway so congrats on getting your friend killed along the way. Seriously, how does anyone---how does the narrative---insist that these people are heroes? At this point this is a story about fallen heroes, but rather than emphasizing precisely how badly the group has screwed up the last two volumes and taking them on a journey back from the brink, they’re still being painted in a perfect light.

So... yeah. Relic is gone. Which we all saw coming the second Ruby happily agreed to keep holding onto it, then got protective when Ironwood mentioned taking it back. Loyalty aside, you cannot possibly think the relic is safer on your or Oscar’s belt than it is in a freaking magical vault. The group should be denied the title of “heroes” for their stupidity and arrogance alone. Especially when they never bothered to tell Ironwood that there was still a question left. That might have changed his mind about letting them carry it around. 

Thus, relic in hand, Neo makes easy work of the rest of the team. Most notably by keeping Nora’s face and giving Ren sad eyes when he tries to strike her. This is a really good moment of visual storytelling and more how RWBY should be using their fights to do double-duty and develop characterization. Neo’s trick not only demonstrates her cruel skills, but tells us precisely how deeply Ren cares for Nora. Even knowing that’s not her he hesitates. Then, obviously, we’ve got the tears as the team runs off. So obviously things are still eating at him and their relationship is a big part of that... which just makes me all the more frustrated that the story passed over his fears at the party. I really don’t care how eager everyone (myself included) was to finally get a renora kiss. We never should have seen Nora ignoring those problems and insisting on moving the relationship forward in a way he clearly wasn’t ready for yet. Ren’s words told us that, as does his grief now. Everyone was wondering if ignoring his anxiety would come to a head in the form of Ren siding with Ironwood, but we didn’t get the chance to find that out this volume. Which, I get it. RWBY doesn’t have a lot of time, but that’s precisely the problem. Tiny tid-bits are dropped and then ignored for weeks, if not years on end. That moment between Ren and Neo was excellently crafted and told us a lot about both, but ultimately it’s just another moment cast adrift from everything else. Who knows if this plot-line will actually continue in Volume 8’s premier, if at all.

So Neo wanders off in an Atlas disguise and hands the relic off to Cinder. What’s Cinder going to do with the relic precisely? Not sure. Gonna have to wait on that one. We do have some decent setup for Neo’s betrayal though. She not only looked pissed at Cinder just snatching the prize, but sad about it too. Neo has always been driven by her own, messed up love, notably for Roman. Now that he’s gone it seems like she was looking for someone else to latch onto. Now that Cinder has proven that Neo is only a tool to her, she’d better watch her back.

Returning to Fria. She, as said, still has a lot of kick in her and easily pushes Cinder back. “That’s the power of a fully realized Maiden,” Winter says as crazy power shoots into the sky. Again, good setup... if I believed RWBY was capable of following up on anything. Remember at the beginning of the volume when Harriet dropped setup on Ruby’s semblance? Yeah, nothing came of that either. And though it still might, again, when? I know I use this example a lot, but you can’t introduce Raven speaking with Tai, drop that for three years (or longer), and then pick it back up like that’s still a relevant thread to follow. By having Winter proclaim that this is a “fully realized” power we imply that others, such as Cinder, may be able to become more powerful as well, but there’s little faith on the viewer’s part that such a line will actually amount to anything. Or if it does, it will happen so far in the future that most viewers will have forgotten about it.

For now though Fria is super-duper powerful. Cinder and Winter can’t even get near her. So it’s up to Penny, the one person not made of flesh and blood, to get the job done. I like that. Great use of difference as a strength. So she dives in and gets Fria to calm down, reigning her power back in. They discuss transferring the power and when Penny tries to remind her of the consequences we get, “I’ll be gone. I know I have a hard time remembering, but I remember that.” Hey. Hey, hey. I want the entire fandom to pay attention to this line because a lot of you still have a tendency to erase agency so as to more easily pin the blame on characters you don’t like. Pyrrha didn’t choose to fight Cinder against Ozpin’s orders, Ozpin killed her! Qrow didn’t choose to fight Clover and team up with Tyrian, Ironwood killed Clover! The Ace Ops didn’t choose to be loyal and maintain the responsibility they swore as military huntsmen, Ironwood just brainwashed them into being obedient puppets! Here, we get another glorious reminder that yes, these characters can actually think and act for themselves. Even the characters with dementia. Asking someone to do the hard thing (Pyrrha) is not in any way comparable to making them. It’s crystal clear from Fria’s line here that Ironwood spoke to her about the situation. He, like Ozpin, was upfront about the consequences. She in turn decided to accept this duty. Yes, I know I’ll die. I’ve accepted that. I have a job to do and I intend to complete it.

So yeah, #stop-taking-away-one-character’s-agency-just-because-you-don’t-like-another-2020.

Penny is thus faced with a glaring responsibility of her own: will she take on the Maiden powers? Because Fria may remember her job, but not who else was supposed to complete the job with her. Was it you? Penny, meanwhile, is looking at all that ice and wondering if Winter can even get here in time. It may well only be her... unless they want it to be Cinder.

As she thinks through this decision we return to JNR. Ren has a brief freak-out about how “We weren’t ready to become huntsmen” but instead of a truthful statement about their maturity and skill levels, the story twists it into a false statement by having Ren start yelling at Nora and placing unnecessary blame. We’re not supposed to believe him here because he’s irrational and lashing out... even though I think “We weren’t ready to become huntsmen” is a 100% truthful statement. The last two volumes have proven to me, if no one else, that having a job with that much power and responsibility isn’t just about whether you can swing your scythe really well. It’s about having the emotional fortitude and, as said, majority to treat it as a job and put that responsibility ahead of your own desires. RWBYJNR has consistently demonstrated that they’re unwilling to do that. It’s their way or the highway, damn promises, responsibility, loyalty, or consequences.

Before things can really break in the group though more soldiers show up and as they’re hiding behind Jaune’s shield he realizes that Oscar is missing. Over the comms Oscar says that he has something he needs to do alone, heading for the vault. I really appreciate this moment because Oscar is the one person in this group who has actually extended some of the unity and sympathy that RWBYJNR keeps yelling that everyone needs to give to them first. He apologizes to Ironwood whereas Yang sticks her nose in the air and insists she did nothing wrong. He approaches Ironwood and asks to find a way forward together while Ruby yells that Harriet has to do what she wants or no, I won’t stop attacking you. We get that moment where Ironwood thinks it’s Winter descending and goes, “I know that must have been hard for you. I’m so sorry,” demonstrating his own care and compassion. We see Oscar embodying Ozpin in his folded hands, use of the cane, and harder eyes, despite the fact that it’s still him in control. 

He has a piece of that maturity the rest of his team lacks. He’s open, Ironwood is open, they’re poised to do what the others around them can’t...

Too bad it all goes to total shit.

You know, I feel like I should be more mad about this but at this point I’m just kind of numb. Why in the world would I be surprised that Rooster Teeth would erase all the work above to turn Ironwood into a generic villain? They did it before, or did I suddenly forget the twenty-minutes that humanized Ozpin only to be followed with two volumes of bashing him non-stop? I knew Ironwood was going to get screwed, I just didn’t think they’d go so far as to do it like this. And shame on me because I should have.

There are times when things happen on screen... but by god it isn’t canon. Because it’s just too stupid to be canon. It’s so horrifically out of character that the only explanation is that this is an impersonator and the writers just forgot to tell us that along the way. Because James Ironwood would never kill a child. Or hell, maybe he would, but it would have to be under RADICALLY different circumstances from these. People realize right that this is so beyond out of character as to be laughable, right? We get:

A man who has devoted himself to fighting the biggest evil his world has ever seen

Learning the importance of care over brute strength, adopting Ozpin’s lessons by giving Mantle Penny

Has spent the last year trying desperately to keep all his people safe, making the hard calls in order to achieve that

Was beyond delighted when the group first appeared, kneeling down before Oscar and hugging Qrow

Has frequently asked after Ozpin throughout the volume, demonstrating a strong desire for him to return

Immediately forgave the group even after learning about Salem’s immortality, still pushing forward with them

Just sacrificed his arm in an effort to continue protecting those around him

Finally realized he didn’t have allies in this team and called only for their arrest, not any violence or mistreatment

Hired the Ace Ops, a group whose conflict was their need to perform that arrest pushing against their desire not to hurt anyone

Ironwood just began the scene by extending sympathy and apologies to another

And you’re going to tell me that this man, this man defined by his compassion and desperate need to protect others... is going to shoot the 14yo kid housing one of his oldest friends? Shoot to kill?

Because make no mistake, that was a killing shot. Ironwood knew Oscar was at the edge. Even if it hadn’t broken Oscar’s aura, that fall isn’t anything you can survive without Humanity 1.0 magic---magic Ironwood clearly wasn’t counting on to save him. They literally took this man and erased EVERYTHING that made him-him, deciding that randomly Ironwood kills kids now because he dislikes a conversation. Kills Ozpin too. It makes zero sense... but you know all precisely why they did it. Because Ironwood is the villain now. He dared disagree with Team RWBY and now that he’s an antagonist they had to make sure he did something he couldn’t come back from. You don’t try to kill the youngest of the group and then come back into the fold. Ironwood is finished. He’s either going to die next volume or the group is going to lock him behind bars as a “witty” parallel of him trying to arrest them, dropping a one-liner about how they’re sorry it came to this.

Which, obviously, I absolutely despise. The rest of the episode? Had a lot going for it. Cool and interesting developments that might have been great if not attached to the horror show of the last twenty-five episodes... but still cool and interesting nonetheless. This? This is the worst thing RWBY has done to date because they not only irrevocably messed up one of their best characters, but they did so in a way that highlights everything that has been wrong with the show the last two years. There was no buildup to this. None. Don’t @ me with “But Ironwood is unstable and the Tin Man has no heart.” No and also no. Rooster Teeth simply decided that they wanted him as a villain and made that happen in the span of a few seconds. It’s just as absurd and insulting as if, last volume while angry at Qrow, Ruby had picked up her scythe and cut through Weiss as a form of anger management. Ironwood aiming to kill the kid he’s been bonding with all volume and Ozpin to boot because they’re having a slightly heated conversation is insane. 

Which isn’t to say that conversation itself helped matters. Because Ironwood remains right. Those are all pretty, philosophical questions, Oscar, but what are we going to do about our situation? Oscar might express more sympathy then Team RWBY, but he’s just as naive and dangerously stubborn. He doesn’t have a plan either, just a continuing insistence that they try. In fact, his arguments are really... nonsensical in places? He says that if Ironwood abandons Mantle they’ll lose hope of uniting the whole world, even though we’ve never established why that’s still a goal when a world-wide army can’t defeat Salem. He likewise makes the absurd claim that because Ironwood is thinking about the big picture “Then you’re as dangerous as she is, James.”

No??

If RWBY is going to incorporate philosophy and moral conundrums into their writing then they actually need to do the work to think them through. Because sorry but the man making a currently still necessary sacrifice in order to keep the world as a whole safe is not the same thing as the genocidal grimm queen hell-bent on destroying it. Again, do they think about the words they’re putting into the characters’ mouths? The worst is how many viewers just eat it up. Because Good Boy Oscar said something vaguely wise-sounding then it must be true...never-mind the absurdity of the statement itself. I love Oscar to bits, just not when the writing uses him as a prop to promote these absurd themes. Not to keep dragging Witcher into every possible part of my life, but it immediately reminded me of this quote from Geralt. “You wizards are all the same...

Just because Oscar says it with confidence doesn’t mean it makes any sense.

Which is where we end up. Oscar falling, Ozpin arriving, the two of them managing to survive the fall. I have to admit that at this point Ozpin’s return just felt damn underwhelming to me. Like yes, of course I’m thrilled he’s back, but watching them mangle James like that just kicked all the enjoyment out of the rest of the episode. That, combined with the fact that Ozpin’s return actually was pretty lackluster. I mean, I feel like a shit for complaining about the thing I’ve wanted since the beginning of Volume 6... but is that really all we get? Ozpin doesn’t save him, Oscar saves them both, because he apparently has complete access to the magic and memories now. What does Ozpin matter then? Ozpin doesn’t speak really, just says Oscar’s name and is then cut off because Oscar doesn’t want to hear anything he has to say unless it’s about saving Atlas. He does express something like gratitude though--- “You’re back, aren’t you? You saved me”---so that’s more than we’ve gotten from anyone else. And Ozpin does narrate... but who is that to? Obviously very reminiscent of our series’ premier, but is he speaking to Salem again? We’re not told---or shown---and as it is that monologue exists purely for the audience. It’s a speech we could have gotten from any character and just happened to get it from Ozpin. It’s not being spoken to Oscar and therefore not forwarding any of the relationships that still need to be mended. In fact, this could well be a speech Ozpin gave years ago, disconnected from who he is now. Perhaps the biggest issue is that the speech is all about fear, further hammering home the finale’s BS stance that Ironwood being afraid of actual, legitimate threats made him into an unhinged child-killer.

Because his “paranoia”? It’s about this. This is what Ironwood was afraid of.

And oh look it’s here.

So yeah... I just can’t fall in love with this moment as I feel I should. RWBY has burned me too many times lately---the last time seconds before this scene---and frankly now that Ozpin is back I don’t trust them to treat his character well. So his return is automatically laced with more worry than excitement to see what comes next. Because if they do this to Ironwood, somehow who has done nothing but try to help this whole volume, what the hell are they going to do to Ozpin, someone who actually lied to and kept secrets from the precious team? I want him back, but not while we’ve got these themes going. I’m legit worried about how the group will react to his return and what the narrative is going to make Ozpin do as penance for his supposed sins. I’m not really thrilled about the prospect of watching more assault that’s painted as heroic justice. Normally I’d be going, “Well you never know, RWBY could prove me wrong...” except that after Ironwood? I really don’t think it will. Because Ozpin may ask, “Will you forgive them? Will you understand why they felt the need to do the things they did?” but it’s “staring back at you is the very thing you should have feared from the start” is what we get when Ironwood is shown again when he’s told Winter doesn’t have the power, he can’t open the vault, and he has no way of escaping this army. Rather than painting this as a tragedy that’s on our “heroes,” Ironwood is just made to look deranged. The story doesn’t encourage us to forgive him, no matter Ozpin’s words. 

The scne was pretty though! lol. Stunningly gorgeous, really. If I just turn my brain off and don’t think about everything surrounding Oscar falling while Ozpin re-joins him, it’s an absolutely fantastic scene...

Yeah, the rest of the episode is mostly things I’ve already covered. Maria picks everyone up in their “getaway ship” because her character apparently only exists now to provide comic relief in the form of illegal actions. 

Penny takes on the Maiden powers while Winter holds Cinder off with no aura. That was badass as hell.  Go Winter, you’re still one of my faves this volume.

Ruby conveniently uses her silver eyes even though they’ve failed twice in the last three to four episodes. 

Qrow is arrested and holds onto Clover’s blood-stained badge. 

Robyn is apparently just fine. 

Watts is potentially getting freed by Tyrian, or else was just distracted by the arrival of Salem, I honestly wasn’t sure. 

The only other thing of consequence is that Winter and Weiss acknowledge that they’re on different paths. They can’t support one another in who they’re loyal to, but Winter will still give her sister a head start.

Oh, that moment and this, of course.

I’ve already spoken about my very iffy feelings about introducing Salem as an actual enemy before the final volume and those feelings are compounded by this absurd denouncement of hard, practical choices. I mean... seriously. What is the group going to do at the start of next volume? “These readings can’t be right,” an Atlas soldier says, horrified at the number of grimm that are appearing around them from an ominous red cloud. That entire army we saw at the end of Volume 6. Plus a giant whale grimm that could easily swallow any of our heroes (Pinocchio reference, anyone?), plus the immortal sorceress who could do any number of things to obliterate you---and take all the time in the world to do it. Like... they’re screwed. They are dead and Ironwood was 100% right to try and take whoever he could to safety and regroup. Except that obviously the series doesn’t end in tragedy here so they’ll wiggle their way out of things somehow. It just won’t be satisfying. Because we absolutely have a hopeless situation here and the story hasn’t allowed the group to acknowledge and then try to circumvent that in any practical manner. Ruby’s silver eyes will inexplicably get crazy powerful. Or Salem will randomly decide to leave. Or they’ll discover some new and untapped skill through the power of friendship. Then, at the end of it all, we’ll be told to look back at Ironwood and call him crazy for trying to save lives with a realistic approach because see? We managed a miracle after all.

I can’t believe I’m going to watch that nonsense. But I will. Because RWBY was a show that I loved and some small part of me still hopes it’ll return to what it once was. At the very least I need to find out what happens to these characters---no matter how stupid and insulting---and this episode, despite all my expectations, did give me tiny glimmers into what RWBY used to be. Moments that were fun or badass or legitimately touching. I almost wish it wouldn’t, just so I could make a clean break with the show. Absolute trash is better than trash that demonstrates skill just enough to make you think there might be hope for a better written story the next time around. Ah well. At least writing the recaps is always fun!

So I’ll still be here, answering asks and chucking out nonsense. Feel free to come join me if you’re ever inclined.  

Until next volume 💜

[inevitably-johnlocked]

TOP 25 BOOKMARKS of 2019

See also: Top 20 Bookmarks of 2018

Hey guys! 

Since this is the last Fic Rec Sunday of the year, I’m going to give y’all the list of my favourite fics that I’ve read this year! I think this is a great way to end off the year, by letting y’all know what I thoroughly enjoyed reading while on my seemingly-never-ending quest to rec you guys the stuff y’all should read! <3 

And of course, I am reducing it to a small list or I will NEVER finish reccing fics because everything I’ve read this year have been fantastic, but these are the ones I’ve found myself going back to a couple times already :)

Hope y’all enjoy! 

------

JOHNLOCK BOOKMARKS

The Burning of the Leaves by blueink3 (M, 15,915 w., 3 Ch. || Post S4, Angst, Reichenbach, Parentlock, Past Jolto, Idiot John, Sherlock’s a Mess, Puppies, Fluff, Possessive / Jealous Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Sherlock POV, Matchmaker Sholto, Melancholic Feelings, Emotional Sherlock, Domesticity, Love Confessions in the Rain, Kissing in the Rain, Pet Names, Panic Attack) – After the events of series 4, Major Sholto invites John and Sherlock to lunch one day. It nearly proves to be too much for their tenuous relationship as the past haunts the present, putting the future that Sherlock so desperately wants at risk.

The Palmyra Atoll by elwinglyre (E, 16,609 w., 3 Ch. || TSo3 Divergence / Episode Fix-It, Stockholm Syndrome, Kidnapped John Watson, John Whump, Evil Mary, Angst, Cuddling & Snuggling, Toplock, Limited 3rd John POV) – As John's preparing for the wedding, Sherlock is preparing to have his heart broken, and Mary is prepared to do the unthinkable. Intervention required. Enter Sherlock. Set before Sign of Three with a far different outcome. John is drugged, kidnapped, and left on an island, but not just any old island.

Wonderful, Etcetera. by VictoryCandescence (T, 16,955 w., 3 Ch. || Wonderful Life AU || Alternate Timelines, Brotherhood, Homophobia, Suicidal Ideations, Mentions of Drug Use, Friendship, Different TRF, Sherlock’s Past, Victor Trevor is Past Boyfriend, Depression, Hallucination?, Love Confessions, Christmas, First Kiss) – Sherlock thinks everyone would be better off if he had never existed, including and especially himself. When he finds himself in a world in which his wish has been granted, he begins to think perhaps even he could be wrong – but it takes an unlikely chaperone to make him not only observe, but understand.

The Kepler Problem by kinklock (E, 24,270 w., 1 Ch. || Sci-Fi AU, Alien Sherlock, Space Repairman John, Alien Biology, Horny John) – Working in uncharted space exploration was not as exciting as John had hoped, especially when it turned out to be mostly bot maintenance on uninhabited planets. However, the mystery of the repeated, unexplained malfunctions on planet BAK 2212 might turn out to be exactly the kind of adventure he'd been craving.

A Home for Us by sussexbound (M, 30,581 w., 12 Ch. || Scars, Bedsharing, Grief, Doctor John, Hurt/Comfort, Post-TRF, Implied/Referenced Torture, Sherlock POV, Pining Sherlock, Suicidal Ideation, Heavy Emotions, Clingy Sherlock, Hallucinations, Disassociation, Emotional Turmoil) – He has been on the road for two years, and he is exhausted. He’s almost accepted that he will never see London (John) again—almost. But then there are nights like tonight, where he is weak, and all he can think of is the warmth of the flat they once shared, the crackle of the fire in the hearth, the teasing smile playing at the corner of John’s lips, the boxes of half-eaten Chinese takeaway balanced precariously in their laps. He aches at the memory of it, at the realisation that it is something he may never experience again.

Chaperones by MissDavis (T, 34,114 w., 7 Ch. || 11 Years Post-S4, Fake Relationship, Parentlock, Disney World, Bed / Room Sharing, Friends to Lovers, Fluff, First Kiss, Obsessive Sherlock, Insecure John) – Right. Of course. Everyone assumed they were a couple and no one would question it. John put his elbows up on the table so he could rest his head in his hands. "You want to pretend to be a couple so we can chaperone a trip to Disney World with Rosie's class and you won't have to share a room with a stranger?" "Exactly." Sherlock beamed at him. "Don't worry about the cost. The Birmingham case last month paid more than enough to cover expenses for all three of us."

Only To Be With You by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John (M, 40,768 w., 4 Ch. || Black Mirror / Future AU || Character Death, Future Technology, Sickness/Cancer/Illness, Heavy Angst with Happy Ending, First Person POV John, Pining John, Heart-Wrenching Angst) – I tell myself that next time I’ll come near this same place again. Wait around for the mysterious stranger in his coat to dash past me, hot on the heels of a new criminal in black. I think this all the way back to my Exit, planning where I’ll wait and what I’ll say when I see him. Scheming on how to get his name. It’s only once I reach the Exit Point door that I realize two hours and forty-five minutes have passed, and I realize that this won’t be the last time I Visit. It won’t be the last time at all.

A Hundred Crimson Sols by elldotsee (E, 55,536 w., 16 Ch. || Astronauts AU || Mars Exploration / Space Travel, Slow Burn, Shy Sherlock, Scientist Sherlock / Biomed Engineer John, Alternating POV, Mutual Pining, UST, Angst with Happy Ending, Domestic Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Injuries, Suicidal Ideation, Zero-G Sex) – Will Holmes is a chemical researcher recognized widely for his contributions to the new Mars exploration program. Thanks to his ground-breaking developments, the IMMC (International Mars Mission Corporation) is one step closer to Martian colonization. Will and his team of scientists are headed out on the first of three manned missions before the first group of settlers arrive. Three days before launch, one of the crew has to be replaced. Will panics because...new people. The replacement is of course one John Watson, biomedical engineer and space hottie who was pretty sure he had retired from actual space exploration and was now content to work in the nice, quiet research lab. Can the crew survive this TOTALLY ROUTINE trip? Will they be able to endure each other for the looooooong trip in close quarters? Gonna be a wild ride... prepare for blast off. Part 1 of SpaceBois go to Space

White Knight by DiscordantWords (M, 69,840 w., 13 Ch. || S4 Compliant/Post S4, Marriage For a Case, Jealous John, Pining John, Janine / Sherlock Fake Relationship, Serial Killers, Case Fic, Undercover as a Couple, Weddings, John is a Mess, Misunderstandings, Wedding Planning, Jealousy, Drunkenness, Love Confessions, Angst with Happy Ending) – Green. The word green was used to convey a great many things. Illness. Envy. Inexperience. Standing there amidst Janine's chattering bridesmaids, watching Sherlock furrow his brow and study fabric swatches, watching him smile and simper and flirt, John thought it a remarkably apt colour choice. Because he felt quite sick to his stomach, he feared the source of said sickness might very well be jealousy, and he had absolutely no idea at all what to do about it. Or: Sherlock needs to fake a relationship for a case. He doesn't ask John.

Being John Watson-ish by elwinglyre (E, 69,902 w., 17 Ch. || Bodysnatcher AU || Author John, Cranky Sherlock, Angst, Sexual Tension, First Kiss / Time, Falling in Love, BAMF John, Past Soldier John, Feelings, Inside Someone’s Brain, Shy Sherlock, Sherlock Loves John, POV Sherlock, Switchlock, Slow Burn, Internal Dialogue, Mental Turmoil) – When consulting detective Sherlock Holmes steps on one toe too many at a crime scene, he's consigned to a desk job in an archaic office on the seventh-and-a-half floor of the New Scotland Yard. It’s in this bleak office that Sherlock discovers a portal into the mind of renowned author John Watson. Grander than his mind palace, this new wonderland affords Sherlock new vistas of experimentation. To learn more about the mystery behind the portal, Sherlock seeks out and befriends Watson. But then it all goes wrong when others find the secret portal door—including the man whose brain he visits.

Just To Hold You Close by sussexbound (E, 70,841 w., 18 Ch. || Alternate First Meeting, Sherlock POV, ASD Sherlock, PTSD John, Demisexual Sherlock, Bisexual John, Cuddling/Snuggling, Platonic Cuddling, Enthusiastic Consent, Bed Sharing, Love Confessions, First Kiss/Time, Sexual Tension, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Cuddle Negotiations, For a Case Until It Isn’t, Hair Petting, Sexual Negotiation, Anxiety, Trust Issues, Slow Burn, Panic Attacks, Frottage, Hand/Blow Jobs, Referenced Self Harm / Abuse / Suicidal Ideation, First Kiss/Time, Anal, Autistic Sherlock) – When a woman is murdered and the last person to see her alive is recently invalided army vet turned reluctant (and prickly) professional cuddler, John Watson, Sherlock Holmes is pulled into a world of intimacy and intrigue he never could have imagined. John is a conundrum and mystery: frank yet reserved, tender yet angry, open yet afraid. Sherlock is instantly drawn into his orbit, and begins to feel and desire things he never has before.

The Vapor Variant by 88thParallel (CanadaHolm) (M, 72,684 w., 18 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Post-THoB, John Whump, Protective Sherlock, Guilty Sherlock, Anxious/Worried Sherlock, Virgin Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD John, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Suspense, Virus, Sickfic, Big Brother Mycroft) – They stood face to face in the middle of a clearing. The dim light of the moon barely allowed Sherlock to see the glassy terror in John’s eyes and the sweat that glistened off his forehead. His nose was bleeding again, blood dripping in a slow stream from his right nostril. They were both gasping for air, John’s eyes locked on Sherlock’s. There was no recognition there, just wild animal fear. Time stood still for an eternal few seconds, and Sherlock took a shaky breath. “John—”Spell broken, John spun and bolted back into the woods. Still heaving for air, Sherlock took off after him

A Further Sea by i_ship_an_armada & ShinySherlock (E, 125,492 w., 23 Ch. || Historical Pirates AU || Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Doctor John / Pirate Captain Sherlock, Sailing, UST / RST, Masturbation, Action / Adventure, Mild Angst & Peril, Romance, Shaving, Molly/Janine, Bottomlock, Hand / Blow Jobs, Past Drug Use, Slow Burn, Mild Violence, Happy Ending) – Here be a tale of adventure for both body and soul, but beware if ye be not of stout heart, for this be piratelock, ya savvy? Luckless ship's surgeon John Watson takes a chance, and finds himself eye to eye with The Ghost, the scourge of the seven seas and a definite thorn in the side of the blaggard, James Moriarty. But when John finds there's more to this most cunning pirate than be meetin' the eye, he has to choose... is it a pirate's life for him?

The Adventure of the Silver Scars by tangledblue (NR [M], 142,458 w., 41 Ch. || S3 Fix-It, Post-HLV/ Post-TAB / Canon Compliant, Case Fic, No Baby, Angst, Humour, UST, Slow Burn, Angry John, Reconciliation, Not Nice Mary / Leaving Mary, Dependent Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Caretaker John, Fist Fights, It’s An Experiment, Virgin Sherlock, Dancing, Drugging, John Whump, Pet Names, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Scars) – It’s been thirteen months since Mary shot Sherlock and John finds he’s still pissed off about it. Sherlock had thought everything was settled: John and Mary, domestic bliss. But when John turns up at Baker Street with suitcases, the world’s only consulting detective might not be prepared for the consequences. A new case. Some old scores to settle. Certain danger. Concertos, waltzes, and whisky.

Proving A Point by elldotsee & J_Baillier (E, 186,270 w., 28 Ch. || Me Before You Fusion || Medical Realism, Insecure John, Depression, Romance, Angst, POV John, Sherlock Whump, Serious Illness, Doctor John, Injury Recovery, Assisted Suicide, Sherlock’s Violin, Awkward Sexual Situations, Alcoholism, Drugs, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn, Body Image, Friends to Lovers, Hurt / Comfort, Pain, Big Brother Mycroft, Intimacy, Anxiety, PTSD, Family Issues, Psychological Trauma, John Whump, Case Fics, Loneliness, Pain) – Invalided home from Afghanistan, running out of funds and convinced that his surgical career is over, John Watson accepts a mysterious job offer to provide care and companionship for a disabled person. Little does he know how much hangs in the balance of his performance as he settles into his new life at Musgrave Court.

GOOD OMENS

you can dance in a hurricane, but only if you're standing in the eye by be_brave13 (G, 1,456 w., 1 Ch. || Non-Linear Narrative, Light Angst, 6000 Years of Pining / Slow Burn, POV Crowley, 5 and Ones, Idiots in Love, Song Fic) – 5 times Crowley knew he loved Aziraphale and the 1 time he knew Aziraphale loved him back (romantically).

Where Heaven Begins by sussexbound (M, 2,515 w., 1 Ch. || Pining Crowley, Soft Idiots, Emotional Love Making, Hurt/Comfort, Crowley Has Healing Powers, Kissing, Bed Sharing, Crowley POV) – Aziraphale bleeds. Is bleeding. He’s wearing human skin, after all.

In the (Second) Beginning by cherryfeather (M, 2,661 w., 1 Ch. || Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Confessions, Soft Crowley, POV Aziraphale, Post-Canon, First Kiss, Wings) – Aziraphale realizes that Crowley's been saying something rather loudly for a week.

The Picnic; or, the Drawbacks of Loving an Angel by sorrowfulcheese (G, 3,776 w., 1 Ch. || Post-Apocalypse/Canon, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Misunderstandings, Moving On, Picnicking, Idiots in Love, Crowley POV, Cranky Crowley, Mutual Pining, Light Angst with Happy Ending) – Aziraphale lures Crowley out for a picnic. It doesn't go remarkably well.

The slowest moving object in the universe by chamyl (G, 4,996 w., 1 Ch. || God POV, Mutual Pining, Idiots in Love, Beach Day, Games, Light Humour, Tenderness, Embarassed Crowley, Soft Idiots, First Kiss, Love Confessions) – Crowley and Aziraphale have had feelings for each other for a very long time. It takes a date at the lake and a round of 36 Questions That Lead To Love to give them the final push.

a garden all their own by leaveanote (T, 5,436 w., 1 Ch. || Post Canon, POV Crowley, Emotional Turmoil, Aziraphale Takes Care of Crowley, Crying, Nightmares, Love Confessions, First Kiss, Heart Wrenching Pining, Pining Crowley, Wings, Tired Crowley, Romance, Healing, Massage, Light Angst with Happy Ending) – The aftermath. An exhaustion deeper than body. A secret too heavy to carry when when grief burned so close. Crowley has to tell him. "What am I to you?" A saving thing, an agony, a binary star, tenderness, an unhealed wound, a home, a home, a garden. Come to me, we'll heal together.

i want to hold your hand (goddammit) by PersephonesReign (E, 7,695 w., 5 Ch. || Crowley POV, Pining Crowley, Emotional Turmoil, Slow Burn, Soft Crowley, Angst and Fluff, Love Confessions, Nervous / Anxious Crowley, First Kiss/Time, URT, Wing Kink, Anal, Top Aziraphale / Bottom Crowley, Hand Holding) – Crowley just wants to hold Aziraphale's hand. What's so difficult about that?

A Brief History of Touch by chamyl (E, 11,849 w., 1 Ch. || Moments in Time, First Kiss/Time, Heavy Mutual Pining, Romance, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn, Masturbation, Almost Kiss, Touch-Starved Crowley, Angst With Happy Ending, Love Confessions, Blow Jobs, Emotional Love Making, Friends to Lovers, Body Worship, Promise of Forever With a Ring) – Six thousand years of pining, stolen glances, almost-touches, plummeting towards the inevitable end.

The Nice and Accurate Love Story of A. J. Crowley and A. Z. Fell by SealandRocks (E, 16,353 w., 1 Ch. || Pining Crowley, Implied Mutual Pining, Emotional Love Making, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, POV Crowley, Jealous Crowley, Crowley’s Plants, Kissing as Healing, Moments in Time, The Arrangement, Love Confessions, Bottom Crowley, Gentle Aziraphale, Slow Burn, Falling in Love, Crowley is Bad at Feelings, First Kiss/Time, Anal Sex / Fingering, Wings / Wing Kink, Porn With Plot, Praise Kink, Kissing in the Rain, Symbolism, Historical References) – Crowley and Aziraphale have been dancing around each other since the beginning. From Eden to London, it eventually becomes very hard to avoid the only other immortal around. And after so many centuries, having a physically body becomes a bit uncomfortable. Crowley is left to wonder what it is about Aziraphale that helps ease the ache in his soul. It would only take him 6000 years to figure out that it was rooted in something deeper all along. Part 1 of Love Stories for the Oblivious

Any Way You Want It by LieutenantLiv (M, 27,585 w., 5 Ch. || Holidays, Slow Burn, Fluff, First Time, Eventual Smut, Swimming, Dreams of Dancing, Kissing in the Rain, Self-Esteem Issues, Misunderstandings, Crying Love Confessions, Soft Crowley, Clingy Crowley, Virgin Aziraphale, Romance) – Saving the world is exhausting work. With Heaven and Hell off their backs, it seems as good a time as any for Crowley and Aziraphale to take a proper break. Neither one of them predicts the direction their holiday takes.Who'd have thought that sharing a cottage in Scotland would be quite so romantic?

[shewholovestoread]

Game of Thrones Season 8 Episode 5 - The Bells

I saw the episode last night and I actually loved it, everything that had been teased, hinted at, came to pass. It was exceptionally well shot and the cinematography was excellent.

Emilia Clarke has progressively gotten better where her acting is concerned and her performance last night was nothing short of spectacular. She conveyed so much just through her expressions, it was amazing.

More under the cut

I’ve seen a lot of people who are deeply unhappy with this episode and that’s cool, you’re entitled to your opinion. Is it rushed, absolutely, but everything about Game of Thrones has been rushed since season 7 began. So now I’m used to it. Did they leave Dany’s devolution too late? Yes they did. Does it lack in nuances, of course it does and at this point, I don’t expect subtlety and nuance from D&D, I’ve gotten myself to look beyond those faults because that’s the only way I could enjoy it. Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed last night’s episode, for once D&D didn’t pull any punches.

Dany’s descent into darkness has been foreshadowed over the last 2 seasons, it’s been there all along. I won’t say that she’s gone insane, she hasn’t, she’s just realised that she won’t get the love and adoration that she’s craved and she decided, if not through love, then she’ll rule through fear. Her scene with Jon also highlights this. It also highlights that she’s realised where his loyalties lie. In her mind, he chose his family over her, he chose Sansa over her. She gave him a choice and he made the wrong one.

Add to that, she’s lost a great deal over the last 2/3 episodes, she lost Viserion, Jorah, Rheagal and Missandei over a very short period of time. She’s been nearly stripped of everything that made her special, she’s been stripped of people who genuinely loved her and believed in her and all of that for a war that she needn’t have been so involved in. Because, even after all of that, she still didn’t get what she wanted, the people’s love. She’s experienced nothing but loss ever since she came to Westeros and she’s done playing nice.

I also liked the way the episode was structured, we first see Dany decimate Euron’s fleet and then The Golden Company and up until that point, if you’re a Dany fan, you’re really rooting for her. It follows in the same vein as the previous encounters that we’ve seen with dragons, where she’s clearly fighting someone the audience doesn’t like. She’s taking down Euron and the sell-swords, she’s still the good guy. But then, the perspective shifts, we see what the small folk see and experience when she turns on them after the bells have been rung. She is the dragon, she doesn’t see the difference between a soldier and a civilian, they’re all cannon fodder to her. If she can’t have them through love, she’ll make sure that they’re so terrified of her, no one will ever think of defying her. We see the damage she does with one dragon, I shudder to think what she would have been done with 2.

As far Varys’ end was concerned, we all saw it coming, I just didn’t expect Tyrion to be the one to betray him. Varys saw her tyranny and acted in the interest of the realm and for that, he has my respect.

Tyrion not only betrayed Sansa when he went to Dany, he also condemned Jon. I’ve had a problem with Tyrion since season 7 and this episode just furthered that. He’s been blind and made more errors than anyone can count, he underestimated Cersei, the list goes on. Like Varys, he can see the parts of Dany that are worrisome but unlike him, he chooses to be blind.

If you had any doubts about Pol!Jon, this episode ought to put them at rest. Jon comes to Dragonstone and continues to turn down the throne and refuses to plot against Dany because he’s already involved in a plot except no one knows about it. His problem has been his own arrogance. I know that he thinks he’s playing Dany for the good of the North and his family but she’s not blinded by him any more. His refusal to confide in Sansa and Arya has now come to bite him in the ass. Dany can see that she has been manipulated by him, that when it came to choose, he did not choose her. He’s complicit in the genocide at King’s Landing. As a military man, this is the most dishonourable thing he’s done. Like Tyrion, Jon convinced himself that what he was doing was right and it was the only thing they could do and now he’s well and truly screwed.

I liked that Sandor was able to change Arya’s mind, that she chose to live instead of dying for her vengeance. She’s a child who was forced to grow up too fast but all of that was when she thought that she had lost her family forever. But now she has them back, she has Sansa and Bran (okay, he doesn’t technically count but still) she has her home back, she even has Gendry, should she choose to be with him. She has something to live for now. It was a marked change that while she had gone to KL to kill someone, she ended up trying to save people.

Sandor and Gregor were too closely linked by their hatred for each other for them to have any other conclusion. Sandor had done horrible things but had tried to change and his greatest act wasn’t killing Gregor, it was saving Arya.

Many people were disappointed with Jaime’s decision to ride South to Cersei and, actually, it made sense. The show illustrated to the audience, his capacity to do good but it was underscored by his love for Cersei. He knew she was toxic, but she was also family, he loved her and and she was the mother of his children. He was never going to abandon her. He never regretted his actions, never expressed remorse for them, he went so far as to say that he would do them all again because they were at war.

In the end, Cersei died with her dignity intact and with the audiences sympathising with her in her final moments. The writers humanised her, her terror at her impending death and with no way to stop it. But she didn’t die alone, she was with someone who had loved her through everything and had fought tooth and nail to get to her.

Sansa, sadly, did not appear in this episode but she was referred to so many times that she may as well have been present. Sansa was right all along, all of her fears and concerns were realised in this episode. Dany is a tyrant, Queen of the Ashes. They exchanged one tyrant for a more dangerous one, one with a dragon. It is possible that in the next episode, she goes after Sansa since she’s the only one who’s still defiant and the North still has to be dealt with. She makes the threat crystal clear when she’s executing Varys, “let those who betray her know what will happen to them.”

The promo for next episode only shows us a few seconds from the first few minutes of the show, it would not surprise me if Dany decides to go to Winterfell to deal with Sansa and the North. Alternatively, it is also possible that Dany has her brought to KL (against her will). She already suspected Jon when Tyrion came to her at the beginning of episode 5, it is possible that she took measures to deal with the threat Sansa presented by being proactive and having her brought South without Jon’s knowledge. It would not surprise me if Bronn still has a role to play considering that he was still in the North when Jon and his men left Winterfell to join Dany.

[beatriceeagle]

9, 10 and 49? If you're up for it?

Always up for it. :)

9. what’s one show you thought you’d hate but turned out to really enjoy?

I generally don’t watch a show if I think I’m going to hate it. But I was very skeptical about The Magicians. I’ve never been able to bring myself to read the books, because I’m so irritated by the G.R.R. Martin blurb on the cover. (“The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea. … Grossman’s sensibilities are thoroughly adult, his narrative dark and dangerous and full of twists. Hogwarts was never like this.” Congratulations, dude, I will never read this book now.) But by season two, the TV show was getting really interesting reviews from critics whose intentions I trust (if not always their taste), and I figured the show had never been blurbed by GRRM, so I gave it a very hesitant shot.

I almost didn’t come back for season two. There were definitely aspects that I enjoyed in the first season, but it wasn’t a show that I trusted, and the end of the season left me deeply unsettled in a bad way.

But ultimately I did come back, and over the course of the second season it won me over, and then I flat-out loved the third season. I don’t think that the currently-airing fourth season is quite hitting the highs of the third, but it’s still doing interesting and unexpected things, and being funny, and caring about its characters. 

A lot of TV shows – especially adaptations, but really just a lot of TV shows generally – develop a kind of inertia, very quickly. An internal and external received wisdom about the Way Things Are Going to Be. These two characters are going to end up together, because they’re the leading man and woman. This character needs to stick around, even though there’s absolutely no reason for them to be here anymore and their story is going nowhere, because they’re a series regular and we don’t want to write them off. Or, conversely, this character is going to die, because that’s how it happens in the source material/our original outline, and we need to get to where we’re going.

It can be boring. Worse, it can be deeply, deeply frustrating, when a show is starting to naturally develop in a different, more interesting direction, but then gets ruthlessly shoved back onto the track of the Way Things Are Going to Be.

The nice thing about The Magicians, and the thing that keeps me coming back, is that, given the option, it almost always chooses the more interesting path. It diverges from the books. It diverges from audience expectations. In some cases, it’s pretty clear, it diverges from the writers’ own earlier expectations. When something on the show is working, but isn’t the Way Things Are Going to Be, they lean into it, rather than correcting it. And when they make a mistake, and (for instance) get rid of a character who still has some juice in them, they often go back and correct themselves. (One of the perks of being a fantasy show is that they can do that.)

I think it’s one of the very best qualities that a show can have. It’s one that I absolutely did not expect from The Magicians, and as long as the show continues to have it, I’ll forgive it any number of weaknesses.

10. what’s one show you thought you’d love but turned out to really hate?

I don’t know about hate, but I was really looking forward to The People v. O.J. Simpson, and then I had to stop watching four episodes in. I don’t think it was bad in any way, but boy did I not want to experience it. I will likely give The Assassination of Gianni Versace a go at some point.

Also – and again, hate is probably too strong a word – if you described the concept of Battlestar Galactica to me, I would be all-in, but I’ve watched the first two seasons twice, and never gotten past about the halfway point of season three. It’s very well-made, but that show just presses all of my buttons. Like, I was just angry all the time, while I was watching it. (A friend’s husband once said that his problem with BSG is that, “It’s about the last of humanity, but I don’t care whether any of these humans die,” and that is… not totally inaccurate to my experience.) I think I have a Ronald D. Moore problem. I had major issues with the two episodes of Outlander that I saw, and outside of one or two exceptions, his Star Trek episodes always really frustrate me too. He’s a very effective writer – I mean, the man knows how to draw you into a scene – but I find that he often wants so badly to get to the scene or scenario or theme or whatever that he thinks is important, that he’s willing to throw away established character, or ignore broader political/social realities, or just be really deeply frustrating. So there are some wonderful things about BSG that I still think about to this day, and am really grateful for – I’ll never get over the shot of Six and Gaius on Caprica from the credits, or Starbuck and Apollo’s fucked-up friendship (which is so totally in my wheelhouse), or the time-jump on New Caprica (which opened the door for time-jumps on TV, which I think has been a big good thing) – but it’s a show that I have a complicated relationship with, to say the least.

49. who are your favourite couples on TV?

I never understood shipping at all – literally, did not ship, did not understand why other people did – until I discovered Wesley/Lilah on Angel. If you’ve never seen Angel, Lilah is an arguably sociopathic lawyer who has sold her soul to Hell’s law firm, and Wesley is a well-intentioned but semi-incompetent and deeply fucked-up demon hunter who’s in love with another woman. The entire time they’re together, they’re openly spying on each other, and they also have a bet going about who’s going to be the first person to say they’re in a relationship. So that should give you an idea of the kind of thing you’re in for.

Wesley/Lilah (Angel)Stiles/Malia (Teen Wolf)Don/Sloan (The Newsroom)Clarke/Lexa (The 100)Tom/B’Elanna (Star Trek: Voyager)Carter/Abby (ER)Hardison/Parker/Elliot (Leverage)Jane/Michael (Jane the Virgin)Korra/Asami (Legend of Korra)

I’m also feeling just a lot of Quentin/Eliot (The Magicians) feelings right now, but that might be recency bias. (It’s not.)

Huh. There are more solid, well-adjusted, and even happily-ended couples in there than I thought!

Ask me about TV!

[minijenn]

Universe Falls Chapter 51

Damn its been almost a month since we’ve had a new UF chapter can ya’ll believe that? Well now we finally have one and its... ok. Kinda short and kinda lackluster but whatever. I need to get back into the swing of things now that I have no distractions holding be back anymore (aside from the ones i put upon myself) but anyway, here ya go. Enjoy!

Previous: http://minijenn.tumblr.com/post/173015479819/universe-falls-chapter-51

Chapter 52: Cry for Help

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With the metaphorical roller coaster ride of events and emotions they had been consistently on for the past several days, Steven, Dipper, and Mabel all readily welcomed a break from this torrent of essentially earth-shattering revelations and aftershocks. However, the “break” that Steven and Mabel had formulated was one that Dipper wasn’t exactly fond of, but was ultimately outnumbered on, which was how he ended up being sandwiched squarely in between the enthusiastic pair as they turned in for the ongoing Crying Breakfast Friends marathon.

All the same, two thirds of the trio were thoroughly enraptured in the depressing escapades of Sniffling Croissant, Sad Pear, and Bawling Bacon all weeping inconsolably over some sort of ‘shocking’ reveal concerning their mysterious family members. “Wow…” Steven mused in amazement in light of this turn in the show. “What a great plot twist! I can’t believe Sniffling Croissant’s dad was actually one of the Angry Lunch Enemies all this time!”

“I know, right?!” Mabel exclaimed, just as stunned. “And that they finally found Sad Pear and Bawling Bacon’s long-lost aunt! It’s like everything’s unraveling all at once and its so crazy! I wonder how everyone is gonna react to all these huge drama bombs!”

“You guys are kidding, right?” Dipper interjected dryly. “Those ‘plot twists’ were totally predictable. I’ve only seen a few episodes of this show and from what I’ve seen, they’ve foreshadowed all that stuff so much that just about anyone could have figured it out from basically the beginning.”

A beat of somewhat awkward silence passed at this callout, until Steven found a silver lining in it and quickly perked up. “Aw, Dipper! You really are invested in Crying Breakfast Friends after all, just like me and Mabel!”

“…Believe me, Steven, I’m really not,” Dipper deadpanned, rolling his eyes at the over the top cartoon on TV.

Not long after this exchange, the temple doors began to open and instantly, all three of the kids directed their attention away from the TV and in that direction instead. After all, none of them had really heard anything from any of the Gems since the return of their apparently tumultuous memories the other day. Suffice to say they were all immensely curious to know both how they were coping with what they had discovered, as well as whatever it was they had remembered in the first place. But given how sensitive of a subject it likely still was for the Gems, the kids knew they were in no position to pry about any of it; the last thing they wanted was to set Garnet, Amethyst, or Pearl off again so soon after the solid ground they once stood on abruptly crumbled apart underneath them.

But still, that didn’t mean the trio didn’t want to know they answers they themselves were still missing even after it was all said and done.

So they watched in somewhat tense silence as Amethyst trudged out of the temple, silent and clearly sullen as she kept her rather embittered gaze downward on her way over to the fridge. She didn’t bother to spare a glance up to the kids on the loft, much less make an effort to speak to them as she dully searched for a snack. The purple Gem’s distracted distance continued only until Steven hesitantly spoke up with a small smile, one that was filled with plenty of concern for Amethyst in light of what had happened just a few days ago.

“Uh… hey, Amethyst,” he greeted with slight uncertainty, exchanging a brief glance with the twins before continuing. “You, uh… you wanna watch Crying Breakfast Friends with us? There’s an all-day marathon going on.”

The purple Gem’s shoulders hitched at the offer, but she didn’t turn to face the trio as she muttered out her response. “Nah… I’m… I’m good…”

“A-are you sure?” Mabel asked, trying to be just as encouraging as Steven. “We’re in the middle of a really good one right now!”

“Not really,” Dipper remarked, though he was quickly corrected by a sudden elbowing from his sister. “Ow! Uh, yeah, I-I mean, it’s really, um… great…”

Amethyst hesitated for another moment or two before finally glancing over her shoulder at the kids, briefly taking in their warm, hopeful expressions before letting out a relenting sigh. “Yeah, alright,” she complied, heading up towards the loft herself before plopping down on the floor in front of the TV. “But only for a little while. I’m sorta… busy dealing with some… stuff.”

None of the kids bothered to ask what that “stuff” might have been, largely since they already had a pretty good guess about it. Even so, another bout of tentative silence took over the room, filled in only by the overdramatic wails of the breakfast characters on screen. But when it was finally broken, Steven was the one to do it, interrupting the show somewhat apprehensively as he addressed the purple Gem on the ground below him.

“Um… Amethyst?” he began, unsure of how to really phrase what he really wanted to ask, so instead, he went in another direction instead. “H-how are you feeling after the whole, um… you know… memory thing that happened the other day?”

“W-what, that whole thing?” Amethyst quickly replied, flinching as she forced a scoff out. “Pfft, I don’t even care about that junk anymore. I-I mean, its really messed up stuff, yeah, but uh… its fine, its whatever. It happened a way long time ago anyway, so its not like it even matters anymore anyway.”

“Uh… no offense, Amethyst, but it sure didn’t seem like it doesn’t matter based on how you guys reacted to getting those memories back in the first place…” Dipper noted truthfully.

“Ugh, well it doesn’t!” the purple Gem snapped, frustrated. “I don’t know about Garnet or Pearl, but I’m over it, so we don’t need to talk about it anymore!”

The kids exchanged a glance, rather doubtful of this claim based on Amethyst’s heated reaction, but none of them were too keen on continuing much further when it came to asking her anything related to the formerly missing memories. After all, it didn’t seem like they’d be getting too far along with the purple Gem when it came to getting answers about them anyway. “Well then, i-if the memory thing isn’t what’s bothering you, then… what does have you so down?” Mabel asked, still wanting to cheer the obviously discouraged purple Gem up.

Amethyst started at this, her eyes growing wide before her cheeks flushed in dark purple embarrassment, which she was quick to play off with another harsh scoff. “N-nothing!” she barked defensively. “Nothing’s got me down, I’m fine! I don’t know why you guys are grilling me with so many questions anyway, I thought you guys just called me up here to watch your weird cartoon with you and-” The purple Gem cut herself off as she nodded towards the TV, only to notice that the program had cut out into loud, bizarre static largely out of nowhere.

“Aw, hey! What’s the big idea?” Mabel asked with a pout. “Steven, did you forget to pay your cable bill or something?”

“My dad’s usually the one who does that, and he’s always pretty on top of getting it paid on time…” Steven mused thoughtfully as he looked to the snowy screen. “But this is pretty weird. It was doing this yesterday too…”

“Well, then maybe its just something wrong with your TV,” Dipper guessed. “Still, its not like you really need to rush to fix it or anything. Its not like we were missing much anyway…” He finished his last statement in a sarcastic mutter, one that Steven and Mabel readily disagreed with.

“Are you kidding, bro-bro? The entire show could be turning itself upside down right now, and all we’re seeing is a bunch of static!” Mabel huffed impatiently. “We gotta figure out a way to fix this!”

“Ugh, hang on, I got it,” Amethyst said as she stood and stepped beside the TV. The purple Gem then proceeded to give it a few soft kicks, though they did little to change the ongoing flow of endless static. “How about now?” she asked, glancing to the TV herself. She jumped back in surprise, however, as the static suddenly shifted, the television itself vibrating wildly as an unintelligible bout of odd gibberish began bursting from it.

“I-it’s never done that before,” Steven remarked, keeping a close eye on the screen along with the twins to see what might happen next. Soon enough, the screen soon changed again as an image gradually began to take shape upon it along with a voice. And as soon as both of these things became clear and distinguishable, the entire group present let out a startled gasp upon seeing exactly what, or rather who was interrupting the scheduled programming.

“This is Peridot,” the green Gem began with her prerecorded message, her manner clearly aggravated and rather frantic as she continued. “Transmitting on all frequencies from abandoned Crystal System colony planet Earth, to Yellow Diamond. My mission has been compromised; my escort and escapee informant are gone and I am now stranded! Please send help!” With this desperate plea, the message repeated itself, with Peridot once again making her anxious appeal to the mysterious Yellow Diamond. Based on this alone, it took almost no deliberation between Amethyst and the kids for them to reach the decision to call Garnet and Pearl out of the temple so they could this troubling transmission. And upon hearing it for themselves, both of the other Gems were quick to place their own lingering remorse from their recalled memories aside, just as Amethyst had, for the sake of the brand new problem at hand.

“I don’t get it…” Mabel remarked, aptly confused as they all watched Peridot’s message over again. “Why would anyone give Peridot her own weird commercial? It’s not like she really has the kind of personality meant for television.”

“She probably just took over the airwaves, Mabel,” Dipper remarked, rolling his eyes as he cast another disdainful glare at the Gem on TV. “Though who knows how she managed to do that. I guess she might be smarter than we give her credit for. Maybe.”

“Doubt it,” Garnet said, her manner stoic as she rose to properly stand.

“Ok, thanks,” Steven finished his conversation on the phone before hanging up and addressing the others. “Connie says its on her TV too.”

“But where could Peridot be broadcasting a signal that strong?” Pearl asked with a concerned frown.

“There’s only one place,” Garnet said, taking in a deep, resolved breath before looking to her uncertain teammates. “Amethyst, Pearl. I know a lot has happened these past few days. And even more has changed as a result of everything we’ve learned. But… despite it all, its time we pull ourselves together and get back to doing what we do best: protecting the Earth from anyone who wants to harm it, including Homeworld. Now,” the Gem leader paused her bold, reassuring, and inspiring speech as she gracefully hopped down from the loft, putting on a small, somewhat unreadable smile as she looked up to the group still gathered above and encouraging them to follow. “Let’s get going. We have a transmission to interrupt and certain green Gem’s plans to thwart.”

The warp pad to the Gem communication hub located far off in the distant desert had been destroyed near the beginning of the summer courtesy of Sugilite. This meant that the only way the Gems and the kids could get there was on Lion, which was a pretty cramped ride, even as the pink beast roared a temporal portal there from Gravity Falls. Still, the night air was cool and crisp as they all arrived, Lion quickly plopping down in exhaustion underneath them as they all disembarked from his back. “Lion, are you ok?” Steven asked with concern, giving his faithful pet a comforting pat on the head as he allowed him some rest.

At the same time, Dipper and Mabel let out a simultaneous gasp of awe as they got their first glimpse of the towering communication hub before them, a Gem locale neither of them had been to since they had not been present for the Gems’ previous venture there. “Whoa… this place is amazing!” Dipper exclaimed, already immensely curious about it as he took a step closer. “I can’t believe something like this just… exists in the middle of the desert like this! What’s it for?”

“Well, it used to be used to transmit messages between the Earth and Homeworld…” Pearl began her brief explanation before Amethyst interjected.

“Before we busted it up a few weeks ago, just like we do with all of Homeworld’s old junk they got lying around here,” she remarked, playfully punching her hand and ignoring the white Gem’s exasperated huff.

“Well… it doesn’t look so busted up now…” Mabel noted, glancing back towards the hub.

“No, it doesn’t…” Garnet agreed, looking up to the tall beam of light emitting from the top of the tower up into the clouds above. “It’s as I feared…”

“Peridot must have somehow repaired the communication hub…” Pearl ventured with a frown as she surveyed the haphazard job the green Gem had apparently done. “Well, at least some of it. I suppose we really did underestimate her…”

“So… we just gotta wreck it up again, right?” Steven asked before letting out an excited gasp of recollection as he looked between Garnet and Amethyst. “You guys should form Sugilite!”

At this suggestion, Dipper adamantly shook his head, remembering well the aforementioned fusion’s violent rampage several weeks ago. “Uh, Steven, that might not be the best-”

“Oh my gosh, yes!” Mabel interjected brightly. “I didn’t get to meet Sugilite the last time around and I’ve always wanted to see how super tough and strong she is! Can you guys form her? Please, please please?!”

While Garnet didn’t provide much of a reaction, especially when compared to Pearl’s expression of silent fear, Amethyst smiled awkwardly, stretching casually as she cast a glance over at the Gem leader hopefully. “Er, y-yeah, well… its up to Garnet, I guess…” she said, a hint of anxiousness in her tone, one that was mingled with a certain amount of eagerness as well. “W-what do you say, G? Shall we mash it up…?”

“No,” Garnet staunchly replied, instantly shutting the purple Gem’s already wavering hopes down before they could even try to grow.

“B-but… don’t we need to be huge like last time?” Amethyst asked, her expression falling as she thought of the practically countless reasons for such a rejection. Reasons that were all rooted in things she had done and mistakes she had made.

“Last time was a disaster,” Garnet said, her tone steady and calm. “Last time we fused, Sugilite went berserk. Its because of her that we can’t even warp here anymore, not to mention how we nearly took out all those manotaurs.” The Gem leader paused, sighing softly as she took her shades off and looked down to the disheartened purple Gem sympathetically. “I can be brash, and you can be reckless. And we can both get carried away. So for the time being,” Garnet put her shades back on, her authority on the matter clear as Amethyst saw her reflection in them. “Sugilite is benched.”

“O-oh… yeah… o-ok…” Amethyst let out a sad sigh of acceptance, averting Garnet’s gaze out of shame as she knew that certainly wasn’t all there was to it. Certainly, the Gem leader wouldn’t say it out loud while the wound was still so fresh, but the purple Gem believed that her foolish, senseless bout of rebellion against the team before that portal just a few short days ago had everything to do with this. A rebellion that she could feel nothing but regret for now that it had all but ruined whatever trust the Gem leader might have once held for her.

“What we need now…” Garnet continued, turning to Pearl, who up until that point, had been standing off to the side in silent observation. “Is to be careful.” While Steven and Mabel let out a shared gasp of excited realization at this, Pearl starkly froze, her eyes wide with surprise and wonder as Garnet placed a hand on her shoulder and offered her a bold grin. “It’s you and me, Pearl. Let’s fuse.”

Upon hearing this offer, tears immediately welled up in the white Gem’s eyes, a huge smile claiming her features, perhaps the first one she had worn since recovering her lost memories. Garnet’s smile faded upon watching Pearl let out a choked, joyous sob, her formerly calm manner completely compromised for happiness and elation she couldn’t hope to contain. “Don’t cry, Pearl,” the Gem leader advised and the white Gem complied, sucking her tears in as she nodded, her lip still quivering all the while. “Come on, let’s do this.”

“I-I’m right behind you!” Pearl readily exclaimed, hurrying after Garnet as she claimed a wide open space for them to preform their fusion dance in.

“Woo-hoo!” Steven cheered, rushing ahead as well to watch as Mabel quickly followed, joining in his excited chanting. “Fusion! Fusion! Fusion!”

“Huh. You know, its pretty weird that its taken us this long to see Pearl and Garnet fuse,” Dipper noted inquisitively. “What’s their fusion even like?”

“Oh believe me,” Amethyst huffed, crossing her arms as she begrudgingly joined the group. “You’re sure as heck about to find out…”

A bright glow sparked through Garnet’s gemstones as she smirked, putting aside all thoughts of painful memories or frightening revelations as she looked to Pearl with renewed confidence. “I’m ready.”

“H-hang on!” Pearl quipped, hurriedly stretching herself out as she continued buzzing with obvious excitement. “It’s been such a long time…” The white Gem’s smile deepened as he own gemstone began to glow, and with an elegant bow, their fusion dance began. The entire thing was slow and elegant, with both Gems slowly, smoothly strutting towards one another. The group on the sidelines watched as the pair met, Pearl linking her arms with Garnet as she stood in front of her, both of their expressions intimate, seductive almost. And then, in a movement so fluid that it barely even registered, the Gem leader suddenly lifted her partner up as though she weighed nothing at all, tossing her incredibly high up into the air in a daring, deft maneuver. The kids jaws’ collectively dropped as Pearl preformed a midair spin high above them, before spreading herself wide, a smile still bright on her face as gravity began to pull her back down towards Garnet’s outstretched arms. The moment she landed, the bright glow of an oncoming fusion enveloped them both, their combining forms steadily growing in size as they reshaped and united. The white light soon turned into a pale orange sheet, the silhouette of a new being appearing behind it until she broke that curtain of light herself.

“Gooooooooood evening, everybody!” the new fusion bombastically declared as she made her debut. Her appearance was surprising to say the least; like most of the Gems’ fusions, she was tall, roughly about 30 or so feet in height as she stood with an air of elegance and self-importance. Her attire and mannerisms carried an air of natural showmanship to them, with a stately black tailcoat and leotard, dark leggings, and a large, bright orange bowtie. Her skin was a deep shade of vermillion, her short, rounded, somewhat triangular hair pale orange, and the rounded shades covering both sets of her bright, expressive eyes dark pink and transparent in coloration. Aside from an extra pair of eyes, the fusion also sported two pairs of arms, one from her poofed sleeves and the other from her slender torso, each of them bearing a pair of long white gloves. The fusion’s effervescent, toothy grin widened even moreso as she caught sight of her captivated audience, which she didn’t hesitate to saunter forward to cheerfully greet. “This is the lovely Sardonyx, coming to you live from the soon-to-be-former communication hub! How are ya’ll doin’ tonight?”

“Greaaaat…” Amethyst deadpanned, far from fond of Garnet and Pearl’s rather over the top fusion.

The kids, on the other hand, were completely awestruck by her, Steven and Mabel in particular as they met her appearance with huge matching grins of excitement. “Giant woman!” the young Gem exclaimed, stars in his eyes as he craned his neck up to look at the massive fusion.

“Oh my stars!” Sardonyx exclaimed, putting three of her large hands down in front of the kids and silently beckoning them to hop on. While Mabel and Steven readily did so, Dipper was somewhat more hesitant, though even so, he climbed onto one of them before the fusion raised all three of the kids up to her level. “If it isn’t Steven Universe, Dipper Pines, and Mabel Pines, all in the flesh! We finally meet. So, what do you think?” Sardonyx smirked as she spun her torso completely around, the arms connected to it somehow remaining in place as she preformed this surprising illusion. “Was I worth the wait? What am I saying? Of course I was! Ohohohoh!”

The fusion’s excitable laughter echoed throughout the desert, eliciting similar chuckles from all three of the kids, though Amethyst refused to join in on the merriment from her spot on the ground. “Oh my gosh, Sardonyx, you’re so funny!” Mabel quipped, bouncing up and down on her heels on the fusion’s large palm. “And so stylish too! I love your bow tie!”

“Oh, why, thank you, Mabel darling!” Sardonyx beamed happily, using her free hand to adjust the aforementioned bow. “It really is quite the trendsetter, isn’t it? Then again, I’m really quite the trendsetter in general, so its not that surprising, is it?”

Mabel let out an amused chuckle at this, thoroughly charmed by the fusion’s apt sense of humor. “Nope! I guess its not!” she laughed, Sardonyx briefly joining in before Dipper interjected.

“Hey, so uh…” he began somewhat awkwardly as he caught the fusion’s attention. “Just a quick question: are you guys always so… theatrical when you’re fused?”

“Theatrical! Now there’s a million-dollar word!” Sardonyx exclaimed with a dramatic gasp of amazement. From there, the fusion suddenly caught Dipper off guard by pulling his hat off his head by the brim with just a single finger, playfully grinning back down at him as she spun it casually upon said finger. “And what an absolutely perfect one to refer to someone as showstopping as I am! Of course, I would expect nothing less from someone as well-read as you, Dipper. Excellent observation, as usual!”

“Oh, w-well, uh-” Dipper was interupted as Sardonyx suddenly returned his hat to him, and at this, he couldn’t really hold back something of a bashful grin as the fusion offered him a proud wink of approval. “Heh, thanks.”

“But of course,” Sardonyx chimed as warmly as ever.

“Wow, Sardonyx,” Steven mused, stars still in his eyes as the fusion looked over at him. “You’re so articulate!”

“Well, aren’t you just the sweetest little charmer!” Sardonyx gushed, playfully and gently pinching the young Gem between the fingers of her free hand as he laughed brightly. “I could literally squish you right now. It would not be hard!”

“Ah, n-no!” Steven chuckled, loosely wriggling out of her grip before the fusion pulled all three of the kids a bit closer to her face.

“Sorry,” she laughed herself with a zealous smile. “I’m just so excited to be here! You see, I haven’t exactly been myself lately. Ohohohoh!”

The kids were all quick to understand Sardonyx’s playful quip and join in on her laughter as she gently set them back down on the ground. “Ha! Fusion joke!” Steven chuckled, glancing back over at Amethyst, who simply groaned in aggravation as she averted the fusion’s attention.

Still, Sardonyx hardly payed her any mind anyway as she once again rose to her full, towering height, a coy grin still playing on her features. “And jokes aren’t the only thing I’ve got,” she began, the gem on her forehead flashing as Pearl’s spear emerged from it. The fusion caught it with one hand, though one of her lower ones tapped her on the shoulder, momentarily ‘distracting’ her. “Hm?” Sardonyx kept her act up as she tossed her spear high into the air, gasping in faux surprise at its disappearance until it came back down towards her. The fusion grinned daringly as Garnet’s gauntlets formed over both her hands, and as the spear approached her, Sardonyx punched her fists together on the lithe weapon, forming an entirely new one altogether: a massive, powerful hammer.

“Whoa…” Dipper mused in amazement at this display as Mabel let out a squeal of elated excitement. “That’s… so cool!”

“Cool is only the tip of the iceberg,” Sardonyx playfully remarked, spinning her hammer as she slung it over her shoulder. “An iceberg that, much like the troublesome hub that stands before us, is about to be completely raised, right along with your expectations.”

“Are you gonna smash stuff with your giant war hammer?” Steven asked the fusion in immense curiosity.

“Hm…” Sardonyx thoughtfully paused. “‘Smash’ is the word one would use to describe what… someone else might do.” Upon hearing this, Amethyst couldn’t help but let out another disgruntled sigh, knowing that this very pointed remark was clearly aimed at both her and the fusion she shared with Garnet. One that couldn’t have been any different from the one that was currently present. “Now,” Sardonyx continued, taking a high, graceful leap into the air, her hammer in tow as she pounced towards the communication hub. “The proper words to describe yours truly are… specific!” The fusion shouted boldly as her hammer swung down on one of the pillars, knocking it out of alignment as she plunged through the gap it had made to tackle another one. “Intelligent!” Her hammer landed once more, taking over several columns at once. “Accurate!” She proved this claim by hitting one of the pillars perfectly before launching herself over the hub. “Faultless!” Sardonyx continued as she took a high leap into the air, a beaming grin upon her face as she sailed through the air in front of the moon. “Elegant…” As more pieces of the hub fell, the fusion continued her list, each descriptive word punctuating another hit of her dependable hammer. “Controlled! Surgical! Graceful! Theatrical,” she flashed a bright grin down at the kids, who all cheered her on in light of this cordial shout-out. Even so, Sardonyx took a grand leap up to the very top of the hub, preforming an impressive flip as she claimed her upmost perch. “Aaaaaand…. Powerful!” She stopped her hammer right before it could land upon the most essential pillar, her manner turning thoughtful once more as she finished her ongoing proclamation. “But yes, occasionally, I am known… to smash.”

With a single, almost gentle tap from the end of the fusion’s hammer, the primary column came crashing down, the light emitting from the hub instantly going dark as Peridot’s message ceased its transmission. The kids’ unanimously applauded Sardonyx’s impressive preformance as the fusion easily landed before them once more, none of them noticing Amethyst’s bitter ongoing pout. “Now, just remember, everybody,” Sardonyx said, spinning her hammer out before it disappeared in a burst of glittering dragonflies. “If you ever have need of the lovely Sardonyx again, just let Pearl and Garnet know. I’ll be there in a flash,” the fusion grinned jokingly once more as she lowered herself down to her audience’s level before taking her leave. “Literally!”

In a burst of light and dragonflies, Sardonyx disappeared, leaving Garnet and Pearl intimately holding each other in her place. In the aftermath of their fusion, the pair of Gems took pause, looking to each other with wide eyes briefly before they both simultaneously exploded into a burst of absolute elation and cheer. Before they even exchanged any words at all, they burst out into a shared gale of warm laughter, especially as Garnet picked Pearl up and easily spun her around in a round of delighted victory. In that moment, after such a round of triumphant fusion and mission execution, thoughts of dark, disturbing, newly-remembered memories couldn’t have been the furthest thing from either of their minds. The pain and woe of the past several days seemed to have evaporated into nothingness, taken away by the uplifting, exciting experience they had just had the privilege of sharing together. And given that this was the happiest the kids had seen any of the Gems since the portal incident, they were all more than eager to join in on this celebration.

“Woo!” Steven cheered as him, Dipper, and Mabel ran up to the ecstatic pair. “You guys, that was great!”

“Yeah!” Mabel readily agreed. “I always hoped you guys’ fusion would be awesome, but Sardonyx was even more awesome than I could have imagined!”

“O-oh, really?” Pearl smiled with a warm, flustered blush. “Well, that’s good!”

“We were awesome!” Garnet proclaimed with a bold flair, eliciting shared laughter from the others.

“I’d say we were,” the white Gem’s grin widened upon hearing such adulation from the Gem leader herself. “Why don’t we do that more often?”

While the others continued happily praising Sardonyx’s most recent ‘preformance’, no one really noticed as Amethyst intentionally hung back from the group, her arms wrapped tightly around herself as she turned away with a disappointed sigh. She had never really been too fond of the bombastic, prideful fusion to begin with, but in light of recent events, she couldn’t help but feel even more disdain towards her than usual. But really, Amethyst knew that her bitterness didn’t completely lie with Sardonyx; a large portion of it was reserved for herself, for the foolish, reckless, borderline stupid decisions she had made. To go overboard with Garnet during Sugilite’s last appearance, to take Stan’s side over her teams’, to even go as far as to physically oppose them all because of a feeling and little else. A feeling that, in the aftermath of it all, had only brought her perhaps more shame than she had ever even known before.

Shame that seemed to tower over her, just like the showstopping fusion she always seemed to stand in the shadow of.

Given that Crying Breakfast Friends had an effective plethora of episodes, its marathon continued over the course of several days, and to avoid any further possible broadcast interruptions, Steven and Mabel had opted to continue watching it down at the Mystery Shack instead of the temple. In doing so, they managed to rope both Dipper and Stan into joining them, and while they weren’t too keen on watching the bizarrely depressing cartoon, but unfortunately neither of them were able to think of any good excuses to get out of it. So the group congregated in the den, which was still somewhat in shambles from the portal incident and the government invasion a few days prior, to watch the show with varying levels of interest.

“Why won’t you say thank you?!” Grumpy Pancake wailed somewhat angrily to Glum Glass, who answered in an expectantly mournful manner.

“B-because! I don’t know how!”

“Aww…” Mabel mused with a sympathetic frown. “Poor Pancake! He just wants to feel appreciated for all his hard work!”

“Yeah, but I can see Glass’ point too…” Steven said thoughtfully. “That’s just the thing with this show! All of its characters are so realistic and relatable!”

“You guys do realize you’re talking about a pancake and a cup here… right?” Dipper asked rather sardonically.

“Yeesh, I can’t believe you kids are actually into this sappy show,” Stan remarked just as dryly. “This thing is so far out there that it puts the cartoons that me and Ford used to watch when we were kids about animals beating each other over the heads with mallets to shame.”

“Oh yeah, how is Mr. Ford?” Steven asked, glancing away from the TV with newfound concern. “He seemed like he was really worried about the Gems the other day after they, uh… um… a-after they got their memories back and everything…”

“Pfft,” Stan scoffed, rolling his eyes at the mention of his brother. “Heck if I know. Sixer’s holed himself down in the basement for the past several days, probably working on some sort of nerd project or something. He’s barely even come up here at all and anytime he does he’s all mopey and depressed, acting like I didn’t just rescue him from some sort of nightmare dimension, the ungrateful jerk.”

“Aw, Grunkle Stan, you don’t mean that!” Mabel protested. “You and Grunkle Ford are brothers! You two love each other, just like me and Dipper do!” At this, she startled her brother by wrapping a playful arm around his shoulder, though unlike a few days ago, he didn’t push it away this time.

“…Kid, me and Ford aren’t as… uh… w-well, we used to be… um… ugh… never mind…” the conman let out a sigh of defeat, glancing away from the kids almost remorsefully. And, before any of them could pursue the unsavory manner any further, Stan quickly changed the topic to something a bit more manageable. “Uh, s-so anyway, how are the Gems doing? I heard that whole memory thing was… kinda rough for them.”

“Actually, they seemed mostly ok yesterday,” Dipper pointed out.

“Yeah, we went to the communication hub in the desert and Garnet and Pearl fused into Sardonyx and she took the entire thing out with her huge hammer!” Steven explained with a bright smile. “You should have seen it, Mr. Pines! It was incredible!”

“Sardonyx?” Stan questioned, raising an eyebrow before letting out a huff of a scoff. “That over the top broad? Yeesh, it’s been a while since I’ve heard anything about her.”

“Wait, Grunkle Stan, you’ve met Sardonyx before?” Dipper asked, rather surprised at this.

“No, but I’ve heard plenty about her from Amethyst,” Stan said, rolling his eyes. “Any time Garnet and Pearl turned into her, she would to vent to me about how pompous and annoying she was. Always seemed to be a sore subject for her if ya ask me, but what the heck do I know about all that Gem drama anyway? Seems like every other day those three are-” The conman suddenly stopped short upon noticing that all three of the kids were looking to him with concerned confusion, prompting him to realize he was treading on rather uncomfortable ground in light of recent events. So once again, Stan diverted away from the matter, even if he did want to discuss it further, just in a different way. “Hey, uh, I-I just remembered, I need to grab something from the kitchen,” he said casually enough as he rose from his chair. “One of you kids wanna lend me a hand?”

“Sure, Grunkle Stan,” Mabel volunteered with a smile. “I’ll-”

“No, not you,” Stan quickly rejected, much to his niece’s confusion. “You,” he snapped his fingers as he pointed at Steven instead. “Come on.”

“Oh, uh, ok,” Steven got up, somewhat confused, though he still followed Stan into the kitchen nonetheless. “So, what do you need help with, Mr. Pines?”

Stan paused, taking a beat to briefly glance back at the den, where the twins were still apparently distracted by the TV, before getting to the matter at hand. “I need you to tell me how Amethyst’s really doing,” he said, trying to act as disinterested as possible and coming across as anything but.

“Huh?” Steven frowned, caught off guard by this somewhat strange request.

“Ugh, listen, kid,” Stan began with an exasperated sigh. “Ever since the whole portal thing, Amethyst’s barely said a word to me. I know she’s pi—ticked off with me for keeping all of it a secret from her for all these years and I understand why, but whenever she gets mad at me, she’s usually pretty quick to get over it and move on. But this time is… different.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, she hasn’t even come down here to rant to me about this whole Sardonyx thing!” the conman exclaimed, somewhat frustrated as he began to pace. “I’m usually the first person she comes to to blow off steam with, especially about something like this, or heck, even that memory thing, but she hasn’t and it—it’s just… ugh, forget it!” Stan let out another aggravated groan as he slammed a hand down on the counter hard as he pinched the bridge of his nose, clearly upset.

Steven was silent for a moment upon seeing the conman’s outburst, concern filling his expression as he glanced down thoughtfully before tentatively speaking up. “You’re… worried about her… aren’t you?” Stan didn’t turn around or even offer a verbal response, but the way his shoulders hitched at this question was more than enough to give the young Gem his answer. “Mr. Pines, if you’re really worried about Amethyst, why don’t you just go up to the temple and talk to her yourself?”

“Because between you and me, kid, I’m probably just about the last person Amethyst wants to talk to right now,” Stan muttered, clear shame in his tone as he finally turned to face the young Gem. “B-but whatever, its fine. I’m sure everything will work out, j-just like it always does…” The conman’s already thin layer of confidence wavered as he turned to head back into the den, a small, defeated sigh escaping him as he spared not another word. After all, what could he really say to explain just how much guilt and regret he had felt ever since that confrontation in the portal room days ago?

However, before he could escape back into the den, Steven hesitantly stopped him. “M-Mr. Pines, wait, I-” The young Gem stopped short, part of him wanting to continue on this tangent concerning Amethyst, though he ended up acting on another part of himself instead. “Y-you… Did you know?”

“Uh… know what?” Stan turned, genuinely confused as he looked back at Steven.

The young Gem paused, faltering as he looked to his feet and remembered the glass tube resting so innocently inside of Lion’s mane, the Gems’ reactions to regaining every painful memory they had lost. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to hear the admittance of the bitter truth from yet another adult he genuinely trusted, but if that truth was there at all, then Steven had to know. “M-my… my mom took the Gems’ memories about Mr. Ford and the portal from them…” he said, his voice so quiet that it was practically a whisper. “I still don’t know why she did it, but… it hurt them. She hurt them… And I… I just was wondering if you ever… knew anything about that…”

Stan was quiet for a moment upon hearing this, his expression softening as he happened to notice the tears starting to well up in Steven’s eyes. For a brief moment, the conman didn’t really know what to say to help ease the young Gem’s obvious pain; so instead, he did the easiest thing he could: he told the truth. “I… No, I didn’t know,” he said, a hand placed against back of his neck as he glanced to the side. “But… to be honest, its… kinda not that surprising to hear. No offense to you, kid, but your mom… she was… shady, to say the least.”

“Tell me about it…” Steven muttered, rubbing his arm as he let out a wavering sigh. “Mr. Pines, I… I think I get it now. Why you never liked my mom that much, I mean. All you wanted to do was save your brother… You never wanted to hurt anyone. But my mom… she hurt so many people… Garnet, Amethyst, Pearl, Mr. Ford… and you.” The tears welling up in the young Gem’s eyes finally reached their tipping point as they finally fell, a tight, pained sob escaping him, one that he had been holding back ever since he had first come across that memory tube. “And… I’m so, so sorry about what she did, Mr. Pines. I know she thought she was doing the right thing, but she wasn’t and no one even knew and Mr. Ford could have died in there, but it was like she didn’t even care and she didn’t even see how much you missed him and wanted him back, and I’m so sorry that she-”

“Whoa, kid, hold on!” Stan interupted, unable to hide his concern as he unceremoniously knelt down to Steven’s level. “What the heck are you apologizing for?”

“F-for what my mom did…” Steven sniffled, weakly wiping a few tears from his cheek.

“For what your mom did…” Stan repeated with a knowing nod, his expression conveying that he understood, at least on some level, what the young Gem was feeling. “Not anything you did. You know, kid—I mean… Steven,” The conman let out a sympathetic sigh as he placed a hand on the morose young Gem’s shoulder. “Your mom was no saint. From what I’ve seen and from what I’ve heard, she screwed up a lot. But I’m not lying when I tell you that nothing that she did was your fault. I don’t blame you for any of this mess, I’m pretty sure the Gems don’t blame you for any of it, and Ford better not blame you for any of it, because if he does, I’ll knock him senseless. Same goes for anyone else who tries to pin any of the nonsense Rose caused on you.”

Steven paused, rather overwhelmed by everything the conman had just said as his tears continued silently falling. “B-but… but Mr. Pines, I-”

“But nothing,” Stan interjected, shaking his head as he tightened his secure, almost comforting grip on the young Gem’s shoulder. “I know what it feels like to carry that kinda blame around, but the difference between you and me when it comes to blame is that I deserve it. You don’t. And you better stop thinking that you do, otherwise I’ll sic Mabel and her aggressive positivity on you.”

Steven was unable to hold back a laugh at this, one that was filled with a type of relief that he hadn’t felt in quite some time. While he wasn’t sure if he was ready to hold onto what the conman had just assured him of, namely the idea that he held no guilt in the mistakes his mother had made, he still wanted to believe that nonetheless. And, perhaps with a little time and a little effort, it was something that he could come to believe. Eventually.

Even so, in light of his newfound happiness, Steven ended up startling Stan by launching himself towards the conman in a sudden, warm embrace. Stan flinched, caught off guard by the burst of affection, though he was even more surprised by what the young Gem said next. “Thanks, Mr. Pines,” Steven whispered, tears drying on his cheek amidst his genuine, gentle smile.

For a moment or two, Stan allowed this unexpected hug to continue, recognizing that the young Gem likely needed this and realizing that in a way, maybe he needed it too after the events of the past several days. Still, the conman had to keep up appearances, hence why he didn’t let this embrace linger for too long, regardless of admittedly how welcome it was. “Alright, alright, that’s enough,” Stan remarked with faux exasperation as he pulled away and stood. “I swear, kid, you’re about as schmaltzy as that soppy cartoon you’re so into.”

Steven let out another small chuckle at this, but before he could, they were interupted by Dipper and Mabel as they briefly stuck their heads into the kitchen. “Uh, Steven?” Mabel began with an anxious frown. “You might wanna see this.”

Everyone returned to the living room to find a sight that all three of the kids found to be disconcertingly familiar: the TV’s normal signal had cut out, replaced nothing but noisy, blank static. An all-too familiar echo of what had dominated the air waves the previous day. “It’s the signal again!” Steven exclaimed, aptly surprised.

“Peridot must still be trying to get in touch with Homeworld,” Dipper mused with a resolved scowl. “But how’d she manage to fix that communication tower so quickly?”

“Well, one thing’s for certain,” Mabel said with a grown smile. “No matter how many times she puts it back together again, there’s one fusion we can count on to smash it to pieces! Let’s go get the Gems!”

“Yeah!” the boys readily agreed, the three of them starting to head out to go to the temple. However, Steven stopped short near the door, even after the twins had already gone through it, pausing briefly to glance back at Stan. The conman didn’t say anything as he stood near the static-filled TV, his hands on his hips as he watched the kids go. He did, however, spare Steven a bit of a wry, yet reassuring smile and nod, almost as if to solidify the newfound solidarity between them. Solidarity the young Gem couldn’t help but deeply appreciate in light of how almost everything he thought he knew had been so harshly uprooted as of late. Which was why he returned the conman’s smile before going on his way, hoping to hold onto the thought that no real blame rested with him someday.

Even if that day wasn’t quite today.

As soon as the kids made it to the temple and reported the signal’s return to the Gems, they all collectively set out back to the communication hub, knowing that they had to put a stop to Peridot’s plans before they could ever hope to come to fruition. With the hub obviously repaired, there was little deliberation amongst the group (save for a small, relatively unnoticed sigh of disappointment from Amethyst) to bring Sardonyx back to break the tower apart once more.

“I hope you’re ready,” Garnet smirked as she stood apace from Pearl, beckoning her forward as the kids and Amethyst stood on the sidelines to watch once more.

“You know I am,” Pearl grinned as she finished stretching out before emerging into an elegant pirouette, dancing Garnet’s way before they met, just as they had the previous night. And, just like last night, the warm glow of fusion surrounded the pair and from that glow, Sardonyx rose to the occasion once more.

“What’s this?” the bombastic fusion asked with faux surprise upon breaking her curtain of light once again. “An encore performance? Just couldn’t get enough of me, could you?” She smirked down at the group below before breaking out into her iconic uproarious laughter. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let the show begin!” And with this proclamation, Sardonyx boldly leapt into action, her hammer materializing in her hands as she pounced for the tower and got to work tearing it apart. The kids were more than ready to cheer the showstopping fusion on once more, though their excitement was soon broken through as they heard Amethyst’s dejected sigh right behind them. The purple Gem didn’t notice as all three of the kids turned towards her in confusion, her back turned to them as she wrapped her arms tightly around herself. And then, as she looked back up towards the hub, or more specifically, towards the graceful fusion deftly breaking it to pieces, she did the only thing she really could think of to finally let some of her heavy, ever-accumulating emotions go: she sang.

“Maybe you’re better off with her,” Amethyst began, her melody and manner both sad as she hunched her shoulders away from the tower. “I think she’s better for you.”

This was a truth the purple Gem knew she couldn’t really deny as she looked towards Sardonyx once more, realizing just how level-headed, just how skillful, just how stable the fusion was compared to the wild, rowdy, out of control, Sugilite. Just another bitter reminder for Amethyst that when compared to Pearl or even Garnet, she was always, always the odd one out, the runt of the litter, the mistake.

“I forgot how great it felt to be us,” she continued, closing her eyes as she tried to recall that feeling. That strength, that power, that freedom she felt any time she fused with Garnet. They were all things that she cherished, things that she valued, more than the Gem leader likely even knew. But now, because she had taken them all for granted and had been reckless and foolish, she wasn’t sure when she’d ever get to experience those things again. “Guess I got… carried away…”

“I had to use you to make me feel strong, but I don’t care about that now,” And indeed, she didn’t. Because what had happened with Sugilite was already dead and buried in the past. What wasn’t buried, however, was a slight far worse than the unruly fusion’s outburst. A brash, dangerous choice she had made in the heat of the moment, an act of rebellion so momentous and so uncalled for that she doubted her teammates would ever really forgive her for it. And as far as she was concerned, maybe forgiveness wasn’t something she deserved for her actions before that wretched portal in the first place. “I see a tower built out of my mistakes,” she sang, fighting to hold back tears as she watched Sardonyx dismantle the physical tower rising high before her, wishing that she was strong enough to tear her own shadowy tower apart herself. “And it all comes crashing down…”

“Is there something I can do?” she asked, her hands in tight fists at her sides as she wished she could take it all back. She wished she could undo the past, that she could fix what she had broken, that she could rise above the faults she constantly seemed to be drowning in.

“Is there something I can do?” she sang again, practically begging for something she knew she’d never get. Because when it came right down to it, her actions in that portal room weren’t something she could blame on Stan or Ford or even Rose. They had been solely her own. And of course, that only made the sting of their consequences even worse.

“Is there something I can do?” she pined one more time, knowing that it was hopeless. There was nothing she could do. Nothing to undo her mistakes, nothing to regain her teammate’s trust, nothing to be any more than what she had always known herself to be: a failure.

“Can I make it up to you?” she finished with a solemn sigh of defeat as Sardonyx finished her work, landing before the dimmed tower triumphantly before disappearing in a flash. She turned her back on Garnet and Pearl as they shared a warm, harmonious laugh over their second victory together, a victory that she knew she’d never get to share. No, instead, the only thing she’d get to have was the heavy, suffocating weight of her mistakes, bearing down on her brutally and crushingly, just like they always did.

Or so she thought. For while Amethyst had poured her heart out through song, she failed to notice the trio that had served as her audience rather than Sardonyx’s. And despite how much they enjoyed the dramatic fusions’ theatrics, they all unanimously sympathized with the purple Gem. After all, it was clear from her song and her reactions to Sardonyx alone that she was feeling left out, excluded from her team to the point that it made her feel devalued and unimportant. In light of everything else that the Gems had gone through lately, that alone made all three of them want to do anything they could to help lift Amethyst’s lowered spirits in the hopes of returning some sense of much-needed normalcy once more. And so, almost as soon as they returned from the communication hub, the kids began to formulate a plan, one that would hopefully serve a twofold purpose: help Amethyst out of her funk and stop Peridot’s plans once and for all, all in one easy, fell swoop.

Night still presided over the vast desert sands as Lion emerged onto them, toting a smaller group of passengers than usual as he leapt out from the portal he had created with a mighty roar. The kids and Amethyst all dismounted the pink beast, the trio stepping forward first to find that the communication hub was still down, just as they had hoped, a sign that their newfound plan might just end up working after all.

“Uh… so are you three gonna tell me why we came here again, or not?” Amethyst asked, her arms crossed as she glared towards the downed tower.

“Well, the way we see it, Peridot seems pretty determined to get that message of hers to Homeworld,” Dipper explained. “After all, she’s already been here to fix the communication hub twice now.”

“Which means the odds are pretty good that she’ll come back a third time when she realizes its all busted up again,” Mabel added with a knowing grin.

“So all we gotta do is wait for her to show up and bam!” Steven slammed his fist into his palm. “That’s when we’ll get her.”

“Oh, yeah!” Amethyst perked up upon hearing this plan, a grin spreading across her face as she also playfully punched her palm. “Bam! She won’t know what hit her.”

“Garnet will be so impressed when she finds out that you caught Peridot all on your own,” Mabel winked to Amethyst, implying that they fully intended on giving the purple Gem all the credit for this group effort.

“And then she’ll think I’m cool again!” Amethyst surmised excitedly, fully understanding the kids’ intent here. “But, uh… are you guys sure you’re up for this? Peridot may be a nerd, but she’s kind of a tricky nerd, if ya haven’t noticed.”

“I think we’ll be just fine,” Dipper smirked as he nodded back to the sword strapped to his back. Likewise, Steven readily summoned his shield while Mabel took out her grappling hook and cocked it, proving to the purple Gem that the trio was more than prepared for anything Peridot threw their way.

“Heh, yeah, should have figured you dorks would come prepared,” Amethyst chuckled, genuinely glad for their help. “Now, let’s catch us a nerd.”

To remain discreet and unseen, the group tucked themselves away behind an outcropping of rock not too far away from the communication hub, one that gave them an ideal vantage point to keep a lookout for any signs of Peridot’s approach. Steven’s telescope made the task a bit easier as they sat and waited, taking shifts of looking out of the spyglass, hoping to catch a glimpse of the green Gem as she snuck through the open desert towards the tower in what would hopefully be a failed attempt at repairing it.

“Hm… nothing… more nothing…” Steven mused with a frown as he surveyed the desert surrounding the hub. Amethyst and the twins were sitting nearby, their backs against the rock as they waited for any new developments in slight boredom. They were all quick to perk up, however, as the young Gem let out a warning gasp upon finally spotting something through the telescope. “Oh! I think I see her!” he exclaimed, quickly zooming in to get a better look only to find that it was a false alarm. “No wait… that’s just a weird cactus.”

The others all groaned in exasperation at this, but even so, they maintained their vigil, even as the hours of the night seemed to drag on without any hint of an appearance from Peridot whatsoever. Most attempts at conversation had drifted off quite some time ago as they all grew collectively more weary and exhausted by the hour. Even so, at some point roughly after midnight, the ongoing round of sleepy quietness was broken by a loud, tired groan from Mabel.

“Ugh, this is so boooooring…” she huffed, crossing her arms as she slouched against the rock. “It feels like we’ve been waiting forever.”

“Its only been a few hours, Mabel,” Dipper remarked, glancing away from the telescope briefly. “Still, I guess this plan isn’t really working like we thought it would…”

“You can say that again,” Amethyst sighed in disappointment. “I don’t think she’s coming, you guys.” The purple Gem paused for a beat, her expression filling with confusion as she glanced over at Steven beside her, only to find that he was oddly focused on his fingers as he moved them close together, but never allowed them to touch. “Uh, what are you doing?”

“I just figured out something really cool,” Steven grinned as he continued his newfound trick. “If you make your eyes blurry, it looks like there’s a little magic sausage between your fingers.”

“Wow…” Mabel mused as she tried it out for herself. “You’re right, Steven! Man, I can’t believe I’ve never tried this before, its great!”

“Pfft, this is stupid,” Amethyst rolled her eyes as she positioned her fingers close together. “It doesn’t even work—whoa…” The purple Gem cut herself off in amazement as Steven pulled the hair covering her other eye away, allowing her to see the aforementioned imaginary “sausage”.

“Heh, well, even if we didn’t catch Peridot, at least I taught us all a fun way to pass the time,” Steven concluded with a satisfied grin.

“Well, maybe we’d have a better chance at finding Peridot if we tried something else,” Dipper said, nowhere near as bemused as Steven, Mabel, and Amethyst currently were. “Like, I don’t know, actually hunting her down and capturing her instead of waiting for her to come to us, which she might not even do?”

“But what if she comes while we’re out looking for her?” Mabel asked with a frown. “Wouldn’t it just be easier to see if she shows up here again?”

“Actually, for once, I’m with Dipper,” Amethyst remarked, flipping her hair back into its usual place over her eye. “The sooner we nab Peridot, the sooner she’ll stop fixing the hub, and the sooner I won’t have to deal with Sardonyx anymore.”

The kids paused for a brief beat at this, exchanging a worried glance as they remembered what Stan had told them concerning the purple Gem’s opinions on the theatrical fusion. Still though, the conman had never mentioned exactly why Amethyst felt that way, hence why Steven was prompted to figure that out firsthand. “Uh… Amethyst? Why… why don’t you like Sardonyx?”

“Yeah,” Mabel joined in just as curiously. “She’s a lot of fun, and she has a cool hammer, and she’s-”

“And she’s graceful, and smart, and controlled, and ugh!” Amethyst finished with a groan as she flopped down into the sand onto her back. “She’s basically everything Sugilite isn’t. Everything I’m not… No wonder Garnet wanted to fuse with her instead of me… She doesn’t even trust me anymore, and why would she? I’m nothing but a backstabbing screwup!”

At this, the purple Gem slammed her fist into the rock behind her, her eyes tightly shut in her remorseful frustration, startling all three of the kids. As Amethyst let out a bitter sigh and placed her head in her hands, none of them were really sure about what to say to reassure her, mostly since they were still somewhat confused by this heated outburst in the first place. “A screwup?” Steven questioned gently. “Amethyst, what are you-”

“I’m talking about what happened with that stupid portal!” Amethyst snapped before the young Gem could even finish. “How I tried to stop Garnet and Pearl from shutting it down! How I basically fought them away from it! My friends, my teammates, I just… turned against them all because I thought it was a good idea to listen to Stan, but it wasn’t! Because now we know, we remember what that machine was for, what it could have done, who it could have-” The purple Gem cut herself off sharply, sucking in painful tears before she continued. “I was stupid. Reckless and stupid, just like I was the last time me and Garnet formed Sugilite, only this time it was with something even worse. And that’s why she won’t fuse with me anymore… Because I nearly ruined everything…”

As Amethyst buried her head into her arms and pulled her knees to her chest, she let out a small, broken sob, one that wasn’t lost on any of the kids as they silently searched for some way to comfort her. The source of her ongoing bitterness and despair the past few days was now clear, and it was obvious that it had more to do with just the memories she had recently recalled. Those painful feelings came from a place of guilt, of remorse so deep and so profound that she obviously didn’t know how to really reconcile it for herself. Which was why perhaps she needed some help when it came to doing just that.

“A-Amethyst,” Steven began softly, ready to place a steadying hand on the distraught purple Gem’s shoulder. “What you did wasn’t-”

“Whoa! Hold on!” Dipper suddenly interjected as he looked through the telescope once more. “Guys! I think I saw something!”

“Huh?” the others all quickly questioned, rising to stand as they congregated around the telescope. Upon peering through it, they were able to see a small, distant light gliding across the far off horizon at an impressive speed as it readily approached the communication hub. And, as Steven took his turn and zoomed in on this light just a bit, he gasped in surprise upon seeing exactly what it was.

“P-Peridot’s escape pod?!” the young Gem exclaimed, allowing the others a chance to see. “She… fixed it somehow?”

“But I thought we had it!” Amethyst protested, knowing that they had apprehended the broken pod when it had been found by the kids and the teens in the abandoned field several weeks ago.

“You don’t think she could have stolen it from the temple, do you?” Mabel asked fretfully.

“I wouldn’t put it past her…” Dipper muttered scornfully, a hand already on the hilt of his sword as they watched the pod easily scale up the side of the tower.

“Whoa…” Steven whispered upon watching the pod’s tractor beams begin to piece the broken hub back together again. “She’s lifting the pillar guys and she’s fixing the hub.” The young Gem paused as the escape pod did, coming to a stop at the very tip of the hub as an indiscernible figure, presumably Peridot, emerged rom it to inspect her handywork. Steven zoomed in once more, trying to get a better look, only to notice that the silhouette standing high above them really didn’t look much like Peridot at all upon a second glance. “Hey, y-you know for some reason, Peridot kinda looks like-” He gasped, his jaw dropping in shock as the figure on top of the hub finally came into clear view, revealing something that sent him absolutely reeling as he relayed it to the others. “Pearl?!”

“What?!” Amethyst and the twins exclaimed in dumbfounded unison, none of them able to believe such an admittedly unbelievable claim.

“Let me see!” the purple Gem was quick to push Steven away from the telescope to look for herself, only to find that sure enough, Pearl herself was standing on top of the hub, a smile of satisfaction on her face from her successful repair of the formerly downed Gem tech. And despite how alarming this unexpected revelation was, Amethyst was very quick to put the pieces together as to exactly what had been going on all along, including the white Gem’s very impressive deception, as well as the no doubt incredibly heavy fall out that would result from it all in the end. “Oh no…”

Needless to say that in light of their discovery the previous evening, Steven, the twins, and Amethyst were all quite unnerved as they sat in front of the TV up at the temple the following morning. The television hadn’t even been turned on, mostly because they all already knew static would inevitably await them as a result of the communication hub’s repair. A repair so strangely yet so discreetly done by Pearl of all people, which was a mystery none of them, save for Amethyst, could really figure out.

“Why would Pearl rebuild the hub?” Steven wondered aloud, voicing what they were all thinking.

“Maybe she’s trying to study how it works?” Dipper theorized, hopeful for the white Gem’s innocence, even if it seemed like she really wasn’t. “T-that way we could come up with a plan to keep Peridot from fixing it again.”

“No…” Amethyst shook her head glumly. “I don’t think that’s it…”

“Maybe she just wanted to get everyone more TV channels,” Mabel suggested with a bit of a forced smile as she turned the TV on, only for, as expected, static to fill the screen once more.

“Oh my! This is no good!” The group gathered on the loft all jolted in surprise as Pearl joined them, putting on an apparent front of surprise as she noted the ongoing static.

“W-what’s wrong?” Steven asked nervously, exchanging an uneasy glance with the others as Pearl readily kept her act up.

“It’s Peridot,” the white Gem surmised instantly. “She must have fixed the communication hub again!” As much as the kids and Amethyst wanted to voice that they knew that this claim was, in fact, far from the truth, they didn’t get that chance as Garnet entered the house, and much to their dismay, Pearl didn’t hesitate to grab her attention. “Garnet, it’s the hub again,” she reported with faux worry. “We’ll have to hurry back to the desert and tear it down once more!”

“Hm, Peridot’s evading my future vision…” Garnet mused with a hint of frustration in her tone, clearly not suspecting anything. “No matter how many times I try, I can’t see us finding her. Oh well,” the Gem leader shook her head clear as she led the way back outside. “Come on, team.”

“Oh, yes! Let’s be on our way!” Pearl sang brightly, a wide, excited smile on her face as she followed Garnet out, more than ready to form Sardonyx with her once more. Amethyst and the kids however, were the last to leave, all four of them bearing the same exact secret that Pearl did. A secret that, they all knew, only had a matter of time before Garnet discovered it. And once she did, there was no telling what might happen.

“I can’t believe Peridot is causing us so much trouble!” Pearl huffed in showy annoyance, though she was quick to perk up once again as her and Garnet prepared to fuse. The communication hub stood tall and repaired once again, just as the white Gem had left it the previous night, and all the while Amethyst and the kids stood by, unsure of what needed to be done to put an end to the white Gem’s bizarre façade. “But it hardly matters, right, Garnet?” Pearl quipped, clasping her hands together happily as the Gem leader gave her a smile of confidence. “We can disable this tower as many times as we need to, together! Okay? Ok. I’m ready! Are you ready?”

As the white Gem continued to cheerfully ramble on, Amethyst wrapped her arms around herself tightly, wishing that Pearl hadn’t conceived this awful plan in the first place. But she had, and the purple Gem knew that remaining silent on the matter would only make her as guilty as her own teammate in all of this. “I know what she’s doing…” Amethyst muttered to the kids, hating that things had come to this even if she understood. Oh, did she ever understand. Because if she had been in the same place as Pearl was, she wasn’t entirely sure if she wouldn’t have done the exact same thing too.

“Y-you do?” Steven glanced over at her, the twins sharing his worry as Garnet and Pearl prepared to fuse behind them. That is, until Amethyst decided to finally put an end to this deceitful charade once and for all.

“Stop!” she shouted, taking a bold step forward and already regretting it the very moment she did.

Garnet and Pearl froze at this, clinging onto each other though their dance was stalled as they both looked to their teammate, startled. “I-Is something the matter, Amethyst?” the white Gem asked, clearly caught of guard.

“G-Garnet… I…” Amethyst bit her lip, averting the Gem leader’s gaze out of guilt, though even so, she knew this had to be done. “I know you might not trust me after… w-what happened the other day, but… y-you… you shouldn’t fuse… i-it… it’s not…”

As Amethyst trailed off, the kids quickly leapt in, hoping to explain the matter more than she was currently able to. “Uh… Pearl… we saw you…” Mabel admitted with a hesitant frown.

“W-what?” Pearl asked softly, her eyes wide as she began to follow, though she only really understood as Dipper elaborated.

“Last night,” he began, a bit more firmly than Mabel as he looked to his sword teacher with clear disappointment. “We were out here waiting to see if we could catch Peridot if she came by again but… she didn’t… And instead you did…”

Pearl sucked in a sharp gasp at this, her breathing short as she looked between the group before her and Garnet, who was still holding onto her, staring at her for answers she couldn’t possibly give. “Pearl,” Steven spoke up, his tone sad and imploring. “What you’ve been doing… i-it’s not right. You have to tell Garnet it was you!”

“I don’t understand,” Garnet finally spoke, her shades catching Pearl’s reflection in them as she stared back up at her nervously.

For what seemed like ages, the white Gem said nothing, her form trembling slightly at the horrific realization that she had been caught. That her nearly perfect plan had fallen to pieces right in front of her. Just like everything else as of late, so it seemed. “I… I’m sorry…” she began, her voice so soft it could barely even be heard as tears started to well up in her eyes. “It’s just… s-so much happened these past few days and… after what we learned, I… I felt like… I felt broken… A-and I needed… something to take that unbearable pain away… And when we fused it was like… it all just… disappeared… You don’t know how much I needed that, Garnet… It was… so much fun being Sardonyx with you…”

Garnet’s reaction to the truth was immediate. With a harsh gasp of shock, her hands quickly flew away from Pearl, almost as if touching her in light of her trickery had physically burned her. The white Gem quickly righted herself, her eyes still wide and tearful as she looked to the Gem leader standing over her, her eyes still covered by her shades, though her expression was filled with obvious surprise and hurt as she shook her head in disbelief. “That’s why I couldn’t see us finding Peridot…”

“W-wait! Let me explain!” Pearl pleaded, shakily rising to her feet.

“You’ve been fixing the hub!” Garnet snapped, her shock turning into rage as she took an aggressive step towards the startled white Gem.

“It really was Peridot! T-the first time…”

“You tricked me!”

“No, no, no! W-we just needed a reason to fuse!” Pearl tried to rationalize, though now that what she had done was out in the open for everyone to know, she couldn’t help but feel rather terrible for her actions now herself. “All I wanted was to feel… whole again! I just wanted to share a few more victories with you!”

“Those weren’t victories!” Garnet shouted, her hands in tight fists as she seemed to tower over Pearl, her anger fiery and fierce. “I can’t believe you’d lie to me like this, after everything we’ve just discovered! I thought you’d know what it’s like to be deceived like this, Pearl, but clearly you’ve learned nothing! Because as far as I’m concerned, you’re no better that he was!”

Pearl sucked in a shrill gasp at this, her hands flying over her mouth as her tears finally fell at such a vicious proclamation. Upon hearing it, Amethyst acted on a whim, knowing that even despite Garnet’s justifiable anger, even Pearl didn’t deserve to be part of such an awful, unfitting comparison. “W-wait, Garnet!” the purple Gem threw herself in between her quarreling teammates. “You know, we’re so much weaker than you! Fusing with you is like, our one chance to feel… stronger!”

“Don’t defend her!” Garnet yelled harshly, making the purple Gem flinch back in fear at the harshness of her tone. “Peridot is still out there somewhere and Pearl’s been distracting us with… nothing!”

“G-Garnet…” Pearl tearfully tried to interject, only for Garnet to instantly cut her off.

“That’s enough!” Garnet ordered, refusing to hear anymore of the white Gem’s desperate excuses. Despite how clearly furious she was, the Gem leader was still mindful of the task at hand, her outraged glare still apparent as she turned to Amethyst instead. “Amethyst, fuse with me!”

Amethyst balked at this, her eyes wide in surprise at this unexpected invitation—no, rather this demand to fuse with the Gem leader at a time like this. “W-wha… b-but I-”

“Let’s just get this over with…” Garnet hissed, her hands still in tight fists as she grabbed the purple Gem’s arm almost roughly. Pearl quickly scurried away from the pair as they preformed a rushed, inelegant fusion dance, one that the white Gem and the kids all watched in apt fear in light of the Gem leader’s still very prevalent fury. In fact, that fury was still incredibly present in Sugilite as she formed, her massive presence far more aggressive and abrasive than it had ever been before as she didn’t even bother summoning her weapon. Instead, the rowdy fusion took the hub down with a single two-fisted punch, one that slammed hard into the tower’s pillars, shattering them in a way that would ensure it would never be repaired by anyone ever again. As the glow from the hub faded and its remains came crashing to the ground, Pearl could only watch with wide eyes of terror as the last strand of comfort and stability she thought she had left in light of how much had already fallen apart come crashing down right in front of her yet again.

And just like the last time, she only had herself to blame.

A feeling of solemn sadness filled the temple the following day, to the point that the overdramatic wails of the characters of Crying Breakfast Friends only seemed to lower Amethyst and the kids’ spirits even more as they sat up in the loft to watch it. None of them were really that invested in the show, however, in light of what had happened the previous day and how rattled it had left them all. Though one scene in particular did seem to ring somewhat true to how things were going in reality as Crying Pear begged Sad Spoon for forgiveness over a wrongdoing.

“Oh please, forgive me!” the pear wailed tearfully.

“Of course, I forgive you!” Sad Spoon cried in response, both of them bawling as they warmly embraced over their repaired relationship.

Amethyst let out a small, sad sigh upon watching this exchange, hoping for something similar between Garnet and Pearl, though nothing of the sort had transpired yet. Because as things were now, the Gem leader was still simmering with unspoken anger towards her teammate, the betrayal clear to read on her face as she warped into the temple. Ironically enough, Pearl also stepped into the house, her expression remorseful, tired, and sad as she approached the temple gate. Her eyes were red from recently shed tears, tears that looked like they were on the verge of returning once more, especially as Garnet passed by her. Neither Gem made eye contact with each other, though Pearl did briefly stop in the middle of the room, almost as if she wanted to say something to Garnet. She didn’t get the chance, however, as the Gem leader walked out the door, not even willing to give her teammate even a single moment of repose. With a soft sigh of disappointment, Pearl’s shoulders drooped as she continued on to the temple gate, disappearing inside of it for what would surely be yet another round of mourning over things she couldn’t change now.

The purple Gem shook her head as she watched this entire exchange, or lack thereof, unfold before her, guilt weighing heavy upon her shoulders as she realized she had yet another regret to add to her ever growing list of them. Perhaps she shouldn’t have said anything to Garnet about Pearl’s deception at all. Maybe things would have been better off if she had just decided to grin and bear it and left it all well enough alone. True, Pearl had lied and tricked Garnet, and based on the memories they had just reclaimed, it was grave mistake on her part. But still, Amethyst knew that anything would be better than the rift that had torn her team apart at the very worst of times.

“Man, it sure would be nice if things worked out the way they do in cartoons,” Steven spoke up quietly, the twins nodding their silent agreement as they had all noted the very same tension between Garnet and Pearl that Amethyst had.

“Yeah…” the purple Gem sighed morosely as the young Gem turned the TV off. “It would…”

And indeed, it would be better if things could so easily repair themselves like that, or if nothing else go back to the way they were before. Because at least before, amidst the portal opening, amidst Ford returning, amidst their memories being returned to them, the Gems could all lean on each other for some kind of support in their mutual confusion and eventual sorrow. At least they could find solace in the fact that they did not have to suffer alone, that they had solidarity in the unbearable pain they all shared. And perhaps if they had depended on that solidarity to heal them more than searching for their own ways of fixing the unfixable past, maybe none of this would have happened. But it had. Another storm, one just as big and powerful and destructive as the last one, swept through their lives once again, ripping apart some of the last few strands of support holding the Crystal Gems together.

Which meant that once those final strands were inevitably broken, it would only be a matter of time before they fell apart completely.

Next: 

[justindherd]

What's Been Going On | Tripping Forward Into the Future

Man, it’s been awhile since I posted on here. I spend most of my time on Twitter, doing the best I can to keep that particular ship from burning down. I screwed myself early on by originally going by the username TheDCProject, an old website my buddy and I ran that had one of the biggest animated Cel collections, but also featured our writing, poetry, as well as photos from our lives. I had established myself as a writer and had a constantly building following.

Then I tried to “consolidate my brand” by changing to my real name and building from there.

Suddenly, no one knew who the fuck I was.

But, still, I was part of the #amwriting community and was a huge fan of The Authoress’ Secret Agent contests. Then, once I was divorced about six years ago, I decided to strip the writing community from those that I was following. I had thousands I was following, but most were just pimping their latest project (100% needed, but no fun to use the service at that point), and so I unfollowed . . . and, ever since, I’ve been slowly losing followers because . . . well, most writers only care if you are following them and they can use you. Once again, I totally understand, but I reworked my experience to follow only those that I had an interest in what they had to say.

Anyway, follow me there.

So, what I have been doing since . . . [checks notes] August 17th, when I released my Fallen video?

Well, I’ve been fighting my former employer due to my Medical Leave, though I can’t necessarily talk about that just yet. I also wrote a 20,000+ word video for the Hellraiser series, after I read Paul Kane’s The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy. This is an expansion of my Cenobitic Ramblings video, but the original was less than 5,000 words so it’s a completely different beast.

I went so deep on this that I kinda forgot to work on anything else.

Well, that’s not true. I was trying to put together a video on Oz Perkins’ Gretel & Hansel (2020), but was having a helluva a time trying to get my thoughts out. You see, I had bought new microphones and TasCam recorders, and had attempted to record my thoughts on movies right after I saw them. I talked about Glass, Gretel & Hansel, and even attempted to do a non-scripted rant on Star Ocean: The Second Story from PSX days.

Unfortunately, all these recordings were so low quality that I couldn’t salvage them. But, and this is the reason that I am bringing this up, I seem to purge my brain as soon as I record/write about any product I plan on covering for the channel. So, I kinda wiped my thoughts and hot takes on these subjects without meaning to.

It took me writing my “Favorite Films of 2020” list to finally break that barrier. I spent way too much time on that script as well, breaking 10,000 words, and recorded it twice, planning on breaking it up into two videos that would equal roughly an hour long between the two of them.

Unfortunately, the DSLR camera I was using refused to focus properly, and, thus, the footage was unusable. I then recorded it again, only for the same issue to present itself. I was thoroughly discouraged, but I planned to record a third time - got the focus right, and was ready to record . . . only for my son to have nightmares, and subsequently pass out on the couch, right next to my recording area.

So, since I couldn’t record in front of the camera, I took my Gretel & Hansel script, and did an audio-only version of it. Then, once I realized there were some significant gaps in the coverage, I grabbed most of my entry from the 2020 Film list and worked it into the actual episode.

And that’s what I’ve been workin on for the past two months, going as crazy as I possibly could since my House of Leaves video.

I’m thoroughly enjoying what I’m doing, even if I kinda lost focus and am doing everything by myself, without real consideration for what order I’m putting it together. Yes, that means I’m doing editing, sound effects, adding music (for the first time since I got lambasted for just throwing music into the HoL vid), as well as special effects, and recreating the title sequence, since I couldn’t find a “clean” version without any of the titles.

Obviously, I’m moving some stuff around on the website, but I really need to reconsider what needs to be on here. My writing career has definitely taken a back seat to the video projects, even if I’ve been toying with going back to The Magician, planning and rewriting it from the ground up. I had a similar notion with Between the Shadows, but at that point I was still waaaay too familiar with the source material. However, with The Magician, I wrote that in such a blur of “Gotta go fast” that I don’t remember the multiple magic systems I made. To even edit it, I’d have to reread the entire novel, one I haven’t touched since 2014.

There’s the added rub that I placed it in the same universe as my novel, The Faithful, but the twist of The Magician was that it jumped two hundred years into the future, and these Elder Gods had taken over the world. A world where I had established that there are immortal gods, and, obviously, Raine would end up in the same situation as my robot magician. It’s kinda like the problem the MCU had for a few years, where they refused to include other heroes, despite it being clear between Avengers films that they should be able to join the conflict. Regardless, it would affect those books which are their own thing.

So, for me to move forward with this project, I’d not only have to remap the multiple magic systems my Magician uses, but I’d have to extract it from the universe I’d already built and reimagine it all. So . . . it’s now been over six years since I finished it, and it’s so fuzzy that I should be able to rebuild it without figuratively killing myself in the process.

So, where does this leave us?

Well, I’m pressing forward with my Gretel & Hansel video, and I plan on hitting some of my favorite films, rather than holding off for some arbritary end point. The only video I’m waiting on is my Hellraiser video, so that I can kinda sustain myself while I spend months working on it. I’m holding for 50 Patrons, so at least there’s some audience for it.

If you want to support me. and my future endeavors, please consider pledging money through Patreon. It’s built to give me money directly when I produce a new video, so it won’t be breaking your bank while I’m working on things.

Thank you guys for sticking with me.

Justin D. Herd

[geneshaven]

It Could Have Been A Lot Worse (Crossover Thoughts)

I have to say right at the start of this---I thoroughly enjoyed the Crossover episodes. Yes, I said it. Lightning hasn’t stuck me. There are no threatening dark clouds hanging above me. My capacity to be entertained is still functioning. And my enthusiasm for Arrow is still shining bright.

I think a lot of this for me is because of my recent back surgery and my inability to jump up off the couch I’m riding during my recovery. I just don’t have it in me to raise my arms over my head and run screaming out of the room shouting NO! at the top of my lungs. Not that that would occur to me. As I said, I enjoyed the Crossover. I kept waiting to be horrified by the Nazi elements of the story. And when they did appear---well, to be honest, it was like watching a cartoon. Does anybody remember Hogan’s Heroes? Just saying…

What I saw was a watered-down portrayal of the most horrific event in human history. I didn’t see any ovens or gas chambers or rail cars carrying millions to be slaughtered in the death camps. I didn’t see the ashes of the dead drifting down from the sky like malignant snowflakes. I didn’t see large pits of executed victims or bodies hung up and left to rot. I did not see anything close to the real genocide the Nazi regime enacted.

I thank God for that.

What I did see was a team of superheroes coming together (most notably Felicity and Iris) and kicking the crap out of their enemies. I saw defiance and bravery. I saw love and hope and one big hooded hug and kiss for the ages. I felt pride watching my favorite TV characters taking out the trash.

I also saw some disappointed fans that might have had other expectations on what the show should have brought to the table. I sort of understand where they’re coming from. I’ve also felt frustrated by some of the story arcs we’ve been given over the past 5+ years. The worst for me (and I’m sure for a lot of you) was the BMD and its aftermath, an aftermath that stretched over a season and a half. It unnecessarily disrupted an established relationship, or so we thought at the time that the relationship was a healthy one. The aftermath brought about a tired, repetitive storyline of will-they, won’t they filled with seemingly never ending angst and pain and other love interests that made no sense. I can remember a couple time I actually yelled at my TV---“Are you fucking kidding me?” Maybe it was my passion for a fictional couple going a tad bit overboard. It was like making a huge financial investment with Monopoly money. It wasn’t real, but the loss was tangible.

Anyway, as I read some of those disappointed fan reactions, I could only think to myself---if watching the show brings so much discord; don’t watch it. There is a freedom of choice here.

**

Okay, now that all of that unpleasantness is out of the way, I want to narrow my focus onto the one part of the Crossover that gave me chills and captured my heart---Oliver and Felicity putting their turbulent past behind them and embracing their future together.

MARRIED!

It kind of-sort of felt like an in-the-field ceremony, but it wasn’t any less real and full of pageantry as if they had been in a big, beautifully decorated, people-filled venue. I loved the spontaneity of it, the improvised vows, and most importantly; the happiness on their faces. Felicity said it best---‘Whatever come at them good or bad, their love for each other will always win out.’ I’m paraphrasing here, but she nailed the sentiment and truth of it.

When Felicity asked if Oliver would marry her, a thousand fanfics came alive for me. It was the perfect ending for their endgame. And as Oliver reached out to take her hand, a montage of their history together washed through my mind:

…from the first moment in Felicity’s cubicle, to the building of their friendship and partnership, to their growing love for one another, to the hope and desperate inevitability of that love, to the fantasy bubble of Ivy Town and their return to Star City under the illusion that nothing could pull them apart, to the tragedies they endured when Felicity got shot and then being emotionally shot again when Oliver lied to her, to the ambiguity that was most of Season 5, to the sour and toxic direction Billy Malone and Susan Williams took them…

All of that gave them a bright and clear realization that love is not something taken for granted. Sometimes it takes blood, sweat and tears to show how valuable and precious it is.

**

So, what is ahead for our beautiful power couple? Does it matter? As long as this marriage is a happy and long lasting one--- adversity and the threat of Nazis or the Easter bunny or even disgruntled fanboys; it all pales next to true love and the gift of having each other to see it through together.

Things could have been a lot worse. We could have had another Season of Olicity still working through their personal problems, of keeping their distance from one another while the slow burn of their love sets their unfulfilled hearts on fire. Injured back or not---I would run screaming from the room if that ever happened again.

** side note**

Does anybody out there think that because of the recent actions by AK and his cronies, this could be the last Season of Arrow? If the entire production powers-that-be are kicked off their ivory towers, would they bring in another team?

If they do, I’m pulling for an all-female Executive Branch.

@it-was-a-red-heeler @memcjo @almondblossomme @louiseblue1 @dmichellewrites @mortallock @casydee @callistawolf @scu11y22 @skcolicity

[elizabethrobertajones]

i love jack a lot but i don't get everyone's excitement about dean eventually adopting him. like why would you want to force him into another parental role with a kid with unstable powers JUST when he's escaping his role with sam? i'm not accusing you or anything i'm just really really frustrated at fandom's mentality

Yeah, there’s some good posts around discussing the various metaphorical and direct representations of the bad family dynamics going on here. I think it’s possible to enjoy and dislike the same thing from different angles. I LOVE Jack choosing Cas as his father and setting his personal compass by Cas. It’s perfect. But for Cas’s sake I’m genuinely skeeved out by it because of the way Jack(’s powers) latched onto him from the womb and that it is basically what I figured all along - that Jack himself is an innocent sweetie pie because he has a soul and he is therefore gifted free will and a blank slate to be what he wants and is at the very least not inherently evil… 

But his powers still did something because of his increased awareness and powers in the womb that I don’t like, which is… convincing… Cas to be his guardian. Cas being forced into the dynamic is one of the metaphorical parallels to the brothers’ issues which I’ve enjoyed the meta about, because of course Cas can still love Jack and all and have meant it because I don’t think he wasn’t acting from the heart in 12x23 because have you met Cas, that was a classic example of his heart on display. And I’m actually hoping they do have a sweet dynamic when Cas gets back. But I still don’t like HOW it happened, in the exact same way I really dig sweet moments between Sam and Dean which don’t have the complicated baggage, but I can still be uncomfortable about romanticising other parts of their relationship, and critical of how Dean was forced to parent Sam… 

So yeah. Anyway, I think the thing with Dean and Jack is that it’s the goal - Sam already likes Jack and wants to give him a chance. Cas has his connection to him already and it’s unlikely he’ll hate Jack on his return :P Dean is not wrong to be upset and critical based on the information he has like @k-vichan‘s post I just recently reblogged was explaining (Sam hasn’t even told him on camera that Jack said that Cas is his father which means until we get past the point of disbelief that he hasn’t said it off-camera that’s still something we might find out later from Dean’s POV to affect how he feels about him. Although I’m usually careful not to get over-attached to what hasn’t been said on camera in case the writers start assuming it’s obvious they shared it and leave an emotional gap… But this is such a big thing it might HAVE to be said on screen or else be a gap.)

Like… Obviously the emotional hook for “coming to like Jack” is something that falls on Dean to have while the others are already seeming to be clear on it. He’s the obstacle - the thing standing between Jack and a happy families thing (so it might be a long haul or Dean is just starting to warm up when things go bad either with Cas’s return or something that happens with Jack for what will be a frankly bizarre season if they don’t tease him ~going dark~ to test him at some point). It’s like a will they won’t they on Dean liking Jack :P 

And I think that in this case it’s not forcing anything on Dean when he comes to NATURALLY adopt random youngins and other hapless friends (like Garth, tbh :P) but that he has to want to do it and it is something he does instinctively because he’s a nurturer and has a caring soul. Maybe because of the Sam stuff but it’s not weird when he does it to, like, Krissy or something. It’s one of his softer traits but in this case it has mytharc relevance, since Jack is, WE can tell, really sweet, but Dean is in no position to see him for what he is, which may compromise them looking after him, and even if Jack is sweet and squishy right now, he has cosmic powers and intentionally or not he’s going to be dangerous on a huge level even if it’s just for drawing attention. I think Dean coming to like him will play a big part in reconciling this whole situation just because he’s the one who instinctively doesn’t like Jack already. And that’s something where he’s messed up with grief and hasn’t seen anything to convince him Jack isn’t a problem, so it’s set up to be a bigger struggle for him.

And that probably also plays into Dean as the emotional centre of the show - that Sam is usually dealing with the plot stuff head on, while Dean is the filter we struggle with it through. I think Dean not trusting Jack is another way of drawing out uncertainty and tension about Jack in the narrative. Is Sam wrong to trust him? Is there still something hinky between Jack and Cas? Will Jack turn bad? Even if it’s seeming quite clear that Jack is not as bad as Dean thinks by far, and Sam’s made the right call here, to go with his confidence in leadership and standing up for himself arc, playing the reconciliation to Jack’s presence in their lives through Dean is giving us (or, well, the surface level read of the show, which I pay as much attention to as I can out of curiosity as a writer about stringing appearances and cheap drama out of more complex stories and I watch the episodes from the POV of “what is the show trying to tell us” before “what can I read into this”) a more drawn out exploration of who and what Jack is and the conclusion on what his character can be. 

And I think that means Dean will be challenging Jack too, and always probably be more on the side of checking if he really is what he seems or second-guessing his actions etc. It will give Jack something to grow and fight against, especially since people HATE letting Dean down and Dean is the moral centre of the show when it comes to love, humanity, what is the right thing to do, the free will choice, just generally a beacon of these themes. If Jack has to win Dean’s approval, it’s going to be a complex and satisfying story and a good way of proving we can definitively trust him. Not because Sam makes bad choices or because Jack doesn’t already seem like a good guy, but just because Dean has Standards which are so high you can define and navigate the story by them. Like Cas rebelling in 4x22. Or on the flip side, 6x20.

This is all kinda wishy washy stuff for later in the season that what we already have, though, and I don’t know how thoroughly others have thought it through or if I am missing some really obvious lines of thought here myself, but I don’t think the instinctive reaction that people are wishing Dean adopts Jack is all just forcing a new child on him, or that people think Dean shouldn’t come to that choice himself, and approve of Jack for real reasons. One of the short posts out there about it that I like is a line of spec that Dean will start to like Jack after he does a Benny - does something to save or help Cas that Dean can’t deny Jack is good any more after seeing. That’s not just wishing another child to look after on Dean, that’s a complicated series of Dean recognising Jack’s potential to be good and understanding him better or now having a motivation to reach out to him. 

And I do personally find it kind of creepy to be super gung ho about Jack as any of their children - Cas for the reasons I already said although I like it for Jack and would be open to Cas being cool with it :P But Sam and Dean as well because I think there’s a lot of point scoring going on with who gets to parent Jack like it’s a token or trophy for them, unlocking a whole bunch of parent headcanons and also, and I know it’s weird to say about a 1 day old baby, infantilising Jack. I think he’s already starting to get an idea of the more complex stuff and a lot of his literal born yesterday mannerisms will disappear as he gets older, since he has an adult intellect to deal with the world, so I’m very curious about his character growth. 

I think it’s just a fandom thing to be eager for the main characters you care about to have fun relationships and the idea of just giving them a kid can be appealing to some people, but it kinda weirds me out. I saw a gifset of the father reveal to Sam captioned with “Sam realises he’s an uncle” and I like that a lot more because it emphasises his brother relationship to Cas, and puts Jack in that context to him. I think since Jack said Cas is his father, “parenting” just means “we are responsible for guiding this young soul” not “I will be his father” and Sam and Dean are basically his uncles, not surrogate fathers, and I’m pretty much just gonna treat it that way, personally, since it’s less skeevy to me. That’s a YMMV thing, though, so I’m not saying you can’t enjoy the dad TFW stuff, I just don’t wanna :P 

(The Claire stuff was different since they didn’t have a whole bunch of responsibility over her and the episodes she was in never made it weird, and it was a side storyline… With this it’s all such high tension it sort of feels to me like I need to draw much stronger lines, especially since with all the fatherhood parallels some/all of TFW are going to be examined through being John at some point or another… There is a LOT more going on with Jack that makes it complicated and fraught :P)

So… uh… tl;dr… I have no idea if I’m even answering your original thought any more :P Idk about the wider fandom of crack posts and cracky art, but I think the meta folks I follow are not being too weird about it or will at least entertain all the posts being critical or introspective about these dynamics and I think some crack posts are just made in the spirit of fun, though it doesn’t help NOT give the impression everyone’s gaga for dad TFW and not being very considerate of the deep dark meta stuff and character angst going on… :P 

[clarabosswald]

this was originally posted on reddit, then shared on gallifreybase - an insight into moffat’s writing process, which i found quite fascinating (especially considering how lowly [?] people think of the effort he puts into his scripts)

“Production Notes for Doctor Who Magazine #514: The Last Time Round - Steven Moffat tells us what happened the day he sent in his final script for Doctor Who“

The Last Time Round

I've delivered! I've delivered the last Doctor Who script I'll ever write! Only counting solo-written ones, and ignoring credited and uncredited rewrites and minisodes, that's 42 in total, I think. Good number, 42. The Douglas Adams number. Back in the day I wrote 43 episodes of Press Gang, but they were shorter, so I suppose that I've written more Doctor Who than I've written anything else. Who cares about this? Me, that's who. Nobody else in the whole world gives a damn about those numbers (not even Tom Spilsbury, and numbers are his favourite thing), but what are you going to do about it - fire me?

Oh, but it's such a simple thing to say, that I delivered a script - so as it's my last go, let's unpack that a little.

A few weeks ago, I was slaving over my first draft. That's the big one, the first draft. Don't let anyone tell you that the first draft is just a discussion document or a Work In Progress - it's not 'just' anything. It's your honest, heartfelt, flailing attempt at perfection. You're aiming for the top of the mountain. You're going to miss, of course, but you've got to try or it means nothing. Whoever got out of bed who didn't have hope?

Something else: the first draft isn't the first draft - it's just the first draft you let anyone read. No idea how many before that. How many times you write each scene, in fact. The first draft is just where it starts for everyone else.

I finished, I pressed SEND and because it was a warm evening, I went out to sit in the garden. I made it halfway to my chair in confidence. Then I started worrying about just how bad that script might be...

The next day, after a production meeting, I sat in the Soho sunshine, on a bench with Brian Minchin, and because time was pressing, he gave me a few notes. Delicate and kind, of course. I listened, and didn't agree, but I promised to have a look.

And when I read it again, oh, I didn't like it at all. Argh, the pain. The parts I worked hardest on seemed scrappy and disjointed. The few sections I'd rushed a bit were the only ones I liked at all. And of course, all Brian's notes were entirely correct. "Not up to scratch," I sighed to my wife that evening. I went back in from the garden, sat down at my computer, and started the second draft.

Ah, the second draft. It sounds so simple, doesn't it? What it means is this: I wrote it all over again. That's what you do. You start from the beginning, you remember what the point of the story was, you fight your way back to what you were trying to say in the first place, and you start climbing back up the mountain. Hopefully the right mountain this time. Oh, and you add more jokes. Always add more jokes. No sane person ever objected to laughing. If you're the only person not laughing at the joke, good news - you are the joke!

I slashed and burned and rearranged. Yeah, that third word really lets that sentence down, doesn't it? That wouldn't make a Game of Thrones - they slash, they burn, they move things around a bit. But hey, I'm a writer, I'm not supposed to be exciting.

This time I pressed SEND and made it all the way to my garden chair, before the stomach-clenching dread and the certainty that I'd get fired.

"They can't fire you this time, dear" said my wife without looking up. "Did I say that out loud?" I asked. "You don't need to," she said.

This time everyone seemed happy. Rachel Talalay, who had been happy the first time, was even happier now.

Nick Lambon, our script editor (whose brain is so clever his hair stands vertical in the updraft) said he'd had a few logical problems with the first draft, said they'd all been solved. But he had some new ones. His hair remained vertical. Mine remained curly, like it was all being sucked back down by the vacuum below.

A day passed, as days do, and everyone remained happy. I considered being happy myself, but I'm from Scotland where happy is worse than naked. Speaking of Scottish, Peter Capaldi emailed. He was mostly happy (that's Glasgow for ecstatic) but had a couple of thoughts. I read the email on my phone, held discreetly under a restaurant table as I was out for dinner with friends - they'd never have suspected a thing if I hadn't shouted, "I've got an email from Doctor Who!!"

I agreed with the first of his points immediately, but wasn't sure about the second. Peter is always clever, though, so I promised to give it a go.

The next day I sat down to my third draft. And I mean third draft. Because you can't just fiddle about with a couple of scenes, you have to start from the beginning again. You need to know the new stuff fits. So you start at the foot of the mountain and climb it all over again, making sure all the hand-holds still work. Everything must still link together, the new stuff must look like it was always there - like it's necessary. And you know what? Peter's first point worked perfectly well, but his second - a subtle realignment of the Doctor's attitude in the final scenes - was bang on the money. The ending was suddenly so much better. Doctor Who is always right.

Then, of course, the readthrough - my very last one. It went well, most of the jokes got laughs, and everyone seemed happy and/or vertically haired. I noticed there was a missing beat towards the end of the story, and we all worried there was a plot-fudge in the middle (no, really??) so I went straight home, worrying about what to do. I wrote my fourth draft the next day. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Changed more than I expected to, but it all felt sound and clear and strong. I added a joke for luck. And there it was at long, aching last - the shooting script.

Pressing SEND! Good luck studio!

We're a week into shooting now. I had a chat with Peter on the set, and we came up with a new take on a moment, which I'll try to make work later today. I have a few other ideas, and possibly a tiny extra scene, but by the time you read this, the script should be done. Well, till we tear it apart in the cutting room, and make a whole new show!

So that's how it was, the last time round. That's how it always was, back then, in those lovely days that still make me still smile as I nod to sleep in my garden chair; those dear, dead, distant days when I used to write Doctor Who.