#unreliable narrators all around

[rocks-in-my-vodka]

fuck these vampires. what the fuck are they even gonna do in episode 8 now??? just end it here??? i’ll end myself here?? okay? thank you?

[lilac-loserr]

I think the reason lwj is so quiet around wwx is because he goes completely fucking stupid when wwx is around. Like full on no thoughts head empty (except for gay thoughts). He can’t open his mouth because he cannot predict what kind of garbled disaster of syllables will spill out if he does. Everything he says in canon has been rehearsed in his head and whispered under his breath fifteen times at minimum before he can even dare to try to say it, lest he accidentally looks into wei ying’s eyes at the wrong moment, causing him to forget everything he was just about to say and also how to walk in a straight line.

Just. Give me stupid lwj.

[stagefoureddiediaz]

Something something about Eddie learning Buck will be there for him off the job, even without Chris being in the equation.

Something something about that being an important realisation for him to finally make because he’s always hidden behind his son when it comes to Buck (and his love life more generally - even Shannon in reality was for Chris not himself) but he won’t be able to this time.

Something something about that realisation being the key to giving himself permission to examine his heart and feel his true feelings.

[cruelplatonic]

the funny thing about writing valentino as the narrator is that sometimes a truly demented sentence tumbles out and when you ask "would he really say that?" the options are

without a doubt

no, he would find a worse thing and say that instead

[transmoriarty]

sherlock posting in 2024 but thinkin abt how diabolical it is w jim saying “u can have me arrested. u can torture me. u can do anything u like to me. but nothing’s going to prevent them from pulling the trigger” literally to the brother of the Government Agent who just recently tortured him for weeks

[professorhayforbreath]

Another really annoying thing about people misusing the "unreliable narrator" bit is that people go on and on about how Percy's recounts in the books are the result of bias and him presenting a more "favorable" version of events, as opposed to, you know, Riordan setting up the cast and plot. Remember, not only is Percy a fictional character, he's also the only POV in the series, meaning that his perspective is the only avenue through which Rick could tell his story.

yes! i feel like so much bad faith analysis comes from forgetting to zoom out and look at a piece of media from the perspective of Someone Made This. percy is a narrative tool being used to communicate a story and i don't believe the intention was ever to present said story inaccurately. it's a middle grade book not a gone girl-esque psychological thriller. you can trust that the events of the book happened the way percy tells it i prommy <3

[chirpsythismorning]

I'm sorry but, I really don't know how anyone can still believe with full confidence that Mike is straight after the airport scene.

It's arguably the most blatant, yet overlooked scene between these three characters, specifically Mike's dynamic with El vs. Mike's dynamic with Will.

Although Mike shows up in sunglasses, I highly doubt he wore them the entire flight. This means Mike probably put on the sunglasses to go from the plane, through the Passenger Boarding Bridge, and directly to the gate entrance where they were waiting for him, all of which are indoors.

Yes, it's sunny in California, and that's what makes this such a good excuse (alibi) for Mike.

Now could this just be a coincidence? Yes, it definitely could!

Now, does Mike ever wear his sunglasses again? No..

Not even for sun purposes in sunny California? No.

(At least not technically until the end of s4... but that's a whole other blatant metaphor about 'eyes being windows into the souls' for another time.)

It's only after him and El have kissed and hugged that Mike finally takes off the sunglasses... How convenient.

But you want to know what Mike did in this scene right before this, that's just... there's really no excuse for it.?

If I was a hardcore milkvan fan at this point, THIS is what would've ended that era for me. Like, I just can't think of anything other than one obvious reason for why Mike did this...

Picture it.

You're Mike, reuniting with your girlfriend with whom you haven't seen in about six months. You were even kind enough to get her a gift, flowers, which you, *reads notes*, quickly put in between you and your girlfriend moments before she embraced you, with you almost instantly shouting CAREFUL, CAREFUL YOUR SQUISHING YOUR PRESENT, so that she had no choice but to separate...

How... sweet?

Nope. I'm sorry, but no. Nothing excuses this at all.

Dude literally risked ruining the present he got for her, by using it as a shield. He literally used the present he got for her as an excuse for why they had to separate sooner than later...

Like, this is repressed gay behavior of epic proportions, especially considering what follows.

Notice how when Mike approached El, he's decked out with hat/sunglasses, his hands full with the flowers and his duffel bag?

Well, notice how in contrast, when Mike approaches Will right afterwards, as he's going in for a hug, Mike switches his duffel bag from his right to his left hand (now empty after giving el the flowers) so that he can go in for a better hug with Will, with his dominant arm, only to immediately backtrack and settle for a shoulder bump...

We also get a shot of Mike looking Will up and down, no sunglasses to hide his reaction this time.

So.. basically, Mike's instinct here with El was to not make it so obvious he's not in love with her, while his instinct with Will was to not make it so obvious that he's in love with him (and boy did he fail)...

Mike addressing Will's painting, assuming it's indeed for some girl, only to never attempt to find out anything else whatsoever, for the rest of the season, about said girl his best friend is in love with?

Argyle calling Mike's shirt a knock-off, essentially calling Mike a knock-off?

Mike looking offended at Will's mention of Angela???

Like, this scene is just all around Mike being an absolute gay disaster, and the fact that 99% of audience doesn't realize this, is downright hilarious.

[coquelicoq]

you reread raksura after reading murderbot and you realize that the kethel in the last book is murderbot from an outside POV. like they don't have the same personality obviously, but if the murderbot books were told from the perspective of, say, eletra from the corporation rim, she'd be talking about secunits the way that all the protagonists of the raksura books talk about the fell. which i feel really conflicted about. you write a five-book series (plus two books of short stories) with a biologically evil race and in the later books start deconstructing it and being like "hey maybe our narrators aren't exactly reliable on this point" but by then it's kind of too late imo. idk. she's doing something interesting here but i don't know if it works.

[rjalker]

"but we can't free these slaves, what if they want to get revenge on us?" Will always be a racist argument, no matter what. It doesn't matter that you have robots as the slaves or orcs or literally any other allegory at all.

[goldenspringmornings]

idk why I’m doing this to myself but I started plotting an au centered around keir so I downloaded pdf versions of the last three books and used the search to pull up every mention of his name from MAF on. he was mentioned/named a total of 176 times (most of that in WAR and most of that was because of the darkbringers) and I think I’m coming out as a keir-sympathizer cause bro wtf were all of these scenes??? if I had to watch a couple fuck in front of me without control of my own body I would hate those people too

[ruvviks]

what is the event/main cause that made roksana cut her mom off?

now this is interesting to talk about because it would be a very gradual process spanning over many many years but it would all come to explode during the events of the broker, despite that fic focusing on vitali; the events of that fic affect his whole family even though it doesn't elaborate much on the effects on his siblings. i initially had several chapters dedicated to roksana but had to cut it short and put it all in one chapter only but when i go for the rewrite i'm putting all of the initial ideas back because it's IMPORTANT. she and vitali are so similar in so many ways but also not at the same time. anyway ok yes here we go

so for roksana specifically she's kind of been a background character in the family ever since she was young. you'd think that after two other kids her parents would know how to parent her correctly but instead they just kind of let her do her thing and she got away with everything, which was nice in a way because it gave her freedom within the house itself but outside of that there was just nothing there for her. with the whole world to her disposal but nobody there with her to help her or keep her company through it all life just got suffocating to her in a way :(

she felt trapped in her family and her brothers always got the spotlight (mostly negative attention, since mainly their mother nadya was always just angry at vitali and after vitali left home daniil just kind of became her new therapist; but roksana did not really pay attention to this, all she saw was her brothers getting attention and not her), so roksana ended up fitting herself into all the boxes her parents wanted her to be in just to get some attention from them and get the love that she deserved. she was the family's poster child, but at the same time this whole role was an act of her, acting the way people expected her to act to get some respect and it was actively chipping away at her psyche, it stopped her from actually growing up and becoming her own person if that makes sense?? her personality was just fabricated specifically for her parents. but that's not who she was or wanted to be. but she knew nothing else

roksana and her father matvey have always had a very professional relationship. he was always busy with work and didn't do a lot of parenting so roksana came to see him more as a guy who lived under the same roof as her rather than her father; in the broker this escalates with matvey seeking revenge against vitali and roksana getting dragged into it and becoming a messenger girl in it all, but by then she's entirely neutral towards her father so there's not even bad blood between them when she stops talking to him; he's just a stranger to her. this is what much later allows her to hesitantly come back after vitali and matvey have made amends to try and build up that relationship again

roksana and her mother nadya however are a different story. the main difference is that roksana always hoped that nadya would understand; that she would understand the position roksana was in and understand her anger and her misery and her sorrows and regrets and that she would try to make it easier for her, give her some relief from the burdens she had to carry. but nadya refused to listen to roksana and refused to take her seriously (much like how she had always treated vitali; important to note that vitali is a trans man and to nadya he was still "her daughter"), not allowing her to show any sort of weakness because she herself had by then long killed her own weaknesses within herself and she expected roksana to do the same

and nadya got what she wanted. roksana grew up a cold and bitter woman, she let her anger win (contrasting vitali who after all this time STILL chooses kindness; if the roles for him and roksana had been reversed, though, he would have turned out the same as her, but the contrast and parallels between vitali and roksana is a story for another time) and she knows it's nadya's fault and she HATES her mother for it. she hates what nadya turned her into and she hates that she never got a normal childhood and she wants nothing more than to get out of there. this is why she vanishes from night city after her appearance in the broker fic, and why initially it is entirely unclear if she'll ever come back

so basically to summarize, nadya robbed roksana of her childhood and her softness and her ability to become her own person by forcing her to be the poster child of the family, and in classic dobrynin family fashion roksana tends to take grudges to her grave, so i don't really see her forgiving her mother for it any time soon. add to that the fact she sees nadya as the cause the entire family started crumbling apart in the first place (whether or not this is true is at this point very hard to tell because like, how far can you trace something like this back and who can be held responsible for what etc etc, but especially taking into consideration she never respected vitali's identity which is what drove him away from home, then did not allow him to reconnect which is what got him into arasaka, and THEN pushed matvey to get revenge after vitali indirectly got them fired at said corporation, and all of THAT is what drove daniil away from home and what caused roksana to change so drastically i'd say it's safe to say she is one of the bigger players in it all LMAO) AND doesn't feel comfortable around her anymore after her affair with ravager (nadya did that while still being married to matvey; they're divorced now), and there you go. mother privileges have been revoked

that being said, roksana does wish things were different. she stuck around for much longer than her brothers did almost in an attempt to fix things?? which again parallels vitali with how he also ends up trying to fix things in the broker fic but basically both of them fail and that's why roksana ends up leaving, she doesn't see the point in staying anymore because there's nothing there for her anymore :(

she does eventually come back to reconnect with vitali (most of their past beef was caused by twisted perspectives of the other's life at home as a child + daniil's rancid behavior bringing out the worst in both of them) and matvey (what i said earlier about them being strangers; no bad blood so an attempt can be made), but nadya has been cut off entirely and so has daniil for roksana because of how similar he is in his behavior to their mother, i talked a bit more about that here

this got very long i am so sorry i am positively insane about this family and all the dynamics. basically the tl;dr is that nadya gets worst mother of the year award forever and always

[tennessoui]

Would you ever be willing to write an Obi-wan + clones fic? It can be platonic but I just love the idea of the clones (Cody, Rex, Waxer, Boil, Woolley, Ghost, etc) being protective over Obi-Wan and Obi-Wan fighting the hardest for them legally, physically, making sure they know their worth and proving it to them with his actions. Ask I’m obsessed with the found family trope.

haha it would very much have to be platonic given that I am absolutely not the writer to ask for anything romantic between obi-wan and anyone that isn’t that one guy

but as far as clone fic goes, im really not sure if I even could write a fic where the focus is on obi-wan’s relationship with the clones. I sorta never really um actually watched all of the clone wars so 🤷‍♀️

But I think a lot of my fics have that dynamic in the background!! “but a number” features a ton of clone and general Kenobi & skywalker bonding and shenanigans, and “building a boat with no blueprints” features soooo much found family dynamics between the clones and obi-wan and baby anakin

it’s less of a dynamic im interested in if I’m being honest even though I love found family vibes. it’s just that there’s a lot of fic/meta I’ve seen that made the rest of the Jedi out to be uncaring about their clones or the bad guys in order to sort of uplift or highlight obi-wan’s relationship with his troops, which I don’t think is really fair cause the parts of the clone wars I HAVE seen don’t give me the impression that obiwan was the one decent guy who cared about the clones while the rest just treated them like slaves or droids or something - all the Jedi cared as far as I’m aware and as far as I care

[forcebookish]

feel like i'm being gaslighted by the ofs fandom like where are all these wild think pieces coming from we can't possibly be watching the same ONE EPISODE of the same drama

anyway,

[nenoname]

once again i firmly believe that the lost journal pages are a truth lie turducken

and also like. i really doubt ford drew the blackness pages, there's some limit to his artistic genius kajshskdhsak

[dirt-str1der]

Enjoying room number nine so much yayy bl visual novel yayy

[steveharringtonsstrugglemeals]

Joyce Byers was one of Steve's nannies when he was a child — it was a side job she picked up when she was still married to Lonnie to help make ends meet. Jonathan doesn't remember it, and Joyce suspects that Steve doesn't either. He had a lot a nannies, after all, and Joyce had only lasted half a year before Mr. Harrington informed her that she had been replaced by a Parisian au pair — five years younger and twice as chic, she was sure. The next time Joyce saw the young Harrington heir out about town, he was wearing a stylish wool scarf around his neck and stumbling over conversational French, while she was shackled to her new post behind the counter at the general store.

(Steve does remember. He remembers every one of the women who raised him piecemeal instead of his parents. They each had something to teach him, some little fragment of personhood that he tucked away and used to build himself into a real boy, whether that lesson was to add a bit of cream to his scrambled eggs or to never trust his father alone with a beautiful young woman. But how does one acknowledge that? How could he properly thank Joyce for granting him that little piece of herself, and apologize for not turning out quite right regardless?)

--

Between her extra shifts at Melvand's and her reputation as a high-strung individual, Joyce has never been particularly close to the other mothers of Hawkins Middle School. But she and Claudia Henderson did have something in common, a mutual understanding between two struggling single mothers. So it shouldn't have come as such a surprise when Claudia confided in her what a big help Steve Harrington has been, picking Dustin up from school and making sure he's not alone when she can't get away from work, fostering the confidence and camaraderie that her motherly doting couldn't provide. And he won't accept more than the occasional hot meal for it, the darling, certainly he would be happy to help out with Will too if Claudia brought it up to him?

But Joyce couldn't take her up on the offer. She wouldn't think of it, trusting her precious Will with Steve Harrington.

She looked at him, and instead of seeing the sweet but spoiled little boy she once knew, she saw his cold, imperious father. Stephen Harrington Sr. was a man carved from stone, all the preeminence and vanity of an emperor's marble bust, and young Steve was his spitting image.

He was the boy who cast a lofty stare from a photograph in the trophy case at Hawkins High. The boy who had never once stepped a Nike-clad foot into Melvand’s, not even for a pack of cigarettes. The boy who regularly sported blackened eyes and bloodied lips, who hefted a nail-studded baseball bat against the beasts of hell.

Maybe he was right for Dustin, Lucas, Mike, and Max and their untempered brashness, their bold defiance in the face of danger. But her kind, sensitive Will? Her Will, who had already weathered so much more than any child should have to?

--

[I might continue this...]