#was in fact a Whole Other Subject Re: Sexuality in the first place that made me go now hang on here

[unproduciblesmackdown]

doing a double take after pulling up One [let's see if this is humorous] thumbnail from someone's blog like waaait a minute about a possible interpretation of this, ctrl shift t bring that back up. & let's give their blog a classic /search/asexual test just like they say & yeah immediate & comprehensive failure lmao

[familyabolisher]

i need your take on the othrt marriage scene in salo, when the young people are forced to marry in full regalia while their naked comrades are being groped and assaulted, and when they're first pressured to consummate the marriage before the libertines stop the process to rape them. how does it fit with the daughters' marriage to the libertines? and with the movie's depiction of these institutions as a whole?

i wrote about this (and the other wedding scenes in the film) already! marriage & its discourse is a shifting goalpost of sorts, and pasolini puts forth a development by which the first marriages (those of the daughters and the libertines) are ironically re-performed in the final marriages (those between the libertines and the studs) in such a way that the studs become functionally their 'sons' primed to inherit the currency of power that they presently hold. the marriage between sergio and renata (the second one) is a ritual of entertainment that provides aesthetic clarification to sexual violence. from the linked piece:

This is not the only time that marriage is brought forth as a legible channel of sexual violence in Salò; each of the four parts of the film contain some reference to a wedding, with the exchange of daughters belonging to the Anteinferno. During the Circle of Manias, two of the captives — Sergio and Renata — are forced to get married, and kept from having sex with one another after having been ordered to do so (thus breaking the rule against penis-in-vagina sex) when the men in attendance choose to rape them instead. The Circle of Shit sees a mock wedding reception in which faeces are served to the guests. Finally, in the Circle of Blood, the studs (four young soldiers) and the libertines undergo a wedding ritual in which the latter are dressed in drag; they exchange rings before consummating the marriage with anal sex. This is what we might call the ‘beginning of the end’; immediately following the final wedding sequence is the series of betrayals on the part of the captives which mark the condition under which the final series of tortures and murders can begin.

In the Circle of Manias, we see a straightforward wielding of marriage by force as a display of power; what makes the scene compelling is that neither Sergio nor Renata are, of course, able to court any power within hegemony after the fact, such that both are made open to rape (and the specific expression of violence-through-power that rape denotes). If the exchange of daughters represents the process by which women are reduced to commodities, Sergio and Renata’s marriage indicates a shift in the concerns of the film from that of the prior hegemonic bolstering towards the sites where violence-through-power is most saliently expressed; the reduction of the captive to a totalised subject position means the loss of all currency of power that participation within hegemony might otherwise bring, and the vacuum left by the absence of such power means that the usage of such rituals on the part of the instigator (ie. the libertines) becomes a dual source of entertainment-as-violence, violence-as-entertainment. Rapeability, to use a slightly gauche term, is gauged at the site where the subject-creation process takes place, proportional to the subject inching towards or straying away from totalisation. Put simply, it’s funny because Sergio, Renata, and the daughters have no power.

The wedding ritual during the Circle of Blood represents another such shift in the concerns of the film; at the same time, it stands in dialectical tension with the instigating exchange of daughters. This time around, the libertines are figured not as the patriarchs of the marital arrangement, but as the brides; the ‘studs’ are cast as their masculine counterparts, a figuring that finds further expression in the expectation that they will perform anal sex on their partners. Here, the film seems to recall the aesthetics of gay fascism; the nexus of ideas around masculinity, virility, strength, and cleanliness all valorised by a Nazi ideology by which the gay subject legible within Nazism can be made sense of come to the fore with the studs, all of whom after all collaborate with the libertines to a significant degree.

Crucially, this scene does not signal any shift in concentrated sites of power and subjectivity. If anything, the supposedly mutable nature of the libertines as far as marriage arrangements go only serves to further highlight the extent and totality of their control, and the ways in which their own deliberate shifts in subjectivity can allow for the reconstitution of the subject at whichever site they please. In the highly ritualised and precisely enumerated space of the palace, the four daughters and the four studs can be taken as one another’s approximate counterparts, and thus become two equal yet divergent channels by which the libertines can exert their power.[2] This equivocation can even open the doors to a yet more interesting reading: that of the studs taking on the functional position of the ‘son,’ paradoxically through marriage. In taking up such a position, they are figured as the patriarchal heirs to the libertines; their collaboration can be considered as a practice of potential inheritance, once again calling to mind the relationship between the economic bolstering of the bourgeois family and the practical ideological articulation of that bolstering.

[adarkrainbow]

"Frauds on the Fairies" was a text by Charles Dickens, published in an 1853 issue of his magazine "Household Words". I discovered it while reading Palacio's study of fin-de-siècle fairytales, since it is a good illustration of what became of fairytales in 19th century England. And it contains a full Cinderella parody!

I will be copy-pasting the content of a website that you can find here.

First, a little introduction to explain the context behind the article:

Although he was an old friend as well as colleague of Charles Dickens, illustrator George Cruikshank (1792--1878) earned the novelist's Horatian satire for his re-writing traditional fairy tales in a moral manner designed to inveigh against the evils of alcoholism, which the reformed dipsomaniac had explored in a cautionary series of plates entitled The Bottle (1847) and its sequel, The Drunkard's Children (1848). Dickens's initial response to this social realism was initially positive, but as one who favoured reasoned moderation rather than absolute teetotalism, Dickens gradually came to regard Cruikshank's temperance propaganda as fanaticism. "As a child he had detested books which had discounted the wonderful and the bizarre in favour of precept or homily, and now his old faith in the stories of his youth was crystallised in this little essay" (Peter Ackroyd, Dickens [1990), page 689). By 1 October 1853, when "Frauds on the Fairies" (written in Boulogne, France) appeared in Dickens's weekly journal Household Words, relations between the novelist and his former illustrator had become somewhat strained. However, re-writing fairy tales as moral (particularly teetotalism) was nothing new in 1853: Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) who in retirement on the Isle of Wight issued the sexually sanitized Family Shakespeare in 1818 had also re-written traditional fairy tales.

Then the article itself:

We must assume that we are not singular in entertaining a very great tenderness for the fairy literature of our childhood.What enchanted us then, and is captivating a million of young fancies now, has, at the same blessed time of life, enchanted vast hosts of men and women who have done their long day's work and laid their grey heads down to rest. It would be hard to estimate the amount of gentleness and mercy that has made its way among us through these slight channels. Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force--many such good things have been first nourished in the child's heart by this powerful aid. It has greatly helped to keep us, in some sense, ever young, by preserving through our worldly ways one slender track not overgrown with weeds, where we may walk with children, sharing their delights.

In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected. Our English red tape is too magnificently red ever to be employed in the tying up of such trifles, but every one who has considered the subject knows full well that a nation without fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun. The theatre, having done its worst to destroy these admirable fictions--having in a most exemplary manner destroyed itself, its artists, and its audiences, in that perversion of its duty--it becomes doubly important that the little books themselves, nurseries of fancy as they are, should be preserved. To preserve them in their usefulness, they must be as much preserved in their simplicity, and purity, and innocent extravagance, as if they were actual fact. Whosoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty, to our thinking, of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.

We have lately observed, with pain, intrusion of a Whole Hog of unwieldy dimensions into the fairy flower garden. The rooting of the animal among the roses would in itself have awakened in us nothing but indignation; our pain arises from his being violently driven in by a man of genius, our own beloved friend, MR. GEORGE CRUIIKSHANK. That incomparable artist is, of all men, the last who should lay his exquisite hand on fairy text. In his own art he understands it so perfectly, and illustrates it so beautifully, so humorously, so wisely, that he should never lay down his etching needle to "edit" the Ogre, to whom with that little instrument he can render such extraordinary justice. But, to "editing" Ogres, and Hop o'-my-thumbs, and their families, our dear moralist has in a rash moment taken, as a means of propagating the doctrines of Total Abstinence, Prohibition of the sale of spirituous liquors, Free Trade, and Popular Education. For the introduction of these topics he has altered the text of a fairy story; and against his right to do any such thing we protest with all our might and main. Of his likewise altering it to advertise that excellent series of plates, "The Bottle," we say nothing more than that we foresee a new and improved edition of Goody Two Shoes, edited by E. Moses and Son; of the Dervish with the box of ointment, edited by Professor Holloway; and of Jack and the Beanstalk edited by Mary Wedlake, the popular authoress of Do you bruise your oats yet.

Now, it makes not the least difference to our objection whether we agree or disagree with our worthy friend, Mr. Cruikshank, in the opinions he interpolates upon an old fairy story. Whether good or bad in themselves, they are, in that relation, like the famous definition of a weed; a thing growing up in a wrong place. He has no greater moral justification in altering the harmless little books than we should have in altering his best etchings. If such a precedent were followed we must soon become disgusted with the old stories into which modern personages so obtruded themselves, and the stories themselves must soon be lost. With seven Blue Beards in the field, each coming at a gallop from his own platform mounted on a foaming hobby a generation or two hence would not know which was which, and the great original Blue Beard would be confounded with the counterfeits. Imagine a Total abstinence edition of Robinson Crusoe, with the rum left out. Imagine a Peace edition, with the [97/98] gunpowder left out, and the rum left in. Imagine a Vegetarian edition, with the goat's flesh left out. Imagine a Kentucky edition, to introduce a flogging of that 'tarnal old nigger Friday, twice a week. Imagine an Aborigines Protection Society edition, to deny cannibalism and make Robinson embrace the amiable savages whenever they landed. Robinson Crusoe would be "edited" out of his island in a hundred years, and the island would be swallowed up in the editorial ocean.

Among the other learned professions we have now the Platform profession, chiefly exercised by a new and meritorious class of commercial travellers who go about to take the sense of meetings on various articles: some, of a very superior description: some, not quite so good. Let us write the story of Cinderella, "edited" by one of these gentlemen, doing a good stroke of business, and having a rather extensive mission.

ONCE upon a time, a rich man and his wife were the parents of a lovely daughter. She was a beautiful child, and became, at her own desire, a member of the Juvenile Bands of Hope when she was only four years of age. When this child was only nine years of age her mother died, and all the Juvenile Bands of Hope in her district--the Central district, number five hundred and twenty-seven--formed in a procession of two and two, amounting to fifteen hundred, and followed her to the grave, singing chorus Number forty-two, "O come," &c. This grave was outside the town, and under the direction of the Local Board of Health; which reported at certain stated intervals to the General Board of Health, Whitehall.

The motherless little girl was very sorrowful for the loss of her mother, and so was her father too, at first; but, after a year was over, he married again--a very cross widow lady, with two proud tyrannical daughters as cross as herself. He was aware that he could have made his marriage with this lady a civil process by simply making a declaration before a Registrar; but he was averse to this course on religious grounds, and, being a member of the Montgolfian persuasion, was married according to the ceremonies of that respectable church by Reverend Jared Jocks, who improved the occasion.

He did not live long with his disagreeable wife. Having been shamefully accustomed to shave with warm water instead of cold, which he ought to have used (see Medical Appendix B. and C.), his undermined constitution could not bear up against her temper, and he soon died. Then, this orphan was cruelly treated by her stepmother and the two daughters, and was forced to do the dirtiest of kitchen work; to scour the saucepans, wash the dishes, and light the fires--which did not consume their own smoke, but emitted a dark vapour prejudicial to the bronchial tubes. The only warm place in the house where she was free from ill-treatment was the kitchen chimney-corner; and as she used to sit down there, among the cinders, when her work was done, the proud fine sisters gave her the name of Cinderella.

About this time, the King of the land, who never made war against anybody, and allowed everybody to make war against him--which was the reason why his subjects were the greatest manufacturers on earth, and always lived in security and peace--gave a great feast, which was to last two days. This splendid banquet was to consist entirely of artichokes and gruel; and from among those who were invited to it, and to hear the delightful speeches after dinner, the King's son was to choose a bride for himself. The proud fine sisters were invited, but nobody knew anything about poor Cinderella, and she was to stay at home.

She was so sweet-tempered, however, that she assisted the haughty creatures to dress, and bestowed her admirable taste upon them as freely as if they had been kind to her. Neither did she laugh when they broke seventeen stay-laces in dressing; for, although she wore no stays herself, being sufficiently acquainted with the anatomy of the human figure to be aware of the destructive effects of tight-lacing, she always reserved her opinions on that subject for the Regenerative Record (price three halfpence in a neat wrapper), which all good people take in, and to which she was a Contributor.

At length the wished for moment arrived, and the proud fine sisters swept away to the feast and speeches, leaving Cinderella in the chimney- corner. But, she could always occupy her mind with the general question of the Ocean Penny Postage, and she had in her pocket an unread Oration on that subject, made by the well known Orator, Nehemiah Nicks. She was lost in the fervid eloquence that talented Apostle when she became aware of the presence of one of those female relatives which (it may not be generally known) it is not lawful for a man to marry. I allude to her grandmother.

"Why so solitary, my child?" said the old lady to Cinderella.

"Alas, grandmother," returned the poor girl, "my sisters have gone to the feast and speeches, and here sit I in the ashes, Cinderella !"

"Never," cried the old lady with animation, "shall one of the Band of Hope despair! Run into the garden, my dear, and fetch me an American Pumpkin! American, because some parts of that independent country, there are prohibitory laws against the sale of alcoholic drinks in any form. Also, because America produced (among many great pumpkins) the glory of her sex, Mrs. Colonel Bloomer. None but an American Pumpkin will do, my child."

Cinderella ran into the garden, and brought [98/99] the largest American pumpkin she could find. This virtuously democratic vegetable her grandmother immediately changed into a splendid coach. Then, she sent her for mice from the mouse-trap, which she changed into prancing horses, free from the obnoxious and oppressive post-horse duty. Then, to the rat- trap in the stable for a rat, which she changed to a state-coachman, not amenable to the iniquitous assessed taxes. Then, to look behind a watering-pot for six lizards, which she changed into six footmen, each with a petition in his hand ready to present to the Prince, signed by fifty thousand persons, in favour of the early closing movement.

"But grandmother," said Cinderella, stopping in the midst of her delight, and looking at her clothes, "how can I go to the palace in these miserable rags?"

"Be not uneasy about that, my dear," returned her grandmother.

Upon which the old lady touched her with her wand, her rags disappeared, and she was beautifully dressed. Not in the present costume of the female sex, which has been proved to be at once grossly immodest and absurdly inconvenient, but in rich sky-blue satin pantaloons gathered at the ankle, a puce-coloured satin pelisse sprinkled with silver flowers, and a very broad Leghorn hat. The hat was chastely ornamented with a rainbow-coloured ribbon hanging in two bell-pulls down the back; the pantaloons were ornamented with a golden stripe; and the effect of the whole was unspeakably sensible, feminine, and retiring. Lastly, the old lady put on Cinderella's feet a pair of shoes made of glass: observing that but for the abolition of the duty on that article, it never could have been devoted to such a purpose; the effect of all such taxes being to cramp invention, and embarrass the producer, to the manifest injury of the consumer. When the old lady had made these wise remarks, she dismissed Cinderella to the feast and speeches, charging her by no means to remain after twelve o'clock at night.

The arrival of Cinderella at the Monster Gathering produced a great excitement. As a delegate from the United States had just moved that the King do take the chair, as the motion had been seconded and carried unanimously, the King himself could not go forth to receive her. But His Royal Highness the Prince (who was to move the second resolution), went to the door to hand from her carriage. This virtuous Prince, being completely covered from head to foot with Total Abstinence Medals, shone as if he were attired in complete armour; while the inspiring strains of the Peace Brass Band in the gallery (composed of the Lambkin Family, eighteen in number, who cannot be too much encouraged) awakened additional enthusiasm.

The King's son handed Cinderella to one of the reserved seats for pink tickets, on the platform, and fell in love with her immediately. His appetite deserted him; he scarcely tasted his artichokes, and merely trifled with his gruel. When the speeches began, and Cinderella, wrapped in the eloquence of the two inspired delegates who occupied the entire evening in speaking to the first Resolution, occasionally cried, "Hear, hear!" the sweetness of her voice completed her conquest of the Prince's heart. But, indeed the whole male portion of the assembly loved her--and doubtless would have done so, even if she had been less beautiful, in consequence of the contrast which her dress presented to the bold and ridiculous garments of the other ladies.

At a quarter before twelve the second inspired delegate having drunk all the water in the decanter, and fainted away, the King put the question, "That this Meeting do now adjourn until to-morrow." Those who were of that opinion holding up their hands, and then those who were of the contrary, theirs, there appeared an immense majority in favour of the resolution which was consequently carried. Cinderella got home in safety, and heard nothing all that night, or all next day, but the praises of the unknown lady with the sky-blue satin pantaloons.

When the time for the feast and speeches came round again, the cross stepmother and the proud fine daughters went out in good time to secure their places. As soon as they were gone, Cinderella's grandmother returned and changed her as before. Amid a blast of welcome from the Lambkin family, she was again handed to the pink seat on the platform by His Royal Highness.

This gifted Prince was a powerful speaker, and had the evening before him. He rose at precisely ten minutes before eight, and was greeted with tumultuous cheers and waving of handkerchiefs. When the excitement had in some degree subsided, he proceeded to address the meeting: who were never tired of listening to speeches, as no good people ever are. He held them enthralled for four hours and a quarter. Cinderella forgot the time, and hurried away so when she heard the first stroke of twelve, that her beautiful dress changed back to her old rags at the door, and she left one of her glass shoes behind. The Prince took it up, and vowed--that is, made a declaration before a magistrate; for he objected on principle to the multiplying of oaths-- that he would only marry the charming creature to whom that shoe belonged.

He accordingly caused an advertisement to that effect to be inserted in all the newspapers: for, the advertisement duty, an impost most unjust in principle and most unfair in operation, did not exist in that country; neither was the stamp on newspapers known in that land-- which had as many newspapers as the United States, and got as much good out of them. Innumerable ladies answered the [99/100] advertisement and pretended that the shoe was theirs; but, every one of them was unable to get her foot into it. The proud fine sisters answered it, and tried their feet with no greater success. Then, Cinderella, who had answered it too, came forward amidst their scornful jeers, and the shoe slipped on in a moment. It is a remarkable tribute to the improved and sensible fashion of the dress her grandmother had given her, that if she had not worn it the Prince would probably never have seen her feet.

The marriage was solemnized with great rejoicing. When the honeymoon was over, the King retired from public life, and was succeeded by the Prince. Cinderella, being now a queen, applied herself to the government of the country on enlightened, liberal, and free principles. All the people who ate anything she did not eat, or who drank anything she did not drink, were imprisoned for life. All the newspaper offices from which any doctrine proceeded that was not her doctrine, were burnt down. All the public speakers proved to demonstration that if there were any individual on the face of the earth who differed from them in anything, that individual was a designing ruffian and an abandoned monster. She also threw open the right of voting, and of being elected to public offices and of making the laws, to the whole of her sex; who thus came to be always gloriously occupied with public life and whom nobody dared to love. And they all lived happily ever afterwards.

Frauds on the Fairies once permitted, we see little reason why they may not come to this, and great reason why they may. The Vicar of Wakefield [in Goldsmith's novel] was wisest when he was tired of being always wise. The world is too much with us, early and late. Leave this precious old escape from it, alone.

[boldlyvoid]

Hypothetically | Chapter 21-24

Summary: Reader and Spencer were friends in kindergarten, she watched him grow up and explore the world while she was still trying to catch up to him. now that they work together, they fall in love incredibly fast. friends to lovers, case of the week style story.

Warnings 18+: Murderers, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Blood, Guns, mentions of autopsy, Fluff, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, bed-sharing, Riding, Unprotected Sex, Virgin Reader, Case of the Week, original crimes, Food mention, Smut, Oral Sex, Light BDSM, Pregnancy, Pregnancy Talk, obgyn appointments and info, Home Invasion, Past Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Emotional Manipulation, Grooming, Pedophilia mention, non-con oral (male receiving), Pregnant Sex, Daddy Kink, Breeding Kink, Homophobia, conversion therapy

A/N; thee case in c21 is personal to me, like fictional revenge.

word count so far: 70K (chapter 1-25)

chapter 21

Having Spencer all to herself for 3 weeks straight was an experience she’ll never forget. They had the whole month of January off together, painting and re-decorating their home till it was exactly how they wanted it. It felt like home, it was theirs for real now.

Painting the bedroom green was the best idea she’s ever had. When the sun finally woke them up every morning, it wasn’t as blinding. It was paradise. The golden beams of light cast a beautiful glow around the room, it was like she was in a magic forest at the start of every day.

Spencer was laying on his back, his hair scattered on the pillow. He looked so peaceful, sleeping with his mouth wide open. Y/N was leaning on her elbow, looking down at the beautiful man she had the pleasure of spending the rest of her life with.

She brushed the hair off his face, watching his nose scrunch up as he felt her fingertips on his cheek. The sun on his face made him glow, he looked like a gift from god laying before her.

“Good morning baby,” she whispered softly. Dragging her finger along his jaw and down his neck, “we get to go to work today.”

Spencer stretched as he woke up, slipping an arm under her and pulling her into his chest. She held on tight, kissing his neck as she settled in. “Morning,” he replied. Raspy as ever.

“Wanna go get breakfast?” She asked softly.

He laughed against her skin, “gotta feed the baby.”

“And the wiiiife,” she teased.

“Not for another 11 weeks and 2 days,” he corrected her. “But yes, we should go get breakfast,” he whispered after a moment.

“Come on get up,” she replied with a big smile. He patted her ass as she peeled out of his grasp. Sitting up and stretching, taking a look down at the basketball protruding from her stomach. “Damn.”

“What?” Spencer asked.

She stood up beside the bed and pulled her shirt up, showing Spencer how big her stomach was. Turning sideways so he really got a good look at it. Spencer leaned over and kissed her right on her belly button that was beginning to pop.

“I know your ears are on in there, I love you, Matthew,” Spencer whispered against her skin.

She couldn’t stop smiling, taking a moment to rub her hands over the bump in amazement. “Hi Mr. Matty MaGoo, mommy also loves you.”

“Mr. Matty MaGoo?” Spencer laughed, looking at her with the biggest smile.

“Yes,” She laughed. “It just came to me, and it's going to stick.”

“Derek’s been calling him Mini G,” Spencer added.

“We should tell him it's Matthew, then he can be little Matty G,” Y/N swooned. “Seriously let’s go I miss everyone.”

“Okay, okay go get ready then,” he insisted, getting out of bed and dragging her to the bathroom.

—

Spencer drove, giving her a chance to look over her work emails before the day started. She was still CC’d on a bunch of VICAP things, being able to snoop on what was coming in and inspecting it.

Sometimes Mindy would CC her in just for an opinion.

Subject: Found Something. From; Mindy Patel To; SSA Y/N Y/L/N, Unit Chief SSA Aaron Hotchner, SSA-CL Jennifer Jareau

There’s been a child abduction in Arizona, I’ve pieced together some thing’s I’ve been working on in the background that might help the case if you are called in to assist. Even if you are not I believe you should take a look at this.

Mindy Patel, VICAP.

Attachment

Year: 1998 Victim 1: Emily Lawrence - 13. Kept till 16. Taken: August 3rd, 1998. Williams, AZ Found: June 10th, 2001. Camp Verde, AZ ME: decay has he placed at 48 hours postmortem when she was found - strangled, sexually assaulted long term, extensive throat damage. Never been pregnant. - COD: asphyxiation Info: good student, innocent shy girl. Followed the rules. Taken when walking home from school. Held for 3 years, assaulted and chained. Dumped without care.

Year: 2001 Victim 2: Olivia Tomms - 13. Kept till 16 Taken: August 3rd, 2001. Payson, AZ Found: June 23rd, 2004. Florence, AZ ME: decay has her at about 2 weeks postmortem. - strangled, sexually assaulted long term, extensive throat damage. Never been pregnant. - COD: asphyxiation Info: good student, innocent shy girl. Followed the rules. Taken when walking home from school. Held for 3 years, assaulted and chained. Dumped without care.

Year: 2004 Victim 3: Shelby Summers - 13. Kept till 16. Taken: August 3rd, 2004. Peach Springs, AZ Found: July 16th, 2007. Keams, AZ ME: decay has her at over a month postmortem. - strangled, sexually assaulted long term, extensive throat damage. Never been pregnant. - COD: asphyxiation Info: good student, innocent shy girl. Followed the rules. Taken when walking home from school. Held for 3 years, assaulted and chained. Dumped without care.

Year: 2007 Victim 4: Beth Green - 11. Kept till 13 Taken: August 3rd, 2007. Saint John, AZ Found: January 13th, 2010. @ flagstaff hospital. ME: COD complications from a miscarriage. Massive blood loss. - well taken care of. Throat damage. Signs of being detained long term. Info:good student, innocent shy girl. Followed the rules. Taken when walking home from school. Held for 3 years, assaulted and chained. Dumped with remorse like he didn’t want her to die, and he felt sorry because he loved her.

Newest abduction: Name: Sally Irvine - 12 Taken: February 3rd, 3pm. Middle School pick-up (missing 13 hours now) Witness Report: Italian/greek man. Early 30’s. Claimed to be her parents assistant. Sally was used to going home with random people from her parents' work. Handsome man, very charming and convincing. He wore a suit and drove a Silver Honda Civic. Rust at the back, partial plate HC8.

“Fuck,” Y/N cried silently as she scrolled through all the information, even in a compact form.

“What’s wrong?” Spencer asked, looking over at her with concern.

“Um,” she didn’t really know why she was reacting like this at first. Then it hit her. “Mindy sent me a case and it’s hitting a little too close to home.”

“Would you like to explain it yet? It’s okay if you want to process it alone,” Spencer comforted her easily like it was his second nature.

She let out a deep breath. “There’s a serial killer in Arizona that is kidnapping girls between 11 and 13, only keeping them 3 years. Every ME report says they have extensive internal throat damage, and 3 of the 4 found were never pregnant. This unsub is forcing them into oral for 3 years straight.”

“Fuck,” Spencer agreed. “I think we should take this one, if you can’t I would fully understand.”

“I think the unsub is my rapist.”

Spencer pulled over onto the side of the road. Putting the car in park and flashing the 4-ways. He turned to her softly and looked at her with a blank face.

“Walk me through it.”

“What?”

“If I’m going to go in there with you and tell Hotch that this is the same guy who hurt you, then you’re going to need to explain it to him and the team,” Spencer explained softly. “You’ve never even told me the full story, I don’t know anything about that summer other than the fact something happened. The first time you repeat this in front of me is going to be hard, and I don’t want you to have to do that in front of all of them.”

She couldn’t help herself from letting out a small sob, “okay.”

She took a few minutes to collect her thoughts, and calm down enough to get full words out of her mouth.

“When I was 12,” she started. “My mom went back to work, and she didn’t trust me to watch my brothers because they were rowdy and never listened to me. Like you said, they were more like my older brothers.

“My dad’s best friend, Jimmy, his wife had MS so she was home all the time. They had 3 older children and a few foster boys, she was used to lots of kids being there. And she had a pool to keep us occupied,” she bit her lip before she explained anymore.

“My mom’s birthday is June 8th. That’s when victim 1 was murdered,” was the first fact she explained that related to the case. She handed Spencer her phone so he could read and follow along.

“My dad is a Mason with the Masonic Lodge in Los Vegas, and he was becoming the master of his division on my mom's birthday that year, so we rented a hall and had a big party. Jimmy’s foster son was there, you remember Christopher Torsey? He was a freshman and I was in grade 6, about to enter grade 7, that was when the grooming started. He took me into the back room and asked if anyone had ever kissed me, I said no. He leaned in and kissed me in the dark and I was a giggly mess.

“My parents and his were really friends and he would come over all the time, our dads would drink in the backyard with our mothers till 1 in the morning most weekends. So I spent long periods of time with this boy for a few years, trusting him like a friend before he started anything. That summer he would always find a way to wander off with me, at first it was just kissing in different places where we could be alone together. Then he would touch my boobs, and he had me take my shirt off a few times.”

Spencer looked calm, but the redness in his face and the pulse in his neck told a different story. Her breathing got heavier as she had to recall it all, and she didn’t want him to be so upset.

“We worked at a local church camp together that July, we’d do crafts and sing songs and after all the kids left and we had to clean up, he’d find a way to take me to the room where they held the nativity scene out of season. He’d start kissing and touching me like normal, and then Kendra walked in once and saw and suddenly he went from obsessed with me, to disgusted, saying I came on to him and that it was all me. He was disgusted by me when we were in public, but he loved me apparently behind closed doors.”

“On August 3rd,” a tear slipped down her cheek. “The day the girls go missing. That was the first time he took me back to the shed and said ‘when two people are in love, they do things, and I love you. So you have to,’ He took his, you know, and I’d never seen one before. It was scary and I didn’t want to, I wanted to leave, but he pushed me against the wall and down to my knees.” She had to stop to take a breath, Spencer was crying silently as he watched her explain it all.

“He kept me trapped there while he did it,” she explained. “The worst part is that his parents were hosting a wedding that night, so no one could hear me basically screaming no over the music. He knew that. And so, when I complained about the sore throat the next day, my parents thought it was from all the singing.”

Spencer let out a shaky breath, he looked at her with so much love and sadness, she knew he loved her. She reached across the centre console and wiped the tears off his face, pecking his lips softly before sitting back to continue.

“The dates match up, he was Italian, they’re all 11-13 with throat damage,” she ran it down. “It’s him.”

Spencer licked his lips, wiping the tears off his face before taking a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go tell Hotch.”

Aaron stood up from his desk after Y/N explained the situation, walking up close to her with a sad smile on his face, “this was a very hard thing to come forward with. How would you like to participate in the investigation?” He was soft with her for the first time, it was surreal.

“Um, I’d like to come with you to Arizona,” she said softly. “when Garcia finds him, I’d like to be the one to interview him.”

“Do you think that is a wise idea?” He asked softly.

“When I was 16, years after everything happened. I went to Jimmy’s house for an event, and Christopher was there, and I went to his room. I was so desperate for the bullying to stop. For the lies, he had told about me to go away, that I went in there and apologized to him,” her voice almost disappeared as she got to the end of the sentence. Crying in disbelief. “2 years later he started abducting. I apologized to my rapist and he started kidnapping girls. I need to look him in the eyes and find out why he did it.”

“Okay, let’s tell the team.”

Y/N and Garcia spent an hour building the case files and compiling all the data they had on Christopher Torsey. Joining the team in the briefing room, where Spencer had already relayed the events to the team. Y/N didn’t need to describe it all 3 times in 2 hours.

She passed all the folders out, trying to avoid the looks the team gave her. They were sorry, they respected her, they wanted revenge for her. She knew it all came from a place of love, however, she hated being perceived by others.

It was a trauma thing. For so long people had the wrong idea about her, she was bullied and put down, and hated for no reason. She hates any form of attention, the glances and staring, the whispers of rumours being told as fact. It was stressful.

“Before we start,” she started softly. “Thank you in advance for your concerns, but I’ve been in therapy for 10 years. I’m very happy, this is gonna fuckin’ suck, but at the end of the day I’m coming home to a man who loves me, a baby on the way, and the best friends I can ask for. He’s going to prison. I win.”

Derek smiled at her, “that’s my girl. What did you find?”

“Christopher Torsey was born in November of 1979. His father was extremely abusive, he was in the ER a lot by the time he was 11. His mother killed herself in front of him when he was 12, he also watched his father rape his mother according to his child therapist,” Garcia started. Not knowing how to say the next part without Y/N crying.

“He uh, he said that his dad would tell his mom to be quiet. That-uh, I’m sorry, shouldn’t you say this?”

Y/N stepped in without a second thought. “He said that his father would hold the fact that he loved her over her head to force her into having sex with him. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“He’s our guy for sure. Do we have an address?” Prentiss asked.

“Yeah, he lives in a double-wide trailer in Cottonwood. Near the back with his own access to the main road,” Y/N explained. “I knew he moved to Arizona when Jimmy finally kicked him out. I haven’t heard from him in years.”

“Y/N is coming with us, wheels up in 20.”

—

Cottonwood PD waited for them to arrive before apprehending him. They were concerned that he would run, with his access to the woods and a four-wheeler in his possession, it was a matter of boxing him in quietly with a backup plan in place and men on the ground.

“Can I suggest something?” Y/N cut into the Police Chief and Hotch’s conversation.

“Sure.”

“Um, what if I walk up in our civilian clothes, and just pretend that we’re there to rub it in his face that I'm happy and in love,” Y/N suggested. “I can wear a wire, you can be in a surveillance van listening in. You’ll be right there if we see Sally or sense something’s up.”

“Are you sure you can do that?” Hotch asked her.

“I am,” she turned to Spencer, “if you can control your temper you can come. If not, I’ll show up with Derek and still rub it in his face that someone loves me now.”

Spencer sighed deeply as he contemplated it. “I’ll kill him,” he admitted. “Take Derek.”

“Let’s get suited up,” Derek patted Spencer’s shoulder. “I won’t let him hurt her again. Don’t worry.”

“I know.” Spencer looked disappointed.

Everyone left the room, leaving Spencer and Y/N alone. She wrapped her arms around him in a tight hug resting her face against his chest. He softly held her in return, rubbing his hands along her back with his cheek on her head.

“I love you, forever and always,” She reminded him. “And I know how much you love me, believe me. I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I didn’t truly believe Chris was wrong.”

She pulled back when she felt a tear on her head. She wiped it softly with her thumb as he leaned his cheek into her palm. “I am loveable, and you love me. I win.”

He laughed softly, “I won too.”

She pulled him into a soft kiss, “I’ll be back in your arms soon.”

“I’ll be in the van watching the whole time, I love you so much,” he added for good measure.

She smiled as she walked away, throwing a fist in the air like the end of the breakfast club. Knowing full well he’d never get the reference. JJ on the other hand, laughed as she followed with Spencer.

They changed into regular clothes, getting in a car from the impound lot and following the surveillance van. Morgan was quiet, Y/N knew he wanted to talk to her, to go over the plan, but he didn’t know how to. The wire wouldn’t be on till they walked out, giving Y/N and Derek their privacy if he ever chose to speak.

“Did you ever confront your guy?” Y/N asked.

He nodded, “Carl Buford. I got to show him who I am now, that I put men like him behind bars. That I’ll always win.”

“Is it a good feeling?”

Derek set his hand palm up on the centre console, looking at her softly as if to ask her to take it. She interlocked their fingers, he rubbed his thumb against her skin.

“You’re right, it fucking sucks. The original pain never goes away, but there is a content feeling knowing he won’t get to hurt another person, that he might get his ass kicked in prison,” he smiled that beautiful Derek smile. “I’ll always be here for when you need someone who gets it.”

“Thank you,” she smiled.

They pulled into the trailer park slowly, separating from the team as they approached Christopher’s trailer. “Just pretend you’re Spencer, treat me the way he would. I know Spencer tells you everything, go off of memory of what he’s said about me.”

“You know he tells me everything?” Derek asked softly, laughing a little to himself.

“Because he also tells me everything,” she smirked. “When he’s tired and he rambles, he tells me about his whole day and that includes when he asks you for advice.”

“You two are gross,” he smiled. “I hope I can replicate it.”

“Come on,” she laughed, getting out of the car and waiting for Derek at the hood.

She took his hand before walking up to the door, a hand on her belly to make it look bigger. Really wanting to show off that she was in a better place than he was.

She knocked, 3 times, stepping back so he could open the door. She didn’t feel scared, she felt anxious in excitement to watch Derek take him to the floor.

“Y/N?” She heard his voice for the first time in 13 years. “What are you doing here?”

“My therapist suggested that I come here and show you someone actually did end up loving me, regardless of what you said,” she explained.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he panicked, flashing his eyes back and forth between her and Derek.

“I can come in and explain it for you if you’d like?” Y/N smiled. “You’ve got nothing to hide I assume? I’m just wildly obsessed with you and a liar right? That’s what you told everyone so I wouldn’t be able to say you forced my head on your dick with the promise that you loved me.”

“I- I uh,” he stuttered. Starting to shake lightly.

“That’s what you do to all the girls, isn’t it, Chris?” Derek cut in, pulling the screen door open and watching as Christopher ran to the back of the house. “We got a runner!!” He announced to the wire.

Y/N didn’t run after him, she knew the team had him. She walked through the house to watch from the back door. Only to find Spencer stiff-arming him.

Christopher flipped over Spencer’s arm, hitting the ground before Spencer was on top of him. Spencer punched him in the face, once, twice, three times before he stopped. Sitting over the unconscious man as he caught his breath. Everyone just watched him. He rolled Christopher over, cuffed him and walked away into the woods.

Y/N carefully jogged into the yard, passing the bleeding and groaning asshole she used to know as she ran after Spencer. He was walking too fast, and he didn’t look like he was going to stop.

“Spencer Walter Reid!” She yelled at him as if she was his mother. “Stop.”

He stopped abruptly, huffing as he did so. He only turned around to face her when she finally caught up to him. “Don’t touch me yet,” he instructed her.

“Okay,” she stopped a foot in front of him. “Look at me, breathe. In and out.” She used her hands as she motioned a breath in, and a release out. She repeated it 4 times, watching him do the same.

“Can I hug you now?” She asked softly.

He nodded, stepping into her space and wrapping himself around her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“It was actually really appreciated,” she laughed. “I was debating if having a baby at 22 weeks was worth punching him in the face a few times.”

Spencer laughed softly into her shoulder. Squeezing her in his grasp as he breathed her in. “I love you.”

“I love you, more,” she smiled against his neck before pressing a soft kiss to his ever-beating pulse. “Let’s go see the team, come on.”

Y/N was adamant about searching the trailer with the team. Going to the surveillance van for a vest and gloves while Christopher was taken to the police station, and Spencer had his hand wrapped up.

It still smelled like him in there. The smell of his detergent mixed with smoke from the fireplace. It never changed. She noticed his PlayStation was on, he was still interested in games. He still slept with the brown comforter that was on his bed when she was 12. It was worn down, holes gathered at the bottom as it was almost see-through now.

She opened the closet to see a very large metal safe in its place. She took a deep breath, looking at the keypad to see what numbers had been worn down the most, guessing his password.

0803

It popped open, it made her feel sick to her stomach. As she opened it, she heard the muffled screams behind duck tape. Sally Irvine was tied up, hunched over in a tiny metal box while he played GTA.

She wanted to kill him.

“Hey, hey it’s okay,” she shushed the girl. “Sally, my name is Y/N. We’re here to take you home, you're safe now.”

Y/N took the tape off Sally’s mouth softly, the girl sobbed immediately. Not able to say a single thing as Y/N untied her and held Sally in her arms. Sally hugged her back as tight as she could, sobbing into her shirt as Y/N rocked her back and forth. Crying along with her.

“He did it to me when I was 12 too,” Y/N whispered.

Sally pulled back and looked at her with puffy eyes, “really?” She asked. Her voice low and scratchy.

“JJ can you get some water?” She called behind her. “Yes. I was his first.”

“Y/N,” the girl repeated. “That’s what he called me?”

She couldn’t stop the sick feeling in her gut, “let’s get you out of here.” She changed the topic, helping the little girl to her feet and to an ambulance.

Y/N smiled at her as she dropped her off with the EMTs, walking off into the woods as quickly as she could. She leaned over, holding her own hair back as she threw up on the ground.

She swatted away at the hand rubbing her back suddenly, continuing to hurl in the bushes as she heard them behind her, shushing her. She wiped her hand on her mouth before she calmed herself down.

She sighed and turned around to see Morgan. His arms were open for her to hug him, she buried her face in his chest as she cried. Not able to fully process all the information she just heard.

“Let’s get you home,” Derek whispered. Escorting her back to the car, she was done for the day.

chapter 22

Valentine’s day had come and gone by the time they finished their most recent case. Landing in Quantico very late on the 16th of February. Everyone departed the plane slowly, half asleep after the 3-hour flight.

“Did you guys miss any plans?” Y/N asked JJ and Emily as they walked together.

“Yeah,” Emily sighed, “I uh, I’ve been seeing someone.”

“Since when?” JJ asked, both her and Y/N suddenly not tired at all. They stopped on the tarmac and stared at her.

“Um, a few months now,” She blushed.

“Was this the sin to win weekend?” Y/N asked softly.

Emily nodded, “what’s sin to win?” JJ asked just as quietly.

“It’s a weekend for gay people in Atlantic City,” Emily replied. “It’s an easy way to mingle in a safe space.”

“Oh,” JJ was shocked. “Oh, so you’re, and you too?” She pointed at both of them as the information was processed.

Y/N and Emily smiled at her and laughed. “Bi? Yes,” Y/N replied.

“I’m still not sure,” Emily added. She sighed deeply, shaking her head as she tried to speak again. “I’ve never really enjoyed male company? It feels more like a performance than a relationship.”

“I mean good for you for noticing that now, if it wasn’t for Spencer I’d be in the same boat,” Y/N smirked at her. “He’s more than just a pretty face.”

“Wow,” JJ was shocked. “I would’ve never known.”

Emily placed her hand on JJ’s back, leading her towards the charter back to headquarters, “oh you poor, poor, heterosexual woman.”

“She has a cat, she cuts her bangs when she’s stressed and she bites her fingernails,” Y/N explained to JJ as they picked their seats. “She likes pussy, JJ.”

Emily smacked her arm lightly, all of them laughing hysterically. The boys walked onto the bus to their cackling, desperately wanting to know what was so funny.

“I was just telling them, I met someone and I’d like for you to all meet her soon,” Emily explained to the rest of the team. “I think you’ll really like her.”

“No way,” Derek smiled, high-fiving her. “Congrats dude, welcome to the dark side.”

“You too?” JJ was shocked. “Okay, put your hand up if you’re a straight person,” she stretched her arm into the air. Hotch and Rossi joined her.

“Really?” Spencer and Y/N looked at each other with excitement.

“What the fuck?” JJ was dumbfounded. “How did I not know this?”

“It just never came up before,” Derek shrugged. “Tell us more about this girlfriend of yours, Prentiss.”

“Or,” Y/N cut in. “you could bring her to Vegas in April.”

“Why?” Emily smirked at her.

“If you’re all free on April 23rd,” She teased them along. “Spencer and I would like you to come to our wedding at my parent’s house.”

“Oh!” JJ and Emily freaked, “holy shit!”

“So, you guys are in?” She laughed.

“Yeah!”

For 2 in the morning, the bus was the most excited they had ever been. And Penelope didn’t even join them on this trip. Normally it was her making this kind of excitement, Y/N basked in the happiness that filled the bus.

They discussed little details on the way to their cars, standing in the garage for a good 15 minutes as they planned the dates they’d need to arrange to have off. Hotch knew he could pull some strings to use everyone’s vacation time for a few days.

They exchanged hugs before breaking apart for the night. Planning to return around noon that same day. Giving them a sweet 9 hours of peace and quiet.

“We still need to invite Penelope,” Spencer whispered when they were halfway home. Interrupting the silence that Y/N was enjoying.

Y/N laughed softly, watching him drive with a smile on his face. “I only told the rest of them because Penelope somehow hacked into my calendar app, to plan a baby shower around my schedule, and saw the plans.”

“Of course,” he nodded along.

“So yeah,” she smiled. “She’s told me that she wants to throw me a baby shower/bachelorette party now.”

“That would be nice,” Spencer agreed, squeezing her thigh where his hand was always glued to her.

“If we even get more time off before the wedding, I’m crossing every appendage on my body in the hopes all the psychos take the day off!” She laughed, twisting her arms and legs in a demonstration.

He laughed, leaning against the wheel as he tried to keep his focus on the road. “I love you.”

“You better!” She teased him.

It went quiet again. She could hear the tires on the sandy slush. The grinding of pressure as the snow compressed into the tire tread. Small rocks being flicked up from the wheels, smacking the underbelly of the car as they approached their house.

She sighed as she saw the place, the beautiful green door illuminated by the porch light. Screaming ‘welcome home!’ As they pulled into the parking spot.

Sleep surprisingly came easier to her the more pregnant she got. She was used to laying on her left side now, she actually preferred it, because it means that every morning when she woke up, the sun came in just perfectly to make Spencer glow.

The alarm on Spencer’s table started to beep letting them know it was 10:30. She softly watched him roll over and smacked the machine before turning back to her and closing his eyes once more.

“No.”

She huffed in a silent laugh, getting closer to kiss the tip of his nose. “Time to wake up,” she whispered between kisses spread across his face.

He was trying his best not to smile as she peppered his skin with kisses. Pushing him onto his back so she had more skin to cover. It had been a while since they did anything together.

Between the cases and the baby, and everything Spencer learned about her past trauma. He’s been a little distant, and it was starting to make her worry. Dr. Korrapati promised that this sudden burst of anxiety was normal at this stage of pregnancy. It was what contributed the most to the nesting phase, but it still scared her.

She wanted to kiss him, to run her hand down his chest and palm over his boxers until she couldn’t take it anymore. So she did, just a little more seductively.

She moaned softly as she kissed the patch of skin under his ear and down his neck softly. She dragged her fingers over his skin, looping around his nipple as she sucked on his neck. She lifted her leg lightly over his, trying to get some friction between her legs as she kissed him.

“We should probably just go to work,” Spencer softly interjected.

She sighed, dropping her forehead against his shoulder and letting her shoulders slouch.

“I’m not broken!” She sat straight up as she yelled at him. “Can I please just fuck my boyfriend? I have been horny for Weeks,” she wasn’t sure where the sudden burst of emotion came from.

“Oh,” he sat up too, resting his hand on her back softly. “I didn’t realize you wanted to after everything, and the baby? You’ve had a rough few months.”

She laughed lightly, “Spence, of course I do?”

She looked at him softly, cupping his jaw in her hand. “I’ve had to process my trauma before. Yes, it’s still bothering me, and yes I have new trauma that I need to address with my therapist. But,” she emphasized. “I am a woman with needs, and one of those needs is getting railed before work by Doctor Reid.”

“You’re one hundred percent sure?” Spencer asked again.

She smiled and nodded, pushing him back down against the pillows. She resumed her last position, putting her leg between his so they could grind lightly and make out. “If it gets to be too much, I’ll ask you to stop.”

“Okay,” Spencer looked up at her, brushing her hair behind her ear as she hovered over him. “I love you.”

“Prove it,” she teased him, leaning in and kissing his neck again.

He reached behind her to grab her ass, she had noticed his hands gravitating there more as she gained pregnancy weight. She wasn’t complaining either, the way his hands felt on her skin was glorious.

He was putty in her hands, tilting his head to the side so she could kiss, lick and suck wherever she so pleased. She reached her free hand into his hair while he other kept her steady, in the perfect spot to grind against his boney hip.

He was all gasps and heavy breaths underneath her, she raised her leg lightly dragging it over his hardening erection before putting herself back in place. Just wanting to see how far along he was.

She rolled onto her back then, laying flat, waiting for him. He pushed his underwear to his ankles as he flipped on top of her. She was nothing but giggles as Her Spencer came out to play.

Opening her legs, she greeted him back into her grasp as he hovered over her. Both hands planted against the pillow as he looked down at her. His hair falling into his eyes, she pushed his hair back behind his ears.

“You might need a haircut soon,” she teased him, biting her lip softly.

“Shhh,” he whispered.

She took his right hand from beside her head, gripping him by the wrist and guiding him towards her mouth. Taking his middle and ring finger in, sucking on the digits softly. Making him release a sound she’s never heard before.

She looped her tongue around his fingers, spreading them lightly as she licked a stripe through them. Feeling his skin against her teeth, which only seemed to excite him more.

She pulled off with a pop, he looked mesmerized by the trail of spit that connected her bottom lip to his wet fingers. “Fuck,” he gasped as his breathing hitched.

“You know where to put them,” she whispered up at him, staring into his eyes as she bit her lip.

He kissed her quickly, pulling her forward so he could get the t-shirt she was still wearing off her body, throwing it off the bed as he kissed her neck, sucking a mark into the skin as he pushed his hand into her panties.

“Jesus,” he whispered against her neck as he felt how wet she was. “You weren’t kidding.”

Making her twitch slightly as he used the two fingers that were just in her mouth, to drag up and down on her clit. Rubbing it back and forth between the two knuckles.

“Fuck,” she breathed out as she gripped his hair. Palming his scalp while he kept kissing her neck.

She could feel him grinding against the bed as he kissed her, moaning against the space under her ear as he quickened his finger movements.

“I need you to fuck me, like yesterday,” she panted against his mouth, licking his bottom lip after.

He pulled away from her then, lifting her hips to drag her panties down. Keeping them on one of her ankles as he gripped the base of his cock and sat on his knees.

The sight between her legs was phenomenal. The glow of the sun on the lake through the windows as Spencer stroked himself in front of her.

Suddenly, he took both of her knees in his hands. Pushing them to her chest slightly before flipping her over. Extending her hips as he held her ass up. Kissing each cheek softly before straightening his posture.

“Ready?” He asked, she wasn’t expecting it.

Her face pressed into the pillow as she tried to find the best position to support herself. Pushing her hips back in a silent yes. He understood her body language, lining himself up with her and slowly pushing in.

She pushed back against him as well, moaning as she took all of him. “Finally,” she sighed, wiggling against his hips.

He gripped her hips, pushing her off abruptly before slamming back in. She was shocked, letting out a gasped moan as he fucked into her. Taking the instructions too literally, railing her.

She had never been that loud before in her life. Concerned Rossi would be able to hear them from across the lake, but it didn’t stop her. Only enticing him to keep it up.

She pressed her face into the pillow more as she attempted to reach her clit. She couldn’t, “fuck, Spence?”

“Yeah?” He slowed.

She took his hand off her hip, “can’t reach.” Her breath was erratic as she tried to explain.

“Aw poor bunny,” he teased her, slowing to a grind as his fingers ghosted over her clit. “Can’t get yourself off anymore?”

“Please daddy?” She let it slip, feeling his cock twitch inside of her as she did.

He leaned forward, kissing her shoulder softly. “Tell daddy what you want, use your big girl words.”

She pushed back against him, raising herself from the pillow to look over her shoulder at him. “I was going to say breed me, daddy.” She teased, watching his entire personality change. “But it looks like you already did.”

He licked his lips, pushing his hair out of his face as he shook his head at her. “You’re going to regret that.”

She pressed her face back into the pillow and perched her ass back more, ever the invitation. He ran his hand softly over her asscheek, slapping it before he started to fuck her again, reaching around to rub her clit, like she asked, ever so nicely.

They found their rhythm then, pushing against each other in just the right way. Between her deep breathing and the moans she released, the only other thing she could only hear was the sound of their skin slapping together as Spencer fucked her harder than ever before.

“Fuck, sweet Jesus I love your cock,” she praised him, punching into the pillow as she pushed herself back into him, on all 4’s now.

Using his free hand, he spread his fingers through her hair. Gripping her at the roots and pulling her head back as he slammed into her.

“Yes, daddy,” Y/N panted as she felt herself get closer to the edge. “Right there.”

“Cum for me bunny,” he instructed her, “let me fill your perfect little cunt.”

She came with a shout, pushing back against him as his words pushed her over the edge. Not being able to ever say no to that man, feeling his hips shake as he tried to fuck her through his own orgasm.

He pulled out, flipping her limp body back over so she could lay on her back, releasing the pressure on her stomach. Legs still spread as he observed his handiwork, scooping it up with his fingers and pushing it back inside of her. Making her clench up at the feeling.

“Spence-“

“Too much?” He smirked down at her.

She nodded, catching her breath as he just sat there. Still, on his knees, cock now soft and resting against his leg. She preached herself up on her forearms, shaking her head at him as she bit her lip.

“Where the fuck did that come from?” She asked him.

“I have no idea,” he laughed. “But hypothetically,” he bit his lip and raised his eyebrow. “I wouldn’t mind revisiting that on a later date.”

She laughed, dropping back against the sheets. “Me either.”

—

She waddled from the car to the elevator. A mixture of pregnancy and over-extending her hips, exercising with Spencer. Lamaze class more specifically, if anyone asked.

“I should really start calling you ducky,” Spencer whispered in the elevator.

“I hate you,” she bit her lip to stop herself from laughing.

“Really?” He teased her, “because if I recall 27 minutes and 15 seconds ago when you were saying ‘fuck, sweet Jesus, I love your cock,’” he whispered into her ear.

The elevator doors opened as her jaw dropped, “notice how I specified which part, Doctor Reid?” She answered abruptly, walking out towards her coworkers.

“So that’s how it’s going to be?” He said as he followed her. Making everyone turn around to see them.

“What’s going on?” Morgan noticed it first.

“Nothing,” Y/N rolled her eyes. “Just correcting the genius.”

“On?” Prentiss pried.

“Well this morning she said and I quote-“

“I will cut your balls off and hang them from the mirror in my car,” she snapped, glaring at him as she pointed her finger in his direction.

“Mama’s got claws,” Morgan laughed at them. “Damn.”

Spencer wrapped his arms around her, kissing her cheek in front of everyone. She turned pink, pretending to be pissed while a smile crept onto her face.

“She loves me,” Spencer smiled, pressing their cheeks together.

“One part, it’s nice to me and doesn’t talk back,” she replied, making everyone laugh as Spencer shook his head.

“Okay, you win,” he put his hands up in surrender as he backed away. Opening the door to the bullpen and disappearing behind his desk.

chapter 23

St. Patrick’s Day was never a holiday that Y/N or Spencer really cared for. Yes, they wore green to work, but other than that they didn’t really see the hype. They were Halloween people.

Will and JJ, on the other hand, went all out.

It was something to do with Will’s love for beer and his frat-boy attitude. Explaining to them that morning in the bullpen that the best parties on his college campus were around St. Patrick’s day and Mardi Gras, making February and March party central in his life.

They walked in with little Henry, decked out in green from head to toe. Green beads around his neck, gold chocolate coins in a basket, and the cutest little shamrock light-up head bopper.

“Look at you!!” Y/N called out to Henry as she walked into the room. Opening her arms up and leaning down to pick him up as he ran into her arms.

“Any Y/N!” Henry called her, not being able to say his T’s yet.

She pressed his tiny cheek against her face as she picked him up and snuggled him against her chest. It was getting harder to pick him up now that she was pregnant but she wasn’t going to miss a Henry snuggle.

“Since when did the FBI consult with leprechauns?” She asked him, booping her nose against him.

“Nooo,” Henry leaned back in her arms, “I’m not a leopard-con,” he tried his best to say the word. Making the team all laugh.

“Well, either way, why’s my favourite little guy here today?”

“Hey?” Spencer complained.

She leaned her elbow into him, “hi unca Spence,” Henry smiled at him. Spencer ran his fingers through Henry’s hair, messing it up under the headband.

“He wanted his godparents to see his outfit before the party at daycare today!” JJ explained with excitement.

Y/N placed him back on his feet, “go on the, show it off!”

He walked around the room, doing a fake model strut as he shook his diapered butt, walking towards the stairs before running back. “Woooow!” Everyone clapped and cheered.

Y/N looked up from Henry’s gaze, seeing Emily in Hotch’s office with a blond woman she didn’t recognize, “what’s going on in there?” She pointed.

“They’ve been in there all morning,” Rossi explained. “I think that’s the girlfriend.”

“How so?” Spencer asked, moving across the room to get a better view through the blinds.

“The way Emily leans against her, hand on her arm like that as she speaks. That’s the same way you and lady boy-wonder act when you’re in there together,” Rossi raised an eyebrow at them.

“Ahh,” Y/N smirked. “I wonder what happened, no one talks to Hotch with the door closed unless they need us to look into something.”

“I’ve gotta go,” Will cut in, scooping Henry up from the carpet with a tight-lipped smile.

“Bye buddy,” Y/N scrunched her nose at him, getting in close to press their noses together. “Have a good day today.”

“Bye, love you,” JJ kissed both her boys and watched them leave the room.

“they’re the best,” Y/N said as she wrapped an arm around JJ.

“Anyone want to go sit and have coffee while we wait for them?” Derek asked prior to a long yawn.

Rossi patted Derek on the back, leading him up the stairs and towards the briefing room. The remaining team members following their lead, discovering fresh donuts and flowers waiting for them.

“A gift for helping in advance, -Noelle” Read the small card on the table.

“Emily’s girlfriend?” JJ pondered, holding the card up and waving it slightly.

“I like her already,” Derek said, kicking his feet back and taking a donut.

Hotch walked in with Emily and Mindy 45 minutes later. Following them was a beautiful blond woman, probably 6’1 even in her flat running shoes. She was wearing cuffed blue skinny jeans and a big Barbie Pink petticoat.

She smiled lightly as she walked in, glueing herself to Emily’s side. “This is Noelle, my partner, Noelle these are my co-workers.”

“Hi!” She waved, “let me guess. Chocolate thunder, Derek Morgan.” She pointed to the nearest person to her.

“Correct,” Derek nodded in her direction.

“You would have to be Penelope Garcia,” she guessed right once again. “Emily was right, your aura is very bright.”

“Oh,” Penelope blushed.

“Y/N and Spencer, she said you’d be basically sitting on top of each other,” making everyone on the team laugh. “JJ, she said you’re like wonder woman, you look more like you could be cast as Super Girl if you ask me.”

JJ blushed, “thank you, Henry would agree.”

“Rossi, I already knew you. I love your books,” she fangirled a little. Something Rossi was incredibly used to.

“Signing hours are from 6-8,” he teased her.

Noelle laughed, her smile wide and toothy. “It’s lovely to meet you all.”

“Noelle has come in today with concerns that local gay men in her circle of friends are going missing. Over the last few holidays, 3 of her friends have disappeared. Dropping all contact after a trip to the bar,” Hotch explained.

“I’m a firefighter,” Noelle explained. “I have a Facebook group of friends who are gay and in the forces in any capacity. Just to let each other know where they’re going, to be safe.”

“Smart system,” Rossi complimented. “But also incredibly easy for someone to pose as trustful to gain access and track them.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Emily’s pressed lip smile portraying just how uncomfortable she was with the situation. “I’ve met our supposed victim number 3. Officer Perry is a great man and we haven’t heard from him since Friday.”

“Where was he going?” Y/N asked.

“He was at the bar with us on Friday for a little, we got a few beers and then he said he was meeting with a guy he met online, he was never big into online dating or even dating in general. He didn’t know how to be an officer and gay at the same time,” Noelle explained the situation fully. “He is one of my best friends, I excused it Saturday when he didn’t call cause I guessed he was having a good time. But when he missed Sunday dinner I knew something was wrong. I begged Emily to let me pitch this to you.”

“I believe you,” Hotch added. “Which is why I’ve asked Mindy Patel from VICAP to join us today.”

Mindy waved, she dressed more like a techie than an agent. Beanie, headphones on her neck and a big black sweater.

“Strauss and I agreed it would be beneficial to have a member of the team solely responsible for going through VICAP coincidences and letting us know. We stumble across too many rare cases thanks to Y/N and Mindy,” Hotch explained. “Mindy Patel is now officially VICAP Liaison. Her office will be across from Garcia’s from now on, she’s going to be our eyes and ears in the missing person world for the time being.”

“I took into account the fact that your friends were all masc for masc, on the police force in some capacity and male obviously,” Mindy explained. “And I found the two men from Valentines Day and New Years, and then more going back every major holiday for the last 2 years as of this St. Patrick’s day.”

“We’ve compiled the data and sent it to Garcia, it’ll be on your tablets shortly,” Hotch confirmed. “I’d like everyone to split up into teams and take an apartment of the most recent 3 victims. Prentiss and Rossi, you get New Years’.”

“Yes sir,” Emily agreed. “Noelle can stay here with Penelope for insight.”

“Yes. Reid, Y/N and Morgan, you’ll take officer Perry’s apartment. It’s the freshest so I need the best eyes.”

“Absolutely,” they replied in unison.

“Myself and JJ are going to the Valentines Day abduction,” check in with Garcia when you need to, fill me in on everything. Good luck.”

—

“Yeah a cop lives here,” Y/N laughed as she searched through the carefully organized home. Combing the place over for the slightest abnormality.

“He definitely wasn’t taken,” Morgan agreed. “He went willingly and never made it home.”

Dust was starting to settle on his possessions. Photos on the wall looked blurry as the sun shined through the windows. It smelled stale, no one had opened the windows in a while and the man who lived here worked out.

His clothing was organized by category. His laundry had 3 separate baskets for darks, lights and colours. Inside his bedside drawers, all his condoms were lined up by type. He was definitely anal about something.

“Guys?” Spencer called from the office.

Morgan and Y/N followed the sound of his voice, seeing him hunched over an iMac. “I moved the mouse and it’s open and unlocked.”

“But you don’t know what to do?” She teased him.

“Yeah,” he blushed. Watching Y/N sit in the desk chair and start looking through his things.

“His Facebook is pretty basic, he checked in at the bar with a photo here of him with Emily and Noelle, and then he went offline. He doesn’t have Twitter or Tumblr logged in, so I’m guessing he doesn’t have that,” Y/N explains as she stalked his activity. “In his history, your male basics. Case research, pornhub, Facebook, Hotmail… hold on.”

She read through all the subjects, all looking pretty normal. “What would a gay man hiding his sex life from his co-workers disguise his emails as?”

“Work-out appointments,” Morgan answered almost too quickly.

‘Workout’ she typed into the search bar. Seeing 15 messages from another man named domworkouts@hotmail.com. “got him, call Garcia.”

“Hey baby girl,” Derek spoke softly as she answered. “We got Jensen Perry’s computer open, his email shows he’s been working out with a domworkouts@hotmail.com.”

“Already working my finger magic,” she teased him. Hanging up before he could say anything back.

“That woman will be the death of me,” he sighed.

“I don’t think we’ll find anything else here, our best bet is with Garcia,” Y/N admitted as she closed all the windows. “Wait,” she pulled up the search and typed in ‘find my iPhone,’ “if he has a Mac he has an iPhone, not many people blend their tech.”

Last ping: 2256 Sheerly Lane, Friday at 23:56.

“I’ll call Hotch while you drive,” Y/N said, pulling out her phone and following the men out the door.

Morgan followed the GPS 15 minutes down the street to an apartment complex. It was worn down and looked as if no one had taken care of it in the last 25 years. “I’m calling Garcia before you go in, I don’t feel good about this.”

“Hey doll,” Garcia’s cheery voice was a nice refresher.

“Hey, do you have any info on who owns and occupies 2256, Sheerly Lane?” Y/N asked softly. “Also send backup to this location, it’s where Perry’s iPhone is apparently and it looks sketchy as hell.”

She heard the clicking of the keys before she heard Garcia’s reply. “Yep, we have 1 occupant. Amy Romano, 46, left the building after her mother died. She’s been living there in room 333 for years, not renting any rooms out at all in the last 3 years.”

“A woman?” Morgan was shocked.

“Must be why we’ve never found the bodies, female serial killers are 90% less likely to ever be caught,” Reid added his fun fact, one she’s heard from him a handful of times before.

“Exactly,” Y/N agreed. “What do we know about her?”

“She’s an interesting one,” Garcia’s tone changed. “Her father was a minister, big bible freak. Her mother was the maid here at the hotel before being given the deed from the original owner’s family. She died in 1988.”

“How much of the religious upbringing rubbed off on her?”

“Enough to make her have multiple psychotic breaks, being diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 15,” Garcia gained more insight. “Claimed to have been visited by God, and was told sinners are punished by word of god. That one day she would be the one to follow his word for the righteous man.”

“What if she’s doing her own form of conversion therapy?” Y/N gasped. “She’s not killing them. She’s following god’s word and freeing them from their sins. This is the perfect place to keep them. Locking them in rooms away from each other, secluding them and only subjecting them to a female for long periods of time.”

“Garcia, we need back up right now,” Morgan stressed.

“they’re 4 minutes out, good luck in there my babies.”

“See you soon, baby girl.”

Being left out of raids was weird to her, watching Spencer put on a bullet-proof vest and load his gun without her cover made her anxious. Luckily, she got to stand with JJ outside. Watching the building as they listened over their radiofrequency.

“Clear,” Morgan spoke over the system.

“Clear here as well,” Hotch said. “Meet me at the stairwell.”

“I hate this,” Y/N whispered.

JJ ran her hand along Y/N’s back softly, “me too.”

“Floor 3, room 33,” Hotch explained. “I’ll kick in the door, Morgan, you enter first. Spencer and Prentiss, follow our lead.”

Not having a visual was the worst part. There was no way to know where they were or who was there. They worked on sounds, if and when the team decided to speak.

“1, 2, 3,” Morgan whispered before they heard the door smash in. “FBI!”

Then it was silent again, too quiet for anyone’s liking, staring up at the third floor trying to hear everything in the neighbourhood.

“Amy Romano put the gun down!”

“No!” They heard before 4 shots were fired.

Y/N’s heart was in her throat; she couldn’t hear anything going on inside. The officers asked over the radio for updates, hearing nothing in return. Y/N couldn’t stop herself from running towards the apartment buildings before anyone could catch her. Up 3 flights of stairs, drawing her gun and walking towards the room.

Morgan was shot in the arm, down. Prentiss, hiding behind a table with Morgan and Spencer as she tried to stop the bleeding. Hotch in the unsub’s grasp, fighting for a gun.

Hotch noticed Y/N in the doorway. Kicking the unsub down. Y/N wrapped her arm around the unsub’s neck, putting her in a headlock as Hotch attempted to cuff her. She struggled like a wet fish against them, slipping out of her grasp and falling to the floor.

“If God wants to tell me to stop, he’ll tell me himself!” She screamed.

Y/N presses her gun to her head, “he just did.”

“Amy Romano you’re under arrest for the kidnapping of 24 men, attempted murder of a federal agent and resisting arrest,” Hotch explained as he cuffed her.

“Y/N!” Spencer stood up, looking at her like she was the crazy person. “We agreed, 3rd trimester, no fieldwork.”

“You didn’t reply on the radio and suddenly I was here,” Y/N explained, “I’m sorry.”

“We need EMTs, Morgan’s been shot in the arm. The bleeding is under control, just hurry.” Prentiss ordered over the radio.

“Y/L/N is going to need to get checked as well,” Spencer added.

“Why?”

“You ran up three flights of stairs, wrestled an unsub and got elbowed in the side,” Spencer explained, taking her hand and leading her out of the room.

“I’m sorry, I get it now I really do,” Y/N stopped him in the hallway, holding him in her arms. “I don’t like when I can’t see that you’re safe.”

Spencer kissed the top of her head, “I love you.”

“The baby’s kicking,” she replied softly, “that’s good right? 4 movements in 30 minutes after activity is a good thing.”

Spencer laughed, pulling back to feel her belly. “I’m sure he’s all hopped up on adrenaline now, come on let’s get him looked at quickly.”

—

They found 16 of the 24 men alive and in critical condition inside the apartment building. SCSI was canvassing the scene with local cops, taping up the building and surrounding property while the city discussed demolishing the building altogether.

Y/N was able to witness Noelle running into Jensen Perry’s arms, hugging him as they cried in his hospital bed. Y/N could imagine the trauma he was going through, the terror and the fear of something you really don’t want, happening anyway.

“Why do people do terrible things in the name of God?” Y/N whispered towards Spencer, looking up at him with soft eyes. Truly curious.

“The religious system runs similarly to cults, they believe the words are to be followed and thus they will gain entrance to heaven. If there’s one thing humans are afraid of more than dying, it’s internal damnation. Holding the fact that they will suffer in death over their head is a way to get them to do anything.” Spencer explained softly. “With the right person, the wrong message can actually sound like a pretty good thing.”

Y/N let out a deep sigh, “how do you raise a good child in a fucked up world?”

“Matthew, 18; 1 through 5, At that time the disciples came to Jesus and said, “Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And He called a child to Himself and set him before them, and said, “Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Spencer repeated the bible verse softly. “Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me.”

Y/N smiled, “I like that.”

“He was always supposed to be good, he has you as his mother.”

chapter 24

April rolled around out of nowhere. Suddenly the snow had all melted, the birds were returning, and the trees were starting to bud thanks to the week of thunderstorms.

Love was in the air, both in the wild and in Y/N’s life.

The wedding’s in 2 weeks and she’s growing daily. She wanted to wait till the last possible moment to get her dress. Wanting it to actually fit over her stomach on the big day without any struggle.

Being placed on office duty for the rest of her pregnancy made it easier, not being allowed to leave Mindy and Penelope's side, under direct order from Aaron Hotchner. She was starting to notice that the more pregnant she got, the more the men of the team wanted to protect her as well.

JJ said it was the same for her the first time, all the alpha personalities came out around the third trimester. It was like they didn’t quite register that a woman on the team was pregnant till it was abundantly clear.

The girls had all agreed to go to the dress store with Y/N when they had a free afternoon, but that didn’t seem to be happening any time soon. Y/N ended up going by herself between cases while Spencer was on a flight, trying on 6 different dresses before she found one that made her happy.

The sales associate was being extra nice to her, knowing she had both a big budget and no time. It was an easy sale, but this wasn’t an easy decision.

She tried a sleeveless, skin-tight number on first. Not being able to even move once she got in it, not even bothering to look in the mirror. It wasn’t right, that was for sure.

Eventually, by #5 they had an idea of what she wanted. Long sleeves to hide her stretch marks, it had to be flowy but still show off the bump. And she wanted lace, embroidery even. Something that made it different, something that was more like her. Always growing, changing, adapting.

She was wandering the racks when she saw it.

It was so long, the train had to be at least 6 feet. It was light, made with sheer fabric so it would twist and flow with whatever direction she ran or danced. She could imagine walking through the grass with the train flowing behind her with purpose.

The most wonderful aspect was the long sleeves and the neckline. Cupping her chest perfectly with a nice ribbon right above her bump. The entire dress reminded her of something, the floral embroidery sending her back to a dress she remembers from her childhood, not able to place it but knowing it in her heart.

She looked in the mirror at herself, she felt beautiful. She shook her head lightly as a tear fell down her cheek. “It’s perfect,” she whispered.

The sales associate shook a big bell then, causing everyone to look at her and cheer. “Are you saying yes?” She asked, as cheesy as it was, she loved it.

“Yes!” She cheered back, feeling the love from everyone in the store.

The dress was huge, she laid the bag against her passenger seat and stared at it for a while. It felt a little crazy that she was getting married in a few days, even crazier that she was having a baby in 2 months.

Her phone rang as she started to leave. “Hewwo?” She answered softly, knowing it was Spencer.

“I just got home, where are you?”

“Oh,” she smiled. “Penelope said you guys wouldn’t be back until 9, I went and picked out a dress.”

“Alone?” He sounded sad.

“It was better this way, I picked it for me and no one else,” she reassured him. “I’m on my way home now though baby, I’ll see you soon.”

“Okay, drive safe. I love you,” Spencer replied, his voice nothing more than a whisper.

“Love you too,” she hung up.

She sighed, turning on the stereo and driving home to her favourite albums. Driving alone was different for her now, she used to love just escaping into the Virginia wilderness, picking a road and an album and just going somewhere.

Driving with Spencer meant silence, hand-holding, humming and ha-ing as he discovered new facts that intrigued him. She loved it, the ambiance of Doctor Spencer Reid was not something you could replicate, it was special and calming and wonderful.

She couldn’t wait to get home to him.

He was waiting on the front porch as she rolled into the driveway. Joining her at the car, wanting to help her carry her things inside. “Hi,” she smiled at him as she stepped out.

He pulled her into a hug, kissing her cheek softly. “Want some help?”

“If you don’t mind carrying in my dress, I need to pee so bad!” She said, almost about to run inside when he stopped her.

“Like how bad?” He asked.

“Excuse me?”

“If you were to get surprised would you pee your pants?” He tried not to laugh as he asked.

“Spence?”

“Just go in,” he said softly.

She sighed, knowing what this meant. Walking up the stairs slowly, turning the doorknob just as slow. Not ready to have her eardrums blown out.

“Surprise!!”

Sure enough, there were balloons and flowers and her friends gathered all inside her front hall. “Oh my god?”

Penelope wrapped her in a hug first, “your first baby shower has to be special!”

“You guys really didn’t have to do this?” She was so shocked to be getting attention that she felt a little embarrassed.

“We wanted to,” JJ hugged her next, their bumps too big to hug normally, opting for more of a side snuggle. “I got you something to change into before we get started.”

Y/N took the small blue bag from her, kicking her shoes off before they went upstairs. Spencer joining with her wedding dress, hanging it in the closet and slipping back downstairs, unnoticed.

Y/N opened the gift bag on her bed, JJ looked around the room for the first time ever. Looking at the photos of their first day of kindergarten on the wall, the artwork they chose. How Spencer wrote notes to her on the mirror with whiteboard markers.

“You guys are really cute,” she smiled.

“Thanks,” she smiled.

Finally taking the dress out of the bag, it was just something simple. Blue with pink flowers. Something she’d definitely pick out on her own. “This is so beautiful!”

“I got it when I was pregnant with Henry and never had a chance to wear it,” She smiled, “thought that you’d like it more.”

Y/N hugged her, “seriously this is the best thing you guys could’ve done for me!”

“I’m also going to need a pink dress,” JJ said softly in her grasp.

“No?” Y/N was shocked. “Really a mini JJ?”

“Yeah,” she smiled softly. “Hurry up we have more surprises for you downstairs!”

—

It took her longer than she hoped to get changed. The baby was just big enough to make her winded all the time now. Having to stop and take a breather just from taking her pants off. Not to mention the struggle of standing up after peeing.

When she finally made it back down the stairs on her swollen feet, she heard a familiar giggle that she loved very much. “You didn’t?”

JJ smiled, “it was Rossi and Will, they flew them all in and got them here.”

Her parents, brothers and wives were all in the kitchen waiting for her. Then she saw Diana, who was pressed up close to Spencer having a conversation in their own little world.

She walked in and cried, hugging her parents for the first time in 5 months. Showing off her big baby bump and chunky face for the first time too.

“You look amazing!” Her mom complimented her, taking her hand and making her spin slowly.

“Thank you, I feel huge,” she smiled. “I can’t believe you guys are here, I’m literally coming home in 2 weeks!”

“When David Rossi calls you and says he has a jet picking us up, you don’t just say no,” her father laughed, wrapping his arm around Rossi. They were going to be something else together.

She gave Diana a big hug when she could, watching her rub her belly and talk to the baby through her stomach for a good 10 minutes. It was so cute, everyone in the room watched and swooned. Secretly always hoping Spencer’s family got a moment like this.

After dealing with the Riley Jenkins case, and Gideon leaving, they worried for him. They never expected him to just show up one day with a girl and start the rest of his life the way he did. But it just made sense. He sped through school and early adulthood well before Y/N, now they’re moving fast, just together.

They had pizza for dinner, spreading 6 different kinds across the counter and telling everyone to dig in. Y/N took a slice and walked around, mingling with everyone to ensure she thanked them for coming.

“Henry!” She finally found him with Chloe and Lizzie. He ran into her arms, giving her a big hug. “Did you meet my niece?”

“You’re my any?” He questioned her right back.

“Come here Clo,” she called her over, huddling them both in close to her. “You both get to call me aunty Y/N, isn’t that so cool? You’re new friends and you share an aunty!”

Chloe gave her a big hug, she was getting bigger and bigger every day, about to turn 4 in a few months. It felt a little crazy, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“How are you?” She asked her softly.

“I’m good,” she whispered at her, smiling before hiding her face in her dress.

“Are you having fun here? Did you meet buddy yet?”

“No!” Chloe’s face lit up.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” She gasped at them both, getting back up to her feet and walking with them to where Buddy hid in the laundry room.

He was curled into a ball in a basket of towels, peaceful in the quietest room in the house.

Chloe and Henry took turns petting Buddy, kissing his head and playing with his tail, it was good for him to get a little used to grabby kid's hands. She was a little worried about how he’d handle a baby, but he was a chill cat he never really cared about attention as long as he was fed.

Eventually, JJ and Lizzie found them, peeling them away from the cat with the promise of cake while Y/N opened her gifts from everyone.

Everyone was watching her as she sat down in the living room, feeling a little anxious like she had to perform for them or something. Spencer finally joined her on the couch then, wrapping his arm around her in a soothing motion.

“So,” Garcia started. “I took it upon myself to organize the party but I didn’t just stop there, I also emailed everyone a link to a chart where they could pick the category of gift they got you so that we avoided repeats and got everything you would need.”

“This is all so much,” she turned bright pink. “You guys really didn’t have to I feel like I haven’t bought anything for myself since I met Spencer.”

“Nonsense!” Penelope hushed her. “Here, pick whatever one grabs your fancy.”

Y/N’s eyes raked over the pile of gifts, “um that big one over there, why not.”

It was a big blue bag, stuffed to the brim with tissue paper. The card on the handle was signed, she opened it to find 'from; Erin Strauss' on it. “Oh?”

“She couldn’t come but she passed that along on behalf of the section,” Hotch explained.

Y/N didn’t waste any time opening it. Finding brand named everything that she would need for breastfeeding, losing her mind at the never-ending bag.

Almost every gift was the same, all themed and absolutely filled. She was never going to have to buy anything for Matthew, she got it all today.

Hotch and Haley got her a babies bath essentials set. Her parents equipped her with every form of linen she would ever need for a baby, as well as a quilt made just for Matthew.

Penelope bought easily $400 in clothes for him over the past 7 months, with the promise of not stopping any time soon. Derek and Emily got together to buy them an all-terrain stroller, for the walks they expect them to take down the back roads. Emily’s girlfriend even brought a mom after-care set for her.

Diana’s gift made her cry the most, opening the box to find old copies of childhood books. “Those were all Spencers when he was a child,” she explained softly. “His love for the world started with those stories, I would like for Matthew to know them too.”

“Absolutely,” Y/N wiped the tears off her face, leaning over to hug her. “If Matty ends up being even half as wonderful as Spencer I’ll be grateful.”

“Spencer, did you get her anything?” Diana asked him softly as she was still mid embrace with Y/N.

“It’s in the garage,” Spencer smiled.

She looked at him with excitement, “you didn’t!”

“I might have,” he smiled.

“What?” Rossi asked, hating suspense more than anyone on the team.

“I was joking about wanting to get an SUV and become a soccer mom,” Y/N’s whole face lit up. “Did you get me a soccer mom mobile?”

He smiled back at her, “here.”

She held the key in her hand, her car was old as hell. She has had it since she moved to Virginia and even then it was a 2004 model. She had never had a new car, with the fresh car smell and clean everything!

“I am so overwhelmed,” she announced, bouncing a little in her seat as she shook her hands. Stimming just a small amount in front of everyone in all the excitement.

“We’re all done celebrating you now, I think we can start getting out of your hair, right guys?” JJ stood and pressured everyone that wasn’t relying on their house for the night, out the door.

Penelope helped Debbie and Diana clean everything up around the house. Peeling Henry and Chloe away from each other was the most difficult part of the night, becoming fast friends and wanting to look at books all night together in uncle Spencers library.

Rossi offered to let her brother Levi and his wife stay at his place while Diana and Y/N’s parents took the guest room in her home. Harrison and Faith driving back to Fort Meade to their own house.

—

Y/N and Spencer sat up in their bed, leaning against the headboard as they listened to the quiet of their house. Their co-workers were gone, their parents were settled in the guest rooms and most likely still awake from the time difference. The day had been so crazy that she barely had time to wrap her head around it.

“So…” Y/N cut the awkward silence. “Wanna make out?”

He laughed at her, shaking his head. “Remember the last time you asked me to do that?”

“Yeah, I lost my virginity,” she whispered back at him. A little scared that everyone could hear them talking.

“We can't,” Spencer looked at her with wide eyes. “It's bad enough my mother knows I’ve had sex once let alone possibly hearing us.”

He nudged him a little, crawling into his lap and sitting there softly. Her belly pressed against him, filling the space between them as she held his face in her hands.

“They’re on the other side of the house,” she pouted. “Just make out with me?”

He kissed her quickly once, “why are you so needy tonight?”

“All day I’ve had everyone's attention but yours,” she explained softly. “I missed you and I want my Spencer time.”

He couldn’t say no to that, because he felt the exact same way. He ran his hands up her thighs, over her hips and finally resting them on her back. She ran her thumbs over Spencer's cheeks, looking at him softly as she tilted her head to really admire him.

His lips were perfect, his nose was adorable. The way his stubble grew in and darkened his jaw was amazing. His bone structure, his eye colour, the way his hair just fell flawlessly into place with 0 effort. She sighed as she looked at him.

“I love you,” she whispered, biting back a smile as she waited for his response.

“I love you,” he giggled as he looked right back at her. It almost felt more intimate than sex, just staring into each other's eyes in a dimly lit bedroom, in the middle of the night.

She ran her hands up into his hair, combing her fingers through it. He tilted his head back every time, closing his eyes and enjoying the feeling. She was about to smile when she got a sharp shooting pain in her hips.

“Oh, my, god,” she breathed out. “Ouch?” She scrunched her face with the pain as the sharpness dulled into the bone, just feeling uncomfortable as she tensed up in his lap. She didn’t even realize she was tugging on his hair in response to the pain.

“What?” Spencer asked, concerned as all hell.

“I think that was Braxton hicks? It was like everything down there just lit up in pain,” she explained with a horrified look on her face.

He ran his hands softly over her hips, soothing the skin in an attempt to help. “Are they bad?”

“It just feels like a pinched nerve at first and then a dull ache, it’s not the worst. I don’t enjoy it that's for sure,” she laughed a little louder. “God, I hope he’s kind to me on the way out.”

“I was doing research into the best drugs and techniques for birth for mothers that don’t want any drugs either because they’re sober or they don’t want to be removed from the moment,” Spencer explained softly. “There are a lot of options if you want to look into them with me this week?”

“Of course you did,” she smiled at him once again, feeling a bit better. “We also have to pack the baby’s go-bag.”

Spencer laughed at the way she phrased it. “Isn’t it just a hospital bag and a diaper bag?”

“No, it’s a mission to have a baby. It’s a go-bag.”

They kept giggling with each other over the dumbest things, staring at smiling as they laughed. Spencer’s hands roamed her back while she poked his face. Happily just talking in each other's space about the most random shit.

It was what she loved the most about him, that they could equally ramble about what they found interesting and the other felt just as excited about learning something new. They had mutual respect for each other's interests and feelings that ran deeper than most, truly loving every word that left their partner's mouth.

By the time they settled against the pillows and attempted to sleep it was half 1 in the morning. They turned all the lights out and still just stared at each other.

She booped his nose softly with her own, watching him scrunch his face as a result before giggling again.

“Do you have any idea what the case tomorrow will be?” She was only asking because she wanted more time with him, needing to find every topic to bring up so that the night never ended.

“Mindy’s pitching something to us tomorrow again,” he whispered. “You’ll be good at this one.”

“Oh I’m excited now okay, goodnight,” she closed her eyes and pretended to snore, making him snuggle in and wrap her arms around him, pulling her in close the way they liked it.

“I love you, bunny,” he said one last time for the night.

She sighed as she settled into him, “I love you more Spence.”

[janiedean]

I came from a country where being gay is not illegal but still very badly seen so what Eric did to me came off as spoiled and privileged. Nigerian men risk their lives every time they try to live and he just comes on a holiday risk for nothing and get a high out of it like... I get he is a poc in uk so racism but he is still privileged in respect to Nigerian living there and it felt like when tourists do all they want and use foreign countries as a eat pray love playground for adrenaline and Deep Moments

thanks for having partially confirmed to me one thing i didn’t quite know how to articulate and again i don’t… right with the premise that ofc not being poc and/or lgbt myself so my opinion is worth what it’s worth i felt like not only it made eric come off as privileged and not quite realizing it - or if it was the target then it wasn’t well written nor did it come across well - the points that imvho are not well put in this entire narrative are the following

let’s say one target was ‘we want eric to reconnect with the nigerian part of his heritage and realize that being gay in the uk is a privileged position in comparison to being gay in nigeria’: there is a single moment where he feels unsafe on the car but then he goes into the bar and it was played as… like THRILLING WILL WE GET CAUGHT OR NOT but i didn’t perceive that he felt in danger or like he realized exactly what he was facing

the whole family reconnection part was like… his mom lied about her husband bc family peace and kind of forces him to not be out bc she fears for his safety so like now unless i remember wrong eric has been out/never felt like he didn’t have to be since the show started so it should have a) given him insight re how it feels to NOT being able to be out b) let his mom connect with him on having to lie abt your significant other part c) concluded with at least a hint he could come out to nigerian family and like… point b) was more or less explored, c) was hinted bc he talked to his grandma abt adam but a) felt ABSOLUTELY missing because he comes back and everything he seems to gather from it is I WANT TO GO TO BARS BECAUSE I CAN? and most of all……. going through a) should have made him more sympathetic to adam’s struggles and instead it seemed like he deduced ‘oh since in nigeria it’s illegal then it makes no sense he’s taking so much time’ like…? it’s… a pretty self centered take to get out of this entire experience and if it was a check your privilege storyline then good but… it didn’t feel like that was how they framed honestly and why talking abt adam to the grandma if he’s gonna dump him???? 

now the eat pray love thing you mentioned is… i mean i felt like it was along those lines but as stated couldn’t be sure re my take but again my issue is with how they went at it, bc you CAN do that narrative if you clearly frame it as ‘we like eric and he’s a swell guy but he’s not free from that kinda behavior in light of the fact that living in the uk gives him automatic privilege wrt being out so we’re going to explore how he deals with it and it might be badly but then he learns from it and checks his privilege’ like it’s smth that can happen and everyone in this show has been shitty wrt smth at some point which is good bc it means everyone is written realistically… i’m not sure the narrative said THAT but it didn’t look like even the writers knew bc it was all over the place?? and i mean… i get that this show has realistic teenagers which means they can behave like petty assholes but like it was rushed, badly explained, not overt re wtf they wanted to do with this storyline and it’s not clear if eric even cares at the end?? and thats ooc anyway bc the eric we saw until this point isn’t… that callous or dismissive? and it never seemed to me like they wanted to write him as positive char that progressively gets less sympayhetic so honestly this entire plotline looks stupid

like the thing is at the end of it: - has eric reconnected to his nigerian heritage/found a way to balance it with his uk background? doesn’t seem to me like he did - has eric concluded anything re telling the nigerian side of his family that he’s out? no - has eric gained some actual insight from his experience that’s not ‘I want to go to bars because I can and I have no patience for someone who needs to take it slower’? doesn’t seem to me like he did - has eric realized that adam not being ready to tell his own mom stuff was a sort of parallel situation to his own mother not being ready to tell her mom stuff and like... if eric’s own mom lied about her partner to her family for years and still wasn’t ready to do it then why is giving adam a bit more time to tell his own mom especially given his less than stellar background re accepting himself and coming out such a hardship? no and we just don’t know basically this entire plotline could have gone a bunch of different places that were interesting/could have caused strong conflict/interesting storytelling but it didn’t do any of these things and fell back on like... cheap drama for the sake of it and honestly idt it was very sensitive wrt anything included in it which honestly strikes me as odd bc if sex ed ever did one thing right was treating sensitive subjects well without dancing around it or making things sugarcoated and still letting the characters not be cardboards so I’m very very perplexed about it and I just hope they plan to reveal wtf they wanted it to be next year because honestly I don’t know what it wanted to be and if they didn’t make it clear it’s not good writing - which until now they had in spades, therefore....

like, there’s nothing... narratively wrong in ‘I want to show that character X who faces racism and homophobia in the UK would have privilege wrt being able to be out/live his sexuality without shame in the UK and not in the country his family comes from and he has no idea because he hasn’t entertained that thought and he might come off as unpleasant or incapable of immediately getting it while that happens’, but the thing is that in this specific narrative it’s not clear whether eric got it or if he didn’t bc teenagers are shallow and don’t get it (which..... I mean the teens in this show aren’t exactly shallow like that so that doesn’t really hold up) or if he’s having trouble processing it or if the trip shook his entire world (didn’t seem like it) so like... I should hope next season it’s addressed what they want this thing to be because honestly idk and I don’t particularly like the direction it took

this adding that anyway again the way they broke eric and adam off like that makes the whole S2 finale look sour and eric come off like an asshole also wrt rahim because I mean, one thing is ‘eric has been in love with adam/has liked adam best all along but adam wasn’t around and he liked rahim so he gave it a shot but rahim wasn’t it for him so when adam does the great love gesture for him in front of everyone he decides to leave rahim for him’ because like that sucked for rahim anyway but it also wouldn’t have been fair to him to not break it off if eric had stronger feelings for someone else (and that was clear from the get-go) and then when they get together eric puts effort in it and they go places, one thing is ‘all of that happens but then the moment they aren’t on the exact same page and/or eric realizes he doesn’t want to put the necessary effort into respecting the time adam needs to handle his things even when adam forgives him and says he’ll try to get on track with him’ and so the solution is nah let’s break up instead of putting some work into it when ngl adam has been doing 85% of that this season................. it makes him look like the moment there’s an obstacle to a relationship he’s in or his partner isn’t on the same wavelength he’d just rather break it off first instead of giving it a go and that’s not a really great look on him and as stated it makes the thing with rahim look really bad because again one thing is leaving someone you like for someone who feels like is the love of your life and another thing is leaving someone you like for someone who loves you that much but then you’ll leave them too because..... he needs time to talk to his mother and he’s not ready to be fully out when he comes from repressingyourfeelingsinternalizedhomobiphobia central? like........ dunno but it just feels sour and like nothing one would expect out of eric as he was written/developed until now so I’mma just wait to see what they do next season but it’s just not good writing all around

[samnyangie]

Personal reviews on RSL filmography

Rsl, iI thought it’d be a good idea to record my thought on each films rsl was in, it was something I always wanted to do...

Rsl in total, was starred in (excluding tv series etc) 27-ish films, to be honest, considering his years as an actor(approximately more than 30 years) he wasn’t starred in that many. We all know why lol

Just saying I’m not a film expert, therefore the list is very subjective.

The reviews with trigger warning (r*pe, g*re etc): Tape, Killer: Journal of Murder, A glimpse of hell. Tho in the writing I’ve censored them with * since I don’t feel comfortable saying them here

There isn’t particular spoilers except for dps, tape, and ground control

The favourites (literally my life time films)

Dead Poets Society

I assume many would agree, and as many would have, it was my first ever rsl film, like I was on the plane and it was one of the films they offered, and I was like, oh I think i heard of this, so I watched and instantly loved it. The message is very relevant to this day, the cinematography is very beautiful and somehow nostalgic. I was horrified with Neil’s death. Tbh now I’ve seen too many memes and all kind of things from the fandom (which I’m grateful for!) I thought the heartfelt I once had would deluded a bit, however when I watched it again last April with my family at the cinema and it still moved me very deeply.

The age of Innocence

Okay, unpopular opinion here, I love this so much. It’s my all time favourite rsl film. It even outruns dps tiny winy bit haha. Aside from how he had tiny winy screen time, appearing at the end but the fact that he played quite an important role and him being gorgeous in it just<33 I couldn’t help but smiling! It just the whole film was so much of my cup of tea? The melodrama and the hypocrisy hidden by elegance among the upper social classes in 19th century is just what I needed. The more I watch it, the more I understand the characters and their emotions, it’s one of those films you should keep visit to discover the things you weren’t aware of before. I watched it again this morning and i couldn’t stop thinking about it. However, I know some people find it boring and I understand why, my sister is one of them lol(except for a bit where rsl was in) but i think it’s more complex than what it appears to be at a first glance haha. In conclusion, it became one of my comfort film to watch time to time. 

The ones I like<33

Swing kids

At first viewing, I didn’t expected much because it had underwhelming reviews but when I actually saw it, I thought it was quite decent and more and more I watched it, I felt like it was underrated. Yes, I think some directing choices were bit old fashioned and cheesy especially the ending, I’m not saying it was a perfect masterpiece but it deserves more recognition than it has now. Also in spite that there’re some parts being too simplified, it touched on something other films about ww2 normally don’t. It was interesting to see the German perspective on it than Jewish or the allies perspective like many of them does, but of course the latter perspectives matter, it could be argued that they more valid than the former, which partly was where sk criticised for, however, the portrayal of the varied reactions of the German people (in this one particular the teenagers) has its value in their on way. Anyway along side with it, the music and the dance scenes were great, without exaggeration, though Swing kids isn’t my fav, peter’s solo dance scene is my favourite scene in any movies I’ve ever watched. I mean that scene had both visuals and meaning as it demonstrated Peter’s determination as well as resentment with a hitch of unsureness. Rsl acting in that scene was just phenomenal, it’s not about showing off the dancing skills but he portrayed every mixed emotions peter has from his expression and the moves, I just can’t talk about this enough especially this scene was the reason I started fallen for him. lol

Much ado about nothing

Much ado is something I never seen anything like so it was a refreshing exprience. I barely watched Shakespeare on screen kind of thing. Though I felt there were some bits too cheesy for me but they are also the charms in the same time, and the cinematography was pretty also Claudio aka rsl, it was like an official announcement of declaring my worship on this man. Especially it was after SWING KIDSSSS so I couldn’t help it now everyone knows how I fallen for him but no one can blame meeeeee Anyway, it’s a really good film to watch when you want be relaxed with cup of tea maybe hehe

In the gloaming

I heard about it before I watched it, that it’s a heart wrenching, tearful piece, though I didn’t managed to cry, it’s just.... painful and in a way heartfelt. I liked that story telling was calm and collected rather than forcing you to join the sob party, just showing the characters to carry on. And thanks to the great acting from the cast, the characters could be emphasised and understood, personally the older sister was the most relatable character for me, well, eldest complex lol. In short I liked it but it’s not something I would watch it often.

Last days of Disco

As a person who looks at aesthetic in films, I simply enjoyed this for that tbh. I don’t know, I just liked the feeling. But I don’t think it’d be everyone’s cup of tea. I love the day time clothes the girls wore in the film. Tbh I love the music too, I think I love all the films of rsl with music in it. Speaking about rsl, oh rsl, he’s.... His character might be bit unlikable but he was just.... This is why I can’t unlove his characters even the debatable ones<33

They were decent! (I would recommend it)

Married to it

This is the first and last ever attempt of rsl of romcomssss The film itself is cliche to be frank it’s like love actually but it’s about marriage life + it’s not christmas but I like heartfelt cliche stories like this, if anyone also loves this type of story, it’s really worth watching, it’s one of my comfort films, also, rsl is so pretty I mean he always is but to see him being a office man with a baby face made me go awww my baby grew up heheh I wish he did another romcom like this or more preferably, melodramatic romance, I’d have made a shrine of it and worship it every morning lol

The boys next door

I kind of smiled while watching it throughout, if you want something that is heartfelt and touch on some serious topic about social workers and the people with mental disorder, Rsl plays a character who has (I think it was) Schizophrenia and troubled relationship with his father(Deja vu I know) but general atmosphere tend to be quite humourous. I don’t get me wrong, though it’s light hearted, it doesn’t mean they treat the topic in the same way. There’s a scene where the protagonist imagining the one of the characters with the disorder talking eloquently and honourably at the court on the rights and the dignity of the people with mental disorders deserve to/should have and they’re just the same people as the people without mental disorders. It was a powerful scene.

My two loves

Rsl’s first ever screen debut film! Hehe it’s about a woman who is discovering her sexual identity and the conflicts within I personally thought it was fairly sensible depiction but I can’t say for sure whether it was accurate or else, since I don’t think it’s my place to say it:) But if you’re interested, it’s on YouTube, you can just search for it or go to this post I made. Fun fact: since it was his debut film, it credits him as he’s real name, Robert L. Leonard, I just find it amusing haha

Tape

It’s another type of film I don’t encounter that often, I enjoyed it, especially with Neil and Todd’s reunion lol. Rsl mentioned how he enjoyed it because it felt like doing a play, my first impression was that the structure is like a play, though the camera work made me quite dizzy haha. But the dialogues, the acting, I think it was quite spot on. Especially the human contradictions and hypocrisy side of it. The most people assume the baddie in the film is Jon the character rsl played and has a distaste for him. I mean how can anyone love a character who is accused of r*pe but to be honest, Vincent for me seemed just as problematic, both of them are hypocrites for sure in their own different ways but in the end we can’t be sure what’s really the truth or not. It’s about the vagueness, and phychology and the uncertainty from the audience on who to believe(well, myself included, most would trust on Amy’s claims since she’s the victim in the accusation, but by her denying the claims, making everything way unclear,) so I don’t know. I don’t really have an opinion haha tho I don’t believe nothing happened because Amy denied so, even Umma Thurman who played her, said that her interpretation was that Amy lied. I felt it’s endless rabbit hole this film. Sorry I couldn’t worded it better.

My best friend is a Vampire

It’s cringey and weird but there’re odd charm to it. Vampire rsl’s so cute as well.... and I think it’s the only film, he acted kind of flirty ? So for that itself I’d like to appreciate itttt And it’s so 80s/90s, like it has general odd nostalgia like all films from that age has. I saw a Korean blog about rsl films and this was mentioned, that- they said- it’s a bible of rsl’s adorableness and I think that sum up the film perfectly.

Mr&Mrs Bridge

Before this was in ‘I mean it was fine” category, but I watched it again and now I want to retract my statement lol Still isn’t my fav but I noticed how delicately depicted each characters are, Mr and Mrs Bridge in particular. This film is alternatively about the changes in the young generation regarding liberty, feminism, free expression especially on sex. It’s in the perspective of the bridges, the mother and father who is old fashioned and conservative (as it was normal in their previous generation) and the children who are the young generation, and the misunderstanding and conflicts between them. After all it all happened not only because of the difference but also the lack of communication, which rsl emphasised in his interviews. I found it interesting that they made it seems like the Bridges truly existed with the video footage and (with the ending) describing what happened to each family member in text with photos. When I watched it at first I was really confused if it was based on a real life. I think what they wanted to suggest was that the Bridges every typical American family at the time. It was something everyone was going through. I said previously I didn’t get why Rsl’s character (the youngest in the Bridges) treated his mother so coldly. Honestly I do get why, but I guess I felt so bad so the mother haha

I mean it was fine

The safe passage

It was okay but to be honest it didn’t stood out to me. It was okay. The story, the characters weren’t that interesting. I wish they extended it longer to go depth with their family relationship or something.

A painted house

I find it likeable, it has a chill, old folk story vibe, but same as previous one. it didn’t really stand out except for shirtless rsl, do close ups you cowards

Bluffing it

I was really fond of the premise of this film and I think it has great intention. It was specifically made to promote the awareness of illiteracy and how to get support. However, I don’t get the reason of Jack the protagonist’s illiteracy. Unless, it was common occurrence in America at the time, I feel like it’d have been more convincing if he was in poor family hood, so there was no time to learn at school due to working at young age...? I mean, just finding it hard to believe he passed the high school just like that, I mean the teachers or anyone should have noticed it, maybe I’m missing something here but it seemed unlikely to me.

Ground control

Again, I liked the message, as it depicted how frightening and difficult job the ground controller is, by one mistake could take away the lives of hundreds, especially as someone who goes on planes a lot... But it was quite cliche throughout, I just couldn’t get engaged to it. But I do admit at the end when the protagonist runs off to the landing zone see the pilot who he had just saved, they acknowledged each other and have eye contacts was truly wholesome. Rsl as cocky, bad boy was such a icing on the cake, I loved it so much. Chewing gum in every scene lol I hope he plays these sort of characters more often. I saw someone criticising him saying he has narrow spectrum of just playing nice boy roles like Neil but I really wanted to debunk the narrative and this could be one of the examples! 

Chelsea walls

I knew that this has split reviews but nonetheless I think worth to watch it, 1. Ethan and rsl re union, 2. Ethan is the directer of the film and rsl sing in it. But I have to say, it’s one of those hard to follow art indie film so I couldn’t finish it on one go. I feel like I have to devour it over and over again. Maybe later on I grow fond of it more lol But his character, I loved him so much. He’s just has everyone don’t touch me, I’m a cocky artist vibe, there’s a scene where his annoying friend annoying him and he looks up and says: ‘Fck off’. Absolute golddddd not to mention he sings and plays guitar so beautifully<333

Well... it’s not my cup of tea

The Manhattan project

I don’t think the film it self was that bad, it’s about high school boy who find out the existence of some nuclear energy research lab and stole the energy to make his own nuclear bomb. I just don’t get the thinking process of the protagonist. It really frustrated me. He seemed apathetic and unlikable I disliked him throughout and that’s why I didn’t really enjoyed it. I mean it has humour and ridiculous storyline might be humorous to some. But more importantly there was such little screen time for rsl!! LIKE WHY? WHY PEOPLE?? HE LOOKS LIKE A FRESH HUMAN MOCHI!!! It makes me soooo mad to think about it

Killer: Journal of Murder

Well, first of all, it had a lot of graphic things than I imagined, brutally murd*red bodies, execution, and r*pe scene, gosh I was strucken by it when I saw that, I had to skipped that scene. It’s based on a real event and a real criminal called Carl Panzram, so if you’re aware of it, it might be more intriguiging to see. But personally for me... meh, I don’t think directing was good as it failed to portray it enough for me to comprehend fully.

A Glimpse of Hell

This is also based on a true event of a tragic accident in the us battleship in Iowa in 1989. They shows tragedy lin a blunt, brutal way by showing horribly damaged bodies of the soldiers torn into pieces, all the horrid things directly so be warned about that. I was quite alarmed because i didn’t expect to see it haha there’s no much to say. The film quality was so so for me. I feel their approach wasn’t appropriate, they were clearly trying to make it dramatic which is fine but in a melodramatic emotional way. It didn’t work because first, there aren’t enough portrayal of the characters for me to get attached, secondly it added the unnecessary exaggeration it prevented me from being emotionally involved or even to think about it. In my opinion, I think it’d have been better if they made it more restrained, dry, focus on the accuracy. For example like 1987 or Zodiac, I mean both of them has dramatic elements since they’re not a documentary but they were not overdone, in a contrary added emphasis to their message/conclusion. I know it’s easier said than done but it was something I consistently felt during it.

Sir.... I’m sorry but-

Standoff

Haha... it’s very peculiar... the directing is off and it just weird. I knew it was bad already but I watched it because rsl as a cop with gunssssssss just... so rare and just.... something else. There’s no way of me missing that seriously. Tbh him doing an action stunt isn’t what I imagine when it comes to him and there’s really any actions scenes anyway but it really was something. Like the character he played here really became my soft spot Hehehehe he was pretty and plus, tbh it’s kind of film I’d make fun of while watching so everything was (alomst) forgivable. There is a recent thing I think about, since this is about a cult, I kind of hope he’d at some day play a role like Eli Sunday from There will be blood: a manipulative, deceitful and maddened priest with twisted faith. Though Paul Dano did a grand job, the idea was in my head the whole time. Well, it’s a shame he wasn’t any of those here lol

Driven

From what I seen, the majority of people seem to unanimously hate this film, and after watching it I became one of those ppl. At least Standoff could be make fun of and rsl held gunssss but this...... I want to say so many things... I feel like they should have chose either fancy, fast paced, thrilling racing film or detailed depiction of emotions/relationships with the racers and people involved in it, I know both can be done, but I think that was outside of their ability, but since they tried to do that at once, it became a mess that doesn’t go either way. And the characters, any of them, including rsl’s are narrow or impossible to understand. I mean rsl did great himself, it was not about acting, the problem lies on the script and editing in my opinion. Also there were so many unnecessary characters made me question of their existence. Luckily rsl’s character isn’t one of them, however because of them, he had to squeeze in and unable to elaborate, which is a shame as he was an interesting character and someone rsl rarely plays; a arrogant and opportunist agent/brother of the protagonist, who would do anything for success... ha.... whyyyyy

This is it. If I watch other stuff I might add to it in the future. Overall, I know I’m biased but I do like His filmography, I do have appreciations in every one of them in different way to the good ones to bad. He may have disagree, but I love his acting on screen, well, I barely seen him on stage (crying)

Edit: as some of you could see, I’ve edited this over and over again haha elaborating on thing or the contrary. I can say with a glimpse of hell I practically managed to watch every rsl films out there lol except for the i inside and the short film he did called a dog race in Alaska. But with the former I’m not interested and already know the storyline, and the latter is just impossible to find, trust me I did my best;; 

So to sum up: I HAVE MASTERED THE RSL FILMOGRAPHY!

[koko-bopp]

Arrogance

kim dongyoung x male!reader

word count - 1.4K

genre - Fluff? | College!au | enemies to lovers!au

warning(s) - Some sexual tension, arguments, arrogant reader, a kiss, competitive relationship

synopsis - You're determined, driven and a student who carries himself with confidence, never accepting second place as an option. Doyoung mistakenly gets himself into your bad books, and yet he also finds himself crushing on you.

“You got the answer wrong.”

He frowns, looking up at you from the economics papers and at you, “Excuse me?”

You two were a good six feet away from each other; this was his dorm, so you took it upon yourself to at least be respectful around his own comfort-space, what would normally be back and fourth insult-banter kind of just because ‘you do what you need to do and I’ll do this, but only if you beg for my assistance, I’ll help.’

You two were only freshman and it honestly started off with you to just striking up a casual conversation. A ‘hi’ ‘hello’ ‘why’d you pick econ?’ ‘i don't know’ ‘you don't know?’

"I'm actually doing Politics, Economics and Philosophy," you huff, grinning at Doyoung, but shifting in your seat to fix your sweater, "This is just my elective."

"Ah," Doyoung nods in approval, "Smart boy."

You can’t really remember why or how you two started getting really standoff-ish, it kind of just started happening after you two were looking at the first-exam scores at the pin board after the class. 

“How do you think you did?” Doyoung asks, having stepped next to you since you both wanted to look at the paper properly after the crowd around it had lessened.

“Very well, it seems,” You respond, not looking at Doyoung but a triump smile on your lips as you just stared at the result.

The answer confused Doyoung, he instead decided to shift his gaze from you and onto the pin board. 

[Y/N] [L/N] — 100%

A hundred? You got a full score? Doyoung was really surprised, especially because he’s only seen you take a handful of notes in lectures and barely go to see the tutes while he’s already gone through so many lecture notes and– how did you get a hundred? Doyoung turned to you again, his eyes wide, “Did you cheat?”

You frowned, turning to Doyoung, “Was that an accusation?”

Doyoung realised what he said, then immediately tried to back-track, “No, I just– you know, it’s just unlikely to get a full score.”

You fully faced Doyoung, your chest facing him as you spoke, your eyebrows were knitted and your hand was in your pocket, your whole aura giving off a ‘as a matter of fact’ tone, “I work hard to be where I am, Kim,” You state, his name rolling off your tongue with dislike, “And more imporantly, I don’t need unethical methods to be better than you.”

Doyoung didn't know how to react to that, he was kind of shocked. You two had been a little competitive during beer pong over at Johnny's party, sure, he also joked about doing better than you in the Econ paper, and maybe he also took a bet he could get nurse's number because he was kinda cute but surely... surely, you never took any of that to heart.

It just had become a hate-love relationship after that. If Doyoung noticed you were stuck on something; he'd give you the answer, you get him coffee on Thursday's because you know he spends the night playing videogames with Johnny on Wednesday, Doyoung makes snarky remarks about your outfits and you'll make insults about his. You guys don't hate each other, but one will always have something to disagree with when it comes to the other; Doyoung's competitive, but as a joke. You're competitive, you want to win, but you're also a huge asshole about it.

Like, you always want to win, but you make sure Doyoung— and anyone you're competing against for that matter– knows that you're always four steps ahead before they even have a chance to look in front of them. You're a tease like that, you answer questions with a question, you make comments that stimulate questions that aren't related to the topic just to throw people off-track. İt has to be the political and philosophical part of your subject, you carry all this whit like a postman does with letters and just distrubute it when you feel like it. 

But, it wasn’t long before Doyoung had identified that he may have a crush on you.

It made a bit of sense. You’re beyond attractive, and even more when you’d furrow your eyebrows to focus on a task, of bite down on something not even realising you’ve done it. There was a time you were chatting with Mark who was sitting behind you that day and someone thought it would be a smart idea to have a go at you; watching you tear them limb by limb just from your words and facts? Your confidence just, its just admiring, watching you answer questions with the will to learn and engage and sometimes even educate. 

And if it wasn’t intellectually, then definetly physically. Sometimes he’s catch you at the gym close to campus, and just, you know, stare for a moment too long, maybe? He’d sat next to you one time at a tute and your hands just looked super nice for some reason, maybe they’d look better around his neck, though.

Maybe it’s is your attitude. The way you carry yourself, your passion to be the best and do the best in everything you do. Dedication is an admirable strength and it’s very evidently a quality you posses.

Yeah, maybe it’s just that.

"I said," you mocked, leaning forward, throwing the pen on the bed, "You got the answer wrong."

"Oh, yeah, smartass? Why you so obsessed with me? Don't you have your own things to do?" He barks.

There was a joking tone in his voice, You picked up on it. "Don't jeopardise my scores. I'm relying on you just as much as you are on me."

He scoffed, re-reading his answer on the case-study paper before looking back at you, "Nothing's wrong with it."

"Okay," you sigh, a bit dramatically, "If you say so."

Doyoung goes over it one more time. There's nothing wrong with it, and he was getting more and more mad at you questioning his credability, “Seriously?”

You don’t even look up from the paper you were holding, he just watched you highlight one of the passages from the text in the neon yellow as you spoke, “Don’t worry about it, damn, I just made a mistake, Doyoung.”

Doyoung threw the paper back onto his desk before getting up from his seat on the chair of his desk and walking over to you. You were sitting on the edge of his bed, and he took the paper out of your hand and disregarded it anywhere just to get your attention. 

Doyoung frowned angrily, looking down at you as you rolled your eyes, placing your hands behind you so your palms were holding you up while also gazing up at the male, “What?” you ask, a bit more rhetorically than not, “You’re seriously upset because I thought you made a mistake?”

“No, this isn’t just about that,” he spat, “This is about you always pushing me into the second place box because you can’t handle anything less than number one. This is about you being so damn pretty that I literally don’t want to beat the shit out of you because of it. This is about you acting like this so often that there’s times where you’ll walk past me and I’ll get worried as to why you’re not flicking the back of my head!” Doyoung just kept going on with his rant, and while you sitting there just watching him and actually, maybe, listening to him for once was making it a bit easier, “All because of a joke in freshman fucking year, you just— I don’t even know! You just hate me because I humoured your integrity? [Y/N], for fucks sake, you always act like you’re better than—”

Doyoung didn’t even know what happened next, he had suddenly landed his knee in between your legs while the other kind of hug off the bed, a hand on your shoulder and the other clutching on the fabric covering your chest as a support. You’d pulled him down from the center of the blue and white stripped t-shirt he was wearing, just to place his lips onto yours.

Doyoung was beyond shocked at first, his eyes had flown open but the feeling became so gentle and mellow that he couldn’t even stop his body from relaxing and his eyelids fluttering shut. Was this what he was waiting for? For you to just give up your arrogance for a minute and just kiss him already?

Your lips were so,,, soft. 

Was that what you wanted? To kiss him? because it seemed to be something he wanted without even knowing it.

You pulled away a few moments after Doyoung had relaxed into your touch, opening your eyes slowly and carefully, then rolling your eyes at the male, "Also, I feel like you should know, that I got the nurse's number, and I was gonna wait until I knew what I wanted as my prize," you said, still keeping a hold on Doyoung's shirt.

He scowled, hitting you on the shoulder, "You kiss me and then you just–! How heartless are you!? That was literally my first–! You know what–?"

"Go on a date with me," you interrupted, "That'll be my prize."

Doyoung could feel his heart in his chest, his cheeks flared pink at the demand but he was also deeply touched, "Are you... are you seriously?"

You chuckled softly, looking at the male you just kissed, "I should really get going."

"You– you're an asshole," Doyoung pouted, his grip on your shirt never leaving.

You winked and grinned at Doyoung, "I'll pick you up at three tomorrow," you stated, before adding; "Don't be late."

[rayofspades]

How to Write a Horror Story: The Magnus Archives

This post is kinda weird since most tumblr fandom content is based on the assumption that Everyone Has Seen The Thing, but since this is a transcript of a video essay, it’s more broad. 

I might link the video in a reblog since, you know, tumblr doesn’t like links.

Anyways, here’s the post:

Hello Jon, apologies for the decep-

I’ve seen a lot of mystery shows in my day, and some supernatural shows, and the common thread between them is that they kind of...fall apart as they go on. 

Obviously, this is a generalization and I haven’t seen every mystery show or every paranormal show, but it’s a pretty common problem. 

At this point in pop culture criticism, it’s basically common knowledge that these shows fall apart due to a lack of planning. If a mystery series is making shit up as it goes along while trying to surprise the audience, it’s going to stop making sense at some point. And if an episodic paranormal show is constantly trying to up the stakes, eventually it’s going to become absolutely ridiculous and stretch the audience’s suspension of disbelief past a breaking point. 

Other people have already talked about this stuff to death, but today I want to talk about a paranormal mystery show that actually succeeds at what it set out to do.  

The Magnus Archives is a podcast written by Jonny Sims and directed by Alexander J. Newall. It ran from 2016 to 2021 and it’s...really really good. It’s an episodic horror story, taking place at the fictional Magnus Institute where the head archivist reads various statements about people’s encounters with supernatural entities. It’s got it all; scary stories, mystery, an overarching plot, office comedy, office romance, office tragedy, a villain that’s making straight men everywhere question their sexuality, and an overall really solid structure. 

If you listen to the Q+As put out by the writer and director, you’ll hear them talk about how they planned the series from the beginning, setting up the layout for each season. Some things were definitely changed throughout the actual writing process; that’s just inevitable and necessary when you’re working on a long running show, but in a general sense, they knew where they were going. But, writing a good story doesn’t just involve knowing where you’re going; it’s about executing whatever plan you have effectively. And I think the execution of The Magnus Archives is pretty brilliant, so I want to talk about it. 

And for the record, I said “brilliant,” not “perfect.” I do have a lot of criticisms of this show, and I’m definitely going to talk about those too, because honestly? Even the problems with this show are interesting in their own right. 

Ok, let’s go. 

Oh, spoilers by the way. For the whole plot. Whole thing. 

Part 1: Horror and Mystery 

Ok, so The Magnus Archives has two separate plots going on: the episodic stories that can be listened to individually, and the underlying meta plot. The former is where most of the mystery storytelling takes place, and it’s a really engaging mystery. It’s starts off slow, and almost undetectable at first. The main character, Jon, also known as The Archivist, is just reading out old scary stories that people have delivered to the Magnus Institute. Stuff like; a college student sees a ghostly inhuman figure asking for a cigarette, a woman’s fiancé dies and she finds herself trapped in an empty graveyard, there’s this goth kid who apparently murdered his mother and then skinned her? But she’s kind of still alive? What the f*ck? Hope we never see that kid again. Also, this “Jurgen Lietner” guy wrote a bunch of cursed books and Jon knows about this? Are more books gonna come up? And then you’re like, wait is the goth kid who killed that burn victim the same goth kid who killed his mom like 8 episodes ago? Holy shit the family of that girl’s dead fiancé FUNDS THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE? Did this famous youtuber meet one of the missing people from episode one? The goth kid is back and he’s looking for Leitner books? The name “Michael” has come up like 6 times? Are they all the same guy? I just—who the f*ck is Jurgen Leitner? 

So yeah, as you can see, a lot of these stories connect in cool ways, and I’ve only mentioned like, 0.2 percent of all of those connections. Furthermore, these stories are told out of chronological order, and sometimes the same scenario appears in more than one statement, told from different perspectives. This asymmetrical storytelling and odd doling out of information creates a mystery that’s really interesting. It also makes for a great re-listen, since you can retroactively see what elements were set up before you even realized that they were going to come back.  

The audio format contributes to this too; you can’t just see that the table from episode three matches the pattern on the box in episode eight. You have to pick up on clues that were mentioned and pay attention to what people are describing, and it’s highly rewarding when the pieces all start to fit together. 

There is a bit of a downside to this though. Technically The Magnus Archives is a horror story first and a mystery second, and these two elements can mesh in weird ways. 

The horror is element is really strong. Each story is completely different, sometimes focusing on psychological horror, body horror, or supernatural versions of more primal fears like heights, darkness, enclosed spaces, etc. Basically, if you’re afraid of anything, there will be at least one episode of The Magnus Archives that gets under your skin. 

Jonny Sims can really sell his stories through both his writing and acting. He plays Jon, by the way, and plagiarized his own birth certificate for the character name. (For future reference, Jonny is the actor, Jon is the character). Overall, he’s really good at writing prose, and each narrator has a very distinct voice even though the large majority of the stories are being read by one character/actor.  

Obviously not every episode is a bull’s eye. Sometimes it’s due to the subjectivity when it comes to what you as an audience member are scared of, and occasionally it’s just weird writing decisions. I’m thinking specifically of episode 21 where the line “the sky ate him” is said, and it is the worst line in the entire show. The whole goddamn show. That’s it. That’s the number one worst line. 

But still, overall, the horror storytelling is incredibly solid, and some episodes even gave me brand new fears, like the unholy isolation of being in space, or the concept that someone you love could be replaced by someone completely different without you noticing.  

But here’s the thing; 

A lot of good horror is based on the absence of explanation. Most of the episodes that gave me the most visceral reactions of genuine terror come from the first two seasons, because that’s when the audience has the least amount of information. 

For example, in episode two, a really terrifying coffin is introduced. It’s creepy, it reacts very strangely to water for some reason, and appears to compel people to try opening it. By the end of the episode, the audience never finds out what’s in that coffin and that is a good thing. That is a huge part of what made that episode so unnerving.  

And then a few seasons later, we do find out what’s in the coffin, and to be fair the answer is both very creative and very scary, but it also takes a lot of the punch out of episode two. 

 No matter how f*cked up your thing is, it’s not going to compare to whatever the audience can conjure up in their own mind after such a creepy set up. This problem isn’t just stuck in this one scenario either; there are a lot of early episodes that, while still good, seem a lot less creepy in hindsight after you learn more about the scenario. 

I don’t think it’s bad writing, but I do think it’s a double-edged sword. Jonny Sims even mentions this sort of issue in the first Q+A. 

But yeah, to sum up; the narration is good, the ideas are creative, and seeing the mystery unfurl itself is deeply compelling. And for the record, the mystery elements aren’t of the Sherlock Holmes variety. It’s less about finding out who did the thing, and more about discovering how all of these individual points are intricately connected, pulling on each other as they move. Woven together like a... oh shit what’s the word? Gah, it’s on the tip of my tongue. Ah, whatever, I’m sure it’s not like a running motif or anything.  

Part 2: Stakes 

One of the main reasons I stopped watching Supernatural is that it devolves into complete f*cking nonsense. At the end of season five, the boys literally defeat the devil, and then the show...keeps going? Which would be fine. It’s also, largely, an episodic show, so if they have more creative ideas, they could definitely keep going with it. In fact, there are some post season five episodes that I thought were pretty good. But as they kept trying to outdo themselves with Bigger Bads, it got kind of difficult to suspend my disbelief. And the final nail in the coffin for me was the end of season nine, when Crowly basically points out to the audience that the main characters keep dying and coming back to life, so there are no stakes. The most-badest bad guy can always be defeated because some new Thing can just come out of left-field, and dying isn’t even on the table as a threat since people have tons of ways of coming back to life. 

The Magnus Archives, while being a show based in the supernatural, notably doesn’t bring anyone back to life, even though some very beloved characters die. I say “notably,” because in the season three Q+A, Jonny even says, “We make a point not to bring people back from the dead in Magnus, I know it sometimes feels like that, but we are very careful to never actually resurrect anyone.” 

Upon listening to this I said “oh my god, these guys are the only writers left who at least kind of know what they’re doing.”  

Also, as far as plot progression goes, The Magnus Archives is lowkey structurally perfect in the way the threats escalate in the underlying plot; both in terms of destruction and power and in terms of emotional consequences. Season one starts off with one major threat that’s dealt with by the end of the season, season two reveals the main villain, season three lays out the grander forces at play, season four ends the world, and season five is about un-ending the world. The difference between season one and season five is vast, but how we got there makes perfect sense. 

As for the emotional stakes, let’s talk about themes and characters. 

Part 3: Themes and Characters 

At the very end of season two, it’s revealed that the supernatural happenings in the Magnus universe are the result of entities far beyond our understanding. Since their existence is so fundamentally different from what we can comprehend, they interact with the world through cursed items, creatures, and humans who have dedicated themselves to an entity.  

A lot of people read this as a metaphor for late-stage capitalism, and I am one of those people. A bunch of faceless entities exploiting humans through means of dehumanization and causing people to suffer because it feeds them seems like an appropriate metaphor. 

While we’re on this topic, I do want to talk about Elias, since he’s the main villain of the entire series and also one of my favorite villains of all time. The Magnus Archives is a series that deals with a lot of moral questions and has a lot of characters who do morally questionable things, so one might assume that the villain of said series is, you know, morally ambiguous and sympathetic to some extent despite being “the bad guy.” 

Nope! No stops, full bastard. It’s great. 

He falls under what I’ve deemed the “unbeatable boss” archetype. He just doesn’t tolerate insubordination or resistance, and that combined with his lack of empathy means that anyone who crosses him is either killed or brought to heel. His power set is cool too. On the surface the ability to see out of any eye and read minds sounds useful, but not deal breaking, but the way he uses that power to manipulate people and anticipate threats...yeah, it makes him kind of impossible to beat.  

He’s just...so evil and he loves being evil and every single f*cking thing he does pisses me off and makes me want to kill him. It’s. Great. 

Anyways, I think Elias’s role as the central antagonist is what makes the capitalist reading so common. He’s the head of the institute, he’s wealthy, he’s powerful, and he dehumanizes people in ways that are both brutal and chillingly indifferent. He seems like an appropriate stand in through that lens. 

I also love how voice actor Ben Meredith plays him like’s he’s trying to seduce the audience.  

With all of that said, I wouldn’t call this the critique of capitalism a direct allegory or anything; in much looser terms, this could be a metaphor for any power structure that exploits humans. Organized religion or cults might be even more on the nose, considering there’s a lot of mentions of rituals and worship within the show. 

But if we boil it down to its barest aspects and focus on the avatar characters, The Magnus Archives is a series about people becoming monsters. Or, at the very least, becoming worse versions of themselves. That can mean a lot of things to different people in a metaphorical sense; the tense relationship between desperation and morality, the eagerness to please at the cost of one’s own mental health, the psychological traumas that lead people down dark paths, and how personal choices can still be dictated and manipulated by outside influences. It’s kind of heavy stuff, but put into a digestible package through the show’s abstractions. 

Well, for the most part.  

There’s some debate as to whether or not Daisy’s arc was handled tastefully. While her demise and Basira’s character arc were clearly meant to condemn police brutality and the deeply corrupt system that allows it to foster, it’s still a weird subject to discuss in such a fantastical context, and there is a strange sympathy for the devil angle that can get kind of uncomfortable for some listeners.  

Okay, stepping back from that for a bit, let’s talk about Jon and how he fits into this whole “people becoming corrupted” thing. 

Jon has one of my favourite brands of character arc, which is one based in deterioration alongside growth. The most obvious way this takes form is his departure from humanity as his relationship with the Eye drives him to psychologically harm others, and he finds himself sympathizing more and more with the people he was afraid of, stating in episode 152 that anyone listening to his recordings might compare him to the other avatars that have had their minds and morals twisted. 

Over the course of the series, he is repeatedly traumatized and the show makes a point that he is being both physically and emotionally scarred. These happenings are what drive his motivation for revenge in season five, and he even states that revenge is making him a worse person. As a character he’s constantly berating himself and his own monstrousness, much to Martin’s dismay.  

That’s why the finale destroys me in the best way. Upon seeing that Jon has betrayed him and basically given himself over to the Eye, Martin asks “how much of you is even left?” And when Jon tries to reassure him that he’s still himself, Martin’s response is “how would you even know?” This cuts through me every time. Up until this point, Martin had consistently stood up for Jon and Jon’s humanity, even in the face of Tim’s doubt, Basira’s mistrust, Elias being cryptic, and Jon’s own self-hatred. This is the ultimate breaking point, the point where even Martin, the love of Jon’s life, doesn’t really recognize him. It’s brutal. Because at the end of the day, Jon is still himself; he’s a deeply broken person trying to make the right decisions.  

We’ll come back to the finale later, but for now I want to talk about the romance. 

Jon’s emotional growth throughout the series is largely tied into Martin. Martin’s the first person that Jon really opens up to, and this later grows into trust which then turns into a genuine emotional connection.  On the flip side, Martin’s growth in season four is largely tied into Jon. Martin starts season four basically waiting to die, but Jon’s return gives him a reason to keep living, and he’s later able to recognize his own value outside of the pure utility of ‘you need to set yourself on fire to keep everyone else warm.’ Both of them give each other reason to push onward despite everything becoming more and more hopeless.  

It’s a good romance. I wish the two had had a few more scenes together before the culmination, but it is built up over the course of four seasons and comes together in an utterly fantastic confession.  

And yeah, the scene with Martin and Jon in the Lonely is cheesy as hell, but it is the highest quality of cheese. These are some gourmet nachos.  

Umm, also kind of stating the obvious here, but it’s also pretty cool that the main character in this horror story falls in love with another man. You don’t see that a lot, and it’s cool that no one even makes a big deal out of it. It’s just a normal romance, but with two guys. It’s nice. 

So, they go to Scottland, they hang out, they’re in love, Jonalias starts the apocalypse through Jon, the world ends, and season five starts! 

...Let’s talk about season five! 

Part 4: Season 5 

At the very start of this post, I said that supernatural mysteries tend to get worse as they go along, and I am deeply sad to report that I don’t think that The Magnus Archives is an exception. It just goes downhill in a very different way than its ilk. 

And, so we’re clear, I don’t think season five totally tanks or becomes unlistenable, it’s just, in my opinion, notably worse than the rest of the show. 

As discussed earlier, it doesn’t fall apart due to a lack of planning; everything still makes sense, but the presentation has changed drastically. The episodic statements are no longer scary stories, but more like slam poems about the various hellscapes that Jon and Martin are trekking through. Honestly if these were published in a book of slam poetry, I would probably think they slapped pretty hard. I genuinely believe that Jonny Sims is a good writer, but as a podcast a lot of these statements just made me zone out. There’s at least four that I don’t even slightly remember. Myself and many others have noted that they just...aren’t scary, unless there’s a specific episode that really gets under your skin due to a certain fear or phobia. 

To quote my friend, “it’s harder to feel a solid impact when the setting is literally divorced from reality. People would either go numb or insane to the point where their fears become unrelatable.” 

And, to be honest, I think that this same surreal odyssey set up could have worked with a slight shift in narration. Two stand out episodes for me were “Strung Out” and “Wonderland.” Both of them show the tormented target actively trying to resist and interact with their tormenter, instead of just trying to escape or live through their situation. “Strung Out” is also more of character study; you learn about Francis’s life before the apocalypse through their interaction with the Web hellscape. Meanwhile “Wonderland” is just...f*cked, and you get to see Jon take the perspective of first-person Bad Guy throughout the whole thing, which is its own level of disturbing. 

But the majority of episodes feel so abstract that I kind of forget the people trapped in them are supposed to be characters and not just concepts, so it’s harder to feel their dread and pain. 

But I’m still here for the metaplot, the drama, and the romance. And when that’s good, it’s great! I think the final handful of episodes are really solid in that regard. 

Buuuuuuut... 

A decent chunk of season five is dedicated to the “kill bill” plot. Jon discovers he has the power to smite people, and while at first, he’s embarrassed about this, since he actively enjoyed killing Not!Sasha, Martin is super into it! He’s encouraging Jon to murder people.  

This is actually the set up for a really good arc. As Jon gets more and more into his own avenging angel persona, Martin could get more and more disturbed by it so by the time they get to London, Martin could be really upset that Jon is so willing to wreak his own divine justice by killing or torturing all of the avatars. 

And this does kind of happen. We do reach this end state, and it makes for a good final conflict, but the way we got here was borderline nonsense. Thematic gibberish, if you will. 

Throughout the journey, Martin is clearly motived by a sense of justice; these people are bad, and so they should die. Whereas Jon is clearly more motivated by revenge; he only goes after the avatars that hurt him personally. At one point, Jon admits that maybe all of this killing isn’t making anything better, but just making him worse. Martin apologizes for egging him on, Jon absolves him by saying he started it, and then Martin’s like “I’ll keep my apology then.” This is the second worst line in the entire series, right after “the sky ate him.” And it’s close. 

But it kind of feels like we’re back at square one. Jon is back to being ashamed of killing and Martin is still keen on his justice stance, but now just less pushy about it. The arc is basically half resolved at this point. 

But then it doesn’t matter, because Jon kills Helen anyway. So, Jon’s back on his revenge/justice thing. Then what was the point of his earlier revelation? Why have that if it’s not going to matter and the conflict that was escalating still culminates with Jon leaning into the avenging angel stuff, and Martin being disturbed by it? It just makes both of them look like huge hypocrites! I f*cking hate it when they’re in the tunnels and Martin says “you weren’t meant to enjoy it this much,” regarding Jon’s smiting. Where did this come from?! Why didn’t you say this earlier? Third worst line in the series. 

And yeah, I’ll say it; the boys fight too much in this season. I loved their romance up to season five, and their cute moments and more lowkey serious discussions are still good in this season, but God, they fight so much. And I’m not saying couples can’t have fights or tension, that’s just realistic and also stories need conflict to be interesting. Jonny Sims is on the record saying that balancing a healthy romance with the stress of a literal apocalypse was a priority, and I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s well balanced.  I’m just saying that sometimes it feels like they don’t even like each other and it really started to grate on me. 

Maybe it would have been better if the beginning of this season was dedicated to charming romance at first, so we as an audience could better appreciate how strong their love is and how it’s truly being tested. But obviously that was never on the table— 

ALEX NO. 

So, yeah, I have a lot of problems with season. I think it’s the worst one by far, even though there is a lot of it I still enjoy, including the ending. 

As I mentioned before, the moment where Martin confronts Jon in the panopticon absolutely kills me, and Jon’s reaction kills me even harder. Throughout the season, Jon had largely been motivated by revenge, martyrdom, and the subconscious call of the Eye, and all three of those factors led him to his position as the pupil. He’s getting revenge against the powers, sacrificing his humanity to get rid of the Fears, and taking his place as wearer of the watcher’s crown. But all of this gets thrown out the window when he realizes that Martin is going to die. And not only is Martin going to die, Martin is going to die specifically because he loves Jon and refuses to leave Jon alone to die horribly. Martin had always been an underlying motivation for Jon, his “reason” as stated in episode 167, but now love as a motivator has come to the forefront, and Jon can no longer go through with his plan because of it. But at this point in the series, they’re both utterly doomed, and Jon concludes that the only possible chance they have of surviving, however unlikely, would be to sever the pupil of the eye, technically killing Jon, but maybe, just maybe, allowing them to escape with the Fears. Whether that’s meant to be literal or more ethereal is left unclear. Hell, maybe Jon’s just making it up completely and creating his own potential happy ending. It’s a pretty potent ending in emotional terms; Jon has to release the Fears and Martin has to kill Jon, and those are the two things they were dead set on not doing.  

The Web, arguably the real main antagonist, basically won, and their manipulation of Jon worked. The destruction spread, and there is kind of a bleak underlying tone to that. 

But at least this ending has some semblance of hope to it. I’m not saying that releasing the Fears was objectively the correct moral decision; the entire point of the dilemma is that there was no objectively correct moral decision. But, while Jon’s solution does have merit, it was also the most hopeless. I think dramatically, any one of the choices on the table could have worked if the writing was well executed, but thematically this one seemed like the perfect combination of grim and optimistic. Like, all of the evils that plague humanity can’t just be defeated forever and things could get worse, but maybe not. Maybe everything works out... 

So yeah, The Magnus Archives...is a podcast. And it’s a really good podcast. Great, even. I can complain about season five all I want, but regardless of how that worked out, you can tell throughout the entire show that the people working on it were trying to tell a genuinely excellent story. 

It’s good. Go listen to it. Even though I spoiled the entire thing and if you’re still here, you’ve probably already listened to it. Listen to it again. 

[autumnblogs]

Aside Glance: The Palpable Absence of the Dubiously Canonical

So you might have noticed throughout my writings that I have at the same time avoided directly talking about any of the expanded universe material while also occasionally alluding to it just enough to make it noticeable. At least, probably.

So to nobody’s surprise, let me say;

I don’t like the Homestuck Epilogues.

Before I dig into why, I wanna dig out what I think I actually do like about the Homestuck Epilogues. CW: for mentions of suicide, sexual violence, fascism, genocide, etc. Spoiler Warning for the Homestuck Epilogues, although if you haven’t read them by now, good; don’t. Keep reading for my thoughts on the Epilogues.

I do like that the Homestuck Epilogues say quite loudly and clearly that Fascism Is Terrible, and that Neo-Liberals are often Discount Fascists at best in terms of the material effects they have on the world that we have to share with them. They can often end up being interchangeable, and events can cause someone with a temperament predisposed toward Neo-liberalism down the path of bloody reactionary sentiment the way it did with Jane.

Homestuck has always been a pretty soundly anti-authoritarian work, and pretty aggressively contemporary work, so it makes sense that Homestuck^2 would reflect an internet culture rabidly obsessing about the politics of the Trump-Era United States, cast its villains as parallels to the Trump Administration, the grody religious movements it catered to, and the hyper-rich dingalings who benefited from it.

I do like that the Homestuck Epilogues develop the theme of criticizing the author and continues to call attention to its narrators, this time by explicitly casting them as villainous, and morally ambiguous/incomprehensible respectively. A central idea in Homestuck is the relationship between Author, Audience, and Characters, and the blending of the lines between them.

I like that it calls attention not just to the idea that a story’s narrator is an agent themselves, but also to the reality that the narrator may not have the best interests of either their readers, or their characters in mind. I like that the authorial powers of these characters are represented as overtly dangerous and evil when they are addressed at all.

I also like that the Homestuck Epilogues are rather brutally honest about the fact that sometimes, the people that you grew up with - your close friends - grow apart from you, and turn into kind of bad people. I’ve watched that happen in real time, and have had to stop hanging out with people because they just kind of... turned evil. That’s something that needs to be discussed more in fiction, and more honestly than the usual way. When the most visible example of like, someone you knew and loved turning into a bad person is like, Anakin Skywalker, maybe the world needs more stories about that.

So good, that’s what we’ve got for things I think were good to say. Well done.

What don’t I like about the Homestuck Epilogues?

In a word, I think, they are cruel. Relentlessly cruel. Even actively malicious.

Homestuck has, of course, always been rather mean-spirited and adversarial, pretty much since page one. And really, so has Andrew’s writing in general, since the days when he ran the site Team Special Olympics. His humor walks a fine line between and outrageous and genuinely offensive, as he dares you to say, “That’s fucked up!” so he can respond “it was just a joke, where’s your sense of humor?”

But the Epilogues transcend the usual sardonic envelope-pushing we can usually count on Andrew for, and instead opt to sink their teeth into the readers in an assault on the senses, and on the sensibilities. Reading the Epilogues is a brutal experience to endure emotionally, and in a lot of places, morally offensive.

And they are this way practically from the first page; our very first impression of the Homestuck Epilogues is a content warning that presents itself in such a way as to be almost unmistakably parodic. The stylization as an AO3 work, particularly in the context of Homestuck, where these sorts of overzealous content warning pages are associated with preachy jerks like Kankri, it comes across as a direct challenge to the viewer, and by a challenge, I really mean an attack. It is a mean-spirited joke at the expense of people who have a desire to curate their media experience - and then the authors have the gall to say that the one of the goals of the Epilogues is to challenge people to curate their media more.

Every time a character could conceivably make a bad decision, or become a more ill-conceived version of themselves, they somehow manage it, which becomes all the more unbearable because of the identification of character and audience that has been the case throughout all of Homestuck. If Homestuck introduces us to this entire cast and says, this is you, the Epilogues seem to follow up with and there is nothing good about you. Jade Harley somehow transforms into a grotesque caricature of a trans-woman, a girl who is sexually incontinent and predatory in a way that is directly tied to her having a dog penis - a state of being which the text variously slut-shames her for in Meat, or alternatively uses to blame her for ruining Dave and Karkat’s relationship in Candy.

John Egbert is severely depressed and dysfunctional, and this leads him either to go off and kill Lord English to chase the thrill of adventure and his own sense of purpose (in direct opposition to the all-but-explicitly-stated takeaway from Homestuck which Dave gives us, that the better option is to just leave the story alone altogether - explicitly the worst decision he could make according to the rules of Homestuck) or descend into decades of nihilistic solipsism while the world disintegrates around him.

Dirk’s worst natures take over him and transform him into a person who can only conceivably be satisfied either by becoming an arch-villain, or by murdering himself.

The Epilogues are aggressively cruel to Jake English, choosing to double down on the lack of emotional resolution he suffered from at the end of Homestuck, and squarely placing the blame for his own misery on his own shoulders, in a way which is pretty hard to read around, which is part and parcel of the general malice which Homestuck has historically treated mentally ill characters with. Nearly all the kids in Homestuck have suffered incomprehensible levels of mental and physical abuse, and the text expects them to simply overcome it sheerly by force of will. Sure, Jake is miserable but it’s his own fault, the text seems to say; if he’d just get his act together, like Dave, maybe he could get on with his life without being mind-broken by Dirk, or raped and whipped by Jane.

This isn’t even to delve into the flagship reveal of Homestuck 2, that Rose and Jade in the Candy Timeline have not only had a daughter of their own (without telling Kanaya), but that furthermore they have replicated their own trauma in her. Rose and Jade’s daughter has grown up completely emotionally alone, in the care of her Moms’ archenemy.

The point in all of this is not that the Epilogues have made everyone behave out of character or anything like that - I think it’s clear after a re-read especially that all of this is a conceivable direction that these characters could have taken. Rather, the Epilogues reliably choose to believe the worst of the characters of Homestuck in terms of their writing decisions. Everyone always makes the worst decision that they could make, or at the very least, nearly the worst. And because of the identification of reader and character, we can’t help but take away from that a sense that this is what the authors think of us as well.

And in case it wasn’t stated explicitly enough, a running theme throughout the Epilogues is that all this conflict and badness taking place is, to some extent or another, because we the audience are looking at it. As Andrew stated in relation to the Epilogues, there’s a kind of Happily Ever After possibility bubble around the characters that intrinsically collapses into conflict the moment we observe the events again - in other words, by participating in a story, we the audience members are somehow complicit in the characters’ suffering. Yet not all stories must be driven by conflict - and who triumphs and who fails in that conflict says a lot about what a story has to say about real life.

The Epilogues engage in a kind of voyeuristic cruelty, a kind of pessimism and cynicism, a kind of relentless ugliness that I have seldom seen, and to what end? The whole thing seems to me an attack on the audience.

Aside from general, abstracted claims toward authorial intent (which I think is there), I also want to say that, I can’t emotionally engage with the Epilogues, for a personal reason; as somebody who has struggled with almost daily suicidal ideation for most of my adult life, the way that the Epilogues deal with that subject goes from troubling to malicious and hostile in its treatment of Dirk’s suicide.

And staying personal, while I haven’t had to deal with some of the other sensitive topics that the Epilogues handle recklessly, handle them recklessly they do - Jake is serially raped by Jane, and in a way that he serves as a vehicle to move the plot forward, rather than with any kind of compassion for Jake’s condition. The possibility that Tavros Crocker might be being molested by Gamzee is brought up flippantly in one scene and played off as a joke.

The Homestuck Epilogues play at maturity through handling dark themes and sensitive topics, and reveal a profound immaturity in their authors because of the ways in which they are cruelly, insensitively handled over and over again.

I guess I’ll close with the least egregious thing. The Homestuck Epilogues just aren’t funny. Even at its bleakest, Homestuck has always been funny. In their relentless pursuit of cruelty, and the shared misery of their audience and characters, the Homestuck Epilogues forgo even this most basic element of Homestuck, which Andrew has always described as being basically a comedy.

Anyway; I will not be doing a thorough analysis of the Epilogues. I hate them too much and they suck.

[weltenwellen]

Okay, so this will probably be long and messy sorry. Also, I don’t really know if you will answer this or truly what I want you to answer but I like the responses you give others so I guess I wanted to send this. (Heads up this is probably over sharing and has tramatic stuff like sexual harassment/assault maybe?) Anyways, so I’m 21 and when I was 14 my brother (17 at the time) would come in my room and mess with me while I was sleeping. I have spent years living with him still and for the most part we are normal (or as close to it as we can be) but I struggle with how I really feel about him and what happened. Like I feel like I have no right to be uncomfortable or hurt by what happened because it was only like a month that it was happening before I told someone and also I was sleeping and only know what happened vaguely since I was half asleep. It could have been so much worse. I don’t even know if I can say I was sexually harnessed or assaulted and maybe that shouldn’t matter but it does to me and it scares me not knowing what really happened before I would wake up. I also feel like I was forced to just be okay with it and act like it never happened to make everything less awkward or something so I can’t tell what my real feelings about it are? We moved a little after it all and I was forced by my parents to be homeschooled from 14-18 and so I was by myself that whole time and only had my family which really made the situation more suffocating. (Also, I’m now too scared to leave the house which means that I still take college classes online) He is still living in the same house with me and I get awkward/nervous talking to him but also I don’t think I hate him even though I feel like I should? I just want to feel like I have a right to be and feel the way I am now? Idk, what I’m really saying or asking from all this but it’s here and I just really needed to get this out. I’m so sorry for sharing this with you and I hope it didn’t do anything to you to read.

I am very cautious when it comes to answering messages about sexual assault/harassment/abuse & i don’t feel like it’s particularly to protect my own mental health, but there is a delicate and thoughtful approach needed and i do not want in any possible way, no matter how small, make someone feel misunderstood or hurt by my response & that’s what i fear will happen since i am not an expert on the subject of trauma on this particular subject, especially when it comes to childhood sexual trauma. that said, i have some thoughts on what you wrote me and I hope my approach to my answer to you makes sense.

from what and how you write me, you seem to struggle to define what happened as sexual assault or harassment and due to it’s severity and time period of when it took place, you do not think your feelings and changes of behaviour is warranted and valid. so let’s approach it not through what took place itself but let’s look at how it impacted you, how it made you feel and change and in the specific environment it happened and in which you are still living in. hopefully when i can outline the impact of what took place, you can see that sexual assault and sexual harassment does not need a certain degree in the initial trauma to count only then as a violence of your personal space and invasion of your body and only then to say that what you’ve felt and currently feeling valid.

first of all, let’s look at the fundamental sense of safety in your own home. you’ve experience a violation to the feeling of safety not only in your own home, but furthermore while you are sleeping and a complete space of being defenceless and not alert to danger. what took place violated your ability to trust through a family member and after what happened furthermore by your parents forcing you to be homeschooled and cutting off or minimising the possibility to establish new relationships to relearn and regain your ability to trust and feel safe in the presence of others. the isolation after what took place, created an environment which did not only not help you to deal with what took place but additionally and especially (!!!) you are still living with the person who violated your sacred personal space and breached your most fundamental boundaries in your own home. so second thing to look at, would be then and now that feeling of constant alertness, a development of a feeling of helplessness and loss of control. even if it looks on paper that what took place is years away, especially since you are still living under one roof with your brother those feelings are to some degree still there every single day? while their intensity might vary on a daily basis or from month to month, their intensity might still be there in the same intensity they have been when you were 14. so when you say you are forced into silence, you were also forced into the position to bury something that needed to be voiced and for you to be put into words for that 14 year old girl that is still somewhere there inside and in order to heal. 

thirdly, let’s look at your family environment. from how you write, i am not sure how much your family knows about what happened but what i can say is that the silence over what happened is fatal to foster any kind of healing for you and as you said, it’s suffocating to you. in combination with the fact that you are still living with your brother, that creates an environment which you should seek physical space from. and as a fourth point, when you say you don’t hate your brother, i would say that is okay. whatever you are feeling is okay. i can imagine that you might even feel shame not only about what happened but also that you feel like you don’t hate him or that you do hate him at times or that your feelings might not match in your eyes with what took place. whatever you are feeling, whatever changed in your feelings over time or whatever feelings persisted, it’s okay. those feelings are not only valid but they’re also important and deserving to be felt and for someone outside of your family to be listened to. when you're looking at the relationship to your brother you are holding and dealing with highly contrary emotions of a love for your brother and a fear of him and even possibly a disgust due to what happened. all these feeling got and still are jumbled together and pull you in all kinds of directions.

so when we’re looking at your sense of safety, your current environment, the isolation afterwards, the delicate age it took place, i hope i was able to show you even just a tiny bit that whatever you are feeling is completely valid & furthermore, that the severity or limited amount of time of the trauma, does not make your reaction and feelings any less significant. there is not one way you should feel when it comes to what happened, when it comes to how you feel about your brother and how you should feel now. i do not think you have had a person in your life since you were 14 in whose presence you were able to give words to what happened and in consequence were able to gain some distance to all you felt then and all you feel now. keeping trauma for so long inside you chest, has a way of letting you implode, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in gigantic tidal waves. 

when you say ‘I just want to feel like I have a right to be and feel the way I am now?’, i think you need to establish an environment outside your family with relationships in which you can (re)establish a sense of safety and learn to fully trust other people (again). also if possible, I would advice you to seek professional help. emotions need to be spoken not for the simple reason to let them pass/go, but also before to untangle that giant mess inside our chest and examine them properly in the light. I hope you could follow my train of thought and it was all halfway logical. from the bottom of my heart, all the best darling. i am sending you all my love, I hope you can feel that a little bit wherever you are in the world ❤️

[snakedevour]

my thoughts on chapter 81 ahead, fellas. it feels like it’s been a while since i analyzed a chapter drop but in my defense they only release once a month and 80.5 didn’t give me a lot of meat to bite into.

nyanyway -- here’s kkg 81. this chapter brings the focus back onto yumeko a little bit, showing us again how she plays, how she thinks, and how she challenges the people around her. basically, for me, this chapter was the whole buffet after several chapters of scraps.

SPOILERS BELOW.

.

.

.

i made a post maybe a week or so ago at this point mentioning that i wanted to talk about how yumeko’s friendliness is “impersonal” despite being genuine and how that feeds into her ( for lack of better words ). and i’m still going to do that and it’ll be in a separate post from this one but this chapter gave me some ammunition in regards to that thought.

the thing that makes yumeko difficult to navigate in terms of interacting with her is that she challenges the conventional definition of “kind” and in a way kind of forces you to delineate between that and “friendly”. 

yumeko is a cocktail with two major components:

1. she is friendly 2. she is powerful

and when you have a friendly powerful person it’s easy to fall into the trap tsubomi has here, in which you feel that because you side with someone friendly and powerful you’re inherently under their protection.

and in a lot of storytellings that’d typically be true... but yumeko is awfully atypical. recall tsubomi’s commentary from chapter 63:

so long as we frame “friendly” as something that inherently goes hand-in-hand with “good” i think we set ourselves up to misunderstand yumeko’s personality. yumeko is friendly but she is not altruistic. yumeko does not “save” people; every time that it seems that she has it’s because they “won” it from her -- yumeko has never been benevolent for benevolence’s sake.

by a lot of standard definitions, i’d argue that she’s not even a good person. 

it’s really nice to be reminded of that weird layer of nuance. we’re also reminded of something that might have gotten overshadowed by her comparative calmness lately and the housepet drama from the last few chapters --

more than just wantonly putting herself at risk, yumeko is obsessed with simultaneously imposing high antes on other people.

let’s briefly throw all the way back to chapter 16 just to get that in her own words:

i kind of want to say that yumeko has sadomasochistic tendencies but that’s probably for another post another day.

anyway, this takes us back to today and chapter 81, where tsubomi goes on to notice the folly in her own thinking:

paired with her thoughts from chapter 63 this says a lot.

“would yumeko bother helping me if I’m not taking any risk?”

i’m pretty sure the answer is no. 

this really just sort of further cements my original opinion that yumeko definitely operates on some sort of metric of “earning” what one has. if you’re interested in my thought piece on that subject it’s right over here.

i really like where tsubomi’s train of thought is going here. up until now we’ve seen yumeko’s cutthroat mentality mostly as applied to herself and an opposing player. we’ve seen her drive the stakes high with yuriko, with sayaka, with miyo and miri and so on. 

this is what i mean when i say yumeko’s friendliness has an element of uncanny valley to it. you can argue that we’ve seen yumeko drag people into gambling alongside her ( like itsuki ), but we haven’t really seen it in this kind of light where it’s leveraged against her willingness to help people.

so +1 to chapter 81 for re-highlighting this fact about yumeko.

moving along, tsubomi is having these thoughts in the first place because terano came by and pointed out to her that she’s an “extra”, and per the logistics of the game yumeko only really needs suzui’s cooperation to win. then we cut to this short set-up scene where yumeko tells the gang ( and us ) the plan for this turn:

this gets tsubomi thinking. because yumeko is donating to suzui, she’ll have 0 points which means if tsubomi challenges her, she’ll win and thereby fulfill the requirements of her life plan to “knock either yumeko or terano out of the election”. tsubomi we’ve seen in past games though is still kind of coming into her own individuality, and is very much used to just taking orders. on top of that, she still feels indebted to yumeko for pushing her to play against kiwatari during the debt swap indian poker.

another thing i commented about in the past was the “human” qualities and motivations of the characters. tsubomi is a real highlight of this chapter because she reminds us of that quality too, because terano’s remarks spark what i think is a very organic conflict in her thoughts:

“i don’t want to be a housepet” vs “i don’t want to betray the girl i’m indebted to”

“i want to live as a person” vs “i want to keep a good conscience”

it’s the portrayal of internal struggles like these that make me angy at the sexualization in this series because these really show that it just isn’t needed. kawamoto absolutely knows what he’s writing and it’s not like he’s writing it poorly so its like...what gives.

not to make this about yumeko again but she does seem to get pretty meta here. i’m pretty certain that she knows what tsubomi is thinking here and i’ll also go as far as to suggest that she might have even set up the play this way to test tsubomi’s mettle. i’ll get into that here in a moment though :)

i say yumeko has an idea of what’s going through tsubomi’s mind here just because her question is very telling -- “have you made your decision?” -- yumeko definitely knows that some sort of choice has been imposed onto tsubomi, and tsubomi’s mentioning of her lack of guidance this turn also implies that yumeko is leaving her to fend for herself. which i think is something yumeko will always do. we’ve established that she’s not altruistic in the slightest...i don’t think yumeko is at all interested in people who lack the will to help themselves, regardless of how pitiable their circumstances.

i know suzui is supposed to be the audience-proxy but idk my guys... i think tsubomi is shaping up to be the better conduit through which we see yumeko’s real colors. 

also, more of yumeko giving us some insight into her values and how she thinks... but @ naomura why did you draw her doing this. yumeko you look SILLY but ily anyway

“only a choice at the end of agony can move your heart” -- yumeko’s starting to give me vibes of someone who’s apathetic unless the ante is driven wildly high hence why she does it but i need at least one more backstory drop before i speak more on that one. just saying it’d line up with a few things tho

moving on, it follows that tsubomi ultimately decides to challenge yumeko because that’s the logical thing to do if she wants to look out for herself. plus some commentary from terano about how it’s all according to keikaku.

anyway, i really enjoyed this next sequence because it throws back to yumeko even more. it reminds us that while yumeko loves taking on huge risks, that doesn’t mean she plays to lose. it’s been a while since we’ve seen yumeko engage in a setup like this so it was great to see that kawamoto still remember what kind of gambler she is:

i actually really love terano but i do enjoy seeing yumeko consistently trip her up. it really upholds yumeko’s role as a dark horse.

anyway, remember how i said yumeko probably set this play up to see what tsubomi would do? this is where we can circle back to that because we see, in fact, that yumeko did not donate her points to suzui like she said she would. 

yumeko is such a convoluted character that you can get caught up on one aspect of her character to the point of forgetting another. in recent chapters we’ve seen her in a supporting role: supporting mary, seemingly helping tsubomi... but thanks chapter 81 for reminding us that yumeko is a gambler before she’s anything else and can and will set up other players. this also kind of raises a mild albeit interesting moral quandary: i think it’s pretty safe to say that this was manipulative on yumeko’s part, but it could also be argued that this is a gamble and she read far enough ahead and just acted accordingly. i think that ambiguity is the point.

and that’s the jist chapter 81, and tbh i really enjoyed it. it felt like i was back in ye olden days of yore where kkg was yumeko’s misadventures. for a while there it felt like they were like “ok we’ve established she’s a really good gambler we must shine the spotlight elsewhere now” -- which is fair, don’t get me wrong. knowing the rest of the -bamis is really important to the plot. it’s just nice to see yumeko back in action proper again 🥺

[mrjprongs]

Character Introduction

Full Name: James Fleamont Potter

Name Origin: JAMES ~ English form of the Late Latin name Iacomus, a variant of the Biblical Latin form Iacobus, from the Hebrew name Ya'aqov. Both Potter parents preferred a name they considered ‘classically and simply English’, having had traditional Indian names and more unusual English alternatives themselves; FLEAMONT   ~ named after his father who was, in turn, named for the otherwise dying out maiden name of his paternal grandmother; POTTER ~ a common surname in both muggle and wizarding Britain. It is believed the name in the wizarding world can be traced back to Linfred of Stinchcombe who was nicknamed ‘the Potterer’. However, there are also ancestors in the Potter family tree with the surname Matkari, which is Marathi for ‘pot maker’.

Nicknames: Prongs (within the Marauders); Jay (His parents call him this, despite all their talk of not wanting to give him an Indian name)

Age: 18

Birthday: 27th March

Sexuality: Tragically Heterosexual (but an enthusiastic ally to the LGBT community)

Relationship Status: Engaged

Positive Traits: Loyal; Intrepid; Resolute

Negative Traits: Callow; Self-sacrificing; Cocky

Patronus: A stag ~ It is the same as his animagus form, down to the markings.

Boggart: Lily wandless and cornered by Death Eaters

Wand Type: Mahogany and Unicorn tail, pliable

Occupation: Intern, International Magical Office of Law

Affiliation: Order of the Phoenix

Biography:

Fleamont and Euphemia Potter never thought they would have a child. Years of difficulties getting pregnant and multiple miscarriages and by the time they surpassed seventy, they had more or less given up. Even for wizards, children were rarely a possibility that late in life. They focused instead on their already flourishing careers, Fleamont in the potions industry and Euphemia as a defence lawyer. As such, the life James Fleamont Potter was born into and the way he was raised was pampered and spoiled and treated like his parents’ little miracle. Fleamont started to direct his company from home, slowly stepping further away until he sold the business completely. Euphemia kept on working, in her job as a defence lawyer, but was more choosy about the cases she took on. Both parents wanted to be home as much as possible with the child they never thought they would have.

The downside, for James, was a lack of friends his own age. The children of friends of his parents were all grown up. James passed his days pranking his dad and playing make-believe as he explored the land out the back of their house. He might not have had much in the way of friends, but when he came home at the end of the day he had dirty knees and a look of fresh-faced glee as he proudly displayed his new ‘broomstick’ to his parents ⁠— another large stick to add to the growing pile in their garden until on his sixth birthday he was given his own. From then, all games of make-believe were halted and flying was the only thing James wanted to do. It didn’t matter to him that his dad’s hip was too bad to fly with him and so there was nobody to pass a Quaffle around with. James flew and flew and he loved the feeling. He would tell anybody who would listen that he was going to be a top Quidditch player when he was older, just because he wanted to fly.

Hogwarts might have been a scary concept to some, leaving his parents for the first time and going to a place where he only knew the professors but James was just excited for the next adventure and the chance to explore a new place. Armed with his newly inherited Invisibility cloak, James boarded the Hogwarts Express, excited and absent of fear and immediately ran into another first year boy, a meeting that he would later consider history in the making. There wasn’t a friendship like that of James Potter and Sirius Black except, perhaps, the friendship of all four dormmates. The Marauders.

Where Remus kept disappearing to was a mystery James didn’t know how to let go but his reaction to finding out the truth was anticlimactic. A shrug and a well it doesn’t change anything, does it? and that was it for James. Except it wasn’t quite it because nothing ever was. He had grown up watching his mother defend the vulnerable in society and while there were things he was missing, young and naïve as he was, he knew he wanted to do whatever he could to change the world for Remus. Their lives had been opposite ends of the scale so far and James could see no justice in that. He made a vow to himself that as soon as they found a safe way to be there, Remus would spend no more Full Moons alone and that when he was old enough he would do everything he could to make life better for werewolves.

It was the start of a turning point, albeit one that would move slowly and gradually. Pranks were still the forefront of his priorities, followed closely by Quidditch, but he kept looking around and seeing injustice and it bothered him because he had no idea why. The look on Sirius’ face every time they boarded the train to go home for the holidays. Remus in the Hospital Wing after a bad Full Moon. The word Mudblood thrown around like a casual taunt. These were all things James couldn’t stand and he wanted to fix them all. He wanted to fix the sneers some of the Slytherins directed towards his friends for no good reason.   (He wanted to fix that Lily ⁠— beautiful, smart Lily ⁠— was friends with one of them and, to James, seemingly oblivious to the way he acted towards others with her parentage.)    He wanted to fix the fact that the summer between his third and fourth years was taken over by his mum going to trial against a Death Eater accusing their house-elf of killing someone. It wasn’t the first he had heard of Death Eaters but it was the first he had paid enough attention to the way his parents talked about them and really taken in what they wanted. It was just a passing comment by his dad, a scornful remark against the Dark Arts, but it stuck with James. For a boy who still tended to view the world in black and white, the Dark Arts became something that fell very much in the wrong.

Arrogant, bullying toerag. Words that rang through his mind the night before his Transfiguration OWL. The rest of his classmates were studying but James sat and re-evaluated his whole life.  (Not that he particularly needed to study for Transfiguration which was not only his best subject but the one he had spent the best part of three years doing extra studying so as to master the Animagus transformation.)  The Dark Arts were wrong and he had wanted to fix those sneers and fix the guilt inside him at all the hurt Remus had suffered from Snape’s discovery of his secret and somehow that had turned into bullying. James rankled at the word and his instinct was to defend himself but the truth was, Lily was right.   (Lily was always right. It was part of her charm.)   He had gone too far, turned into the one taking action before his victims had done anything.

In one night James’ dreams of playing Quidditch professionally seemed to have disappeared. His parents tried to ask, but James was unable to put into words what had changed. If he hadn’t wanted to, James knew he would never have to work. Family money could comfortably see him through to old age but with that money came privileges, even more than the ones attached to his blood status, as well as the potential for influence. How could he waste that away on pursuing a Quidditch career when there were people he could help? Again, Lily was right ⁠— the arrogance was outstanding.    (She really was the cleverest witch ever, possibly even more so than his mum).

The James Potter who went back to Hogwarts for his sixth year was like a new man. The growth spurt over the summer helped to solidify his newfound maturity. Quidditch had to be somewhat of a priority now that he had the captain’s badge on his chest but it was not the all-consuming obsession the school had grown to expect. He was more focused in classes, suddenly switched onto the idea that a natural intelligence might not help his ignorance about a lot of the world, and he started tutoring a few younger students in Transfiguration. There were still pranks and mischief, but they had adopted an air of being their last chance to be teenagers. Similarly, there were still Full Moons and late night excursions, even a Map to help them sneak around, but these too had changed for James. They were still about helping Remus, as they always would be, but he also kept half an eye on the Map for others potentially up to no good, so that he could stop anybody else getting hurt the way more and more muggleborns had been recently. And, when the Head Boy badge came with his seventh year booklist, less people were surprised than would have been a year earlier.

Nobody had really believed he was serious about dropping Quidditch after school until he turned down the scouts and applied for a job in the Ministry of Magic, within the Department of International Magical Law, where he hoped to one day be able to have an influence on laws governing human rights and equality. He was also amongst the first in line to sign up for the Order of the Phoenix. He might still be privileged and sheltered in comparison to his friends but James was desperate to do anything to help keep them safe.

[ammunitionist]

a small gift brings a little life to king company. 

or, ack ack finds a guitar- and hillbilly remembers how to play. 

ao3 here | full first chapter under the cut

Ack Ack honestly has no idea what it is for a good minute. 

He doesn’t bother to get up to check- never stand when you can sit- so the wooden thing leans, an odd little enigma, just in the peripheral of his sight for the better part of ten minutes. It’s definitely wood, he can tell from the hint of grain at a distance. The angle is just so that the neck looks uniform, that he can’t see the strings at all. It almost looks like a broom handle. 

It isn’t that Andy’s never seen a guitar. He’d had a friend in high school who played (just not very well) and guitars were common enough in small town New England. It wasn’t unusual to walk down the street at dusk and hear some old timer picking away at the instrument.

It’s funny to think back on himself, sixteen or so, thinking of anyone as elderly. With the new recruits popping up around him on the daily, he’s starting to feel like an old timer himself. 

Ack Ack tries to ignore the odd chunk of wood, get in another nap before sundown, but they’ve been eating good lately. Sleeping good, too. He simply has too much energy to let go of the curiosity. 

Without moving- never sit when you can lie down- he calls out to the man sitting closest to him, scribbling in a small book held in his left hand. 

“Hey, Sledge,” he asks genially, his hands resting behind his head. “What’s that wooden thing over in PX? I can’t see it all too well.”

Eugene looks up from his book almost too fast, glancing first at Andy and then leaning over to scrutinize the object of interest. Ack Ack stifles a small smile at how eager the mortarman is to please. 

“Hell, Skipper,” he says, blinking. “It’s a guitar.”

“Really?” Ack Ack says, almost embarrassed at his lack of observational skills. “Shit, I am getting old. I thought it was a broom.” Sledge laughs, because of course he does, but Andy’s already sitting up, looking directly at the handle of the thing. The neck, he recalls its specific name being. Slender and slightly curved, it looks out of place with the crudely made shipping crates stacked around the PX. 

“Is that all, sir?” Sledge asks. Andy barely acknowledges it, too occupied with the discovery. He nods, waving the younger man off with a hand and a vague ‘yes, Private’.

Hillbilly plays guitar. Ack Ack knows because he mentioned it once, and just once, but that’s the kind of information you store away for people you care about. Somewhere in the long list of things Andy knows about Eddie- a list riddled with question marks, smudges, and the not infrequent total censor- is the fact that he plays.

 He learned from his daddy, apparently. That was the kind of skill they handed down in the Jones family. Workin’, fightin’, n’ the guitar, Eddie had put it, the end of his cigarette a glowing ember in the darkness. He only really taught me th’ middle one. 

Andy hadn’t interrogated, but between that one night and the other things on his list about Eddie Jones, he’d figured out what that meant. 

Knowing Hillbilly played the guitar just- always did something to him, something strange. Not like giving him a hard-on, it was never the subject of a sexual fantasy, but some aspect of the idea of Hillbilly’s large, callused hands cradling the neck of an instrument was an image that stuck in his mind. Knowing a man like that could make music- enjoyed it, even- just pushed Eddie deeper into Ack Ack’s heart. 

Despite himself, Ack Ack slowly hauls himself to his feet, brushing sand from his palms on the nearly-compromised fabric of his dungarees. No one pays him much mind, just another man wandering towards PX. The Seabees had touched down about a week ago, so the postal exchange is more or less looted, but Ack Ack has no burning desire for candy bars or magazines. 

Still, when he gets there, he feigns interest in the dregs of merchandise. Back issues of Superman, a few melted Hershey’s chocolates, a copy of Sports Illustrated. If he beelines for the guitar, the corporal sitting in the corner will definitely upcharge him. Pocketing an extra few dollars was never above the Merchant Marines, and this young man- chubby, blonde, picking something out of his teeth with a Jap bayonet- looks like no exception. 

Finally making the wide, lazy half circle to the guitar, Andy feigns mild interest in it, tilting the head of the instrument towards his belt. Upon closer inspection, it’s practically beaten to pieces- the body has a fair few dents in it, and a concerning looking crack runs nearly the entire length of the neck. One of the tuning pegs had been replaced with a roofing nail at some point, poking out like an odd splinter at a not-quite right angle from the headstock. 

“You play?” The corporal asks lazily, examining a caught piece of food on the end of the bayonet with catlike self-satisfaction. 

“Me? No.” Andy shakes his head, letting the guitar back to rest against the crates. “One of my boys does, though.”

He almost smiles to himself when he refers to Hillbilly as one of his ‘boys’. It’s not unlike calling the White House a ‘big ol’ mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania’. 

“He any good?” the blond asks. Andy shrugs, pocketing his hands discreetly. He really has no idea if Hillbilly is any good, but it doesn’t matter much if he is or not. Ack Ack would pay out in spades to see him play even if he couldn’t sustain a single note.

Upon receiving no verbal answer, the corporal takes Andy’s silence as permission to keep chatting. He sighs and sets the bayonet down, kicking his feet up on the shoddy crates nearby. The containers creak ominously.

“That there belonged to Johnson. Buddy of a buddy, or somethin’.” 

Ack Ack glances at the corporal in mild interest, mostly playing along in favor of a discount. 

“Went lookin’ for some dead Japs to loot a couple nights ago.”

Andy figures what happened before the man finishes his thought, but that doesn’t stop him from clarifying. It’s with a sick glee that Ack Ack only sees in men that have never once seen a friend die in their lives. 

“Got blown to hell on a landmine. Skipper said to put the thing in the PX or use it as firewood.”

“Ah.” Ack Ack says, less keen on the conversation than he would be to sitting on a land crab in his skivvies. The corporal grunts in acquiescence.

He almost up and leaves the exchange there and then. What kind of earthly gift would a dead man’s guitar be? Hillbilly’d show no outward insult, likely feel none inward either. Ack Ack can’t begin to express in words the amount of gratitude he feels for Eddie’s tolerance. Still, he deserves better than this. 

But where else could he find a guitar in the whole of the Pacific?

“How much?” he asks succinctly, looking up from his boots. He hopes the curtness in his tone reminds the corporal of their ranks, of his decidedly upper hand. 

“Seven dollars.” The blond replies, eyes narrowing slightly. Andy has to stifle a scoff. 

“It’s not worth more than three, Corporal,” he sighs, nudging the body of the instrument with his boot. “Look at it. Beat to hell.”

“Six.”

“Four.”

“Deal.”

He leaves the postal exchange with the thing in hand, simultaneously lighter than it looks and much, much heavier. Sledge glances up at him with interest as he walks by, glancing between Ack Ack and the instrument. 

“You play, Skipper?” he calls out as Andy passes, heading deeper into K Company’s cluster of men. 

“No!” Ack Ack replies, a wry smile countering Eugene’s expression of confusion. 

Hillbilly never went far from King Company, but he also avoided its center. Ack Ack liked to think he prowled its perimeter like some kind of guard dog, keeping an eye on even the rowdiest of the unit. It’s a reliable kind of safekeeping, one that Andy has come to value more as they’ve moved further towards the mainland. Both for himself and his men, that protection is beyond invaluable. 

He’s smoking a cigarette up against some concrete rubble, the slowly setting sun dying his pale brown hair a burnt orange. Between the small ember at the end of his cigarette and the dying light, Hillbilly’s almost golden. 

Ack Ack sits down quietly in front of him, the slight sound of shifting rubble enough to garner a glance from his Lieutenant. His eyes catch on the guitar and linger, though, and Andy holds it out- an offering. 

“Where th’hell did y’ get that?” Eddie asks, sitting up to take the proffered instrument. Andy shrugs, pulling a crushed carton of cigarettes from his breast pocket. 

“PX.” he replies simply, biting one out of the package and lighting it with a quick turn of his wrist. 

Eddie turns the guitar over in his lap once, twice, three times, examining it. Andy watches mildly, his eyes catching on the neck of the guitar resting in the crook of Hillbilly’s palm. His stomach warms, just slightly, the sight of the slender thing in his lover’s hand like a hot cup of coffee on a cold morning. 

“How did y’ know I play?” Hillbilly asks again, tone slightly sotto with confusion. 

“You told me.” Ack Ack answers, mildly surprised that Hillbilly forgot. “A few months ago. Remember?” 

Eddie shakes his head vaguely, but his attention has already re-allocated to the instrument. He settles it in his lap, the curve in the hollow body fitting over his thigh. It’s a small guitar- that, or Hillbilly’s just bigger than the last person Andy saw holding one- but he still supports it comfortably. 

He runs his fingernails across the strings experimentally, and both of the men wince in tandem.

“Is it broken?” Ack Ack asks, momentarily worried that his gift is damaged beyond utility. Hillbilly snorts. 

“Nah,” he sighs, a wolfish smile cracking his face in half. Ack Ack has never quite seen him smile like that before. 

Unbothered, Eddie turns one of the pegs in the head, thumbing the top string in rapid succession. The tone wobbles slowly higher. 

“Jus’ outta tune. I think I can handle it.”

Andy smokes as Eddie coaxes the instrument into tune, slow going considering the state of it. It’s a pleasant experience, to hear the strings slowly come up to par, and the surprising gentleness with which Hillbilly tunes it brings up the warmth in Ack Ack’s belly to a low simmer. To watch his broad hands dance across the head, fiddling with the pegs, is certainly an odd sight for the middle of the Pacific Theater, but it’s one Andy more than welcomes. 

Finally, Hillbilly strums the guitar’s strings again, and even though the sound is unremarkable Eddie seems to find it satisfactory. 

“Does it play?” Andy asks, tapping his cigarette on a nearby block to ash it into the sand.

“Well, why don’ we find out?” Eddie grins. He adjusts his hand against the neck of the guitar and strums carefully, a gentle note ringing out from its body. Tension leaches from Andy’s shoulders immediately. Between artillery, rifle fire, and bodies hitting the dirt, it feels like the first soft sound Ack Ack’s heard in months.

“Oh,” he breathes, and Eddie glances up to meet his eyes. They both pause for a moment, holding the gaze, before another smile breaks Eddie’s face and they start laughing. The absurdity of it is captivating. A fucking guitar, here, in a warzone. A flimsy, breakable little thing that somehow made its way to them unbroken. It feels like watching a daisy bloom on the rim of a shell crater. 

“Shit, sir,” Eddie chuckles, broad shoulders shaking in amusement. “I didn’t think I’d be seein’ one of these for a long time yet.” 

Ack Ack has to grin. The sun had all but fully set in the time it had taken Eddie to tune the guitar, and the long shadows on his companion make the moment all the more absurd, a strangely stark figure against the rubble.  

Small fires have started up again throughout the camp. They dot the landscape like little flowers, flames blooming upward into the black sky. Ack Ack and Hillbilly have a favorite, one nearest the Captain’s tent, and relatively sequestered. Them, Haney, and a few select NCOs. It’s a good crowd, and none of them say anything if Hillbilly’s hand drifts a bit close to Ack Ack’s knee, or if Ack Ack’s head dips momentarily onto Hillbilly’s shoulder. They’re still careful, of course, but it’s good to know that a toe over the line goes unnoticed, for virtue of respect or some other unnamed force.

They get up in tandem and wander deeper into King Company, towards their fire ring of choice. Haney is sparking at some dry tinder just as they arrive, coaxing a small flame to life under the larger logs. He glances up as they settle in, eyes falling on the guitar in Hillbilly’s fist. 

“The Marine Corp,” he starts, sitting back with a grin. “Must practice leisure with the same fervency as the act of war.”

Hillbilly smiles at him, the exact same accommodating smile Ack Ack gives to the Gunny when he starts his tangents. Ack Ack settles back, shifting in his seat. 

“And in that leisure,” Haney continues, a wolfish grin splitting his weathered features, “Each Marine must be invested in his brother’s recreation as well as his own.”

Eddie nods, equal parts amused and obliging. Haney gestures at the instrument.

“Play us a goddamn tune, Jones.” 

Eddie adjusts the guitar in his lap, fingers hovering over the fretboard in hesitation. 

“I, uh, I ain’t played in a long while,” he starts, but Ack Ack nudges his side at the same time Haney gives him a genial wave of the hand. No one minds. Even bad music will be the first melody any of them have heard in months, other than the terrible raucous ballads that swell up among the men sometimes. Ack Ack tolerates those songs for the morale boost they are, but he never feels an impulse to sing along. 

Hillbilly arranges his fingers against the fretboard and strums quietly, picking up a lazy pattern. Ack Ack watches his nails hit against the strings, his strong fingers even further golden in the firelight than the dying sun. He has the same sheen as a bronze statue, like the ones Andrew had seen in the greens at Bowdoin.

Eddie swaps the chord, pausing for a moment in between. He swears under his breath, obviously frustrated with his apparent rustiness. 

In the protection of the shadow between their bodies, Andy presses a supportive knuckle into Eddie’s side, up underneath his jacket. 

His skin is warm to the touch. 

After a few minutes of fumbling around the frets (and growing gradually bolder), Hillbilly pauses, letting his arm fall from the guitar’s neck. He swipes the back of his hand across his nose discreetly, glancing around the circle to gauge his company’s apparent tolerance. Ack Ack follows his gaze, just to realize they’d accumulated somewhat of an audience. Five, maybe ten of the enlisted men from a nearby group had heard the quiet strumming and crept up on the edges of the firelight to listen. From where he sits, Andy can recognize Burgin and Shelton, meaning Sledge probably isn’t far. 

“Why don’t you fellas come and join us?” he calls genially, gesturing for the men to have a seat, instead of crouching in the semidarkness like a bunch of house cats. They start, with the guilty countenance of children caught in the cookie jar, but move into the light anyway.

“Instead of standing out there like a bunch of Peeping Toms, at least.” Andy murmurs, settling in subtly closer to Eddie. From what he knows of the men, they’re either dumb as a bag of rocks or queer themselves, so there should be no issue with their standard dance on the edge of obviousness. He knows Hillbilly probably isn’t happy with the added volume, but Ack Ack figures it won’t do any of them much harm for a little

entertainment. 

“Just play them one song and I’ll make ‘em leave,” he murmurs into Eddie’s neck, making it look like a subtle stretch on his part. “Promise.” 

Eddie sighs, shifting uncomfortably, but Andy knows that he’ll do it. He knows that Eddie will do anything when he asks like that. 

It makes his heart stutter a bit in his chest. 

The strings squeal faintly as Hillbilly leans back, tongue running over his teeth while he considers his options. “Any of you, uh, heard’a Midnight Special?” he asks tentatively. 

“I have,” Snafu interjects, drawing most eyes in the circle to him. His accent is deeper than Hillbilly’s, and his drawl makes his Is into long, lazy ‘ah’ sounds.

“Can’t sing, though.” he adds, picking something from his teeth. 

Someone snorts. Ack Ack’s pretty sure it’s Sledge. 

“Well,” Eddie sighs under his breath, nearly contemptuous, but he doesn’t finish the thought. Instead, the guitar starts up again, and everyone settles in a bit closer. The fact it’s music would probably interest most of them alone, but Andy has no doubt most of these men would pay real money to hear their very own Lieutenant Jones sing a ditty.

The introduction to the song lasts for a while, a simple and slightly jaunty chord progression, but right as Ack Ack is starting to think Eddie’s stalling he opens his mouth and he sings. 

His voice is nothing special. A gentle, sweet tenor, making up for lack of range with modesty. It’s about the voice expected of a man who played music as a child and fell off, being as his instrument of choice is not included in the provisions of a Marine. 

It may be nothing special to everyone else in the world, but to Andrew, it’s fucking magical. 

“Yonder comes Miss Rosie,” Eddie intones, over the soft notes of the guitar. “How in the world you know.” 

All at once, some otherworldly tiredness sinks into Ack Ack’s bones. 

It’s strange, though, to call it that. He had felt exhaustion before- Hell, almost every single day since their landing on Peleliu- but this is different. Hillbilly’s voice makes him want to rest, to tuck his head into the crook of Eddie’s shoulder and let his voice carry him away to gentle oblivion.

“Well, I know her by the apron,” Hillbilly carries on, a loud pop from the fire interjecting in the middle of the lyric. No one so much as jumps. They’ve all been through worse. “And that dress she wore.”

“What kind’a dress?” Someone calls, to quiet chuckles. Ack Ack smiles faintly. If there’s nothing else to be said for King Company’s crude banter, it’s at least endearing. 

“Umbrella on her shoulder, Piece’a paper in her hand.” Hillbilly sings. A couple men have joined their circle since the song began, ones apparently more familiar with the music the Lieutenant grew up on. Their voices join in slowly, crooning the ballad towards the smoke rising into the black sky. Andy doesn’t mind- with his proximity to his lover, Eddie’s voice easily overpowers the rest. 

A few more lines pass like that, slurring together in a pleasant melody in the Captain’s head. He has to fight to keep his eyes open, but he doesn’t struggle after fixing them on Eddie. 

His curls burn amber in the firelight, same as the angular plane of his cheek and just the barest corner of his jaw. With his eyes closed and lips parted, Hillbilly looks like a fucking fever dream of a man. 

“Let the Midnight Special,” They all sing at once, loud enough that Andy’s pulled from his momentary reverence. Even Snafu joins in, apparent vocal ineptitude nothing but another one of his little quips. 

“Shine her light on me.” 

Ack Ack watches the smoke from the fire carry sparks up towards the stars.

“Let the Midnight Special,” he joins in quietly, a second after realizing the lyric repeats.

“Shine her ever-lovin’ light on me.”

[commonplaceprojkelseyh]

Reflection!

Kelsey Harper

Professor Dr. Richards

(ENG-3298-01, WGS-3298-01, GBS-3298-01)

July 30th 2021

Individual CommonPlace Book & Reflection Paper

Feminism & Gender Equality

Did you know that eight out of the top ten countries have a larger female gender population compared to the male gender yet the percentage of women within the workforce was at 28% since 1959 up until 2020? That means for every 1 male, there are 7 females to that one male, making the population higher for women. It is sad to report considering I have been a part of that percentage since 2000.  To think that an entire race of extraordinary females for more than just one reason are not on the same working tier as man, even though woman represent a great deal larger within the population compared to men is astonishing. I know what you are thinking, it is due to our past ancestors that made the corporate world, “a man’s world” however, so much has changed in today's society to encourage women that they are just as equal to man in more than one way!

I, for one, grew up in a “both my parents work” home situation, which ultimately left my brother and I with a lot of babysitters. For many other people like me, that can be normal right? Well, what I didn’t know for the longest, was that my mom was working as a Merrill Lynch Financial Advisor managing over 500 million dollars in assets which ranks her in the top one half percent of all females and more importantly males in her industry. Ironically she has been doing this for over 34 years and the percentage of women who are at her level in the investment business has never moved past 15%. Making her one of only 200 other women in the entire industry at her level(which made her job an everyday event to consistently prove herself to the men around her.) She picked a career that was based on meritocracy, so there was very little subjectivity to her advancement. Basically, she was responsible for her own success, the harder she worked, the better she did. This inspired me at an early age because my mom never seemed to think that whatever she was searching for, shooting for or hoping for was unreachable. If anything it never even crossed her mind to not work as hard as she could to be within her industry and have the reputation she has built up to today. She has made it her mission to bring up other women to follow in her path. Okay, so you may ask well how does this even relate to our class? Well, part of the reason I was so interested in taking the class in the first place was the title, which is, “Woman’s Writing Worldwide”, which stood out to me because of the first word. It stood out because of that five letter & two syllable word that can make or break a human coming into the world. For others, within third world countries, like the ones we have been reading about, that word defined one from the jump and almost pre-decided that female's destiny. As much as I would like to say it is different in the United States, it is similar in the way that being a woman in today’s culture is a huge ever-growing adjustment because men are only making it harder for us to speak our truths and claim our spots within the working class. Trust me, I may sound like a hater on the male race, but I am eternally grateful to a lot of them for making me the person I am today, however if men truly understood woman, like we do them, the world would be a much fairer place because it is not a competition all the time like men tend to make it to be.

One person that spoke volumes to this exact subject was Meghan Markle, in her speech that specifically dealt with her first encounter with being a woman’s right advocate at the early age of 11. In that speech, she essentially told the audience that she was watching a TV show in grade school, when a commercial came on for a dish liquid with the tagline, “woman all around America are fighting greasy pots and pans,” when two boys in her class quickly said after that commercial, “yeah that is where women belong, in the kitchen.” She was so bothered with this that she wrote to the first lady, then Hilary Clinton, Linder Elerby, Gloria Albred and the soap manufacturer, Proctor and Gamble to change the tagline to, “people all over America are fighting pots and pans.” When in fact, a month later they in fact did change the tagline and opened the doorways for Markle to really understand the magnitude of her actions within this topic. She then goes on to even say that, “women need a seat at the table, they need an invitation to be seated there, and in some cases when a seat is unavailable then they have to make their own. It is said that girls with dreams become women with vision. May we empower each other to carry out such a vision because it is not enough to simply talk about equality and it is not enough to simply believe in it, one must work at it. Let us work at it together, starting now.” I absolutely loved her entire story because it really hit home for me who was mesmerized by her willingness to stand up and say something. Without that willingness from women such as her, women as an entire race will never have a seat at the table. I am thankful to her and for the blessed opportunity to come across that story which inspired me to start a club chapter of CHAARG(changing health, attitude, actions to recreate girls) to encourage women to speak their truths, focus on themselves and be inspired by the powerful woman around them to step up and not only prioritize their mental health & wellness but their eating, their exercise, their self care, their mental health and overall happiness.

Another important factor to add, is that it has been observed in women's fight for equality in the workforce,  that there are a lot of women that fall into the category of being a part of the “sandwich generation.” This generation of professional working women have been tasked with both caregiving for their children and their aging parents. This has caused breaks within their career paths and deferred promotions. This is particularly felt within the wealth gap of income disparity between men and women. Recently, I have noticed a corporate trend towards improving this disparity. Corporations are offering more flexible work hours to accommodate these “sandwich generation” working mothers.

One speaker that really spoke volumes to this exact subject was the Msimang TED talk, where she described a time in her life where she had something taken from her by the opposite gender and felt for the first time the extreme difference between a boy’s perspective and a girl’s perspective. A great quote from our actual syllabus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was, “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete. They make one story be the only story.” I enjoyed this quote because both the story by Msimang and the quote by Adichie, touch upon a common goal, equality in every form. Another element that really moved me within Msimang’s TED Talk was her inner passion for storytelling and really trying to capture what makes a good story. I also was really inspired by the TED Talk by Dalia Mogahed, a religious muslim that spoke heavily on the idea of Muslims within America. Although her topic wasn’t exactly about gender equality but more so about racism in general, she spoke about a time in her life when she felt embarrassed to not only be a muslim but also a female muslim. Her story about being scared for her life after the 9/11 attacks, was the first time in her life, she said, that she was afraid to be her true self. I felt for her in this way that I too, felt similar when walking down a city street by myself as a young adult female. Although the two are still very different, in the moment while watching her speak about her story, this was the first image that popped into my mind.

Most importantly, I enjoyed the TED Talk by Kavita Ramdas, with her extraordinary opener, which was: “ Given my TED profile, you might be expecting that I'm going to speak to you about the latest philanthropic trends -- the one that's currently got Wall Street and the World Bank buzzing -- how to invest in women, how to empower them, how to save them. Not me. I am interested in how women are saving us. They're saving us by redefining and re-imagining a future that defies and blurs accepted polarities, polarities we've taken for granted for a long time, like the ones between modernity and tradition, First World and Third World, oppression and opportunity.” This got me thinking more and more about gender equality as a whole and just how important and influential women are in society. Countries such as China, took a very long time to find this out, as many of new born baby girls were sold to the States for money because in their culture, “boys were the only ones that could work to bring the family up, girls are an embarrassment and are only here for one thing, reproduction.” However, after several years, they grew to know that they ended up needing more women because they were running out of women to bear children, hence the population drop in 2019 into 2020.

To combat that however, it has been proven through the last century that intellectually women are naturally more nurturing & emotionally smarter than men, just like the saying that “women develop maturity faster than men do”. So women tend to outshine men in industries such nursing.  However, men tend to rely more heavily on their physical strength in order to obtain certain jobs that are not typically where women fit into the picture such as construction and engineering. I, for one, have never viewed it like that because I have always believed that no matter the race or ethnicity, age, gender, religion, sexuality or financial standing, everyone deserves to work a job they love in any industry and that all judgement should be shoved out the window without reason.

In conclusion, I believe in the strength of women as a whole race to be able to one day never have to speak of women's rights. I envision a time within my life that women will have a seat at the table, they will be heard, understood and most importantly treated equal to men. I believe it starts with women empowering other women first and then men following that trend.

[jadelotusflower]

November Roundup

Some writing success this month - I finished and posted a new chapter for Against the Dying of the Light, and made progress on The Lady of the Lake and Turn Your Face to the Sun. I didn’t work much on my novel, but I did do some editing on the first third so that’s progress.

Words written this month: 6647

Total this year: 67,514

November books

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo - joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize (with The Testaments by Margaret Atwood) this was an engrossing and interesting read. Stylistically unusual formatting and scant use of punctuation that is a bit jarring at first, but you quickly adapt as you read. There’s no plot as such - instead the story is formed by vignettes of twelve black women and their disparate yet interconnected lives. We have mothers and daughters, close friends, teachers and students, although the connections aren’t always obvious at first - we can be exposed to a character briefly in the story of another with no idea that she will be a focus later on. It’s very skillfully done, to the point whereupon finishing I wanted immediately to re-read (but alas, it was already overdue back to the library). There is so much ground covered that we are really only given a glimpse into the characters lives, but there is a diversity of intergenerational perspectives of the African diaspora in the UK, and I highly recommend.

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett - after finishing The Pillars of the Earth I had intended to read the sequel, but this was available on the library shelf and I had to place a hold on World Without End, so the prequel came first. Set sixty years before the Conquest (150 before Pillars) it primarily addresses the growth of the hamlet of Dreng’s Ferry into the town of Kingsbridge, through the lives of a monk with a strong moral code, a clever and beautiful noblewoman, and a skilled builder, working against the machinations of an evil bishop. Sound familiar? This is Follet’s most recent work, and I do wonder if he’s running out of ideas as this covers very similar thematic ground.

Ragna is a compelling female character, but once again the romance-that-cannot-be with Edgar is tepid, Aldred is a very watered down version of Prior Philip, and there’s no grand framing device such as building the cathedral to really tie to all together (although things do Get Built, and it’s interesting but not on the level of Pillars). This is the tail end of the Dark Ages and it shows - Viking raids, slavery, infanticide - and while it seems Follett’s style is to put his characters through much tragedy and tribulation before their happy ending, I wish writers would stop going to the rape well so readily. But at least the sexual violence isn’t as...lasciviously written as in Pillars? Scant praise, I know. But Follett’s strength in drawing the reader into the world and time period is on display, made even more interesting in this era about which we know very little.

Women and Leadership by Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala - I have a great deal of respect for Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister who was treated utterly shamefully during her tenure and never got the credit she deserved, perhaps excepting the reaction to her iconic “misogny speech” whichyou can enjoy in full here:

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was the first woman to be Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs in Nigeria, was also the former Managing Director of the World Bank, and currently a candidate for Director-General of the WTO.

This is an interesting examination of women in leadership roles, comparing and contrasting the lives and experiences of a select few including (those I found the most interesting) Ellen Sirleaf, the first female President of Liberia, Joyce Banda, the first female President of Malawi, New Zealand’s current Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and of course, Gillard and Okonjo-Iweala themselves.

November shows/movies

The Vow and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult - I’ve been following the NXIVM case for a while now, when the news broke in 2017 I was surprised and intrigued that it involved actresses from some of my fandom interests - Alison Mack (Smallville), Grace Park and Nikki Clyne (Battlestar Galactica), and Bonnie Piasse (Star Wars). Uncovered: Escaping NXIVM is an excellent podcast from that point in time that’s well worth a listen. There’s been a lot of discussion comparing these two documentaries and which one is better, but I feel they’re both worthwhile.

The Vow gives a primer of NXIVM as a predatory “self improvement” pyramid scheme/cult run by human garbage Keith Reniere, from the perspective of former members turned whistleblowers Bonnie Piasse, who first suspected things were wrong, her husband Mark Vicente who was high up in the organisation, and Sarah Edmondson who was a member of DOS, the secret group within NXIVM that involved branding and sex trafficking. Seduced gives more insight into the depravity and criminality of DOS from the pov of India Oxenburg, just 19 when she joined the group and who became Alison Mack’s “slave” in DOS - she was required to give monthly “collateral” in the form of explicit photographs or incriminating information about herself or her family, had to ask Mack’s permission before eating anything (only 500 calories allowed per day), was ordered to have sex with Reniere, and other horrific treatment - Mack herself was slave to Reniere (as was Nikki Clyne) and there were even more horrific crimes including rape and imprisonments of underage girls.

Of course each show has an interest in portraying its subjects as less culpable than perhaps they were (there were people above and below them all in the pyramid after all) - Vicente and Edmondson in The Vow and Oxenburg in Seduced, but what I did appreciate about Seduced was the multiple experts to explain how and why people were indoctrinated into this cult, and why it was so difficult to break free from it. This is a story of victims who were also victimisers and all the complications that come along with that, although I’m not sure any of these people are in the place yet to really reckon with what happened and all need a lot of therapy.

Focusing on individual journeys also narrows the scope - there are other NXIVM members interviewed I would have liked to have heard a lot more from. There is also a lot of jumping back and forth in time in both docos so the timeline is never quite clear unless you do further research. I would actually like to see another documentary one day a bit further removed from events dealing with the whole thing from start to finish from a neutral perspective. The good news is that Reniere was recently sentenced to 120 years in prison so he can rot.

I saw value in both, but you’re only going to watch one of these, I would say go for Seduced - if you’re interested in as much information as possible, watch The Vow first to get a primer on all the main players and then Seduced for the full(er) story.

The Crown (season 4) - While I love absolutely everything Olivia Coleman does, I thought it took a while for her to settle in as the Queen last season and it’s almost sad that she really nailed it this season, just in time for the next cast changeover (but I also love everything Imelda Staunton does so...) This may be an unpopular opinion, but I wasn’t completely sold on Gillian Anderson as Thatcher - yes I know she sounded somewhat Like That, but for me the performance was a little too...affected? (and someone get her a cough drop, please!) 

It is also an almost sympathetic portrayal of Thatcher - even though it does demonstrate her classism and internalised misogyny, it doesn’t really explore the full impact of Thatcherism, why she was such a polarising figure to the extent that some would react like this to her death:

But I suppose it’s called The Crown, not The PM.

Emma Corrin is wonderful as Diana, and boy do they take no prisoners with Charles (or the other male spawn). I was actually surprised at how terrible they made Charles seem rather than both sidesing it as I had expected (but perhaps that’s being saved for season 5). It does hammer home just how young Diana was when they were married (19 to Charles’ 32), how incompatible they were and the toxicity of their marriage (standard disclaimer yes it’s all fictionalised blah blah). The performances are exceptional across the board - Tobias Menzies and Josh O’Conner were also standouts and it’s a shame to see them go.

I was however disappointed to see that the episode covering Charles and Di’s tour of Australia was not only called “Terra Nullius” but the term was used as a very tone deaf metephor that modern Australia was no longer “nobody’s land/country”. For those who aren’t aware, terra nullius was the disgraceful legal justification for British invasion/colonisation of Australia despite the fact that the Indigenous people had inhabited the continent for 50,000 years or more. While the tour was pre-Mabo (the decision that overturned the doctrine of terra nullius and acknowledged native title), there was no need to use this to make the point, especially when there was no mention at all of the true meaning/implication of the term.

The Spanish Princess (season 2, episodes 4-8)- Sigh. I guess I’m more annoyed at the squandered potential of this show, since the purpose ostensibly was to focus on the time before The Great Matter and give Katherine “her due” - and instead they went and made her the most unsympathetic, unlikeable character in the whole damn show. (Spoilers) She literally rips Bessie Blount’s baby from her body and, heedless to a mother’s pleas to hold her child, runs off to Henry so she can present him with “a son”. I mean, what the actual fuck?

I’m not a stickler for historical accuracy so long as it’s accurate to the spirit of history (The Tudors had its flaws, but it threaded this needle most of the time), but this Katherine isn’t even a shadow of her historical figure - she’s not a troubled heroine, she’s cruel and vindictive, Margaret Pole is a sanctimonious prig, and Margaret Tudor does little but sneer and shout - the only one who comes out unscathed is Mary Tudor (the elder), and it’s only because she’s barely in it at all. It’s a shame because I like all of these actresses (especially Georgie Henley and Laura Carmichael) but they are just given dreck to work with.

This is not an issue with flawed characters, it’s the bizarre presentation of these characters that seems to want to be girl power rah rah, and yet at the same time feels utterly misogynistic by pitting the women against each other or making them spiteful, stupid, or crazy for The Drama. I realise this is based on Gregory so par for the course, but it feels particularly egregious here. (Spoilers) At one point Margaret Pole is banished from court by Henry, and because Katherine won’t help her (because she cant!) she decides to spill the beans about Katherine’s non-virginity. Yes, her revenge against the hated Tudors is...to give Henry exactly what he wants? Even though it will result in young Mary, who she loves and cares for, being disinherited? Girlboss!

This season also missed the opportunity to build on its predecessors The White Queen/Princess and show why it was so important to Henry to have a male heir - the Tudor reign wasn’t built on the firmest foundations and so needed uncontested transfer of power, at the time there was historic precedent that passing the throne to a daughter led to Anarchy, and wars of succession were very recent in everyone’s memory. At least no one was bleating about The Curse this time, which is actually kind of surprising, because the point of the stupid curse is the Tudor dynasty drama.

But it’s not all terrible. Lina and Oviedo are the best part of the show, and (spoilers) thankfully make it out alive. Both are a delight to watch and I wish the show had been just about them.

Oh well. One day maybe we’ll get the Katherine of Aragon show we deserve - at least I can say that the costumes were pretty, small consolation though it is.

[streetsavoir-faire]

Born Name: Damien Quincy Rodriguez 

Age: 22

Birthday: May 26th 1998

Overview:

Mother: Catalina Rodriguez (39 February 19th, 1981)

Father(s): Michael Rodriguez (41 April 24th, 1979) Richard “Einstein” Jones (50), Fagin Jones (47)

Mother’s Occupation: Unemployed, Student

Father’s Occupation: Fast Food worker, mechanic, Odd-jobs in a diverse field. Warehouse work, delivery, MLM’s, production, etc.

Family Finances: Lower Class, Skirting Poverty

Other Close Family: Francis “Frankie” Corbyn (41) - ‘Uncle’,  Ignacio Alonso Julio Federico De Tito (24) - Big Brother, Oliver Saluki-Sykes (20) - Little Brother, Rita Saluki-Sykes (29) - Sister,

Pets: Dorothy - Redish/pink betta Fish, Tiny - Tito’s Rottweiler/Pitbull Mix

Home Life During Childhood: Before he was found and taken in by Fagin? Horrible. Dodger suffered abuse from parents who were far too young and immature to have children. They didn’t want a kid, and they made that very clear to Dodger from the very moment they brought him home. He was never shown love or compassion from his mother or father. He was barely taken care of and owned one toy in his five or so years of living with them. He suffered emotional and physical abuse and spent many nights on the streets, unsupervised. Often, he was locked out of his house for ‘misbehavior’. Eventually Dodger just decided to stay out there and spent his nights under a bridge before eventually Fagin took notice of him and eventually gained his trust and brought him home.

After Fagin, his childhood was still a little troubled. Their family was poor, and often struggled to find money for food, luxuries or heat. Even struggling, Dodger much preferred his found family as he got to learn what it was like to have people that loved him. Even with debt collectors, facing abuse from the Sykes’ and occasionally needing to eat small inconsistent meals, or cuddle up together instead of having heat in the house. He wouldn’t trade it for the world.

What Did His or Her Bedroom Look Like: When Dodger moved in with Fagin he quickly took over the apartment’s storage loft and claimed it as his own. While it was dangerous (there was no barrier to stop anyone from falling back into the living room below) and a little drafty (there was also a nifty hole that gave him access to the roof) - it was home for Dodger. With a mattress tucked up into the corner and the rickety ladder to get up and down (that he himself rarely used), it was perfect for Dodger. Sure - it wasn’t all the spacious or child-friendly but... it was his favorite.

Any Sports or Clubs: Dodger didn’t go to school - and therefore he didn’t participate in any clubs or organized sports. Instead he went with Frankie to his theater group, spent time reading with Einstein & Fagin or scaled buildings and played made up sports with Tito.

Favorite Toy or Game: Dodger’s favorite toy (and something he still cherishes to this day) was a small teddy bear that Fagin got him the first night he came home. It’s over a decade (closer to two) old and is worn beyond relief, but Dodger still keeps it in his bedroom. As a child he carried it everywhere and was incredibly protective of it. It has plenty of tears and stitches that Fagin fixed himself - but Dodger loves it all the same.

Schooling: Again, Dodger didn’t go to school. He left his home before he would have been enrolled and while Fagin and Einstein tried to get him into school, Dodger simply couldn’t handle the hours away from his new family, nor could he deal with how overwhelming the whole concept was. So instead, they all did their part homeschooling himself and Tito over the years. He’s got plenty of street smarts and owes everything else he knows to Fagin, Einstein and Frankie.

Favorite Subject: Reading with Fagin & Einstein. (And reading plays with Frankie since he was so dramatic)

Popular or Loner: Popular  (not in school obvs)

Nationality: American

Religion and beliefs: None

Physical Appearance

Face Claim: Tyler Posey

Movie/Era Representation: Alone 

Complexion: Smooth, olive skinned, freckled

Hair Colour: Naturally Black / Currently Dyed Blue

Eye Colour: Brown

Height: 5′10

Weight: 153.4lbs.

Build: Athletic/Slim

Tattoos: A very large and ever growing collection --> See here

Piercings: 14mm Gauges in ears, nose piercing, snake-bites (re-pierced), eyebrow piercing (re-pierced)

Common Hairstyle: Typically sweptback, sometimes a mess when he wears a hat or beanie, usually tries to keep it semi-long, swept to the side (x is a common look)

Clothing Style: Casual street wear. Ratty jeans, ripped jeans, dirty jeans. T-shirts, muscle tanks, sweatshirts. Backwards hats or beanies. Worn black and white converse. Nothing fancy. You’ll tend to see a red bandana somewhere on his person. Sometimes he wears it around his head, sometimes around his neck, occasionally tucked into a pocket or around his wrist. But it’s always somewhere.

Mannerisms: Likes to drum his fingers or drum on things in general, also a knuckle cracker. Tends to move a lot because he’s high energy.

Usual Expression: Smiley babe

Health

Overall (do they get sick easily)?: Yes. A combination of terrible care to himself and drugs makes Dodger extremely susceptible to getting sick. He’s a perfect picture of what not to do health-wise and it shows.

Physical Ailments: Mildly Anemic,

Disorders: None

Neurological Conditions: None.

Allergies: Latex, mangos, cats,

Grooming Habits: He showers, unlike most #men he is not a 3-in-1 kind of guy, so he knows how to use separate body wash, shampoo and conditioner. He’ll wash his face every morning & every night and brush his hair and shit but he’s not over the top. Shaves if his facial hair gets longer than a mild scruff. Keeps the boys tame.

Sleeping Habits: Inconsistent. Dodger has no real sleep schedule, but he tends to sleep just about anywhere when he needs to. He’s the least picky about how he sleeps and falls asleep easy.

Eating Habits: Uh, he eats. Sometimes. Some days it’s eating for a village, some he skips for a day and is like ‘oh yeah oops.’ It depends. So I’d call this inconsistent as well.

Exercise Habits: He’s always exercising just by association. He walks/runs everywhere and climbs shit and is doing his free running/parkour all over Swynlake.

Emotional Stability: Fair. He tends to stay cool and tries to be the mediator when it comes to trouble. Dodger tends to be the one who keeps it together and stays calm when they’re in a situation. The relief, really. However when he does slip, he can get emotional quickly. Fun-fact: Dodger never yells. He may say things firmly, angrily, etc but he won’t yell.

Body Temperature: Runs warm.

Sociability: A social butterfly.

Addictions: Drugs (weed, alcohol, pills, etc).

Drug Use: Daily, addicted. The hard stuff isn’t daily (weed is... multiple times a day), but more every few days, once a week.

Alcohol Use: Often.

Your Character’s Character:

Bad Habits: Drugs. Drumming on objects or idly, cracking his knuckles, zoning out mid-conversation, scratching the back of his neck, smoking, manipulating people.

Good Habits: Loyalty, offering his help, extending manners, being kind.

Best Characteristic: Openness.

Worst Characteristic: Pride

Worst Memory: Being beaten within an inch of his life & having to leave his family and home behind and flee the country.

Best Memory: Being officially adopted as Fagin & Einstein’s son.

Proud of: Holding his job at the garage. Getting his gig at Pixie’s. Still being in a relationship (new record).

Embarrassed by: His inability to get his music off the ground, how he’s still in the same place in life when everyone else seems to be getting somewhere or doing things.

Driving Style: Does not drive.

Strong Points: His passion and drive. His ability to bring things and people together.

Temperament: Carefree and easy going.

Attitude: Optimistic & outgoing.

Weakness: Coming off as too confident, cocky.

Fears:  Being abandoned/being alone again, his family getting hurt or dying.

Phobias:  Being abandoned.

Secrets:  An open book. Perhaps the one secret he has is knowing that Roscoe abused Oliver.

Regrets: Going to William Sykes and trying to buy them time to pay back their loan.

Feels Vulnerable When: He’s with his parents.

Pet Peeves: People who brag about their money. Charities, but not charity. 

Conflicts: Having money in the family. Having Roscoe married to Rita when he fucking hates him but wants Rita to be happy.

Motivation: Support for Fagin & Einstein/to make them proud.

Short Term Goals and Hopes: To start picking up more gigs and getting music off the ground.

Long Term Goals and Hopes: To be able to fully financially support himself and the fam through his music and that he can quit his real job and do what he loves.

Sexuality: Pansexual

Exercise Routine: Running all around Swynlake like a crazy man.

Day or Night Person: Night - that’s when the action is.

Introvert or Extrovert: Extrovert

Optimist or Pessimist: Optimist

Likes and Styles:

Music: Punk Rock, Rock, Alternative,

Books: Any book that Fagin & Einstein used to read him

Magazines: Playboy (lol)

Foods: Quesadillas

Drinks: Coke, whiskey, vodka, rum, Gatorade,

Animals: Any are cool

Sports: The made up ones he’d play with Tito, Free running,

Social Issues: Domestic Abuse, Child Abuse, Women’s Rights, Magick Rights,

Favorite Saying:  Absotively Posilutely

Color: Red

Clothing: Jeans, T-shirts.

Jewelry: Gauges, lip rings, nose ring, eyebrow stud.

Games: Poker, Rummy, Uno,

Websites: Not a huge internet person (because he didn’t grow up into it like most kids his age). He uses Twitter a lot though. Youtube just to watch things. Used to use the ‘Hub’ quite a bit ;)

TV Shows: Doesn’t really watch TV, but when they could pay for cable, anything ridiculous. He was a fan of the Crocodile Hunter if only because Tito and himself would mimic that show and get into so much trouble.

Movies: Again, he’s not really well versed in movies but.. I’m sure he was into shit he wasn’t supposed to watch when he could get ahold of them. Fight Club, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, etc.

Greatest Want: To be happy & with his family.

Greatest Need: Affection.

Where and How Does Your Character Live Now:

Home: Dodger now lives in Benbow (2D) and honestly his biggest complaint is simply being on the second floor. He would much prefer an apartment he has to climb higher to break into (since who uses the door?). However, he doesn’t like the apartment nearly as much as he loved the old rickety apartment they lived in back home. He misses his loft and all the weird things that made it perfect. This apartment isn’t terrible - sure, the door sticks something fierce and it’s a little cramped for five people but... it’s fine. And the neighbors aren’t the worst, it’s just... never felt right. It’s still home, if only because home is determined by the people living there more than the place itself.

Household furnishings: A mish-mash of things. Nothing in the Jones household is a set. It’s all second-hand or used items that they got when they could and when they could afford to. That means everything from the tables and chairs don’t really.. match like they might in a normal household, but none of them really mind. They’re just grateful to have them in the first place.

Favorite Possession: The bear Fagin got him when he first came home.

Most Cherished Possessions: The bear Fagin got him when he first came home (shocker) - though a worn red bandana that he took from Fagin also comes in close second. He’s almost always wearing it somewhere. Also the stuffed Reindeer from his first Christmas. The beat up guitar that the whole gang pulled together to get him.

Neighborhood: Benbow

Town or City Name: Swynlake

Relationship with Family: Great! Dodger is incredibly close with his found family. He would lay his life on the line or do anything for all of them. He’s closest to Fagin, but only because that man gave him everything in life he’s ever needed when no one else would. He loves his family so much though. Even if he annoys the absolute piss out of Frankie & Rita, he couldn’t be happier.

Car: Doesn’t have one

Career: Part-Time Mechanic, Part-Time Musician, Part-Time Con-artist/thief

Dream Career: Musician

Dream Life: Happy & can provide and take care of his family so they don’t have to work so hard anymore.

Love Life: Peri

Talents or Skills: Singing, Guitar, Percussion, Piano - musical talent in mostly all forms, athletic ability/balance, can juggle, sleight of hand, pitch perfect.

Intelligence Level: Street smart, book....slightly smart.

Finances: Poor as fuck

Past Careers: Full time thief, part time street performer, odd jobs,

Past Lovers: ‘Lovers’, none really. The closest he had was a toxic first ‘boyfriend’, Corey but it didn’t last long.