#which is probably why Lynn fucked it up

[pinkrangerv]

Also, being totally honest, it kind of highlights exactly how much KARONE was robbed of.

This guy was a pathetic dickweasel. But he managed to finesse his way into power, and his bullshit meant that when Ecliptor rescued (or bought) Karone, Ecliptor had no way to return her to her parents. So Karone was forced to be a child soldier.

Ecliptor didn't want that. Karone didn't. You can SEE the effects of it--when Dark Spectre goes down? Everyone IMMEDIATELY decides Karone is the unquestioned queen. And that means she and Ecliptor, and a fuck-ton of other people, were planning this in the background. Coups don't happen overnight, and that kind of near-universal support? Dark Specter fucked over everyone, but Karone also personally won the loyalty of a hell of a lot of people--that's why we saw her giving speeches to Quantrons, or rescuing civilians. She's a damn good leader.

And she's a fucking QUEEN. So you know who should've gotten to kill Dark Spectre?

Karone. Not Darkonda. Karone not just deserved it, that was the clearest way to legitimize her claim, and it was something that would have stabilized her entire nation by making her untouchable.

Because Karone, the competent and compassionate (if cranky, and willing to kick Elgar's ass repeatedly) leader, should have gotten to straight-up murder the useless wannabe genocidal tyrant.

On a meta level, this is probably to 'preserve Karone's goodness', but honestly? Judd Lynn did not know how to give Karone the complexity he'd started with. Karone wasn't 'good' or 'evil'. Karone was a princess\general of a NATION. She did horrible things, because rulers do horrible things; she did good things, because rulers do good things. That complexity was part of her character, and Lynn fucking butchered it.

Once again I am challenging Judd Lynn to baseball bats at dawn.

Totally empathize with people who want the comics to show Dark Specter as a powerful enemy in battle (especially after how long they’ve been building him up) but in a way the show introducing Dark Specter as a larger scope villain just for him to actually be super pathetic and taken out by his own followers turning on him makes him more memorable than another run of the mill SUPER REALITY-ENDING THREAT 

[kiwimetry]

Casket of Souls review: Stressful.

I think it’s really funny though that they make Thero save Illia and then he passes out, but we don't find out about how they handle the remaining dozens of bottles. Like, I'm assuming Thero and Valerius team up to figure out which souls go with which sleeping patients, and Thero casts his magic circles to save as many as possible, or instructs other wizards on how to help, and we simply don't see it. But also, what if actually there was a time crunch and all those people died because Thero used up his energy to immediately save Illia?

[johnnyutah]

average adam faulkner stanheight fan: if adam isn’t in saw xi we riot! @lionsgate @kevingruetert @jameswan #adamlives #justiceforadam #corpseinconsistencies

average john kramer fan: What people don’t realize about John, is he’s such a genius that even when he makes mistakes, he planned on making the mistakes. He is the greatest villain of all time

average jill tuck fan: Appreciation post for the Women of Saw 🩷 [the same ten photos that get posted once a week]

average lawrence gordon fan: last night i watched a 2004 tv movie about serial killers called ‘the riverman’, followed by the cheesy family rom-com ‘a castle for christmas’. today my friends and i are going to binge the entire third season of netflix’s ‘stranger things’. none of us have seen a single episode of the rest of the show and we don’t plan on it. then we might rewatch ‘another country’ together

average amanda young fan: sorry i haven’t been online in 4 weeks i’ve been too busy trying to get the new pig cosmetic in the rift [posted 7 weeks ago]

average mark hoffman fan: [underneath a gifset of costas mandylor in a republican christian propaganda ‘sci-fi’ movie] #hes so fucking hot #i would give anything to put him in a sports bra and make him do jumping jacks in front pf me i would literally do #ANYTHING #i need to make him into a marionett and fist him lol

average daniel rigg fan: Here’s a quick low effort doodle I did of Daniel! I just love him so much ❤️ [a literal masterpiece, the best art you’ve ever seen in your entire life] [3 notes]

average allison kerry fan: i am hardcore attached to ONE ship which is probably either allison/amanda or allison/lindsey and my whole blog is devoted to them. there are dozens of us DOZENS

average lynn denlon fan: okay so i know bahar is a realtor now but in her last instagram post where she’s congratulating her son on some new achievement, both the first and last words in the post have 11 letters, AND there’s an X and an I visible in the background of her post 👀?? is this a reach???

average jeff denlon fan: No seriously let me finish seriously when you compare him to the other shitty men in Saw he’s NOT that b

average david tapp fan: i’m 39k away from publishing my 40k tappsing Everybody Lives AU <3 this is going to be epic [account has been deactivated for an indeterminate amount of time]

average brit stevenson and mallick scott fan: Hey I stayed up making this instead of writing my thesis paper for grad school. Here’s a 30,000 word document about the implications of Brit’s promotion within the Marshford group and how it would lead to her eventual demise and also how she rose to the top in her group. It also delves into her relationship with Mallick, whose existence, I believe, is an obvious literary reference to an ancient Roman play read by only me and three other people currently alive. I translated relevant passages and included them in my work. I got understimulated around page 8 so I did take a break to pierce myself in the same spot that I believe Mallick would have a piercing. If you read my fics on AO3 you will already be familiar with the location.

average peter strahm fan: haha peter does CRACK cocoaine haha i think he sniffeds some drugs! why else would he be so MANIC HYPER CRAZY!!! i love my crazy JUNKIE man LOL get him some andderall STAT!! if hoffman didn’t kill him the SPEED certianly would of! LOL!

average lindsey perez fan: i love lindsey perez i’m such a big fan of the character lindsey perez

average matt gibson fan: i literally would eat garbage out of a dumpster

average ezekiel banks fan: holy shit i just finished spiral what a good movie what the hell!!! what a cool addition to the saw universe! i bet everybody else loves this as much as i do! let me take a big drink of water as i check tumblr dot com to see all the nice things people will have to say about darren lynn bousman’s Spiral

average william schenk fan: my hobbies include: being a fujoshi,

average cecelia pederson fan: [pic of cecelia yanking on the metal loop around her neck and smirking] https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT3f5IIzt5PG-M7G9_Z-gjY4gZaiUneTdMlYrFAcdBGcJo0-N-RDQcj2JfxOaBTxKa6J_DiDQNgqVpg/pub

average logan jigsaw fan: What people don’t realize about John, is he’s such a genius that even when he makes mistakes, he planned on making the mistakes. He is the greatest villain of all time

[ratgrinders]

HIII i’m also a rat grinders fan in the “not interested in pretending they aren’t fucked up” but rather “interested in Why they are so fucked up” way 💥💥💥 i have Thoughts on how the shatterstar ritual affected the rat grinders in different ways and i wanted to know if u had any similar thoughts :3 - @teenagerebellion

THIS IS SUCH A GOOD ASK thank you for sending it!!!!!!!!

Ok so I AM gonna be working off the assumption that a rage crystal functions less like "mind control" and more so amplifying existing feelings to murderous extremes. Think Adaine in the mall fight when she's asked to picture "what would the world look like if all Adaine thought about was rage" and we see a destroyed Sylvaire from Adaine's search for her mother. We know that Adaine would never do that, but we see the underlying motivation is the same.

Off the bat we know Kipperlilly's ritual is different from the others since she chose to do it "willingly" and wasn't forced to choose via death (it's described as having no scar, unlike the others, so she may have not even had to die at all). That doesn't mean though that she wasn't infected with a rage that caused her to do things she never would've done normally, as I don't think Freshman Year Kipperlilly, whose biggest grievances were "I think Aguefort likes them more", would jump to coldblooded murder. I think the fact that Kipperlilly chose the shatterstar affects her mindset pretty greatly going in to rest of the year, because there's no easy way to differentiate between what's "her" and what's the rage star. She probably is constantly thinking things like "This is all me. I am in control of my own faculties. There was no coercion involved I'm just naturally a villain", partially because she doesn't want to admit that she, a mastermind, let herself get controlled like that. Essentially, the ritual itself was so seamless and the descent so gradual, I don't think even Kipperlilly has a strong sense anymore of who she is without rage.

Ruben we know canonically has a bit of amnesia after being revived, not even seeming to remember the entire year he was shatterstarred. Ruben basically has the opposite problem from Kipperlilly, where his change in identity post-shatterstar is so drastic that his sense of self is almost completely eroded, because "how could I have been motivated to become someone like that?". Ruben's not a naturally angry person, but still though, that WAS Ruben, the rage star just tapping in to Ruben's underlying desperate need for approval, emotionality, etc. and bringing it to the forefront. The rage star imbued Ruben with such an intense pain and rage that he felt he could only express it through his music. Post finale revival I think was Ruben just being in shock at how much he's changed, but I think the memories will come back to him and he'll have to reconcile these two Vastly Different versions of himself.

Ivy I believe was still kind of a mean girl before the shatter star, the shatter star just made it more likely for her to say it to people's faces rather than behind their backs. Honestly, I'm imagining her maybe as a young Sandra Lynn before, in the sense of both having this constant bemusement. Beyond that, though, I think Ivy may have been the most likely to take the rage star willingly as opposed to being killed for it (I actually think most of the Rat Grinders still could've been persuaded to take it willingly, but that's a post for another time). Ivy seems to have a lot of pent up rage and disdain for the world around her, and the shatter star only amplified that.

Oisin got buff after getting shatterstarred, which is a really funny canonical fact to think about lmao, because I'm just imagining him doing a bunch of angry push-ups or something. Anyways Oisin before the ritual I'm honestly imagining him to be the type to hang out with guys like Skrank and Shellford, aka those kind of nerdy unpopular guys who nonetheless are still kind of egotistical and little dicks sometimes. (This is actually why I think they were the ones playing pong at the party with Oisin, because they were actually kind of friends before.) Just like Ivy, the rage crystal just gave Oisin more of an excuse to externalize his rage at the world, but I think the main thing it did was just give Oisin a little more self-confidence because now he has all this power backing him up.

Mary Ann was EXACTLY the same before and after the ritual, it was actually a little disconcerting to Jace and Porter and they didn't know what to make of it. The main thing for Mary Ann, I think, is that she really doesn't have much of an emotional stake in the rage ritual, or the beef with the bad kids, or anything like that. She's just Entirely Indifferent to whatever atrocities are being committed, which is just a different type of fucked up lol. Honestly, I think as a barbarian Mary Ann's a bit more used to controlling her rage which is why the rage crystal might've had less of an effect, Lydia Barkrock style.

Buddy's death was so sudden and traumatic, with such a short amount of time to get used to the implications before the finale, I think Buddy's mind is just in a tailspin post-ritual just trying to grab on to anything that makes sense lol. He knows worship and devotion, its been a crutch in his life for so long, and that's what he defaults to when he can no longer reach Helio. In fact it almost seems a bit like a coping mechanism, latching onto it so securely even in the face of all other logic.

[dullgecko]

Some moments between the bad kids and the other parents

(Freshman) Sklonda seeing Fig sitting on the curb at like 11am and offering to take her home, but Fig doesn’t want to go so she lets her spend the night. Sklonda did end up calling Sandralynn and found out what was going on at home. Fig was allowed to come over whenever she wanted after that.

Sandralynn taking Gorgug with her to see some griffins that have been resting in the mountains it was a long hike and Gorgug let it slip that he wanted to be Druid at one point, Sandralynn was so supportive. The griffins were probably the coolest thing Gorgug’s seen.

Hallerial and Adaine having an elvish dinner together, it gets really deep and they start talking about existential stuff, like how they’re both gonna outlive their friends and family, Hallerial lets it slip that she’s not ready for Fabian die because she wasn’t there for a lot of his childhood.

(Freshman year) Kristen asking Gorthalax a lot of religious stuff. Like did he think falling was worth or if he knows any deities that he thinks would accept her. Gorthalax want to get emotional because he used to be angel questions stuff divinity.

Riz going to the Thistlesprings to help him modify some of gadgets and he leaves with things like smoke bombs, poisonous bullets, and coming to realization that the Thistlesprings are bad ass as fuck.

Fig doesnt want to go back into the appartment with Gilear, and she doesnt want to go home to her mom, so she just sits outside of the Strongtower appartments in the middle of the day on a Sunday with nowhere to go. Sklonda is on her way to work, spots this kid that she knows is in her sons adventuring party (which only three weeks ago got attacked by a horrific corn monster at school), and offers to drive her home on the way to the station.

Fig is clearly upset about something but she refuses the ride so Sklonda gives her her house keys and says to at least stay inside her apartment if she has nowhere else to go. Riz is in there passed out asleep on the couch anyway so its not like she'd be left to her own devices in her apartment while she's at work it's fine. Coincidentally this is also the first time any of the bad kids see Riz actually asleep so when the conspiracy theories start up among the rest of the bad kids later that goblins dont sleep Fig is able to refute the claims. With proof. She took pictures. Mostly because it was also the first time she saw him wearing anything other than his suit (he had actual pajamas on).

She eventually goes back to Gilears appartment to get her stuff when Sklonda comes home later that night, and her and Riz have their first sleepover (even though Riz was asleep most of the day already).

--------------------------------

Sandra Lynn agrees that Gorgug should look into being a druid. Baxter clearly likes him so he has a bit of an affinity for animals, and their party really needs one if they're going to be doing any sort of adventuring in the wilderness. She gives him so many pamphlets when they get home. She's a bit disappointed when he ends up multi-classing as an artificer because thats two strikes she's had trying to help a kid be a ranger (Fig is so terrible at it she's banned from using projectile weapons). Oh well, she still has four other bad kids she could try converting... maybe she'll try the goblin next time.

-----------------------

Fabian is there for the beginning of the dinner but his mother and Adaine start getting so philosophical that he ends up excusing himself. Honestly he can't stand the whole you're dying so fast talk full elves tend to devolve into whenever talking about him. It makes his chest hurt in a way that he cant quite work out why. Its probably the fact that his mother and grandfather seem to have both been mourning his death from the moment he was born (his mothers favorite coping mechanism being drinking herself senselees) rather than enjoying the time they still have with him.

---------------------

Kristen has a lot of questions, and is constantly doubting herself, so having Gortholax there to get at least SOME answers is very comforting. Gortholax does get a little quiet with a far off look in his eyes when she asks him if he ever doubted the convictions that lead him to falling, and he can only ever give her half answers. He doesnt doubt that what he did was right now because he likes how his life has finally panned out.

----------------------

Riz really likes visiting the Thistlesprings. Other than the fact that Gorgug is there the Thistlesprings are so nice, and their house is full of furniture actually scaled for a creature his size (his apartment and office are furnished with human-sized furniture simply because its cheaper to buy second hand). There's still a lot of furniture for Gorgug too of course, they wouldnt force him to sit in gnomish sized chairs, but its nice getting to just sit and chill in a world thats his size while his friends parents tinker with his weaponry. He's pretty sure half the stuff they give him isnt stricktly legal, but they just pat his head and tell him not to let anyone find out about it and he'll be fine.

Plus, they seem to be on a mission to overfeed the hell out of him every time he visits which is always awesome.

[rrat-king]

Can you share some Kristen angst headcanons? (I know you have them)

anon. i will literally kiss you on the mouth i have. so many

she isn’t used to adults not trusting her. she grew up chosen, she knew the rules and how to follow them so adults just inherently trusted her and took her word as fact. that’s not to say she wasn’t a little shit before the bad kids, she was just used to getting away with shit because no one thought to question her. so moving into mordred where she has none of that clout to back her and is being pretty consistently tailed by sandra lynn would be so fucking jarring. people calling her bullshit when she’s used to getting away with anything had to be a total fucking nightmare for her cuz like. new rules, new dynamics, she isn’t inherently trusted anymore and she has no clue how to navigate that

the applebees had to be just... so emotionally repressed. i believe that they are a no crying family, she's the only girl of three boys but the same rules had to apply and i think thats why she is so kind of like... emotionally erratic especially in sophmore year, just because you spend that long holding everything in and plastering a smile on it, you get a little weird.

kristen has no sense of self preservation. she spent her whole young life being protected by helio so like, she makes dumb moves and gets hurt a lot, not because she is dumb but because she is isn't used to her actions having harsh consequences. she jumped off the top of the building with nothing but a ribbon because she genuinely thought it would work, she thought some divine intervention would save her, and when it didn't? she got hurt. and she keeps getting hurt because she was raised to believe that she was more or less invincible and shes just not.

feels immense guilt over how good she was at being helioc and how easy it was for her to be prejudiced. unlearning 14 years of fucked up, racist rhetoric has to be just so hard and i think its probably hard feeling stupid for not knowing things that everyone else does. and she has these thoughts of like, missing how good she was at being helioc, how easy it all was, so she hates herself for missing that part of herself but its just so hard to be reformed.

i see a lot of comparison between her and adaine in like. the shitty parents club but i honestly think she’s almost more comparable to fabian in having parents who love her so dearly but like. only the idea of who she represents not the actual person who she is. this is also, kinda rough but i do believe the applebees believed in corporal punishment but i think that fabian and kristen are both pretty staunch in believing that it wasnt that bad, which the bad kids probably hate.

i have more. im deranged about kristen.

[questintheskies]

1. CM Punk says people in AEW felt “betrayed” when he visited WWE Raw backstage in May 2023.

2. CM Punk confirms that no one came to pick him up at the airport for AEW All In, didn’t cry about it, calls it irresponsible.

3. CM Punk says he told Tony Khan that “this place [AEW] is a fucking joke, you're a clown”. Then he quit AEW.

4. “I don't like the drama but the truth is the truth. He's not a boss, he's a nice guy. That's a detriment to the company [AEW] but it's not my company." — CM Punk when asked about Tony Khan

5. CM Punk talking about AEW: Says it’s not a real or sustainable business, not about selling tickets, not about drawing money. Having good matches maybe which there’s nothing wrong with. Will always exist as long as Tony Khan keeps pumping money into it.

6. “If you're more than happy with some goof saying you had a 5 star match & the building is a quarter full…then we're not in the same business." — CM Punk

7. CM Punk was a consultant to Tony Khan in AEW, working with 2 contracts. One was a talent contract, the other was the consultant contract.

8. CM Punk believed AEW was an alternative to what WWE was. But 90% of the problems he had or identified about AEW were the very things that made AEW different…

He's happy that AEW exists because it allows wrestlers to make more money, but then also says "guaranteed money kind of ruined pro wrestling. If you had to get paid off the house, things would be a lot different"

9. CM Punk on the infamous Hangman Page promo before DoN.

Says Hangman went off the script, and that he wanted to double leg him and “murder” him on live TV if it wasn't for his professionalism. Says he went to TK and the lawyers to get the situation fixed.

10. CM Punk says nobody in AEW talked to him for 6 months after Brawl Out, he had to sort his tricep surgery by himself. He says the difference between getting injured in both companies is “night and day”

11. “I don’t regret my time there (AEW). Im just brutally honest about some things — And it’s done.

I hope they’re happy, I known I am. I would like to leave it at that. I understand fans and the tribalism, I’m a Blackhawks, I’m a Chicago Cubs fan, so I will always troll and needle White Sox fans, or Blues fans, or Predator’s you know?

But some of the shit was so outlandish, talking about my Dog and all this awful stuff”

12. CM Punk says before joining AEW, he was close to re-joining WWE, even before being on WWE Backstage.

He said they had a handshake deal in place but then it didn’t happen. He says Nick Khan lead the charge even before Khan joined WWE as he was with CAA.

13. CM Punk says stories of him being violent backstage are overblown and not true. (Earlier he admitted to choking a co-worker backstage and wanting to murder Hangman Adam Page for going off script)

14. CM Punk didn't have a non-compete clause after being fired from AEW.

15. Samoa Joe told him to stop acting up at All In Wembley, so he did. Then he turned to Khan and told him, “This place is fucking joke, man. You’re a clown. I quit.” Joe and Jerry Lynn came to his room and got him to do the PPV opening match. He said he was “too fired up” then and now rehashing it, and will probably regret talking about it, but “that’s what happened.”

16. He says he wrestled the match for Joe, referee Paul Turner, Lynn who was the agent on the match, and the fans. But he knew it was his last time wrestling Joe, and in the company.

17. He hasn’t spoken to Khan since backstage at Wembley when he quit. He didn’t do anything to make him fear for his life, as Khan said when announcing Punk’s firing on Dynamite, but Punk sayd “he is who he is.” He believes there was a “concerted effort to try to slander [him] and try to ruin [his] character.”

18. Spreading “rumors and lies and bullshit” was the genesis of all his issues at AEW. He thinks it might have been jealousy or envy, but doesn’t understand why anyone would try to dim the star of the company’s top guy.

19. Punk says his remarks at the post-All In scrum weren’t planned, but when he saw “reporters” there who are friends with other wrestlers and who wrote things about him without checking with him, it set him off. He does say it’s in his “top three CM Punk promos”, though.

20. There was nothing it the scrum that Khan hadn’t heard before. Punk doesn’t think he can talk about what happened afterwards. Confirms he is referring to Brawl Out, but says he “didn’t have to sign an NDA for anything I did wrong.” He has nothing he wanted to hide, but Khan wanted him to sign an NDA — he doesn’t know why.

21. As to why he did agree to come back, “I have a lot of friends there”, and Khan wasn’t going to let him go. Rather than sit at home, he thought he’d try to “get some guys together and have some fun shows.”

22. Asked if there’s anything he’s proud of from his time in AEW, he says he made a lot of friends and got to a lot of “cool shit” — specifically mentioning getting to work with Sting. “I think the positives outweigh the negatives”.

23. He talks about attending an indie show recently and telling someone that what happens there works at that level, as evidenced by it selling out an arcade bar, “but that shit doesn’t fly on national television — I think that’s being proven right now.”

24. He’s proud of the work he did with MJF, and thinks MJF’s future is bright as he’s immensely talented. He wasn’t great when he catered to the “niche internet audience”.

25. Punk doesn’t think he’ll ever bury the hatchet with Colt Cabana. He says Cabana approached him at some point before the All Out ‘22 incident, but he told him he wouldn’t speak to him without a lawyer present.

[riggedtraps]

how do u feel abt everyone u know?

Everyone? That's a pretty generalised question, but sure.

John: so caring and kind to me, I love him like a father. He's taught me everything I need to know to survive and to carry on his legacy. I don't think I can begin to describe how grateful I am that he chose me. John helped me quit my addiction when I thought it wasn’t possible. Sometimes, we clash a bit. His methods don't make sense to me sometimes, but I always try to do what he says because he always has good intentions. I love him wholeheartedly. He brought me back to life.

Jill Tuck: she's sweet and she's kind. We don't talk anymore but I appreciate her trying to help me with my addiction...until she decided to give up on me.

Lynn: we have a complicated relationship. She's sweet but with a fiery streak. Very hot. But after the shotgun collar trap, I'm pretty sure she hates me. At the least, she distrusts me. I don't blame her and I don't know how to fix it.

Hoffman: Piece of shit. Die. Die with fire. Who the hell let the ape out of its cage? Well—okay, I hate him, but I guess I admire his resourcefulness. I appreciate when he helps me with traps. It's hard to like him when he constantly disobeys John, though. One of these days, he's gonna say the wrong thing and I'll hit him. I can’t wait.

Lawrence: I like him, he's nice and smart. We don't talk much. I'd like to talk to him more but I think he hates me. Okay, no, I know he doesn’t, he said he doesn’t, but why doesn’t he? I put him in a trap. And I know the trap changed him, for the better—but also for the worse. It's...complicated.

Adam: again, it's complicated. We're friendly, amiable. But I put him in a trap as well. I think my guilt gets in the way of us. I don't know how he feels about it. I feel like a piece of shit because I am a piece of shit. Every time I'm around him, I get awkward because I don't want to hurt him again.

Scott: he's...an interesting one. He's nice enough, he's mostly chill. He kept flirting with me even though I'm a lesbian, which was pretty funny. I went to one of his concerts once. It wasn’t the best but it wasn’t complete shit either. Overall, he's pretty decent.

Niki: Probably one of the few friends I have. I shouldn't have but I've grown a bit of an attachment to her. She's funny and kind and really, really, pretty. I'm not gonna say anything else because if I do, I'll say things that I want to keep to myself.

Brent: I think the trap he was in messed him up more than he wants to let on. I know he appreciates it because he was able to serve justice to that monster Easton, but killing someone when he was that young...It's got to have messed him up. Has it even sunk in for him? That he's a fucking murderer? Poor kid. Makes me wanna keep an eye on him, make sure he's protected.

Eric Matthews: piece of shit. He ruined my life. I thought I killed him but apparently, he's somehow still alive. If anyone knows his location, tell me, I need to finish the job. I'll make sure John doesn’t find out this time.

[wjbs-bonkle-au]

The intense agony of playing the Bionicle "Free The Band" campaign's godawful games.

Hi! I'm Lynn and I am very sleep deprived. Anyway here's an extremely long-winded explanation for why I can't make a proper archival post about the Bionicle "Free The Band" games, Voya Nui Adventure and Island Investigation. These games are - in my opinion - the very worst Bionicle games, and they are bad and terrible and shitty and aaaaaaaa and here's why.

Part 1: Voya Nui Adventure should be tried in the Hague

Starting off with the one that I consider Irredeemably Bad™. So this is like a twin-stick shooter and I hate it. You start out only being able to play as Matoro, and you shoot fast. That green crystal thingy is a turret, which shoots at a slightly slower pace than Matoro's weapon, and doesn't deal much damage per shot, plus it can be cheesed by hiding next to that rock on the top left. So that's fine. If you go up to that glowing tablet at the top, you unlock the ability to go to a presumably defunct website and download "So Far We Are" by French Kicks, whoever that is.

So then you go to room 2 and oh fuck it's Thok he is there. This is only the second room. Thankfully there's a health pickup, but unthankfully Thok does at least twice the damage of the turrets, and he can move. But that's fine. You kill him and take his coin, which opens the door to room 3.

Fuck room 3. The second you enter it, the turret on the right starts shooting you. Not only that, but you can probably notice that it seems to be glowing.

That's because it's buffed.

This is my health when I took the above screenshot:

And this is it after being hit by a single projectile from the buffed turret:

But UwU, wat dis?

Hell yeah, it's Jaller! Surely he's better, right? So I press space to switch to him, and his stats claim he has "very powerful blasts":

So I try him out and oh his firerate is shit. I still destroy the turret though, and unlock "Just Another Girl" by From Satellite (who?).

I'm missing a bit of health, but that's fine right? So I go up to the next level, which is ice-themed!

The second I enter the room, Zaktan is immediately charging towards me. And worse, your Toa's health-bars are persistent between levels and don't refill when you die, meaning that I basically only have one life. However, you don't have to kill the enemies to progress, so I go south

This room has another buffed turret, but also a health thing and Hahli! However, Zaktan is about to come into this room, so I make a beeline for Hahli, and I manage to defeat Zaktan... only for the turret to immediately kill me, meaning I have to repeat the process again.

Except this time it doesn't work, because of Hahli's mechanics.

See, both the Toa I have had unlocked before this have had infinite ammunition, but Hahli is different. She fires harpoons, which have to be picked up after firing, and she can only hold four at a time. They also have a fairly long travel-time. This makes this section painful. And then it turns out that pressing the change character button immediately after dying (which I did by accident) breaks the game and prevents you from respawning. I am done.

Part 2: Yo Yo please end me

Island Investigation isn't that bad. It is, however, very broken.

Some context; for some ungodly reason, in 2006 there was a crossover between Bionicle and rock-band The All American Rejects. This is a point-and-click adventure game with FPS elements about saving AAR from the fucking Piraka.

Also Kongu mindjacks a Matoran which is Fine™.

I wrote a whole thing explaining this game and included a screenshot but it didn't save so uh. It looks like MNOG but with shitty prerendered Pirakas and weird gradienty item icons, you have a gun, and there are Piraka Jumpscares™. Also Avak is bigger than a house I guess. Play this one, it's completely broken but kinda so bad it's funny.

[therecordconnection]

Ranting and Raving: "Video!" by Jeff Lynne

There is no such thing as the “Cult Classic” anymore. Today, if a movie fails or a television series flops, it’s just removed and completely forgotten without a second thought. With physical releases no longer having the same cultural weight as before, it makes media preservation even harder. I hear if you complain long enough about this and get caught, Netlfix or Hulu or Pooblo or Tuubah or whatever else comes to your house and hits you with the Neuralyzer from Men in Black so you’ll shut up.

In the eighties, this wasn’t the case. Movies could brick at the box office, but they might get lucky and find their audiences later on through cable or video rentals or just really good word of mouth. Xanadu still exists today and has love because HBO kept showing it during its infancy and LGBTQ audiences eventually latched onto it (though that’s probably more due to the everlasting power of Olivia Newton-John’s gay fanbase). Phantom of the Paradise owes its continued love and existence to Guillermo Del Toro, the Daft Punk robots, and all of Winnipeg, Canada really loving that movie. I’m with them in that boat (Phantom is one of my favorite movies). Electric Dreams, a 1984 science fiction-tinged romantic comedy, exists today purely through video rentals and good word of mouth.

Electric Dreams is a wonderfully weird cult classic in every sense of the word. It has a very lovably goofy eighties rom-com setup and delivery: Miles Harding (Lenny Von Dohlen), a loser tech nerd geologist who gets no bitches, falls in love with his new apartment neighbor Madeline Robistat (Virginia Madsen), a quirky and beautiful cellist. They're an unlikely pair in every conceivable way, but they fall for each other. The only problem is that Miles' fancy new supercomputer (who becomes sentient and later identifies himself as “Edgar”) would like to see Miles destroyed so that he can be with her instead. Edgar then does everything in his power to ruin Miles’ life and his chances to be with Madeline. Eventually, Edgar comes to accept the love between Miles and Madeline and they get their happily-ever-after. 

On paper, the whole thing probably sounded silly to a 1984 audience, which might be why nobody bothered to see it at the time, but Electric Dreams fucking rules. Von Dohlen and Madsen are great and have such an odd yet instantly lovable chemistry with each other that you can’t help but root for them (it helps that they were good friends instantly and remained that way until Van Dohlen passed away in 2022). Steve Barron, one of the great music video directors of the early MTV era (he’s responsible for Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” Toto’s “Africa” and “Rosanna,” and many more), brings that same music video storytelling style to this movie’s visuals. If this movie had done better upon release, it would’ve gotten everything Miami Vice’s directing style often gets credited for. The soundtrack is also really great! Giorgio Moroder did the movie’s theme with Human League frontman Phil Oakey as well as a killer score for it (only Moroder could find a way to expertly turn Bach’s “Minuet” into a duel between a cello and a computer. He couldn't get more eighties than that if he tried). There’s also a really neat Heaven 17 cut that sounds like a Crash Bandicoot level theme (“Chase Runner”), Culture Club right at the end of their relevance (“Love is Love” and “The Dream”), and Jeff Lynne from Electric Light Orchestra with arguably the two best songs in the movie. One of them, “Let It Run,” is awesome as hell, but “Video!” is the one we’re gonna talk about.

“Video!” appears at a pretty pivotal point in the movie. It soundtracks the montage of one of Miles and Madeline’s first proper dates, which involves sneaking away from a tour group to run around and play in Alcatraz (I’m serious). They’re also seen together at a carnival. Before this date, Miles tasks Edgar with finding a way to write music for Madeline. He intends to pass off whatever Edgar comes up with as his own work, hoping to impress her and make her fall in love with him. This is one of the main reasons Edgar wants Miles out of the picture. He knows he can make music with Madeline (he did it previously in “The Duel” scene, though Madeline thinks Miles is providing the music, not the computer) and fell in love with her by doing that. He is fully aware that Miles is trying to win her love with a lie. Once Edgar figures out how rhythm works, he figures out how melody is made by reviewing and absorbing the music playing in television commercials. “Video!” then starts playing proper once he’s got the basics down. For a computer with no previous songwriting experience, writing a Jeff Lynne composition is a pretty impressive feat!

Electric Dreams is not the first movie Lynne has contributed music to. There are two others. The first one was 1976’s All This and World War II, which is a movie which pairs all-star covers of Beatles songs and World War II footage. I’ve never seen it and I don’t think I need to. But you can hear Lynne, the most famous Beatles fanboy to ever live, do a fully symphonic version of “With a Little Help From My Friends” and “Nowhere Man.” It’s pretty cool. The other one was Xanadu, which is much more well known. Lynne provided five songs: “I’m Alive,” “The Fall,” “Don’t Walk Away,” “All Over the World,” and the title track with Olivia Newton-John. I think they’re all great. Xanadu totally works on its own as a great ELO EP if you want to forget there’s a movie attached.

This is all to say that Lynne was no stranger to giving songs to strange movies, even if he harbored regrets later on about doing that. He regretted Xanadu for a while, but made peace with it decades later (he re-recorded “Xanadu” in 2000 for the ELO compilation Flashback and he’s revived “All Over the World” for every ELO tour since 2017). I don’t know how he feels about Electric Dreams and at this point, he’s done so much in his career that I doubt he even remembers it. I think he should! I think “Video!” is a great song and I think he was a perfect fit for Electric Dreams. The entire soundtrack is dated as hell, but in a fun time-capsule kind of way. It represents the sound of what people in 1984 thought the future was going to sound like. Lynne had already spent time imagining the sounds of the future.

At the dawn of the eighties, Jeff Lynne had gotten tired of dealing with the big orchestras you hear on that great ELO run from 1976-1980. Orchestras started becoming a pain in the ass for him around the time when synthesizers and keyboards were getting some big technological boosts. New wave artists like Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, and the Human League were pushing synths and keyboard sounds into the mainstream and proving that the new technology could be used to make some wildly futuristic sounds. Lynne quickly learned that with a few fancy keyboards, you could start simulating strings and classical sounds, but in a new and exciting way. Suddenly, Lynne and ELO keyboardist Richard Tandy could keep the symphonic pop sounds the band had been making, but update the sound and take it into the future. Suddenly, the “Orchestra” part of the ELO name suddenly found itself obsolete and out of a job.

Dick Clark asked him about this choice on an American Bandstand appearance in 1986. Lynne responded, “Well, you know, I got fed up with using a big orchestra because they used to always be in a union and stuff like that and they used to put their equipment away while we were still recording. So I thought what we'll do is we'll use just ourselves and then we can work as long as we'd like and nobody would complain.”

So Lynne took advantage of all this new technology that was floating around and used it to craft the 1981 masterpiece, Time. That album is the best example of retrofuturism in music I can give. In Time, Lynne imagines a loose concept album about a guy who gets yoinked out of 1981 and flung into the year 2095. The entire album is full of songs where Lynne imagines a future that he would never live to see (I won’t either, unless I somehow make it to a full century of life). Hover cars, rides to the moon, robotic girlfriends (built by IBM) who can also serve as telephones, prison satellites, ivory towers, plastic flowers, and meteor showers as a common weather condition are all present in Lynne’s visions of the distant future. Most of his predictions feel like they’re coming out of science fiction magazines from when he was a child, but the album is more concerned with just letting his imagination run wild and wonder about how one would feel if they were flung far into the future where everyone they’ve ever loved is gone. The future presented in Time feels like daydreaming rather than any kind of cautionary tale or warning. I’ve never gotten the sense that Lynne thinks any of what’s in the album will actually come true. 

If Lynne got anything right, he somehow nailed the still-lingering nostalgic yearning to return to the eighties. Lynne’s narrator constantly laments that he’s stuck in 2095 and 1981 is name dropped in “Ticket to the Moon” and “The Way Life’s Meant to Be.” “Ticket to the Moon” even begins with what is now a variation of the only kind of Youtube comment you’ll find on any old song from the decade: “Remember the good old 1980s / When things were so uncomplicated / I wish I could go back there again / And everything could be the same.” He might as well have called himself “Nostradamus” when writing that one, because that line is going to keep feeling accurate to people until every child of the eighties and every vintage style eighties cosplayer on instagram is dead and in the ground. Lynne using the current year the album was made in had a real danger of seriously dating it, but Time has never sounded dated to me. It doesn’t sound like anything else from 1981 and it still doesn’t. Lynne blended all the old sounds and genres he loved and infused them with the new sounds of the day on that one and imagined a future that still sounds just as magical then as it does now. It took pop music a few years to catch up with what Lynne was doing on that one. Time is still a retro futuristic dream and he carried all the tech and sound effects that he was using on that album with him when he made “Video!” for Electric Dreams. ELO’s future was up in the air by 1984 (Lynne would dissolve the original band for good two years later) so he tackled “Video!” as a solo artist (literally, as no other ELO members are on this) and released it under his own name.  

I don’t know if Lynne’s predictions for 2095 will come true. The verdict is still out on that. But what I do know is that everything Lynne is describing in “Video!” is a reality that I’ve lived to see, though perhaps differently from anything Lynne could’ve imagined in 1984. We’ll get there.

In the context of Electric Dreams, “Video!”’s lyrics are all about the many things Edgar the computer can find out about the world in pre-internet cyberspace. He can watch it all, from rock n’ roll to old time movie scenes, and learn. He has no other choice: he can’t move from Miles’ desk and see it himself. Nothing in Lynne’s lyrics are dated except for one thing. He mentions that satellites “send their love from up above / Down to [his] VTR.” VTRs, which I believe is meant to be a reference to “Video Tape Recorder,” is an obsolete machine in 2024. It’s long been replaced by digital video, such as DVDs, Blu-Rays, and 4K. That’s the only specific reference he makes besides working in both the movie’s title and  the title of the Phil Oakey/Giorgio Moroder collab. “They beam across the sky / Together in Electric Dreams.” I imagine Lynne was probably told he had to work in the title somewhere. To his credit, it’s a pretty smooth title drop. Clumsier movie songs have done it much worse. 

Lynne sneaks in a few lyrics in the song that become ominous and foreshadowing if you’ve seen the movie more than once. The first two verses end ominously with the lines “The world is at my fingers / Under control” and “I’ll just stay here on my end / I’ll have it all.” Those lines foreshadow Edgar eventually using his supercomputer intellect to control other computer systems and mess with Miles’ life, from cutting off access to his credit cards and funds, to manipulating phone lines so Madeline can’t call Miles later in the movie for comfort when her cello has been broken in an accident (it gets caught in an elevator door and gets crushed). His whole motivation in the movie is that he “wants it all,” especially Madeline. Lynne later captures that ominousness with the absolute beast of a song “Let It Run,” but “Video!” is reserved for Lynne soundtracking the moment where Edgar stays inside and excitedly discovers the world at large and how to write pop music, while Miles simultaneously goes out and discovers the world at large with his lovely lady. 

Musically, “Video!” strikes a balance and finds a perfect blend of the mechanical and the human elements of music making. Lynne seemed to understand that more than some of the art-school new wavers that were ruling the US and the UK in the early eighties. The entire song is mechanical, but that makes sense given the in-universe explanation that a literal computer is making it. The rhythm is provided by a drum machine and everything else is synthesized and sequenced to hell and back. Even the fun sound effects throughout the song and during the middle instrumental bit are canned and not original to the song. There’s something that kinda sounds like a twangy guitar at the end of the verses and on the chorus, but that could just as easily be a keyboard making that sound. Lynne has made records where he’s played all instruments organically, but keyboards, sequencers, and machines not only suit the assignment, they’re necessary for the assignment.

The human elements are Jeff Lynne’s vocals and his always sharp sense of melody. Lynne’s never been the most mind blowing singer, but his vocals and melodies capture a magic and a warmth here that few of the survivors from his generation still making music in 1984 were capable of. He sings the song with that same sense of wonder that he has on Time. I love the melody of the verses and that chorus is so upbeat and happy and infectious. I love the way he slides into the chorus by holding out the word “on” before saying “video.” Oooooooon! It’s pop music at its most delightfully fun.

I’ve been surrounded by video my entire life, but Lynne makes it feel like it’s a brand new concept to me when I hear this song. I said that everything Lynne is describing in “Video!” is a reality that I’ve lived to see. That reality is Youtube. “The world is at my fingers” because I can more-or-less search for whatever I want (whether I actually find it is another story). The entire second verse can be used to describe someone discovering Youtube for the first time:

I see that rock and roll And all those old-time movies scenes They beam across the sky Together in electric dreams I'll just sit here on my end I'll have it all

Youtube, for all its numerous (numerous) flaws, allows me to be my own MTV VJ and watch scenes from my favorite movies with only a few mouse clicks. I can sit at my computer and watch videos in comfort (and while eating my dinner). Like Edgar, I have it all. Lynne sings that verse with completely sincere jubilance. The song is entirely mechanized, but the feelings presented in the song are not and they help provide a warmth and joy to the whole song that makes it sound like a dream. Lynne makes the concept of watching video sound like it’s the most exciting technical marvel you’ll ever see. He sells it like he’s Grover Cleveland lighting up the 1893 World Fair. It’s fantastic. Lynne isn’t even just fascinated by video, he’s fascinated by the entire process that helps bring it to life. That first verse takes the song from the hugeness of outer space and leads it to the small and insular space of a computer in an apartment without ever losing a step.

The satellites that search the night They twinkle like a star They send their love from up above Down to my VTR

Lynne sounds absolutely amazed by the technological wonders of 1984. He sings it with a child-like fascination that’s so lovably dorky. He sounds like Miles Harding does in the movie when he gets to talk to Madeline about architecture and his dream project during dinner. I was only ten years old when Youtube first arrived in December of 2005, so I essentially grew up with the rise of the internet and internet video creation. I imagine it must have been mind blowing to older people who were there to witness that boom. Maybe some of them were as excited as Lynne sounds on this song.

Nowadays, we take a lot of the modern technology around us for granted, but for Lynne in 1984, this was all exciting and new. That might be where the excitement and exuberance in the song stems from. Betamax and VHS had only existed for about a decade when Electric Dreams first came out, so people were only just getting started in terms of building up home video libraries and having video readily available to them. Camcorders were only starting to become a common commodity when Electric Dreams arrived, so I imagine people were going nuts and losing their minds that they could make home movies and shoot video of their own. Nowadays, technology has reached the point where the little bricks in our pockets (which are Edgar-level supercomputers of their own) can do almost anything, even film video anytime, anywhere. Now more than ever, the world really is at our fingers due to the way technology and social media keeps us interconnected.

“Video!” sees a continuation of Jeff Lynne’s interests in technology and the future that he was exploring on the Time album. Once again, his music is featured in a movie that’s weird, strange, and ridiculous, but also incredibly fun. “Video!” and Electric Dreams as a whole, is a beautiful little time capsule. It arrived during a time when the wonders of the future and technology was full of optimism and we were once again evaluating our relationship to tech as the world was continuing to undergo constant change. After Electric Dreams, Lynne would examine his own relationship with technology with the 1986 song “Calling America,” one of the last ELO singles before he went off to enjoy a second life as an in-demand producer for a while. He doesn’t sound as excited when he sings “Yeah, we’re living in a modern world” on that one. He doesn’t sound as excited about satellites on that one either, though that might have more to do with him being fully sick of ELO by that point and having to wrap up one last album before he can move on to other things.

Electric Dreams, both the movie and the soundtrack, aren’t as well remembered as Xanadu and I think that’s a shame. Electric Dreams is such a strange, beautiful, and moving love story. It’s the thinking man’s version of Spike Jonze’s Her (it’s also better than Her). The movie only played in theaters for a few short weeks before resigning to its fate as a strange movie you take a chance on when you’re wandering around the video store on a Friday night and you and your partner are looking for something interesting to watch. In hindsight, maybe a movie like Electric Dreams was just too strange to ever capture mainstream attention. 

But don’t feel bad for it! It’s lived and has found its share of people who love it, despite its initial failure. I’m one of them. Lenny Von Dohlen and Virginia Madsen are also in that boat. They loved working on it and had nothing but positive things to say about it. Madsen still considers it one of the best things she’s ever made and I agree with her. Cult classics like Electric Dreams find their audience. Sometimes it just takes a while.

I can tell you that Tumblr absolutely fucking LOVES this movie. If you do a search for “#electric dreams” you will find SO. MUCH. FANART for this movie in that tag. It’s not even funny. Tumblrinas L O V E making art of Edgar the computer. They love making art of him so much, you’d think he’s the protagonist of the movie, not Miles and Madeline. You’d also think Miles, Madeline, and Edgar are in a polycule with each other (hot take: polyamory would not have saved them). The fanart in that tag isn’t even that old either. People love this movie and they love him. (A shocking number of fanart posts depict Edgar hanging out with GLaDOs from Portal, HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and AM from the Harlan Ellison short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. I have come to the conclusion that Tumblr really loves antagonistic machines).

Electric Dreams celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year (it came out on July 20th, 1984, so this post missed its birthday by eleven days). An unloved film in its time, but a lovably strange and beautifully sincere science fiction romance that remains a beloved cult classic to those who know about it. If you want to see the film for yourself, it’s on Youtube for free. I highly recommend it.

Jeff Lynne is also celebrating this year. At the time of this writing, he’s preparing to take his modern day version of Electric Light Orchestra on the road one more time before retiring for good (he’s calling it the Over and Out Tour, which I think is just a fantastic name). He’s definitely not going to play “Video!” but he’ll be playing every ELO banger in existence, of which there are many. If you’ve never seen the maestro present his music live, I highly recommend you catch him before it’s too late. I plan on going to one of the Philadelphia nights. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. 

“Video!” and Electric Dreams are snapshots of a simpler time that dared to get a little silly and dream about a possible future. Some of its ideas about where technology was headed and our relationship to that technology were hauntingly accurate, some of it is hilariously outdated. Lynne’s visions of video and where video technology ended up being incredibly accurate in all the best ways. Video madness came upon us like a trance in the dark and because of that madness and the internet that houses all that madness, a movie that went completely unnoticed forty years ago can still exist and float out there today, waiting to be found. It wants to share with you what the world looked like during an interesting crossroads in time and it wants to show you what people thought the future might look like. Electric Dreams wants you to know that the future is strange, but it’s also bright and love can be found in the strangest of places if you know where to look. Don’t worry. It’s all under control and it’s all on video.

Electric Dreams sends its love to you. Send some of yours back to it.

[derangedanomaly]

Idk why but I like doing this rn, so uhm- found a new way to spam you too lol

1. "Kris Laila Lynn, I almost like my name:D"

2. "I'm a Scorpio!"

3. "Blade:D"

4. "Uhm, I'm bored ig"

5. "I'm taken, don't try anything bitches😔✋"

6. "Movie? Uhm.. The goldfinch! "

7. "I'm like- 6'2? I think"

8. ":) " my mother wants me dead" by ily, tho it's a techno remix"

9. "Ace, rain and-.. Drawing"

10. "Mhhhh, thinking abt my Au, seeing or hearing anything that Nm does to my boys aaaand, being in this game."

11. "The boys, asylum!sans:D and.... Killing-"

12. "Uh.. Like- idk.. Spaghetti?"

13. "FINN WOLHARD... Sry-"

14. "Uhm.. Like 4 or 5 tattoos and... Over 7 piercings"

15. "Uh, like- idk rly"

16. "Turn off's? Uhm- too many things"

17. "Scary movies"

18. "Computer"

19. "Mh.. Idk rly"

20. "Like 2days ago? Met someone who acted like she was my mom or smt."

21. "I mean yeah, I hate doing it tho"

22. "I speak uhm, German, Spanish and French, and a little bit Russian, but no where near fluid"

23. "Not rly I think"

24. "Like-.. Idk... She-ra or smt"

25. "Am I supposed to think of a question?.. Idk uhm-

What's my fav book? I rly like the novel the goldfinch- cuz it's gay:D and rlyyyy good, I could talk for hours on end abt it!"

Decided that my MTT would answer! :D

Red- Blade

Purple- Ace

Orange- Ted

1. "My full government name's Dust Undertale. But that last bit is- uh.. well.. dead.. so you can call me Ace. Just- Ace."

"I'm Blade!" "Uh... Any other-?" "Blade."

"Ted..." "..."

2. "I'm Aquarius, Blade's Taurus and Ted's Leo."

"Aww! Ace! You remember my birthday?!"

"Shut the fuck up...."

3. Fanon answers:

"KRIS! KRIS IS MY BIGGEST BEST FRIEND-"

"Blade...settle down.. uh..my best friend...? Probably... Lilian......." He seemed bashful admitting it. (Lilian belongs to @0glitched0-1out1 !)

"Chaos. My best friend is one hundred percent Chaos!"

Canon answers:

"Best friend? Uh... Well...you see-"

"He doesn't have a best friend."

"HEY! NOW THAT WAS UNCALLED FOR-!"

"I consider Ted my best friend!"

"... I'm not your friend.. I'm neither of you a friend.... You dirty brother killers..."

"......."

4. "Annoyed, because this questioning has been going on for-"

"I FEEL GREAT!!"

"......tired...."

5. Fanon:

"Taken. My partner is Kris, and he's the best partner I could ever ask for..."

"TAKEN!! TO MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE LILIAN!" (They're not married. He just likes to call her like that. 😔)

"... I'm... single... I'm not currently... interested in a... relationship..."

Canon:

".... relationship status? I'm single currently.."

"SINGLE- But I'm getting bitches!"

"No. You aren't."

"HOW DARE YOU! Yes I am-!"

"Single... I'm not searching for a... relationship..."

6. "I like... Friday the 13th... For some reason...."

"Why that? I think that Halloween's better."

"You know.... I always felt like the movie House Of Wax somehow speaks to me!"

(💀 they have NO idea..)

7. "We're all pretty tall... But those are the effects of- well... Being under Nightmares command... No. I'm not going to clarify what exactly I mean by that, but I'm 6'11"

"Why are your answers always so long? Anyways- I'm 6'8,71!"

"... 9'1,45..."

8. "I relate to.. uh.. Wet by Dazey and the scouts... BUT I LOVE SHOULDER BOULDERS BY S3RL!"

"Of course you do... But I like K. by Cigarettes After Sex"

"..? A song.....? Uh.. I like... Butch 4 butch... By Rio Romeo.."

9. "Horror themed things..., Games and Novels.."

"Blood, my rats (Jeffrey, Bob, Mike 💀), and alcohol!" (He's lying...)

"Flowers, animals and...peace..."

10. "...." Ace refuses to answer...

"=)" Blade seems unwilling to answer too... twitching and holding his knife tightly...

"...My family which I didn't see for too long.... Nightmare... And... being stuck in this realm.."

....

11. "The unstoppable marching of time that'll slowly lead to unexpected death..."

"My caricatures, my 18+ mags, and...death! =)"

"My...family..." (Papyrus...)

12. "Food? I don't eat."

"I like- uh... Pancakes? I guess? Lmao."

"......everything but nothing at the same time......."

13. "OMG- Well, I wouldn't call him a celebrity- BUT CHAOS! HAVE YOU SEEN JUST WHAT THAT GUY ACHIEVED?! HE-"

"I like myself! :)"

"... Celebrity?"

14. "None."

"I wanted to have some! But I didn't do it. :("

"...."

"Ace? Why are you suddenly so qui- wait.... AIN'T NO WAY-"

"... Uh..."

"YOU HAVE A TATTOO?! OR A PIERCING?!"

"... I... don't have a tattoo..."

"...So... A piercing?"

"OMG- YOU HAVE TO SHOW!! SO YOU HAVE SCARS AND A PIERCING?!"

"....not only one..."

"...."

"YOU HAVE MULTIPLE PIERCINGS-?!"

"Cut the camera!"

15. ".... I'd rather not say..."

"Turn-ons..?"

"OH- DO I HAVE A LIST FOR YOU! SO-"

16. "I'm asexual you fucking dick nips-"

"...huh..?"

"Turn-ofs? Uhh... Can't think of any right now!"

17. "Scary movies."

18. "Computer!"

"Anywhere I could watch porn-"

"... Television..."

19. "... What's a perfume?"

(I told you they all smell.. 😔😭)

20. "20 minutes ago! :D"

"... I don't cry much.."

"...."

21. "No."

"Yes-!"

"No. No he doesn't. We all can't really...cook."

22. "Well... I'm Arabic! I can speak English, Arabic and Japanese!"

"I can speak Russian, French, Spanish and Italien."

"...I can speak... German...and Japanese..."

23. "No."

24. "Steven Universe, Big Bang Theory and Red Dwarf!"

"Naruto, Demon Slayer, Komi Can't Communicate!"

"Why that last one?"

".... She's hot-"

"Ew, Blade! SHE'S 17!!"

"NOT MY FAULT THEY MAKE HER LOOK OLDER!!"

"No! You're just gross!"

"... I don't really watch... Tv much..."

(I skipped the last one- since I didn't really know what to add. 💀🙏🏻)

[discount-elysium]

Pale Static Exchange Gift

Happy Pale Static Exchange @nonsal! I wrote a fic for your requests. You can read it on ao3 here, or under the cut below, whichever you prefer! I hope you had a lovely holiday season, and that you enjoy your present!

FIC: (You are) the life I needed all along

PAIRING: Harry/Kim, Harry & Kim

Summary: Harry invites Kim to a nice dinner, and it does not, in fact, go spectacularly wrong.

YOUR APARTMENT’S SHOEBOX OF A KITCHEN - The room is warm, the dough under your hands is pleasantly sticky and forming well, the radio is softly playing, and you’re in the middle of making dinner for your favorite person.  Life, for the moment, is good.

SHIVERS [Medium: Success] - Outside of your window, the grey expanse of cloud hangs low and dismal over the rain-dampened street.  Few people brave this temporary lull in the downpour: a man rushing to meet his sister, a woman coming home early from work, two sticky-faced children sharing an adventure.

Revachol no more sleeps than her people do–but perhaps even she’s afforded a moment’s repose, in all this rain.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - And you, Harrier Du Bois, have a stew pot full of broth, several pounds of farmer’s-market-Lynne’s best chuck, onions, carrots, potatoes, and a fuckload of herbs cooking on the stove.  From the smell of this kitchen right now, you might as well be the best cook that ever lived.

YOU -

Fuck yeah I am!  I’m a superstar chef.  Gorący Kubek eat your heart out.

Admittedly I did once light my kitchen a little bit on fire.  But it was a very little bit!  Barely worth bringing up any more, really.

…I do okay.

YOU - For a moment, you put a little more force into kneading your bread dough than is probably strictly necessary.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Aw, who cares about the kitchen fire?  That was two months ago.  Might as well have happened to a different person.

HALF-LIGHT - There’s still scorch marks on the counter.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - And?  Nothing here’s unblemished, including Harry, but that’s not the point.  Can’t you feel the saliva pooling under your tongue, Harry?  Can’t you smell the air?

PERCEPTION (Smell) [Easy: Success] - It does smell very nice.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Thank you.

YOU - Of the various pastimes you tried your hand at post-Martinaise–and there were many–

ENCYCLOPEDIA - Knitting, journaling, bird-watching, cooking, drawing, wood-working, knitting again–

YOU - Cooking is the only one that seems to have really stuck.  It does you good, having something to keep your hands busy that produces tangible results.  It doesn’t hurt that recently, those results have been delicious.

And today, you’re finally going to do the thing you’ve wanted to do for months!

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Failure] - Sleep with Kim!

VOLITION - Khm.  Ah.  The other thing Harry’s wanted for months, Feel-good.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - No one appreciates genius in its time. :(

VOLITION - …

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - …fine.  Feed Kim your food.

YOU - Homemade bread and stew may not be the fanciest fare, but they’re still good, and you’re confident that you can make them well.  Kim’s going to come over to dinner and eat something you’ve made him, and he’s going to enjoy himself.

LOGIC - This is going to go over better than the scarf did.

YOU - You pause, momentarily, in your kneading. 

EMPATHY - Hey, he said he liked the scarf!  

RHETORIC [Easy: Success] - No, he said it was ‘thoughtful.’

EMPATHY - Which is a way to say you like something!

LOGIC - If he liked it so much, why doesn’t he ever wear it?

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - It was a little…lumpy.

INLAND EMPIRE - Warm, soft white wool, cloud-like under your fingers.  You were in the craft store for a case and touched it in passing–you left without it.  That night you thought of aerostatic pilots with long white scarves to ward off the chill of interinsulary travel; you thought of Kim, blowing warm air over his cold fingers in alleyways and turning up the collar of his coat.  You went back to that little store a day later.

HAND EYE COORDINATION - I did my best!  Speaking of which–

YOU - Idly, your hands move.  The warm dough stretches, elastic under your hands.  You’ve oiled a bowl already; you put your dough into it for its first rise and cover it.

CONCEPTUALIZATION - Like the pupa in its chrysalis: warm, enclosed, waiting for change.

YOU - With your stew cooking and your bread rising, there’s not much else you need to do in the kitchen.  You putter out to your living room with the intention of tidying up, but it’s…honestly not that bad?

COMPOSURE - Khm.  Yeah.  That would be from the compulsive nervous cleaning you already did a few hours ago.  I can only hold this ship together so much, and luckily this time, the nervous energy was constructive!

LOGIC - Kim’s been to your apartment before, Harry.  He’s seen it worse than this.

YOU - The only other thing you were planning to do was pick out a post-meal board game.  You don’t have very many board games–they’re expensive–but you’ve started a little collection since Martinaise, and you’re hoping Kim will want to play one tonight.  You think you’ve narrowed it down to two options, Beyond the Pale–

ENCYCLOPEDIA - A two to four player semi-cooperative game about aerostatic pilots lost in the Pale, desperately trying to repair their aerostatic while fending off possibly-hallucinatory creatures from the Pale–but the pilots may have hidden motives…

YOU - And Tailor Made.

ENCYCLOPEDIA - A shorter, but very charming two to four player game about sewing custom blankets to attract various cats to sleep on them.

YOU - But maybe only giving Kim two options is too restrictive?  Maybe you should just pull your whole collection out and let him pick?

EMPATHY [Challenging: Success] - Harry.  Try taking a deep breath.

YOU - You take a deep breath.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - You can breathe deeper than that!  Put your diaphragm into it!

YOU - You take a second, deeper, manlier breath.  Then you take another, because real athletes always give 110%.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - Your hands stop shaking.

YOU - Oh.  

EMPATHY - Yes, oh.  

YOU - I was panicking, wasn’t I?

EMPATHY - Mmhm.  Want to make a guess about why, Harry?

YOU -

What is this, introspection?  Self-awareness?  I don’t like it.  Real men keep their mysterious emotions bottled up inside their chiseled and rugged chests until they, for unrelated reasons, abruptly die of bleeding ulcers or heart attacks.  (Opt out)

I can do this.  I can have a whole entire thought about my emotional state and I probably won’t even cry about it.  (Opt in).  

ESPRIT DE CORPS [Medium: Success] - In the halls of Precinct 41, Satellite Officer Jean Vicquemare is abruptly struck by the irrational feeling that he owes Patrol Officer Judit Minot 5 reál.  He shakes his head, and the baffling certainty passes.

YOU - In preparation for this terrifying new endeavor, you take a quick lap of your living room.  Then you close your eyes very tightly–

LOGIC - Is that really a necessary step?

EMPATHY - Shush.

YOU - And you confront the question.  Why are you worrying?

YOU - 

Because you want tonight to go well.

Because since minute one of your haphazard reentry into this world, it’s been a little bit about Kim, hasn’t it?  Not all about Kim–he would hate the thought of that–but a little.  His Kineema called you back to life.  When everything in the world was terrifying and nonsensical, he was a steady point against which you could orient yourself.  You rebuilt yourself painstakingly, and he didn’t help, exactly, but he gave you grace.  He was gentle with you when you stumbled.

And in the months since Martinaise, he’s continued to be your friend.  He’s not perfect, and neither are you.  There have been arguments, and doubts, and low points.  But when you need him to have your back, he has.  Every time.

And it’s not that you want to repay him, exactly, because you don’t owe him.  But tonight, you want him to feel warm, and well fed, and appreciated.  You want him to feel good with you.  Because of you.  

….because you love him.

YOU - You get the oddest feeling that there was a more honest choice you could have made–a thought there you turned back from fully confronting.  But that’s a silly thing to think about!  Haha.  Ha.  Phew.  Emotions sure are hard.  Good thing you won’t be looking directly at yours again any time soon.  

EMPATHY - …Harrier.

YOU - Anyway, that was a productive realization: you really want tonight to go well!  And you definitely know exactly what you can do to make that happen, and to not have to think any more deeply about this whole thing: make dessert!!

EMPATHY - …I give up.  I don’t get paid enough to manage this mess.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Amen, brother.

…

YOUR APARTMENT - By the time Kim knocks on your door that evening, you’ve got the stew ready in the nicest bowl you own, homemade bread waiting on a cutting board beside it, and a berry crumble ready to pop in the oven once dinner gets started.  Your slightly-lopsided kitchen table is as neatly set as your mismatched silverware allows for.  Your apartment is clean.  Your boardgame choices are set out.  You’re all set to woo–khm.  What an odd slip.  You’re ready to impress the hell out of Kim.

KIM KITSURAGI - Kim knocks on your door at 19:30 on the dot, precisely on time.  When you open the door–

REACTION SPEED [Easy: Success] - HE IS WEARING THE SCARF.

KIM KITSURAGI - With his collar turned up, and the scarf tucked in around his neck, the lumpiness of it is less noticeable than it was in your memory.  He looks warm, and comfortable.  For no particular reason, your breath catches in your chest.

YOU - “You look nice!”

KIM KITSURAGI - Taken slightly aback, Kim blinks.

SUGGESTION [Medium: Failure] - Uh, shit.  Uh–try saying more?  That’ll fix this.

YOU - “In my scarf, I mean.  Or–your scarf.  Because I gave it to you, so it’s–it’s your scarf.”

PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] - Kim’s smiling, now.  It’s small, but it’s there.

YOU - “I should probably invite you inside.”

KIM KITSURAGI - “Yes, detective.  Unless you’re planning to serve dinner on your doorstep.”

YOU - You lead Kim inside, and offer to take his coat.  Kim shrugs out of his coat and scarf and watches with a faint air of confusion as you hang them up on coat hooks for him–something he could very easily do himself.  Out of the bright orange jacket which you sometimes privately think of as his armor, Kim always looks a little softer and smaller.  It’s a good look.

KIM KITSURAGI - When you pull out a chair at your kitchen table for him, Kim goes still, briefly.  His dark eyes search your face for something, and you’re not sure exactly what he sees.  “Detective,” he says.

RHETORIC - He sounds almost wary.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] - Unable to bear the weight of his gaze, you wave vaguely towards his seat at the table.  “Go ahead.  Sit down, get started.  I’ll just–uh.  Pop in the crumble.”

YOU - If you take longer than you need to, strictly speaking, to find your oven mitts, open your oven, and set the dessert in–if you wait until you’re sure you’ve heard Kim’s weight settle into his chair, and the click of serving utensils–well.  Hopefully the other detective in the room isn’t going to call you on it!

KIM KITSURAGI - By the time you join him at the table, Kim has in fact started eating–he, like many other people who grew up in the years following the Antecentennial Revolution, doesn’t tend to leave food sitting long before tucking in.

INLAND EMPIRE - Memories of hungrier days linger long after they’re gone.  You’d know, Harry.

KIM KITSURAGI - He passes the cutting board towards you, an evenly-cut slice waiting for you there.  “It’s all very good.  Thank you.”

COMPOSURE [Challenging: Success] - The sting in your eyes comes as a surprise, but you blink, hard, and manage to push it back before you do something horribly embarrassing like cry over Kim complimenting your food.

KIM KITSURAGI - Kim settles a hand on your elbow, gently.

REACTION SPEED - Not fast enough for Kim not to notice, though.

ESPRIT DE CORPS [Medium: Success] - Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi is an excellent detective.  From the moment you opened your door, he’s been gathering evidence: your uncommonly clean living room, the way you took his coat, the way you pulled out a chair for him.  Nothing you do goes unnoticed.  He’s coming close to a conclusion, now.  

EMPATHY - Are you actually willing to hear it?

YOU -

Distract him.  Open your mouth, say something outrageous, and draw his attention away.

[Volition: Challenging] - Look at Kim, and wait for what he has to say.

VOLITION [Challenging: Success] - You steel yourself.  It’s difficult to meet Kim’s eyes–those eyes that, for all their far-sightedness, see so much–but you bring yourself to do it.  You wait.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Detective.”  He pauses a moment, then, “Harry.  You know you don’t need to impress me.”

YOU - “Can’t I want to?” Suddenly the words are bubbling up at your lips, urgent.  “Don’t you deserve to be impressed, Kim?”

RHETORIC - You know that sounds like–

EMPATHY - Shut.  Up.

YOU - “I just want you to stay.  For good food, and for berry crumble, and for–to trounce me at board games, after.  I want you to have a good time with me.  Is that too much?”

PERCEPTION [Challenging: Success] - Kim lets out a very controlled breath.  He’s looking at you very steadily.

KIM KITSURAGI - “No, Harry.  That’s not too much.”  His hand tightens for a moment on your elbow, and then he lets go.  He takes the bowl from in front of you, and ladles stew into it, setting it back in front of you full.  “Eat, before it gets cold, hmm?”

YOU - The rational thing to do would be to do as Kim says, but instead you say, like a child in need of reassurance, “So you’re staying?”

KIM KITSURAGI - There’s something in the way he’s looking at you, now, that you cannot fully parse.  “Yes, I’ll stay.”  He looks away with a smile–an almost private little curve of his lips.  “We have plenty of time.”

[hils79]

Catching up on some of the things I've been tagged in. Some of these are very old. So sorry. I'm crap.

Fic author interview! I was tagged by the fantastic @lynne-monstr

No-pressure tagging: @pangzi @foxofninetales @merinnan @killerandhealerqueen @strandedchesspiece @thesilversun @silver-colour

How many works do you have on AO3?

266 as of now

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

1,467,370 words however some of those words are on collaborative fics. I don't know how to filter out the ones I wrote by myself but it's well over the 1,000,000 mark and that makes me happy

3. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Unleashed  (MCU, Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers) - 801 kudos

Visible to All But Me - (DMBJ, Wu Xie/Zhang Qiling) - 666 kudos (ehehe 😈)

The Truth About Cats, Dogs and Penguins - (Men's Hockey RPF. Evgeni Malkin/Sidney Crosby) - 621 kudos

In which Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes are surprisingly capable parents - (MCU, Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers) - 530 kudos

Not The Russian Way- (The Man From UNCLE movie, Ilya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo/Gaby Teller) - 516 kudos

I find it fascinating that a DMBJ fic is in my top 5. The other fics are all pretty old and in large and popular fandoms. I think it was just good timing in that I posted when a lot of people who have since moved on to other fandoms were into DMBJ off the back of Ultimate Note airing.

4. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try! I think it's just polite to at least say thank you. Occasionally I do forget of miss one though.

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

I don't really do sad or angsty endings

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Yeah, pretty much all of them.

7. Do you write crossovers?

Very rarely. I think all my crossovers have been co-written with other people.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not hate exactly, but somone once accused me of plagiarism because I posted a fic with vaguely similar themes to one of theirs. Luckily for me this was back in the LJ days where there was a comm specifically for reviewing accusations of plagiarism where independent people would review both fics. Of course they ruled in my favour but it was really fucking upsetting at the time.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I have, but I prefer not to.

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I am aware of.

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have! Someone translated one of my MCU fics into Chinese which made me very happy.

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes, a bunch of times! It can be really fun if you get along well with the people you're writing with.

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

That's like asking me what my favourite fandom is. My favourite ship is whatever ship I am into at the time.

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

RIP my au for The Untamed where Lotus Pier was a hotel that famous musician Lan Wangji came to stay in while he was on tour.

15. What are your writing strengths?

Probably dialogue or soft domestic fluff

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

Description. A beta reader recently commented that in one of my fics I hadn't actually described what anyone looks like. I just want them to talk and kiss, okay?

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Not full dialogue, no, but now that I've started writing in Chinese fandoms I think there are some words that can be used. Generally only terms of address, though. Like someone calling someone 'laoban'

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

19. What’s a fandom/ship you haven’t written for yet but want to?

I do still kind of want to write some Mysterious Lotus Casebook fic. At least one at any rate.

20. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written

Juxtaposition (DMBJ, Wang Pangzi/Wu Xie/Zhang Qiling)

I don't generally write AUs, and I definitely have never written anything close to this long before. It took me a year to write it and I am very proud of it.

[adaines-furious-feast]

because i cant stop thinking about it and i think it was your blog where i saw the idea most, but thoughts on jace joining the sophomore year quest:

he's obviously there to hinder them as long as possible so that arianwen can do her stuff. they're so <3 to me i can't *not* include them in any jace-related storyline anymore

porter then has to go w/ the ratgrinders himself, which is a whole different story lol

also gilear doesn't go with them. something, something only needing one aguefort staff member per quest. and jace is the smarter choice

jace is absolutly dying on the van-boat. he gives such "i need to drive so i can be in control" energy. especially post-shatterstar.

jace at the golden gardens <3 he's so glad they're spending so much time here on leviathan he can finally fucking relax

post-shatterstar, jace cares too much about arianwen and doesn't want to sleep w/ garthy o'brien and he's already in a precarious situation w/ porter.

jace befriending sandra-lynn faeth. they're going to be messy bitches together. if jace can't sleep w/ garthy, sandra-lynn still will

jace wanting to protect adaine bc she's arianwen's daughter still, even if she doesn't know that she's trying to stop her mother.

and jace fighting like hell to keep adaine away from the elves who want to take adaine away and being *devestated* when they take her. he wants to be her dad *so bad* but she's off sacrificing herself.

jace hoping he can kill angwyn so he can *finally* have more of arianwen's attention. and him *really* wanting to kill angwyn after seeing what he's done to his daughters.

jace loving and hating kei lumenera. it's such a fallinel thing and i think jace just really hates fallinel and the traditional high elven things. he's such a material girl to me.

he also dislikes all of leviathan other than the golden gardens. he's such a solesian <3 <3 <3

jace in arborly and having to watch the fucking shrimp party antics.

jace lying about not having plane shift (or he doesn't know plane shift bc why would he be leaving this plane of existence when this plane has all that he needs?) and having them take longer and longer to buy arianwen time.

jace, who feels guilty about sending aelwyn off with her mother when she deserves to rest. jace, knowing that he was supposed to be going into the forest but kalina *likes* where he is, what situation he's wrapped himself up in. and now he's *porters* and porter wants him to trail along the bad kids and see if they're the threat that may come up

i think porter knows that the bad kids are the ones that would end up coming after them, since no other party is giving this much effort. but with how distracted and wild they usually are, i think porter discredits them. especially after gorgug multiclasses into artificing.

jace, who has kalina in his ear all of the time, who is so amused by all of this and is driving a wedge further and further between arianwen and jace, because he is not Cassandra's anymore, he is Porter's

jace in hell. it's too hot and humid and it's messing with his hair

Jace having to fight penelope!!! even though she is in hell and actively trying to get revenge, that was his student!!! probably one of his best students!!!

jace and bill. consider? /j

jace in the nightmare forest? jace turned into a puppet by kalina??? jace who is forced to hunt adaine and hurt her even though she's so much like arianwen it hurts and he never wants to do that.

kalina who taunts him about it. kalina who asks him if adaine will want her to be her new dad after *attacking* her? kalina who uses him like he's her favoritest little mouse.

and jace, who eventually comes to and sees arianwen once again, but she's been corrupted. jace, who sees his beloved attack her children, casts *power word pain* on adaine without remorse. jace, who's illusion of arianwen cracks and he tries to patch it together by saying she's under the influence of the crown and that he has to stop her in order to save her, that something went wrong, but,,,

did it?

and then kristen, who jace had practically forgotted was here, decides to ressurect cassandra herself, twisting her into someone different than what jace was sworn on, but his goddess is back!

except, she's being tied to a sophomore he knows is currently failing her cleric classes. except he can't worship her because he's tied to porter. except, she's punishing her own, true devoted worshipper Arianwen.

and kalina is destroyed and jace is happy for a moment, until he sees what's become and how he couldn't have ever won in this scenario.

and as they gather their bearings for one last night in the golden gardens, aelwyn asks how long he was with her mother, because aelwyn *knows* that he was the caster arianwen was planning on taking. and aelwyn *knows* that he's wrapped up in something greater than him

something, something jace and aelwyn parallel about always following the wrong person bc you care about someone who doesn't care about you the same way.

and jace who wants to be there for her, because now she has no parents (he's still reeling from the thought of adaine killing her father with a single punch), but jace knowing that if he gets any closer, porter will want to infect them as well.

and aelwyn goes on to find kipperlilly copperkettle, working for her to keep an eye on jace. and jace having to do sophomore year now w/ rival groups both considering him a mentor and how he doesn't want to betray either of them, but knows he will.

Oooph, absolutely nothing to add. At this point, whatever the fuck went on in the Mountains of Chaos in the original time line probably hurt a whole lot less than this

[phobia-sweets]

Okay, so how would different villains react to a vigilante reader doing this to them in the middle of a fight

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRbq6LVV/

Also I absolutely adore your fic and writing, please and thank you, and have an amazing day

used the freedom of getting to choose myself to practice writing music meister :3

(also im glad(?) to inform you i got that video on my fyp like two hours after getting this request lmao)

OH AND THANKYOU THAT MEANS A LOT i hope you also have a good day!!!

General! Music Meister & Firefly x reader

Warnings & Notes: None?? i got carried away w firefly, not proofread (reader is a bit dumb at the end of firefly's part lmao)

MUSIC MEISTER

During your time as a vigilante, you had learned to always bring earplugs wherever you went, just in case if you bumped into him.

“You do know your trick doesn’t work on me, right?” You chuckled, adjusting your domino mask. The music meister – or Darius, had taken control of the Gotham city opera house, where the both of you currently were. Luckily for you there were no civilians present when he took control – except for some guards, Who had left – leaving you alone with him.

“One of these days, you will be the one to do my bidding” he started, “It’ll be just a matter of time.”

Now, technically taking care of him without anyone to control should be easy, but you didn’t really want to hurt him. But then again, What were the chances there actually were people there being controlled, but just hiding, waiting for you to attack? You wouldn’t put it past him to plan that, he was quite smart. “Why won’t you just be good for once and give up voluntarily?” You suggested, and was met with him chuckling. “If you won’t, I still have a card up my sleeve.”

“Oh?”

You walked closer to him, To which he didn’t react – planning something? Were you playing into a plan he had in his head? Fuck it, you already started going through with this, may as well go for it. You were maybe a meter away from him when you practically jumped up to him, placing a kiss on his lips. He made a sound of surprise, eyes wide as he looked at you, a sweet red creeping up to his cheeks.

Then you handcuffed him. “Sorry, Darius.”

GARFIELD LYNNS

Adding a cape to your uniform was one of the purely aesthetic choices you made. In your defense, capes were really cool. Unfortunately, They could be very inconvenient when they got stuck. Especially when there was a specific pyromaniac trying to immolate you. Trying to pull your cape from under some barrels that had fallen, you heard him -

“There’s going to be nothing but ash left when I’m done with you!” Firefly yelled, sharply inhaling as he landed a few feet away from you and adjusting his grip on his flamethrower. You turned to quickly look at your utility belt, spotting the butterfly knife on its usual spot. Turning to face Firefly, you sighed,

“We’re not done yet.” You straightened your back, watching as he walked closer. You took the knife, making sure he didn’t see it and starting to cut your cape off.

He laughed. “You will burn with gotham tonight-”

“Yeah, yeah, you’ve told me that quite a few times already.” You interrupted him, and regretted it almost immadietly when you felt the warmth of the flames from the flamethrower come dangerously close as he fired it for just a second.

“Any last words, hero?” You could practically hear the smirk in his voice, “before I melt your face off?”

“I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.”

“Heh heh, Too bad.” He laughed. You needed time. You knew that. If you didn’t find a way to either keep him talking or catch him off guard, you’d be as good as dead.

“Wouldn’t you prefer a nice slow burn over an explosion?” You questioned, Motioning to the barrels of… What ever was in them. You didn’t know, but it probably wouldn’t mix well with fire.

He stopped. Probably considering whether to blow you up or burn you. You cut the last bit of fabric off of your cape, free to move. Lunging towards Firefly, you pushed away his flamethrower, one risk taken care of. Now you just had to restrain him. You needed to catch him offguard. So you almost instinctively tried to place a kiss on his lips, but was met with the cold surface of his helmet. But hey, it worked. He stumbled backwards and you seized the opportunity to tackle him to the ground and tie his hands together.

“I could’ve taken my helmet off for that, hot stu-”

“Shut the fuck up.”

[horizon-verizon]

Can someone explain to me why should Dyana care about her rapist’s children ??

TG care more Aegon being “ruined” than a rape victim. Disgusting freaks. They hate that Dyana will have screen time but it’s primarily because it might divert people’s attention from B&C and reminds them what Aegon and Alicent did to her.

Dyana is only 16 years old. The scene between her and Alicent is one of the most chilling, sickening, cruel, hard to watch scenes in the entire show. Not only she was raped, she has to sit on the floor with her head lowered and beg for forgiveness. She was UTTERLY traumatized and broken (to the point I thought she probably killed herself), and then, Alicent subtly scared her into silence. TG won’t admit that Dyana was raped precisely because Alicent hides Aegon’s crimes, refuses to punish him & it enables him to continue.

I do hope that Maddie Evans (who is still a minor!) will stay away from social media if her character ends up being involved in B&C. Some psychos won’t resist harassing and telling her repugnant things like that one person did to Lynne Smith until she blocked them.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that we should not care if someone doesn't care about children's safety, since those kids are innocent of their father's cruelty. But I'd place blame on Aegon if Dyana were to be a part of it. Through his, Daemon's, Alicent/Otto's actions, this day will come for those kids no matter what.

At the same time and more importantly, you are right about what I think you are saying, which is that we shouldn't totally ignore what Dyana went through. Just for the sake of a fucking rapist man! Why should we burden the rape victim with doing a moral good or restrict her from trying to get back a semblance of control before we hold Aegon accountable for the rape--is not rape one of the most egregious evils a person can do?! When Alicent also refused to give the girl proper justice, thus making her even more helpless & (likely) desperate, thus giving context as to why she would participate?

Someone reminded us that moontea, also, was extremely dangerous, both from Lysa Tully and from episode 4 when the maester gives Rhaenyra the tea & explains its properties. Dyana then, also, was in danger of losing her life! We don't know if Alicent had the tea "properly" brewed.

Remember what happened to Joffrey Baratheon's actor, how he was basically bullied off of acting even though he was stunning?! Ugh!