#you’d think since the main story’s lead is a girl I’d introduce at least one fleshed out female character by now

[popicoooo]

KotS | Elite | Grillans 3

Two days after kicking Merrian out of his home, Grillans mopes in his living room. His father brew foreign tea for him, a sweet berry taste, and draped several blankets across the couch for him. Grillans had tried to work yesterday, but when he accidentally broke one of his tools trying to scrape out barnacles his father gently suggested resting instead. Today, Grillans simply stares at the fireplace, letting the flame burn his retinas to burn his own memory.

Unfortunately for Grillans, the spirits will not let him cope unhealthily.

“So yer cuddled up in a mountain of blankets right now cause some western boy doesn’t wanna be yer friend.” Veida asks deadpan from her side of the table. Usually, this day of the month the two of them craft medicine for the village, Veida’s family are herbalists by trade and Grillans is the last living descendent of the village’s medicine witch, his grandmother. As such Grillans and Veida have been close since a very young age.

“It’s a lil’ more complicated than that…” Grillans mutters into the blanket around his chin. A valley of dried herbs, ground bone, and vialed blood between them and Grillans can still feel the disappointed look Veida gives him. Veida, a small girl with black curly hair and stone black eyes, is the closest thing Grillans has ever had to a friend. A bond deeper than friendship, as her mother also died while giving birth to her, and their fathers promptly adopting each other into their family in solidarity. Their souls could not be better crafted to find each other.

“If I knew you’d be moping about a boy,” Veida says like nothing worse could ever happen to her, “I wouldn’ta come. Since when do ya make friends anyway?”

“I don’t, apparently.” Grillans says self-deprecatingly. Veida sends a concerned look over the table. Grillans usually blisters or snipes back at her. She sighs and resumes grinding together ingredients.

“He meant that much to ya?” Veida asks gruffly. Never mistake Veida as an emotional healer.

“Yeah.” Grillans unwinds himself from his blankets to sip at his tea, long gone cold. “Didn’t realize he did until he told me I didn’t.” Veida frown, the kind that means Grillans said something hard for her to follow, but she sighs again and slides over her mortar. Grillans grabs it and runs his thumb along his canine hard enough to cut skin. He squeezes droplets of blood into the bowl while whispering to the boar spirit, but his heart is still distracted. Expectedly, the ingredients inside deteriorate into a tar-like sludge.

“Spirits be,” Veida swears, pouring the ruined medicine into a pot with similarly ruined medicine. “Old man Vladimir won’t be able to work at this rate.” Grillans licks his thumb until the bleeding stops, re-enveloping himself in his blankets. Wet prickles at his eye, a phantom heat rising at the dent in his head where the other eye should be. Tears of anger, both at himself and Merrian. Merrian, for being a selfish boy. Grillans himself, for ever believing a western businessman could be anything but.

Small calloused hands press at the sides of Grillans’ head. He opens his eyes to Veida leaning over him, looking damn near constipated at his display of emotion. She wipes her thumb at the corner of his eye and massages at his dent.

“Hopeless sot.” Veida mutters. Grillans laughs softly, letting her chide him as she soothes his skin. He leans into her hands gratefully, knowing that she doesn’t favor affection by touch but is humoring his grief. The tears end after a few sobs from Grillans and he smiles at Veida in thanks.

Grillans hears the door to the docks open, turning and expecting his father. Instead he sees Merrian, an unusually blank look on his face. His eyes are trained on where Veida holds his face, a dark look in them before meeting Grillans’ eye. Merrian breaks into a polite smile then.

“Did I come at a bad time?” Merrian asks, a playful lit to his words. He steps in and closes the door behind him, sliding up to the back of the couch and putting his chin in his hand. “You never told me you had a lady friend, friend.” Merrian whispers into Grillans ear, causing his to jump from his seat and Veida to stumble back from him.

“Why are ya ‘ere?” Grillans nearly yells, an odd cocktail of confusion, hate, and relief. Veida glares at Merrian, stepping around Grillan and putting her small frame between them. Merrian straightens to his full height, making Veida almost comically small.

“So yer this Merrian character?” Veida juts her chin.

“Guilty.” Merrian puts a hand on his chest. He glances at Grillans questioningly before continuing. “And you are?”

“None of ya business. Who said you were allowed back ‘ere?” Merrian raises his eyebrows slightly in surprise.

“Am… I not allowed?” Merrian looks at Grillans. Grillans tries to summon the feelings of anger that have kept him trapped these past days and comes up empty. He clears his throat.

“Nah, yer fine.” Grillans stutters. Veida whips around and looks at him in shock. She slaps his side and Grillans flinches.

“Don’t just let this bastard walk over ya!” Veida growls. Grillans knows she has a point, but seeing Merrian here sets him off kilter. His neatly brushed gold hair, mysterious green eyes, the soft peach of his lips…

“If I may,” Merrian coughs into his fist, “I came today to clear the air. I should’ve come earlier, I’m well aware, but my mother was quite cross when I was late to my coming of age ceremony.”

“Comin’ of age?” Grillans says before he can think. “Yer older than me?”

Merrian grins cheekily. “Am I now?”

“What’s this about an apology?” Veida interrupts. Merrian looks down at her like he forgot she was there.

“Yes, right. Grillans, my—“ Merrian closes his mouth sharply with a painful clack, Veida giving him a wildly disapproving look. “Excuse me, rather, Grillans, friend, I have reflected on my involvement with you over these last months and it has come to my attention that how I conduct myself has caused you undue harm. For that, I apologize and seek to amend our relationship.” Merrian finishes, head slightly bowed.

Grillans stares at him blankly. “Haw?”

“What kinda apology is that?” Veida practically shouts. “Ya barely said anythin! Damn westerners don’t even know how ta apologize right.”

“I don’t know what you mean, I quite clearly apologized.”

“Sure, but fer what?” Grillans says.

“For my conduct.” Merrian says firmly, an angry flush coming into his skin.

“I heard that part. What conduct?”

“Well, you know, my conduct!” Merrian sputters like it’s obvious. “Coming here every week, being overly familiar, invading personal space, the like!”

“The first thing ya did when ya came in was whisper inta Grilllans’ ear.” Veida says flatly. Both Grillans and Merrian flush. Merrian shoots her a glare.

“Yes, well, I apologize for that too!” Merrian waves his hand around like swatting at flies. He turns on his heel and starts to walk out.

Grillans quickly grabs for his arm. “Ya don’ need ta apologize fer bein’ friendly.” Merrian turns again to face him. The look of frustration on Merrian is unfamiliar to Grillans, the lines in his face foreign.

“Then why? Why cast me out?” Merrian’s eyes pierce Grillans. “No matter how I turn the events of that day over in my head that’s the only explanation I can find. We are business partners, and I over stepped my bounds. Truly, I apologize as the party with more power over our situation.”

“More power?” Grillans repeats incredulously. “It was never about power. Not ta me.” Grillans’ face twist with his emotions, the anger finally returning. “Ya, on th’ other ‘and, seems like that’s all that’s on yer mind. Was it always business?”

“What else can it be?” Merrian mutters. The air grows tense as the silence prolongs. Grillans’ tongue feels thick in his mouth, unused to these kind of conversations. What he wants is to forgive Merrian. Not because Merrian has really recognized what happened and wants to grow, but because Grillans wants him around. To think he’d feel this way about some western boy…

“We’re taught ‘round here that apologies are best done with actions.” Veida says to Merrian, who once again looks like he forgot she was here. She pointed to the table of medicine ingredients. “Sit.”

Merrian glances uncertainly at Grillans. Grillans just shrugs, gesturing for him to go ahead. He knows better than to fight Veida on anything. Merrian shuffles over and sits cris-cross, back perfectly straight. He looks ridiculous at the worn table’s head.

Veida rattles a bottle of rat ribs in front of Merrian’s face. “Yer gonna take five o’ these and grind em.” She slides over her mortar and pestle. Veida then wanders into Grillans’ kitchen and Merrian glances at Grillans with wide eyes. Grillans laughs, Merrian turning red and glares petulantly. The westerner glares at the mortar and pestle, then the bones, and counts out five. He lines them up, curving towards the ceiling, and grabs the pestle. Merrian then slams down the pestle long-ways and starts rolling it like he was making flat bread. Grillans rests a hand on Merrians arm, face slack-jaw and glazed over in disbelief. Grillans grabs the pestle from Merrian and scoops as much of the bone as he can in its mashed state, then, while looking Merrian solidly in the eyes, uses the pestle as their ancestors rightfully intended. Grillans sets the finished product in front of Merrian.

Merrian holds his face in his hands the moment Grillans breaks eye contact. He peaks out after a moment and mutters, “Is it too late to claim that was a western method?” A faint grin grows on his lips as Grillans shakes his head solemnly.

Veida comes back into the living room with an ornate white mortar and pestle, runes and grooves as familiar to Grillans as his own name. Veida gingerly sets Grillans’ grandmother’s mortar down with respect, whispering quietly so her soul continues to rest peacefully. Grillans does the same.

“It’s beautiful.” Merrian breathes like the words were pulled out from him. Compared to Veida’s plain stone pair, it does seem quite ostentatious. “Why haven’t I seen it before, friend?”

“It’s our families’.” Grillans says, not looking away from the mortar. He can faintly feel his grandmothers wrinkled hands on his shoulders, the faint metallic sent that always followed after her. “‘S a lil personal.” At this Grillans looks at Veida. It’s already shaky ground inviting Merrian into their village’s medical practices, him knowing so or not, but it’s another to show a blatantly traditional tool in front of an inlander. One wrong word could send the milita to their door with fiery intent.

Though he guesses his father striking a deal with a westerner held the same danger.

Veida simply shrugs him off and starts grinding down bramble. I guess they’re making another pass at old man Vladimir’s atrophy medicine. Grillans’ family mortar sings as the pestle runs along the bowl, nostalgic to Grillans. It’s not the same when his father uses the mortar for their meals, the medicinal way of grinding like the boar themselves is hopping around.

“Beautiful, sonorous, and practical.” Merrian says, one again in awe of the mortar. He looks at Grillans with a twinkle in his eye, the former already puffed up with pride. “Something westerners should learn from, surely?”

“Gimme yers.” Veida says, already grabbing the edge of her mortar. She looks in and swirls the ground up bone. “Not bad,” she mutters noncommittally, pouring it into the larger mortar and mixing. She then slides the bowl to Grillans. He stares at the bowl a moment before glancing at Merrian. He’s sitting still for the most part, the picture of nonchalantness. But his hands fidget, a subtle reminder of the first time, and only time, Grillans ever fragrantly conducted magic with Merrian’s knowledge. The memory brings the faint pain of countless cuts.

Grillans takes a deep breath, sighs, then brings his thumb up to cut.

Grillans can feel Merrian’s eyes on him as he squeezes drops of blood into his family mortar. When he speaks to the boar spirit this time, the magic catches. Not just the aftertaste that comes with their spirit, but this time there’s the pressure Grillans remembers his grandmother pressed into him when he was young and just learning. A tell begetting her pride in his power. In a blink, the mess of ingredients turn into a vibrant red liquid.

“Finally!” Veida snatched the mortar back from Grillans, pouring the medicine into a new vials. She then pointed at new ingredients for Merrian to grind, snapping amounts and instructions for grinding motions. While Merrian would go through the motions, he didn’t seem to listen intently. He worked absentmindedly, at least one eye on Grillans, especially when Grillans did magic.

Focused. Absent minded. Commenting or just glancing. Intent, or curious? Grillans cannot tell and will not ask.

[yamayuandadu]

Circe by Madeline Miller: a review

As you might have noticed, a few of my most recent posts were more or less a liveblog of Madeline Miller’s novel Circe. However, as they hardly exhausted the subject, a proper review is also in order. You can find it under the “read more” button. All sorts of content warnings apply because this book takes a number of turns one in theory can expect from Greek mythology but which I’d hardly expect to come up in relation to Circe. I should note that this is my first contact with this author’s work. I am not familiar with Miller’s more famous, earlier novel Song of Achilles - I am not much of an Iliad aficionado, truth to be told. I read the poem itself when my literature class required it, but it left no strong impact on me, unlike, say, the Epic of Gilgamesh or, to stay within the theme of Greek mythology, Homeric Hymn to Demeter, works which I read at a similar point in my life on my own accord.

What motivated me to pick up this novel was the slim possibility that for once I’ll see my two favorite Greek gods in fiction, these being Hecate and Helios (in case you’re curious: #3 is Cybele but I suspect that unless some brave soul will attempt to adapt Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, she’ll forever be stuck with no popcultural presence outside Shin Megami Tensei). After all, it seemed reasonable to expect that Circe’s father will be involved considering their relationship, while rarely discussed in classical sources, seems remarkably close. Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women and Apollonius’ Argonautica describe Circe arriving on her island in her father’s solar chariot, while Ptolemy Hephaestion (as quoted by Photius) notes that Helios protected her home during the Gigantomachy. Helios, for all intents and purposes, seems like a decent dad (and, in Medea’s case, grandpa) in the source material even though his most notable children (and granddaughter) are pretty much all cackling sorcerers, not celebrated heroes. How does Miller’s Helios fare, compared to his mythical self? Not great, to put it lightly, as you’ll see later. As for Hecate… she’s not even in the book. Let me preface the core of the review by saying I don’t think reinterpreting myths, changing relations between figures, etc. is necessarily bad - ancient authors did it all the time, and modern adaptations will inevitably do so too, both to maintain internal coherence and perhaps to adjust the stories to a modern audience, much like ancient authors already did. I simply don’t think this book is successful at that. The purpose of the novel is ostensibly to elevate Circe above the status of a one-dimensional minor antagonist - but to accomplish this, the author mostly demonizes her family and a variety of other figures, so the net result is that there are more one dimensional female villains, not less. I expected the opposite, frankly. The initial section of the novel focuses on Circe’s relationship with her family, chiefly with her father. That’s largely uncharted territory in the source material - to my knowledge no ancient author seemed particularly interested in covering this period in her life. Blank pages of this sort are definitely worth filling. To begin with, Helios is characterized as abusive, neglectful and power-hungry. And also, for some reason, as Zeus’ main titan ally in the Titanomachy - a role which Hesiod attributes to Hecate… To be fair I do not think it’s Hesiod who serves as the primary inspiration here, as it’s hard to see any traces of his account - in which Zeus wins in no small part because he promises the lesser titans higher positions that they had under Cronus - in Miller’s version of events. Only Helios and Oceanus keep their share, and are presented as Zeus’ only titan allies (there’s a small plot hole as Selene appears in the novel and evidently still is the moon…) - contrary to just about any portrayal of the conflict, in which many titans actually side with Zeus and his siblings. Also, worth noting that in Hesiod’s version it’s not Oceanus himself who cements the pact with Zeus, it’s his daughter Styx - yes, -that- Styx. Missed opportunity to put more focus on female mythical figures - first of many in this work, despite many reviews praising it as “feminist.” Of course, it’s not all about Helios. We are quickly introduced to a variety of female characters as well (though, as I noted above, none of these traditionally connected to the Titanomachy despite it being a prominent aspect of the book’s background). They are all somewhat repetitive - to the point of being basically interchangeable. Circe’s mother is vain and cruel; so is Scylla. And Pasiphae. There’s no real indication of any hostility between Circe and any of her siblings in classical sources, as far as I am aware, but here it’s a central theme. The subplots pertaining to it bear an uncanny resemblance to these young adult novels in which the heroine, who is Not Like Other Girls, confronts the Chads and Stacies of the world, and I can’t shake off the feelings that it’s exactly what it is, though with superficial mythical flourish on top. I should note that Pasiphae gets a focus arc of sorts - which to my surprise somehow manages to be more sexist than the primary sources. A pretty famous tidbit repeated by many ancient authors is that Pasiphae cursed her husband Minos, regarded as unfaithful, to kill anyone else he’d have sex with with his… well, bodily fluids. Here she does it entirely  because she’s a debased sadist and not because unfaithfulness is something one can be justifiably mad about. You’d think it would be easy to put a sympathetic spin on this. But the book manages to top that in the very same chapter - can’t have Pasiphae without the Minotaur (sadly - I think virtually everything else about Pasiphae and Minos is more fun than that myth but alas) so in a brand new twist on this myth we learn that actually the infamous affair wasn’t a curse placed on Pasiphae by Poseidon or Aphrodite because of some transgression committed by Minos. She’s just wretched like that by nature. I’m frankly speechless, especially taking into account the book often goes out of its way to present deities in the worst light possible otherwise, and which as I noted reviews praise for its feminist approach - I’m not exactly sure if treating Pasiphae worse than Greek and Roman authors did counts as that.  I should note this is not the only instance of… weirdly enthusiastic references to carnal relations between gods and cattle in this book, as there’s also a weird offhand mention of Helios being the father of his own cows. This, as far as I can tell, is not present in any classical sources and truth to be told I am not a huge fan of this invention. I won’t try to think about the reason behind this addition to maintain my sanity. Pasiphae aside - the author expands on the vague backstory Circe has in classical texts which I’ve mentioned earlier. You’d expect that her island would be a gift from her father - after all many ancient sources state that he provided his children and grandchildren with extravagant gifts. However, since Helios bears little resemblance to his mythical self, Aeaea is instead a place of exile here, since Helios hates Circe and Zeus is afraid of witchcraft and demands such a solution (the same Zeus who, according to Hesiod, holds Hecate in high esteem and who appeared with her on coins reasonably commonly… but hey, licentia poetica, this idea isn’t necessarily bad in itself). Witchcraft is presented as an art exclusive to Helios’ children here - Hecate is nowhere to be found, it’s basically as if her every role in Greek mythology was surgically removed. A bit of a downer, especially since at least one text - I think Ovid’s Metarphoses? - Circe directly invokes Hecate during her confrontation with king Picus (Surprisingly absent here despite being a much more fitting antagonist for Circe than many of the characters presented as her adversaries in this novel…) Of course, we also learn about the origin of Circe’s signature spell according to ancient sources, changing people into animals. It actually takes the novel a longer while to get there, and the invented backstory boils down to Circe getting raped. Despite ancient Greek authors being rather keen on rape as plot device, to my knowledge this was never a part of any myth about Circe. Rather odd decision to put it lightly but I suppose at least there was no cattle involved this time, perhaps two times was enough for the author. Still, I can’t help but feel like much like many other ideas present in this book it seems a bit like the author’s intent is less elevating the Circe above the role of a one note witch antagonist, but rather punishing her for being that. The fact she keeps self loathing about her origin and about not being human doesn’t exactly help to shake off this feeling. This impression that the author isn’t really fond of Circe being a wacky witch only grows stronger when Odysseus enters the scene. There was already a bit of a problem before with Circe’s life revolving around love interests before - somewhat random ones at that (Dedalus during the Pasiphae arc and Hermes on and off - not sure what the inspiration for either of these was) - but it was less noticeable since it was ultimately in the background and the focus was the conflict between Circe and Helios, Pasiphae, etc. In the case of Odysseus it’s much more notable because these subplots cease to appear for a while. As a result of meeting him, Circe decides she wants to experience the joys of motherhood, which long story short eventually leads to the birth of Telegonus, who does exactly what he was famous for. The final arcs have a variety of truly baffling plot twists which didn’t really appeal to me, but which I suppose at least show a degree of creativity - better than just turning Helios’ attitude towards his children upside down for sure. Circe ends up consulting an oc character who I can only describe as “stingray Cthulhu.” His presence doesn’t really add much, and frankly it feels like yet another wasted opportunity to use Hecate, but I digress. Oh, also in another twist Athena is recast as the villain of the Odyssey. Eventually Circe gets to meet Odysseus’ family, for once interacts with another female character on positive terms (with Penelope, to be specific) and… gets together with Telemachus, which to be fair is something present in many ancient works but which feels weird here since there was a pretty long passage about Odysseus describing him as a child to Circe. I think I could live without it. Honestly having her get together with Penelope would feel considerably less weird, but there are no lesbians in the world of this novel. It would appear that the praise for Song of Achilles is connected to the portrayal of gay relationships in it. Can’t say that this applies to Circe - on this front we have an offhand mention of Hyacinth's death. which seems to serve no real purpose other than establishing otherwise irrelevant wind god is evil, and what feels like an advert for Song of Achilles courtesy of Odysseus, which takes less than one page. Eventually Circe opts to become mortal to live with Telemachus and denounces her father and… that’s it. This concludes the story of Circe. I don’t exactly think the original is the deepest or greatest character in classical literature, but I must admit I’d rather read about her wacky witch adventures than about Miller’s Circe. A few small notes I couldn’t fit elsewhere: something very minor that bothered me a lot but that to be honest I don’t think most readers will notice is the extremely chaotic approach to occasional references to the world outside Greece - Sumer is randomly mentioned… chronologically after Babylon and Assyria, and in relation to Persians (or rather - to Perses living among them). At the time we can speak of “Persians” Sumerian was a dead language at best understood by a few literati in the former great cities of Mesopotamia so this is about the same as if a novel about Mesopotamia mentioned Macedonians and then completely randomly Minoans at a chronologically later point. Miller additionally either confused or conflated Perses, son of Perseus, who was viewed positively and associated with Persia (so positively that Xerxes purportedly tried to use it for propaganda purposes!) with Perses the obscure brother of Circe et. al, who is a villain in an equally obscure myth casting Medea as the heroine, in which he rules over “Tauric Chersonese,” the Greek name of a part of Crimea. I am honestly uncertain why was he even there as he amounts to nothing in the book, and there are more prominent minor children of Helios who get no mention (like Aix or Phaeton) so it’s hard to argue it was for the sake of completion. Medea evidently doesn’t triumph over him offscreen which is his sole mythical purpose. Is there something I liked? Well, I’m pretty happy Selene only spoke twice, considering it’s in all due likeness all that spared her from the fate of receiving similarly “amazing” new characterization as her brother. As is, she was… okay. Overall I am definitely not a fan of the book. As for its purported ideological value? It certainly has a female main character. Said character sure does have many experiences which are associated with women. However, I can’t help but think that the novel isn’t exactly feminist - it certainly focuses on Circe, but does it really try to “rehabilitate” her? And is it really “rehabilitation” and feminist reinterpretation when almost every single female character in the book is the same, and arguably depicted with even less compassion than in the source material?  It instead felt like the author’s goal is take away any joy and grandeur present in myths, and to deprive Circe of most of what actually makes her Circe. We don’t need to make myths joyless to make them fit for a new era. It’s okay for female characters to be wacky one off villains and there’s no need to punish them for it. A book which celebrates Circe for who she actually is in the Odyssey and in other Greek sources - an unapologetic and honestly pretty funny character -  would feel much more feminist to me that a book where she is a wacky witch not because she feels like it but because she got raped, if you ask me. 

Circe evidently having the time of her life, by Edmund Dulac (public domain)

[enviroexpression]

WLW tv recs

Ok, so these are my personal favorites that probably have a similar, more ‘mature’, vibe like Leyren. 

(Link in titles)

Maggie & Sydney (Saving Hope)  

These two are VERY similar to Leyren, imo. Maggie is one of the main characters and served a similar position in the ensemble as Lauren being the ‘reckless’ one that needed to get her personal life together, and Sydney came in season 3 as the unique recurring love interest that took her by surprise. 

(looks like the videos in the playlist can get a bit out of order, so look out for that)

Root & Shaw (Person of Interest)

Person of Interest actually became one of my all time favorite shows. I started watching because I had heard about this potential pairing, but I became obsessed with the whole thing. Root is introduced at the end of season 1, is recurring in season 2, and then is a regular from 3 on, and Shaw is introduced mid-season 2 and becomes a regular from 3 on. If you find yourself liking the vibe, I highly recommend the show. The first season is meh, then half of season 2 is incredible, and then from 3 on its truly high quality and some of my top favorite tv ever. Their story might not make a ton of sense without the greater context of the show, but I’m sure you’d still enjoy it. 

Pepa & Silvia (Los Hombres de Paco)

This was a random show in Spain like... nearly 15 years ago, but I was watching their story at the time thanks to people subbing and I just adored everything about them. (tragic but beautiful ending)

(go to the channel to see all the parts. I think they sometimes don’t sub parts without the girls in it, but it should all have english subs)

Jamie & Dani (The Haunting of Bly Manor)

A good show on Netflix if you’re okay with gothic romance type stories. Not really scary, but ghosts are involved. This couple was a surprise and one of the most lovely things I’ve ever witnessed. I would recommend just watching the show since it’s so short and I can’t really find their romantic scenes edited out (they’re the lead characters). They had/have a massive fandom on tumblr, so there’s lots of great content when you’re done. Also, The Haunting of Hill House (technically the first season, but they’re separate stories) is brilliant and has a lesbian main character too. 

Yorkie & Kelly (Black Mirror 3x04 - San Junipero)

Black Mirror is an anthology show on Netflix, so each episode is like its own separate movie (just go there to watch the full thing). This episode is a masterpiece and a wlw classic. 

Juliana & Valentina (Amar a Muerte)

I think they’re one of the first lesbian couples on a Mexican telenovela. Or at least one that was able to show affection (they actually cut most of their  intimate scenes, but they shared them separately online later). Very sweet. Some similarities to Leyren--almost as if it’s Lauren and Leyla meeting as teenagers. The first half of their story is a beautiful love story on their own, but then they get swept up in the bizarre larger plot of the show and it gets kinda weird, but the first half is beautiful and totally worth watching.

(the last video on that drive is the full story)

Alex & Maggie (Supergirl)

I don’t really care for coming out stories, but they did a nice job with this one and the actresses had great chemistry. Sadly the recurring one, Maggie, left because the actress got better work, but I still think they were great while they lasted. 

(link is first part, go to channel and scroll through to find each part. sadly not a playlist)

Cosima & Delphine (Orphan Black)

A good show on its own, so I’d recommend it. This relationship kinda gets wonky in the middle, but they get a happy ending. 

Cristina & Isabel (Tierra de Lobos)

Girl falls in love with her father’s prostitute. Tale as old as time, right? Not a very happy story, and the second half is... brutal, but there was something about them I’ve always loved.  

Jenny and Emma (Hand Aufs Herz)

Probably my top comfort ship. It’s a cheesy, dated German soap that was trying to be like a cheap version of Glee, but these two... they make it worth it. Top 3 personal favorites, but I understand they might not hold up for a lot of people. 

(Playlist might not go all the way through, so you might have to use the ‘all vidoes’ section of the user)

Petra and JR (Jane the Virgin)

They’re just cute. And hot. There was also another lesbian couple on the show (Luisa and Rose), but while they were also very hot, they weren’t really one you ended up rooting for. 

Quinn and Isabela (Harlem)

A show on Amazon you might like. These two haven’t really taken off yet, but it was picked up for a season 2 so I’m hoping that’s what Quinn’s story will mainly be about now. They cute. 

Florencia & Jazmin (Las Estrellas)

An Argentinian telenovela about 5 sisters with different mothers but the same father inheriting a hotel when he dies that they have to run successfully for a few years together in order to actually get anything from his will. Florencia is one of the sisters who has tourettes and falls for the redheaded hotel cook, Jazmin. It’s campy and dramatic, as any good telenovela is, but unlike the others they got the same treatment for intimate scenes and screentime in general, so they were a really big deal. 

And then movies I would recommend:

Kyss Mig (’With Every Heartbeat’ in english)

A really beautiful well made romantic drama (from Sweden I think). Before ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ I thought this was the best quality film we’d had so far. 

Imagine Me & You

Probably the best (and only) true classic rom-com. It’s iconic. 

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Just... brilliant. This is one you need to really sit and be present for. 

The Half of It (Netflix movie)

Cute teen romance movie. We’re all hoping there will be a second one but who knows with Netflix. 

The World to Come 

It’s a harsh movie, but it makes their romance more beautiful. I hate the ending with a fiery passion... so I just pretend it didn’t happen. 

Gia

Angelina Jolie and Elizabeth Mitchell. Enough said. 

Desert Hearts

A classic, and one of the only older movies we have with a happy ending. 

D.E.B.S 

Super campy but a lesbian cult classic.

Carol

I would categorize it more under a movie about gay people but for straight people, like most things, but still stunning cinema and beautifully well made. Nothing to really dislike about it.

Saving Face

Cute, and refreshingly not about white people. 

Summerland

HUGE Lauren and Leyla vibes. Just with eccentric writers, not doctors. 

There’s lots more I can recommend, but these are my favorites. 

[jlalafics]

"Almost Paradise"-a birthday story for mrspeetamellark!

Happy birthday @mrspeetamellark! This is one day late but I hope you enjoy this continuation of your lifeguard!Peeta story!

You can find the first part here.

Also, mind the smut at the end.

______

“How do I look?” Katniss stepped into the living room where Annie and Finnick sat on the couch. “Do I look too much like a girl who’s seen nothing but forests and whose pastime is archery?”

She did a little twirl in her sleeveless green jersey dress and cropped jean jacket for the couple.

“You look cute!” Annie stood up, rounding her. “But take the jacket off.”

“And undo the braid,” Finnick added.

Katniss shrugged the jacket off, handing it to Annie before unraveling her braid.

“Why?”

“If you’re cold, he can’t give you his jacket or put an arm around you if you’re wearing one, can he?” Annie pointed out.

“And nothing is sexier than a hair flip and an over-the-shoulder smile,” Finnick told her.

Katniss snorted. “What do you mean?”

The man bent his head, throwing it back before looking over his shoulder to smile at Annie and Katniss.

“See?” Finnick smirked. “Irresistible.”

“Is that how Annie got you?” Katniss asked.

“No, it’s how he got me,” her cousin replied. “His hair was at his shoulders at the time.”

There was a knock on the door.

“He’s here!” Finnick screamed out excitedly.

Katniss laughed, going to the door. “I thought I was going out with Peeta.”

“I’m just really happy for you,” Finnick replied.

“He’s hoping that you’ll stay the night with Peeta so we can shag like rabbits,” Annie said as Katniss opened the door.

“I should at least take you to dinner before you stay over.”

Peeta stepped into the house, his eyes meeting Katniss’. He kissed her cheek.

“You look beautiful.”

“Thanks.” Katniss looked over Peeta in his brown leather jacket, fitted white tee, and jeans. “You look great.”

“Yes, very dreamy,” Annie agreed.

Finnick fluttered his lashes. “I’d do you.”

“On that note, we should go,” Katniss told him. “Bye, guys.”

Annie gave her a hug. “Have a shit ton of fun.”

Taking Peeta’s hand, Katniss led him out the door.

“Use protection!” Finnick called out, just as the door closed behind them.

++++++

“My Mom is the local medicine woman while my sister assists her,” Katniss said as they strolled. “I’ve never been very good at all the medicinal stuff which is surprising since I usually go hunting with my Dad or Gale…well, maybe just my Dad now.” She turned to the man, smiling at her in amusement. “I’m talking a lot, aren’t I?”

“No, I like it,” Peeta said as he gazed at her. “You have a lot to say and I want to hear it all.”

“Maybe it’s because I kind of disappear into the background a lot of the time,” she told him. “Being a hunter and all. I mean, everyone who lives in my neighborhood looks the same. Dark hair, olive skin…Mom and Prim are the exception. Both blonde and blue-eyed.”

“Why is that?”

“My Mom grew up in the higher-class part of District 12,” she explained. “And she ran off with my Dad.”

“So, they were Star-Crossed Lovers,” Peeta replied.

“Yup, minus the gang fights and death.” Katniss looked around the line of shops along the wooden-slatted walkway. “Where are we?”

“This is District 4’s commercial area,” he explained. “This is where visitors like yourself might come to eat at a restaurant or buy some local goods. The folks from the Capitol come here during the summer and double our revenue for the year.”

“We don’t have anything like that in 12,” Katniss replied. “Unless you’d be interested in goat’s milk or cheese made by Prim’s goat.” Peeta raised a brow and she chuckled. “Yes, my sister has a goat.”

He reached for her hand, giving it a squeeze.

“Would buying goat’s milk score me brownie points with you?”

Katniss closed in the space between their joined hands. “Maybe.”

Peeta stopped, reaching to lift her chin. “Maybe?”

“Probably,” she relented, her chin wobbling in nervousness.

The way Peeta gazed at her was exhilarating and unnerving, all at once. It was as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. If she was being entirely honest, most of her thoughts regarding this strong-jaw, golden-haired man were not entirely clean.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

Katniss swallowed harshly. “Starving.”

Peeta stepped towards her, his hands going to her shoulders—to turn her around.

In front of her was a storefront displaying an array of pastries and cakes, but it wasn’t the food that made her jaw drop slightly.

It was the sign.

“Mellark Bakery?” Katniss turned to him, a smile playing on her lips. “You have a bakery.”

“My family has one,” he told her simply. “I thought that we might explore some career options for you.”

Katniss was confused. “What?”

“You said that you didn’t have your dream job.” Peeta pulled her towards the entrance. “I thought maybe we could see if you cut it in the culinary world.”

“Or I could possibly burn the place down,” she retorted.

“Come on. If anything, it will be something worth remembering,” he told her.

“I can’t believe that you remembered the ramblings of a deranged woman who swam right into an undertow.”

“Kind of hard to forget when you were screaming in my ear.” Peeta put an arm around her, his mouth brushing against her lobe. Her legs almost caved at the motion. “I think it will be fun. Doing something together in the back of the bakery.”

“Fine.” Katniss let out a sigh. “You’re lucky you’re so damn cute.”

He kissed the top of her head affectionately.

“I’m lucky because you said yes.”

++++++

After stepping into the bakery, Katniss was introduced to Peeta’s parents, Charlie and Roberta.

“How did you get Peeta’s name?” she asked immediately. “Your names are surprisingly normal.”

The elder Mellarks immediately took to her with easy chuckles.

“I was under some heavy-duty pain relief after he came out,” Roberta answered. “And Charlie here was running on no sleep at that point. One of us must have sputtered out, Peeta.”

“They just wanted to be different,” Peeta told her, arm still slung around her shoulders affectionately. “But they kept in order.”

She turned to him curiously. “Meaning?”

“Nop,” Charlie replied, a grin that Peeta obviously inherited, on his mouth.

“You Mellarks are confusing,” Katniss said with a shake of her head.

“Not Nop, but N-O-P.” Peeta looked to his parents in affectionate exasperation. “As in Noli, Oren, and Peeta. So, as you can see, I got the best name of the bunch.”

“I guess I must be pretty boring with my plant name,” she replied. “At least, Prim got a sweet one, and it fits her perfectly.”

The bell at the top of the front door interrupted their conversation and Peeta quickly led her to the back of the bakery, where she was greeted by stainless steel counters and industrial ovens. There, Peeta told her that they would be making sticky buns for them to eat. He pulled his family’s recipe book from the back office and showed her the recipe.

“You’re the first non-Mellark to see this book in years,” he told her.

“Don’t worry.” Katniss smiled at the man beside her. “I won’t steal your precious recipes.”

They both got to work making the dough and Peeta showed her how to add the ingredients into one of the electric mixers. After, standing behind her, he instructed her on kneading the dough to the right consistency—smooth and just a little sticky.

“There you go,” he said lowly, his warm breath against the nape of her neck. Katniss’ breath quickened at the feeling of him pressed to her back. “Just put a little more pressure into the dough.” He moved her hair to one side, resting his chin on her shoulder. “You’re actually pretty good at this.”

Katniss made another fold, pressing into the dough.

“It’s actually relaxing,” she admitted.

Peeta took a bowl, placing the dough in it so it could rise.

While they waited, Katniss told him more about District 12, about the main street where there was very little commercial area. How her father recently retired from the mines and how one of her friends was the mayor’s daughter.

“You’d like Madge,” she said. “She’s very sweet, all blonde hair and blue eyes.” Katniss peered at him. “Maybe I won’t. I tend to become invisible when Madge is around—”

“I happen to have an affinity for brunettes with smoky eyes,” Peeta told her. “You’re not invisible, Katniss.” His arms wrapped around her, pulling her against his chest as he kissed her temple. “I see you.”

“Thank you for telling me that.” Katniss turned to look at him. “I see you, too.”

Peeta’s hands reached to cradle her cheeks and her breath hitched in anticipation. He leaned and Katniss didn’t pull away when he brushed his lips to hers. It was the gentlest of touches, but it spread through her like wildfire.

“More,” she breathed against their kiss.

Peeta shifted, and their lips once more. Her bottom lip was pillowed between his own and he sucked at her tender flesh, drawing a moan out of her chest. Her hands reached, carding through his hair to grip and anchor her as Katniss felt that she might collapse in pleasure at any moment.

“You are fucking delicious,” he whispered along her tongue. “I want to taste every part of you—”

“Well, don’t do it here!” They pulled apart to see Charlie at the doorway leading to the front. “I don’t want to tell my grandkid that he or she was conceived on the counter where their Dad was.”

“Moment’s over.” Peeta helped her off the counter—how did she even get up there? He gave her an apologetic smile. “For what it’s worth, that was one hell of a first kiss.”

She had to agree.

Katniss had wanted a kiss where she saw stars behind her eyes—and she did.

However, it didn’t compare to what she felt as their lips met.

Fire.

++++++

After being discovered by Charlie—or Dad, as he insisted Katniss to call her—the man had sent them away with a basket of bread and pastries, along with some cheese, meat, and wine. They had found a nearby parklet decorated with flowers and made sandwiches.

They sipped on their wine while Peeta told her more about the Mellark Family. Their bakery had been a staple in District 4 since Peeta’s great-grandfather had built it from the ground up. Roberta was a Capitol transfer that had come when she was in her teens in search of adventure. What she had found was love, Charlie sweeping her off her feet and putting a ring on it as soon as he could.

“I think Noli might’ve been the reason for the rush,” Peeta told her with a smirk. “Don’t let them know that I know.”

Peeta’s two older brothers were working in different Districts, Noli in District 2 and Oren in District 7, but visited often.

“Oren’s girlfriend is actually from District 7 and they’re visiting in the next few days. You should meet Johanna. I think you’ll like her.”

When they were finished with their food, they returned the basket to his parents and Peeta came back with keys to a Land Rover that had seen better days. The blue paint was rusting and when Peeta turned on the engine, she could feel the hard rumble directly under her.

They had set off on a tour of District 4 and Peeta had pointed out the Hall of Justice in their town square and the mayor’s home, a block away from it. He showed her where he and his brothers went to school. After graduation, Peeta had been the one who decided to stay in District 4 and would eventually take over Mellark Bakery.

He had a love for baking, finding peace in just creating.

Katniss admired that he had found his place in the world.

“Tell me about this guy you’re supposed to marry.”

She met his eyes as he stoked the bonfire in front of them.

They had settled on the beach after their tour, the tide low enough so they could settle close to the water.

“Gale is…complicated and simple all at the same time.” Her fingers dragged along the cool sand. The moon rose over the water, highlighting the curiosity on Peeta’s handsome, sculpted face as he waited for her to continue. “It would be simple to marry him and start a family. That been the plan—to him at least.”

“And why is he complicated?”

“Because I want more,” Katniss replied. “I’m not ready to settle. Not in District 12 and not with him.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t want lukewarm love…a lukewarm life. My family is great, but they know me enough to see that I’m floundering in 12. It was why Prim urged me to just leave after Gale got down on one knee.”

“She’s one smart sixteen-year-old,” Peeta remarked.

Katniss nodded in agreement. “Definitely an old soul.” She stood up, holding out her hand to him. Peeta took it and rose from his seat. “You ever want more?”

“Not until recently,” he told her, his blue eyes darkened in the moonlight.

The heat between them was inescapable. However, neither made a move to part.

Instead, their bodies only pressed closer until Katniss could feel the prickle of her hardening nipples against Peeta’s broad chest.

Her eyes went to his. “What do you want?”

“I thought that much was clear,” he told her roughly.

Their mouths met in a crushing kiss. Her hands grasped at his biceps as he encircled her waist, pressing his pelvis to hers and she pressed up, feeling the cloth of his jeans against her clit.

Peeta growled, his lips moving off to taste and suckle her skin. Katniss purred as he reached the juncture of her neck and bit lightly. She watched as he kissed along the neckline of her dress, his hands grazing the sides of her breasts teasingly before he sunk to his knees.

Panic gripped her and grabbed his wrists. “What are you doing?”

Peeta grinned. “What do you think I’m doing?”

“I’ll never come that way,” she told him simply. “And this has been better than anything I ever felt. I don’t want to ruin it.”

“Give me a chance,” he replied, his hands on her hips to keep her from joining him on the sand. “If you don’t like it, then we’ll stop.”

Slowly, Katniss acquiesced.

Peeta lifted her skirt, carefully tucking it up into the elastic waistline. He stared at her bare skin for a moment and she consciously rested a hand to her stomach.

Thank God, she wore her cute underwear.

“Lovely,” he breathed out.

Peeta kissed along her thighs, letting her get comfortable enough to widen the opening between them. His mouth pressed to the insides and she knew that he could taste her arousal, his tongue swiping quickly along the line of her panties.

“Fuck, you’re wet,” he said hoarsely.

His mouth went to her clit, sucking through the lace, and she keened at the sudden twist in her belly.

Her hands moved to her panties and he helped her, guiding them off her before they found their place in his back pocket.

Peeta’s mouth was immediately on her cunt, roughly kissing along her sodden labia and her hands dug into his hair, holding him in place. This was something that she had never felt before, waves of desire pulsing through her core and she tried to catch that feeling with each swipe of his tongue.

“Ride my face,” he commanded, hitching her thigh over his shoulder. “I want to taste all of you.”

Katniss let out a breath at the desperate tone in his words. She pressed her pelvis closer to him, experimentally moving back and forth along his tongue as his hands cupped her bottom.

When her clit hit his nose, she let out a hiss. “Fuck!”

He chuckled against her cunt, before pressing his tongue flat against the nerve before thrusting two fingers inside her.

The euphoria took over and Katniss moved a hand to her chest, pinching a nipple and feeling the sparks of pleasure course to her core. Her other hand remained firm on Peeta’s head as he sucked and fucked her with his tongue and fingers.

Katniss felt herself there at the edge, surprised at how quickly Peeta had gotten her there—but she let herself fall into it.

Like that afternoon, she headed right into a riptide, knowing Peeta would be her rescuer.

“Oh…fuck…” Her hips canted on her own as she crested, pushing her cunt onto his face. “…I’m coming—” Peeta’s fingers quickened as he lapped at her peak. “…yes…Peeta!”

Her body snapped and Katniss arched, crying out into the dark sky as her orgasm crashed over her body and she felt the warm release seep out her conto Peeta’s waiting mouth. He was gentle, lightly tasting her as she came down from her high.

Carefully, they fell back onto the sand, breathing harshly, as they looked up the starry heaven above them.

Katniss reached for Peeta’s hand and he entwined their fingers, squeezing her hand tenderly.

Peeta tugged until she rested her head against his chest, and she sighed contently at the feeling of solidity that being with him brought her.

“I think I found what I was looking for,” she said quietly.

His hand settled in her hair. “And what is that?”

Katniss turned; her chin pressed to his chest so she could meet his azure eyes.

“You.”

Peeta smiled, the warmth of it spreading through her body and causing a flutter in her stomach.

She didn’t know if this was love, but she was willing to stay until she knew what it was.

“Do you want to go…” Peeta’s gaze was careful, his hand moving along her hair as to not break the spell between them. “…to my place?”

Finnick would be getting his wish.

Katniss nodded, a smile playing on her lips.

“Let’s go.”

*I’d like to do another part at some point…

[sammysdewysensitiveeyes]

Marauders #22

I absolutely hated this issue, so be warned that’s a lot of salt here, and my usual whining, so skip this post if you’re not in the mood for that.  Also spoilers below.

First impression - what absolute, self-indulgent horseshit.  I hesitate to use “fanfic” in a derogatory way, but a lot of Marauders has read as being very “fanfic” in terms of self-indulgence, and greatly favoring certain characters while denigrating others.  I actually don’t think that’s a bad thing in fanfic.  It can be annoying to read if that’s not what you’re looking for (or it can be wonderful, if it IS what you’re looking for), but ultimately, fanfic is all about self-indulgence.  It’s about writing what you want to see in a story, and if Duggan’s Marauders was someone’s actual fanfic, I wouldn’t have anything bad to say about it.  I might dislike the characterization, and probably wouldn’t read it, but it ultimately wouldn’t matter because it’s fanfic.  Frankly, I’m just as bad about constantly centering everything around Pyro (and finding ways to work him into stories where he doesn’t even belong), because I’m writing just for myself, so I can be self-indulgent.  But I’d expect much better from a professional writer.  I’d expect much better from someone being paid to write a team book.  I’d expect a god-damn balanced book that actually pays attention to the whole cast and gives a thoughtful interpretation to ALL the characters, even the villains, rather than a book dedicated to shining a spotlight on two already well-established characters, and treating them like queens who step all over the rest of the cast. 

So, we ignore almost everything set up at the Gala, including the attack on Christian and the Marauder (the ship) being set ablaze.  Why aren’t the characters handling that, Duggan?  Is that really being saved for another month?  We don’t even know if Christian is dead or not, you can’t even spare a panel for Iceman reacting to this?  Instead, we tell a flashback story that eventually reveals that Lourdes Chantel is still alive, and Emma helped her fake her own death to escape from an abusive Sebastian.

What exactly is the point of this story, in terms of the overall Marauders arc?  Will Lourdes show up later to play a role?  Is this meant to further push Sebastian along some kind of path to redemption (recognizing that he drove Lourdes away with his actions).  Because so far, Duggan doesn’t seem the slightest bit interested in rehabilitating Sebastian.  This seems like yet another story establishing Emma GOOD, Sebastian BAD, the same message that’s been getting pounded into the readers’ heads for 22 issues.  Like, we KNOW, Duggan.  We know that you think the sun shines out of Emma’s ass, you’ve already well-established that you think she’s a brilliant, wonderful, compassionate, badass queen, through 22 issues of centering the entire series around her, at the expense of EVERY other fucking character in the book (even sometimes Kate, the other obvious favorite).  It’s gotten beyond tiresome at this point.  Like, I feel like even people who love Emma and hate Sebastian are getting bored by now, because it’s not even good storytelling to have a strawman villain who is no real threat just getting repeatedly knocked down.

So, Duggan has taken both Sebastian and Emma, and further removed any kind of complexity or nuance from them.  Sebastian can’t have a kind or tender side, he can’t ever be shown in a positive light.  His relationship was Lourdes was previously part of his tragic origins, pushing him to be a worse person than he’d been in a past, but no, lets retcon him to be a controlling abuser, whom Lourdes is desperate to escape.  Because it makes Sebastian look bad and Emma look good.  Honestly, it would have been more interesting and powerful to have Lourdes come back from the dead, and be disgusted by the person Sebastian has become.  That would actually have an impact.

And by the way, why did Lourdes need Emma’s help in establishing her new identity?  She was already part of the Hellfire Club, she’s the one who brought Sebastian in, she’s rich as fuck.  Lourdes should be well capable of getting away from Sebastian on her own.  She might need Emma’s help for faking her own death, but the rest of it?  Emma should just do a little hacking to access Lourdes’ personal fortune and transfer it into a new account, and then she’s good to go.  But no, Lourdes has to be treated like a little lost lamb, a helpless battered woman for Emma to rescue.  And Emma’s deal with the Kingpin further exonerates Emma for her past crimes, because obviously, she’s just working off the debt she incurred helping poor, innocent Lourdes!  It can’t be that Emma did bad things in the past because she was ambitious, cruel, vain, and power-hungry, she has to be a woke queen who was always there to help other women.

I think Duggan thinks he’s being feminist with all this, with the “women help each other,” message, and either ignoring or villifying all the male characters.  But he’s not.  It’s not feminist to take a very complex, interesting, powerful woman like Emma Frost and completely remove all responsibility and agency for her past crimes by turning her into an abuse victim and repeatedly retconning her to be better than she actually was.  (To be fair, Duggan is just continuing a trend already started by other writers).  Emma is ambitious, power-hungry, cruel, callous, self-absorbed, vain and snobby.  But she is also brave, intelligent, compassionate, kind, protective, heroic, and self-sacrificing.  All of those things are part of Emma.  She is a teacher who loved her students, and the love for those students is part of what sent Emma on her long, difficult path towards redemption.  Yes, she’s a badass queen, but she is also a flawed individual, who has worked to overcome those flaws and become a better person.  And constantly re-writing the past to make her an “always good” abuse victim who only ever committed crimes because the big bad men forced her into it cheapens that redemption.

Speaking of cheap redemption -     

The Wilhelmina subplot: Wow, Duggan really will prioritize ANY character over Bishop, Iceman and Pyro, won’t he?  I know this is me throwing a tantrum, because “Wah, Duggan is writing someone other than my favorites!” but after 22 issues I feel justified in this whining.  Iceman, Bishop and Pyro are supposed to be regular cast members, and so far Duggan has given more serious development and emotional scenes to Callisto, Forge, Dolores (the human contact at the X-Desk), Masque, Jumbo Carnation, Magneto, the Cuckoos, and now Wilhelmina.  I don’t mind the development for many of those characters, I like Callisto and Forge and Jumbo (although I’m a little annoyed at the Magneto stuff, since he’s already front and center in the Krakoa era, and about to star in a mini-series, does he really need more time in the spotlight?).  But honestly?  Fuck Wilhelmina.  I was never that interested in the Hellfire brats, and I’m not the slightest bit interested in watching the retcon redemption of a character that murders animals for fun.  Why does she get a spotlight story while the three dudes on the team STILL haven’t gotten anything more than vague background hints of character arcs.  I mean, compare the very emotional flashback and Wilhelmina’s breakdown to the half-assed, mostly taking place off- panel “redemption” that Duggan has given Pyro.  Just a single line of “maybe this crew is bringing out the best in me,” with no lead-up, no further reflection, no hints about Pyro changing his ideas before then.  Why did you even put Iceman, Bishop and Pyro on the team if you’re not going to use them, Duggan?  Because you’ve made it quite clear that you’d rather write ANY character other than them.  I can’t even look forward to Tempo and Banshee joining the cast next issue, even though I like them (and I really want to see more development of Tempo), because I know they will be yet more characters that get pushed into the foreground, while Iceman, Bishop and Pyro remain the underdeveloped background clown trio.    

Also, it seems kind of offensive to have a cruel, murderous female character, and then say that her cruelty is entirely due to sexual abuse?  What kind of message does that send to sexual abuse victims?  That it will turn you into a monster?  Why do female villains keep getting sexual abuse as part of their backstory?  Why can’t they just be bad?  Or have something else going on?  So the Cuckoos flip a switch in Wilhelmina and she’s magically “fixed,” or at least on her way to better?  Again, I think Duggan thinks he’s being feminist with this, but he’s not. 

At least Wllhelmina has been a recurring villain in this series, so I can kinda see how her potential redemption may move the plot along, but Duggan is still introducing new plot threads, while leaving so many others dangling.  What about Christian?  What about Shinobi and Fenris?  Will Bobby and Christian ever even speak to each other again?  Will the supposed main cast members of Iceman, Bishop and Pyro ever, EVER get a proper character arc?

Or will we get an entire issue of Emma, Kate and the Cuckoos giving Wilhelmina a redemptive make-over, because girl power, amiright?

[babyspiderling]

Up To Interpretation Michael Jackson x reader

(Victory Tour)

I stand on the corner of the stage, the arena dead silent around me. I hear a radio playing softly from somewhere backstage and I sign along, closing my eyes and letting my hands dance and tell the story the singer weaves. I hear the click of hard souls on the concrete, their clacks drawing closer to me. The squeak of sneakers, or some kind of rubber soled shoe follows behind the first set. I don't stop signing through the interruption, focused on keeping up with the speed and the intent behind it. I hear both feet whispering to each other, but I don't pay them any mind. I have to be perfect for the first performance of the tour. The rubber soles squeak away as the click clack of the other pair grows closer. A hand is placed on my shoulder and I turn to the hard soled feet. I am met with one of the singers I am interpreting tonight. I concentrate on his eyes, signalling him to go on. Behind him, I see one of his brothers run up behind him, his rubber sneakers squeaking across the stage, a notebook and pen in hand. He shouts "I got what you asked for Mike!" Mr. Hard Shoes glances over his shoulder and accepts the items. Opening the book, he scribbled down on the paper. He quickly shoves the book into my hands and gestures to me to read what he had written. "Hello, my name is Michael Jackson. Who are you and what are you doing here?" His handwriting is a bit difficult to read, random capitalization's here and there, and the words scribbled quickly and carelessly. I guess I was taking too long to read the note, sneakers huffing out a "Great, not only is she deaf, but illiterate." I swallow and hand the book back to Michael, turning to sneakers. I stare him in the face as I sign. "Me not deaf. Me hearing. Me don't speak. Me sign. Me sign for you."

A/N: This is ASL Gloss, The sentence structure for ASL is a bit different than regular English. ASL is quick and to the point, since there are no signs for words like "and" "the" "or" etc. Deaf People are not cavemen, they can express the same thoughts, feelings, and ideas we can, they just do it a little differently.

His mouth drops open a little bit in confusion, his eyes locked on mine as he says to Michael, "What is she saying and why is she staring at me?" I roll my eyes and turn back to Michael. I sign "Your book, you give me? Please?" Michael gets the picture, the sign for book clueing him in. "Oh! You want my notebook? Here." He hands me the notebook and pen and I write carefully and legibly. "I'm not deaf. I'm actually hearing. I'm mute, so I sign. I'm your interpreter for the U.S leg of the tour." I hand the book back and patiently wait for him to read it. He playfully smacks sneakers upside the head, laughing out a "You idiot, she's not a crazy fan. She's our interpreter for the show! And she heard everything you said." I smile, seeing the relationship the two have.

Sneaker's eyes widen comically as he realizes how far he stuck his foot in his mouth. He walks up to me, holding out his hand for me to shake. "Sorry 'bout that. I'm Jackie. We just saw some girl standing on stage waving her hands around like a crazy person, and didn't know what to think." I shake his hand, signing book again so I can properly introduce myself. Under my previous message I write "I'm Y/N, I understand the confusion. I'm mute, meaning I can't talk, but I can hear everything just as well as you can. For some reason, the fact that I can't talk made them hire me on the spot. I was actually about to ask for the set list so I can rehearse, or at least be a little prepared for tonight." I hand the notebook to Jackie and keep the pen to myself, writing on my wrist to purchase a few notebooks myself. He nods and leads me to the backstage area, Michael following close behind. "I'll introduce you to the guys and get you the set list, alright?" I nod my head, memorizing the path since I probably won't be able to ask for directions if I got lost.

Jackie leads me to a dressing room filled with four other guys and two girls. Michael introduces me to the group, "Guys, this is Y/N, she's our interpreter for the U.S leg of the tour. Y/N, this is Jermaine, Marlon, Randy and Tito. These are our sisters La Toya and Janet." I wave to them, staying silent. Marlon says "Cool, signing even when off the clock, nice gimmick." I look back to Michael and sign "They read book." He stutters out "Oh right. Here guys, this should explain some." He takes the notebook from his pocket and tosses it to Jermaine, who then passes it around. La Toya walked up to me with this glint in her eye. "Oh! You're so pretty! If we were going anywhere else, I wouldn't do a thing, but those stage lights will completely wash you out, even the guys have to wear makeup. Can I get you ready?" I think about it, and nod. I hold up a finger, and write down. "It has to be simple. Nothing flashy. Rules of the game. No jewelry, no distracting clothes, no sparkle eye makeup. Not up to me, just comes with being an interpreter." She reads it quickly and sags her shoulders a bit. "Fine, I get it. Nothing too flashy. But I promise, we're going to have some fun." She drags me to a second dressing room, one with lit up mirrors and vanities. She sits me down and pulls out a giant makeup case. I relax my face and let her do her thing, trusting her to not go overboard. She plugs in a curling iron as she finishes up my makeup. Without any paper around, I try my best to communicate. I pull my hair back, off my face, another rule of interpreting. Luckily, La Toya got the message. "Oh! Hair back, got it." She curls my hair, completely covering it in hairspray, and gives me a beautiful bun on the top of my head, leaving the second half of my hair down. I inspect myself in the mirror, never feeling this beautiful in my life. I turn to La Toya and sign "Thank you", hoping that if she doesn't understand my hands, she can understand the look in my eyes.

I walk out into the hallways, now hustling and bustling as it gets closer to show time. I was given the set list and lyric sheet for the night while I was made over. I run the entire show at least 5 times before being called to take my place, the instructional prologue getting ready to play.

By the end of the show, my wrists and fingers ached from the fast movements to stay on pace with the band. Walking backstage, I just want to take my makeup off and stretch out my aching joints. Michael stops me in the hall and asks me, "Hey, you want to fly with us? I'd love to get to know you more, plus give you the set list for the next show to let you practice." I nod, wanting to answer his questions. He lights up. "Maybe, you can teach me some sign language? Don't get me wrong, I love writing back and forth, but it'd be cool to sign to each other" He leads me to the limo that is taking him to the hotel and then the airport in the morning. "I'm not sure where your room is, but I can have your stuff sent to mine and we can talk some. If you'd like." I shrug my shoulders, I didn't know either. He makes a quick phone call and I watch the lights move past. "Hey, Y/N, you were really cool there. It was like you were singing and dancing with your hands at the same time. Why don't you talk? If you don't mind me asking. You don't have to answer." I hold out my hand for the notebook and try my best to write on the bumpy road. "Long story. I'll tell you at the hotel, roads too rough to write it out on the way." He reads my writing and nods in understanding. "I get it." We fall into a comfortable silence as we drive to his hotel.

I follow Michael through the lobby, up the elevators and to his suite. My bags are placed in the main room, and Michael stretches his arms above his head. "Hey, Y/N, I'm going to go take a shower. If your story really is as long as you're saying, go ahead and start writing it down. I can read it while you shower." I nod and he hands me a legal pad, much better than the little hand notebook Michael carried around at all times. I sit down and start writing.

"I've been mute since I was 6 years old. My dad and I were going to the record store to listen to some and take others home to add to our collection. The light turned green, and we went, but someone else swerved into our lane, causing a head on collision. My dad died on impact, but they said he didn't feel any pain. Pieces of glass got caught in and cut my throat. I woke up in the hospital with no vocal chords, no voice. The damage done was too much for them to take and they had to be removed. I don't want your pity, I've gotten nothing but pity since I was 6. I'm not fragile and you do not need to treat me as such." I put the pen down just as Michael finished up in the bathroom. I gestured to the pad, and grabbed clothes for the shower. When I came out Michael was just staring at the paper, some areas warped with his spilled tears. He looked up at me with glossy eyes and enveloped me in his arms. "Oh, Y/N, I am so sorry. We don't have to talk about it or anything. We can just go to bed right now if you want." I shake my head. I break away reluctantly and go back to the paper. "No, it's ok. If you have any questions I will do my best to answer them." He thinks for a moment and asks, "Can you make any sounds? If you don't have vocal chords, how can you be vocal?" I hum a little tune, and make a couple of noises. We sit down, and he asks me to teach him to sign. We start with finger spelling.

"What's your favorite candy?" "(F-A-V-O-R-I-T-E C-A-N-D-Y)" "Wow! I love those! I like S-K-I-T-T-L-E-S. Oh! And P-E-A-N-U-T M-N-M-S!" I smile at him. He's a really fast learner. I yawn and glance at the clock. I sign "time" and point at the clock. He follows my finger and reads the time. "Oh wow, 1:30. We should probably get to bed. I'll take the couch and see you in the morning." I reach for the pen to protest but he snatches it before I can lay a finger on it. "No Ifs ands or buts. I'm taking the couch." I roll my eyes, signing "Silly boy" and making my way to the bed. I fall into a blissful sleep easily.

The next morning Michael and I are on our way to the plane, the next stop being Irving. We sit across from each other, Michael signing what he can, and writing what he can't. I teach him little words and phrases as we go, and specific ones at his request. Sooner than expected we touch down and make our way to the venue. The entire tour goes by in a flash, performing every night with the boys, only watching from the wings our eight shows in Canada. On our last night in LA and my last night on the job, Michael drops a bomb on everyone around the world. That this was the last show for the tour. I translated what he said for the audience, a look of complete confusion on my face. I struggled to focus on the task at hand, translating for those Deaf at the show, unable to comprehend what had just happened. The show had ended finally and it was chaos backstage. People yelling at Mike for his cancellation, calling it selfish, immature. I couldn't help but feel a little hurt. I knew that this was my last show, and that I would no longer be working with the band, but I thought he would at least tell me since I thought we were close. I pushed through the throngs of angry managers and crew members back to my little corner.

I gathered my things, coming across one of the notebooks that Michael and I had practically filled. The others full of writing were in my suitcase back at the hotel. In my heartache, I accidentally dropped the notebook, its pages falling open on impact. A page filled with shading and lines caught my attention, its place in the back making it invisible to me. Examining it closely, I realize it's an incredibly done sketch of me, done by Michael. I was asleep when he did this. I think it was on the plane to Denver. I gently closed the pages, and placed it into my bag.

I turned my gaze to the sound of the door opening, revealing none other than the artist himself. With creased eyebrows, I simply sign "Why?", not understanding why he did it a bit. He sagged, as if all the air had been let out of him. "Because, Y/N, I couldn't stand being under their thumb anymore. I couldn't work with Joseph anymore, I need to be the one in control. I want to make my own music, send my own message, without anyone telling me otherwise." I nod, understanding where he was coming from, but sad to see him go. I wiped at my tears and signed "I'll miss you Applehead." This made him chuckle and pull me in for a long, large hug. "I'll miss you too." He kissed the top of my head and took a step back. He signed "You always in my heart." something I had taught him, but fragmented. He picked up the notebook laying in the top of my bag and tore out an empty page, as well as a pen. He handed both to me. "Write down your address and I promise I will write to you practically everyday. And if I ever go on tour, I know just who I'll hire to be my interpreter." With one final tearful hug goodbye, it was time for us to go our separate ways. I would miss him, but I knew I would always be in his heart, and he in mine.

Taglist: @accio-boys​

[sunflowergirl522]

You’re a Girl?

Pairing: Obi Wan Kenobi x Reader

Summary: You’re a trooper in the 501st legion and get assigned to help the 212th Battalion with part of a mission. Obi Wan doesn’t know that you’re a female clone until you take your helmet off in front of him. He’s shocked by both your gender and the connection he feels to you.

Word Count: 2758

Warnings: language

Masterlist

***

“Bugs! I’ve got a new mission for you.” Rex comes into the barracks where you’re listening to a radio and cleaning your helmet.

“Just for me?” Rex nods and approaches your bunk. “ What about the rest of the squadron?” It wasn’t unusual that someone needed your help for a mission; it was just normally at least with someone else from the squad, normally Rex.

“It’s not for General Skywalker otherwise I would be going with you. You’re being assigned to the 212th Attack Battalion under General Kenobi.” A smile graces your lips at the battalion number.

“That’s Cody’s squadron isn’t it?” Another nod from Rex who’s normally serious composure is breaking at seeing your face light up.

It’s been so long since you’ve last seen Cody you can’t help but to be filled up with excitement. You had been in a training squad while Cody and Rex were first appointed Commanders and they both connected with you during their first recruitment journey to Kamino. They had both jumped into older brother roles when they had heard another clone telling you that you’d never make it anywhere since you were female. And they knew they liked you when they turned the corner to defend you only to see you punch the other clone in the face. Rex has told you stories on how they would argue over who would recruit you before they decided with an arm wrestling match. As much as you want to see Cody you’re glad you’re part of the 501st Legion. If you weren’t here you would’ve never met some of your closest friends or General Tano who you had become quick friends with before she left.

“When do I leave?”

“Tomorrow at 1300.” You nod at that in acknowledgement.

***

“General Kenobi.” Fox greats Obi Wan in the hanger while Cody goes to get the new recruit.

“Fox, it’s nice to see you. Where’s Anakin?”

“Oh, he’s over there talking with Rex and Bugs.” He points over to where Anakin was talking to the two clones. “You’re getting a good one General. Bugs is the best hacker we’ve got.”

Obi Wan watches as Cody walks up behind the clones punching the one Fox had called Bugs in his shoulder and Anakin begins to head towards him.

“I believe you’ll be satisfied with Bugs’ abilities Obi Wan.”

“Yes, Fox says that he’s the best hacker.” Anakin and Fox don’t miss that Obi Wan uses the wrong pronoun. They get why but they thought Cody would have brought your gender up. Anakin stops Fox when he goes to correct him with an amused smirk on his face. Anakin can’t help but think of how Obi Wan’s face will look once he realises you’re a female clone. The thought alone has him holding back laughter.

“That he is.” They all watch on as the three troopers get closer to them while bumping shoulders with each other after every few steps. Obi Wan can’t help but notice that the middle one was somehow a little bit smaller than Cody or Rex. It’ll be easy to determine him from the rest of the troopers due to the purple stripes going down his helmet.

“General Kenobi, it’s good to see you again. Bugs this is the general you’ll be working with during the mission.” You're frozen in your spot looking at the general. He’s easily the handsomest man you’ve ever seen, not that that means much only ever being around clones and General Skywalker and all.

“Trooper Bugs reporting for duty sir.” You salute him and Obi Wan notices that your voice sounds softer than any other clone he’s spoken to before.

“Pleasure to meet you, Bugs. Cody are we ready to head out?”

“I’d say we are sir.”

“Very well let’s get going.” He turns to say his farewells to General Skywalker and Fox while you turn to say yours to Rex.

“Cody, you take care of her okay? If anything happens I’ll have your head.”

“I can take care of myself Rex.” They both ignore you.

“I’ll be having my own head Rex believe me.”

“Rex please, I’ll be fine. I’m just going as a hacker, I won’t be in battle nearly as much as I am now.”

“Just make sure you come back. I can’t lose another friend so soon after Echo.”

“Oh please, you act like he died, all he did was go with that other batch of clones.” You roll your eyes under your helmet at him. “And I’m not gonna die or switch teams on you. I’ll miss you okay? But I’ll see you as soon as this mission is over.”

“You better.” You headbutt each other before he turns to say bye to Cody and General Kenobi comes back into line of sight.

“Rex, I’ll have your trooper back to you in no time.”

“Yes sir.” The general turns and begins to walk towards his shuttle. Cody nudges your shoulder and you give one last wave to Rex before turning to follow them.

***

The way back to the base Obi Wan couldn’t help but admire the way the two clones interacted with each other. He always enjoyed seeing clones headbutt each other with affection or body slam one another with excitement. It was…nice to witness when he grew up in the jedi temple not seeing anything like it. All he ever really saw other padawans get were pats on the heads. His master, Qui Gon, was different from other Jedi Masters in the fact that he would make sure Obi Wan was getting enough food and would help dress any wounds he would get from training or blasters.

“We’re all hoping this will be a quick mission Bugs so you should be back with your regular squadron in no time.”

“May I ask exactly what I need to do during the mission, General Kenobi?”

“We have a starfighter from the trade federation with a command console that we need access to. We just need your help getting into it.” Your eyes follow his hand as it strokes his beard in thought.

“That shouldn’t take me long at all General.” The shuttle lands and Cody is the first to step out followed by Obi Wan and yourself.

“Would you like to take a look at it now, before you get acquainted with the barracks you’ll be staying in?”

“That would be helpful, General. I could get an idea of the control console I’ll be working with.” The general nods at you and leads the way with you and Cody following close behind him.

In front of you is a Vulture Droid Starfighter. It’s not what you had in mind when the general said they had a control panel for you to hack. All there was on this type of starfighter is a droid brain that you can only hope isn’t fried. The main control panel is almost always on a droid control ship.

“You have to be fucking kidding me!” You don’t mean to say it outloud, you didn’t even realize it until General Kenobi turns to you with a certain look on his face and Cody nudges your shoulder. “I’m sorry General but you realize that this is a droid starfighter right? The only thing I could do is maybe find out where its commands are coming from, and that’s if you guys didn’t destroy the brain when you got it down.” You rip your helmet off when you get close to the fighter to better inspect any damage to it. “And it looks like it took some blasts to it’s main console system which I’d need so I could activate the brain.” You turn around to see the general standing with his mouth agape and Cody taking his own helmet off. “What?”

The shock that filled him left Kenobi speechless. The first thing he realized was your hair. Half of your head was half shaved with an X design on the back of your head. The next thing he realized were the numbers 4172, that he can only assume is your clone number, with a bug underneath them tattooed on the back of your neck. The third thing he realized was that you were no regular clone, somehow you were female. All of the differences he had noticed earlier made sense now. Your voice breaks him out of his frozen state and he just blurts out the first thing his mind can think of.

“You’re, you’re a girl?”

“That I am. Now back to the fighter at hand,” you point behind you to try to bring his attention back to it, “what do you need me to get information on exactly?”

“How?” You’re glad you turned back towards the droid so the general didn’t see you roll your eyes at him.

“Apparently when I was being created something went wrong with my genetics and the Kaminoans couldn’t figure out what. They wanted to put me on maintenance but I convinced them somehow to let me train and then decide what to do with me. So here I am, a female clone trooper. Now can we get back to the starfighter, I just need to know what exactly you expect of me so I can figure it out myself.”

“Oh, uh, of course. Just tracking it back to the main droid ship is fine if that’s all you can do. If you’ll excuse me I have some things to deal with. I’m sure Cody can show you around.” He nods to Cody before darting away only casting you a sideways glance.

“Well that was odd, is he always like that?”

“Almost never. Are you ready for the mess hall?”

“Am I ever, let’s get going.”

***

Being in the 212th Battalion’s barracks isn’t much different from the 501st but it was so much different at the same time. In both barracks the troopers had made their space their own. The only difference here is that you didn’t know what any of the stuff meant for the clones here. You miss Rex and Kix and Fox and you can already tell you’re going to miss being in your own bunk. Cody is showing you the bunk you’ll be sleeping in when the rest of his battalion comes in, back from a mission no doubt.

“Commander welcome back!” The troopers cheer at seeing Cody and you can’t help but wonder if that’s how everyone will react when you get back.

“Who’s this?”

“Squad, this is Bugs from the 501st Legion she’ll be-”

“You’re the female clone I’ve heard about.” One of them interrupts Cody while he tries to introduce you. “What are you doing here?” You ignore the disgust in his voice and go on to explain your role.

“I’m here to hack into that vulture droid out there to help with the general's next mission.”

“Please as if you could do that. Didn’t they tell you that deformed clones are for maintenance onKamino?”

“It’s a good thing I’m not deformed then isn’t it?” You cross your arms and try to plant yourself into the floor. You can tell where this is going and you don’t feel like attacking another fellow clone over this.

“There’s no way they let you go out on missions.” He scoffs at the thought of you doing anything a normal clone would. “You're inferior and would just mess it up or slow it down.” You bite the inside of your cheek and look down at your feet in anger. “The kaminoans should’ve just terminated you when they realized the mishap with your sex.” He spits in your direction and that’s your breaking point.

“I’ll fucking show you inferior!” You throw yourself at him successfully tackling him to the ground before repeatedly throwing punches into his helmetless face. He then throws you off of himself and kicks your side a few times before you grab his leg and swing up your own kicking his chest to knock him back down.

No one noticed that Obi Wan was outside the door during the whole thing. He had been coming to debrief the troopers on the mission and congratulate them for making it back when he began to insult you.

“That’s enough!” Hearing the general's voice makes the two of you freeze with you in a headlock ready to elbow him in the face. It’s also enough to kick Cody into gear and pull the other clone off of you. He had been shocked that anyone in his battalion would react that way.

“General Kenobi! This newcomer just attacked me out of nowhere.”

“I did no such thing!” You lurch to attack him again but Cody is quick to hold you back.

“I saw who started it, trooper. Bugs, a word?” You groan thinking he only saw when you attacked. You pull yourself out of Cody’s grip and storm out of the room, not missing the smirk on the other clones face. Obi Wan sends a disappointed look to the trooper and shakes his head before he follows you down the hallway. “Follow me.” The general gently grabs your elbow and turns down a corner only letting go once you reach the destination. You spend the whole journey looking down at where he’s holding the crook of your elbow oh so gently. When you finally look up you realize you’re in the med bay and the general is rummaging through a cabinet across from where you’re standing. This is definitely not what you were expecting.

“Are you alright?” General Kenobi turns to you with disinfectant spray and a rag in his hands. “Here, have a seat.” You sit in the stool he motions towards confused at what’s going on.

“I’m alright.” You cringe back when he reaches out to clean the few cuts on your face from the fight. “May I ask what you’re doing General?”

“I’m uh, cleaning your cuts?”

“Why? Would you do the same for any other clone who got injured?”

“Well, no I suppose I wouldn’t.”

“So why me? I’m not some fragile thing, gender be damned I’m still a trooper and I can take care of my own wounds, I’m not useless.” You mumble the last part to yourself and stand up ready to leave.

“I don’t think you’re fragile. I’m sure you’re tougher than that ridiculous trooper that insulted you .”

“Wait, you saw that? I thought you only saw me attack him.”

“Yes I saw that. Now will you sit back down to finish cleaning the blood off your face?”

“Yeah sure fine. Probably isn’t even my blood anyway.”

You let him wipe the blood off finally realizing how close he actually is to you. His hair looks soft and you restrain yourself from the urge to run your hands through it. And you swear you can see storms brewing in his eyes as they pay close attention to cleaning you up. This type of affection isn’t common among clones so you’re not used to someone touching you so softly, careful not to injure you more. Rex was the softest with you and even then he would just make sure you were able to patch yourself up if need be. No one has ever taken care of you like this with the exception of the medical droids you’ve come in contact with.

Obi Wan isn’t sure why he’s doing this. He hasn’t had the urge to take care of anyone like this since Satine. The connection he felt to you shouldn’t be this strong so soon after meeting you, and this is one of the only ways he really knows how to show his affection towards you. When he heard the clone insulting you it had made his blood boil and the fact that he couldn’t explain why made it worse.

“I’ll do something about that trooper, he should have more respect for his fellow clones who fight alongside him.”

“Don’t worry about it General. Cody is going to make sure he has some sort of punishment I’m sure.” You both hold eye contact for a bit before you look away, your heart beating faster than ever due to your closeness. “If you don’t mind General Kenobi, I’d like to get started on the Vulture Droid so I can get back to my regular squadron.” You excuse yourself and leave the room.

Obi Wan watches you leave confused on why his heart hurt at the thought of you leaving so soon after you arrived. He hesitates before walking out after you to talk to Cody about the troopers’ punishment.

[itsybitsylemonsqueezy]

Hey, I’m here once again with the ranting (if you don’t mind)! I just finished playing Yakuza 5 and damn I have a lot of feels I want to share. When I was first introduced to the franchise, I thought that nothing could beat Zero for me, but here I am now, holding back my tears and thinking what a fine game 5 turned out to be! I really loved the bonds that characters formed along the way, it just felt so sincere and warm that my heart throbbed nearly at every dialogue Х) Like Saejima/Baba, Mirei/Haruka (and Akiyama too!), Shinada/Takasugi were absolutely delightful. And don’t get me started on the ending scene with Kiryu and his daughter. I fucking lost it there. So damn emotional and pure. And while I adore Zero for its majestic tragedy and fatalism, I also love the kind and inspiring atmosphere of 5. Of course, there were some flaws, like I didn’t find the main antagonist all that interesting (especially after Ryuji and Mine), but in the end I was ready to overlook it just because the heartwarming scenes between the characters were so well done. So yeah, for me it’s top tier along with Zero. What’s your personal opinion on the game (and your favorites in the series in general)?

Congrats! Oooooh, Game 5. I’ve got a lot of feels about Game 5 too ^^; It’s a real fav c: There’s an awful lot I love about it, but there’s one or two things that really stick in my craw. I’m not sure I could put it up with Zero, but it’s definitely a game I treasure c: 

I find it interesting that your interpret Zero as fatalistic and 5 as inspiring. Zero definitely has a lot of high-key tragedy, but I think the fact that we come through the other side, that Kiryu doesn’t go into the ground with Tachibana, that Majima decides that even though he could be happy with Makoto, it isn’t what he wants, I find that really powerful and even hopeful. Not inspiring perhaps, the choices we all make in that game are crushingly hard and frequently we’re punished for things that aren’t our fault. But seeing Kiryu confront his potential for the first time and, perhaps for the last time, deciding he’s not afraid of it, that this is a mantle he can carry and do good with, really does things for me. And I’ve gone on at length before about how we ought to read Majima’s choice at the end as not sacrificial, not denial, but rather a choice of identity. What stopped him from going with Makoto isn’t fear for what it would do to her (though certainly those protective instincts are still alive and well), but rather a... with nothing holding him back, he would still choose the life he started. He could leave it all right here but... there are things he wants to do, not has to do, wants to do. And he makes the choice to be yakuza, to be the Mad Dog, crucially, before he sees Kiryu. He could leave it all behind, but then he wouldn’t be himself. He wants to be yakuza. And he couldn’t do that if he was with her. I think that’s really cool and really life-affirming. 

Meanwhile 5... it’s hard for me to articulate what 5 is about because we have a bunch of different character arcs, some of which mesh quite nicely and some of which have nothing at all to do with each other. It’s probably best if I just break this down piece by piece ^^;

(spoilers follow for game 5 my little chili babies)

Kiryu’s arc, as I have articulated before, I fucking love in game 5. However, I do have my criticisms of it. In many ways, the conflict we’re facing in 5 is something that should have come up awhile back. But, even delayed, it is satisfying. It is satisfying to force Kiryu to confront his mistakes. It is satisfying to at least reach a turn on Kiryu, to have him decide that he wants to live and does feel worthy, even if it’s at the last possible second. Like, I interpret 5 as much more fatalistic because Kiryu’s dying in the snow in the middle of saying how he wants to come home to his daughter. Like... he may have finally gotten his revelation, but he was already in the middle of repeating the cycle. What would have been truly satisfying was to force him to live, to insist that he grow up and learn how to live with people because dying won’t fix it. This is a problem we’ve had since the beginning and have never really addressed. This was our chance to address it and it breaks my heart that game 5 comes so close and was going the right direction, but doesn’t quite give us that resolution that Kiryu’s going to continue his relationships and be okay now, that he isn’t going to back out this time. And if the creators had been brave they would have ended the fucking series here with that resolution. That’s SO OBVIOUSLY the main conflict in Kiryu’s plot and here, at last, we were finally fucking dealing with it and this SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE END. THIS WAS IT. THE ACTUAL FUCKING END, I- *breathes* Let me not derail this entire thing with game 6. Let’s just... never talk about game 6. 

That said... one of the things I ADORE about game 5 is this is the clearest sense of motivation we’ve had since Kiwami 1. For the first time in FUCKING FOREVER character choices made sense! HALLE-FUCKING-LUJAH. I CANNOT TELL YOU what it did to me that it was Majima that got Kiryu into the game. I cannot tell you the breath of life it gave me, after all this fucking BULLSHIT, that the game came FUCKING HOME on the most important person to Kiryu is Majima. Daigo needs help? Kiryu can’t help. Haruka needs her dad? Kiryu can’t help. These are both mistakes, don’t get me wrong! Absolutely terrible decisions, but they make sense out of Kiryu’s depression, out of his fears and doubts and feelings of unworthiness, his guilt. He’s so caught up in “better off without me” and so scared and so guilty, he can’t answer people even when they ask for help. But Majima. He can’t turn away from. He hears Majima’s dead and Kiryu loses his goddamn mind. Because it’s his fault. Because he wasn’t there. Because he left him out there and now Majima’s dead. Kiryu asked him to do something and, for all Kiryu knows, Majima’s dead because of him. And... as much as Kiryu hates himself in this moment, as much as Kiryu is sure that it’s all his fault, he’s SO upset, he has to go help, he HAS to go fix it. Majima’s dead and with his last breath, Kiryu will make this fuckign right. He’s gotta try. Because Majima being dead is... unacceptable. He can’t handle it. I fucking love that. At long last, it felt like the same story I’d been watching from 1. At long fucking last, we got some fucking proof of Kiryu’s feelings. And for that alone, I love game 5. I’ve got some issues with it, but that was... vindication. Spent 3 games waffling and pretending we didn’t know him unless we’re literally in the same scene, but even Kiryu’s denial isn’t that strong. Majima’s dead and Kiryu can’t anymore. He’s gonna go there and, god help him, he’ll go into the ground with him. You look at that and tell me it was un-fucking-requited. 

On that note, I just gotta gush for a second about that scene where the girl is naked in Kiryu’s apartment and Kiryu just ???? He’s not even “no thank you” he’s like PAINED. Like... she hugs him and Kiryu looks like he’s being fucking tortured! That is not the reaction of someone with even an iota of attraction to feminine bodies! This gay icon! Like, if you’d done that to Majima he would have been like “You’re pretty, babe, but I am Emotionally Unavailable” like the bi icon he is, like... you may not take her up on it, but you can still appreciate her or at least turn her down gracefully. But Kiryu out here doing his best to touch her as little as humanly fucking possible like’ he’s TERRIFIED. That’s not someone being overly polite, that was “cannot conceive of being attracted to this.” Just... this gay fucking dad. Holy christ. 

Related GOTTA love Kiryu’s boss being “Hey, there’s a rumor going around that you’re gay! Any thoughts?” and Kiryu just “That Is A Thing People Ask Me” which is the EXACT RESPONSE of a queer person who doesn’t want to out themselves but also doesn’t want to lie. Game 5 fucking iconic for those 2 scenes alone, god bless. 

Moving away from Kiryu for a second, although this game is VERY about Kiryu’s story, let’s talk about Saejima! Saejima FINALLY gets to come into his own as a character, we get to handle him properly as a character and not as a crux in Majima’s character development. I love the marked differences in how Kiryu and Saejima respond to Majima and handle him. I love that they fucking NAILED motivation here. That Kiryu and Majima mutually code romantic, that they both make batshit decisions because of each other, in that way that you do when you’re madly in love with someone. Meanwhile, Saejima loves his brother but isn’t in love with him. Saejima’s relationship with Majima is stable and trusting. He’s not losing his mind over Majima’s death because he trust him and knows him. If he’s dead, Saejima trusts that Majima did all he could and it was just his time. That’s why he’s not losing his mind, he’s resolved. He just wants to know what happened. And it’s this stability that really tells us who Saejima is and how he functions as a protag. His strength is his trust in others, which at times IS naive, but it’s also what turns Baba. It’s what keeps Saejima strong when Kiryu’s falling apart. It’s so cool to see a character who isn’t paranoid, who isn’t tore up with guilt, in this series with very complicated leads. Saejima is functional and necessary because he isn’t any of those things. He doesn’t get swept up in big emotional turmoil. He cuts through a lot of foibles that would have tripped up his brother or Kiryu and it’s just really refreshing to see and exciting to experience Saejima’s brand of problem solving. He’s not terribly clever and he’s not subtle, but he’s honest and sure that counts for A LOT in this series. Gotta love Saejima. 

And, as I have gushed about before and will again, Baba. Baba. Saejima turning Baba hand me fucking ascending. Baba Known Whore Shigecki turning on a time because Saejima screams “Because we’re kyoudai!” I am LIVING. I love their relationship. I love that Baba’s a little shit. I love that he’s inexplicably a supermodel. I love that his constant vibe is “would like to choke til he cries on Saejima’s dick.” I love that Saejima has a gorgeous prison boyfriend. Well deserved! I love the idea of Baba getting integrated into the group. I need WAY more fic about him coming back to live with Saejima in Kamurocho and Saejima just has an ex-assassin boyfriend now and we all get to live with that. Ugggghhhh, bless. So good. No notes, no criticisms, just good.

Haruka was LONG overdue to be a protag, I’m so glad this game did it. But... pop idol? The thing she explicitly said in Kiwami 2 she didn’t want to be? *siiiigh* Like, I get that she can change her mind as she grows up and that that’s the Thing You Do with Japanese teenage girls, but... Imagine Martial Artist Haruka! Raised by the yakuza, surrounded her whole life by people with incredible fighting skills, who would gladly teach her self-defense. Imagine! Or even training her to become a yakuza! My wife and I joke about Seventh Chairman Sawamura Haruka, but imagine how satisfying that would have been! A whole Tojo dynasty of Kiryu’s kids! She’s so ripe for it! And I know the yakuza is a male-only organization but... c’mon, this is fiction and sexism is boring. I guess I can understand the creators unwillingness to depict violence against women, even if it’s being perpetrated by other women but uh... *eye twitch* game 5 is maybe not the BEST example of their... respecting women... 

*screams into a pillow for several minutes* *breathes* *screams for another fifteen minutes* Okay... I uh... I um... can’t talk about Mirei Park without having an aneurysm. PLEASE skip this bullet point if you don’t want to read Mirei Hate. I just... I Hate Everything About Her And I Don’t Know Why She Fucking Exists. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade and if you like Mirei, y’all welcome to feel how you feel but... she is the only thing I truly Hate about game 5. I just... leaving aside my personal feelings about the... Majima part of her story which we just... Won’t talk about... Leaving that aside... I don’t know why she’s here? She’s the person who convinces Kiryu to leave his children. She’s predatory, she took advantage of a vulnerable young girl to live out some personal dream? Like, sure, economic opportunity, independence, but we don’t get a lot of motive from Haruka that it IS her dream to be a pop idol. She has said in the past that’s not what she wants, she makes mention of doing this for the money to support her family, Mirei LITERALLY SAYS she wants Haruka to do the things she couldn’t, and ultimately Haruka asides not to do this anyway because she’d ratehr be home with her dad! So what was the FUCKING POINT of Mirei Park? Is she a villain? Is she sympathetic? What the fuck was I supposed to take from her? How the fuck am I supposed to read her? She tells this TRAUMATIC story off-hand to Haruka to... justify her decisions? Motivate Haruka? Dragging in another long-term character for no good reason and reframing how we have to think about said character. But then THIS NEVER COMES UP AGAIN. The information wasn’t even important! It’s just traumatic! If it was supposed to keep Haruka doing the pop idol thing, it didn’t work! Haruka still leaves! If this was meant to deepen our relationship to Mirei or complicate her or whatever, IT DOESN’T, SHE WAS LITERALLY DEAD THE NEXT SCENE. I just... WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED HERE?! What even the fuck was I supposed to do with any of this?! Leaving ASIDE my VERY intense feelings about what this did for Majima (for the sake of not going ogg Even More than I already am, I just won’t talk abotu it here), I just have no goddamn clue what the point of Mirei even was. She’s not useful to Haruka’s arc and she only serves in Kiryu’s arc to be a villain. We could have had Haruka leave home and decide in the end that Kiryu’s her dad and that’s where she wants to be a MILLION different ways, we could have done that MUCH more kindly and consistently with the rest of her character and values, but we don’t! We have this shitmess instead!

I’m really really sorry to anyone reading this who likes Mirei. You don’t have to agree with me! And I’m not trying to make you feel bad! I’m not trying to tell people how they should feel or what they should get out of the story. If you got something out of her, you related to her, you found her part in the story meaningful, that’s great! I’m genuinely glad that you did. I... didn’t. I have a lot of negative opinions about what happened. Usually I try to just not talk about it because I don’t want to ruin someone’s good time. I’m not here trying to start shit. So I apologize for my tone and I did try to put a warning before it and recommend it be skipped if it’s the sort of thing that would offend you. My Mirei rant is over now, I won’t talk about it again.

I have absolutely no idea why Akiyama is in this story, tbh? He contributed very little, but I’m glad Haruka got to hang out with someone cool and that one of her uncles was here watching out for her, since Majima was “dead” and Kiryu was in the middle of a personal crisis ^^; I love Akiyama, always happy to see him, but he really had nothing to do here ^^; I was sad for no Hana though 8C Wherever there is Akiyama, there must also be Hana!

Shinada... is adorable and actively injured the plot. I’m sorry, I just... no one ever talks about the fact that including Shinada in the story actively hurt it. I love him too! He’s an incredible idiot and very sweet, but why the fuck is he here? What did an ancient baseball cover up have to do with anything? This was the only way you could think of to put Daigo in the game again? Really??? And Daigo doesn’t even do very much here! So like... not really worth it. You could have had a whole substory of Daigo finding out what happened to Majima, fuck DAIGO COULD HAVE BEEN ONE OF THE PROTAGS. THERE’S A THOUGHT. We could have utilized, y’know, characters we already have, but no, instead we introduce this dumb fuck to do... what exactly? Oh right, beat up Baba AFTER HE HAD ALREADY DECIDED NOT TO SHOOT HARUKA! Like, YOU DIDN’T EVEN NEED SHINADA FOR THE THING YOU NEEDED HIM FOR. Saejima and Kiryu were enough of an influence on Baba to stop him! And that makes sense out of Baba’s character arc, since it’s about personal redemption and learning to be a person and his faith and love of Saejima, y’know, the character he actually HAS a relationship with, is about that. The point of Baba was him learning it WAS his choice and him MAKING that choice. See, I can’t argue that Baba’s superfluous to the plot, but he WAS the threat! He was actively involved and he’s what makes Saejima involved. Shinada doesn’t occupy the same space, he has no horse in this race, he’s not yakuza, he’s only here because he and Daigo kinda like each other or whatever, and, again, HE WASN’T EVEN NEEDED! Baba’s arc was complete and the threat was terminated without this shit! Like, Akiyama has no reason to be here either, but at least he was a true neutral, neither helping nor harming the plot. We actively waste time to bring Shinada in and he hurts Baba’s arc by overly punishing him and potentially risking the decision he just made. Like if I was Baba, I might have gone “you know what, fuck you, I will shoot her just because your self-righteous ass decided to hit me for MAKING THE RIGHT CALL” Jesus... 

I hate to be nothing but a curmudgeon but just... no one brings that up and I just had to say it if no one else was gonna. 

As for villains, the game would have been a lot stronger without the “thwarted destiny, I should be on the throne” bullshit especially since the story has done a SHIT JOB with the legacy of Nishiki and in NO WAY utilized the fucking koi or the burden of Nishiki’s death properly for this to hit the way it should. It makes theoretical sense that Kriyu’s last villain should be the reincarnation of Nishiki, but the story did not build that up or support it so it falls really flat. That said, the main problem in Kiryu’s arc is that dying is not a resolution. Dying doesn’t fix a problem, it only delays it. THAT’S the thing we have to confront and we almost nearly do and... I’m just so excited that we finally articulated that, I’m willing to forgive A LOT. 

And finally we wrote Majima entirely out of the game only to confirm that his only reason for living is Kiryu and then, again, didn’t resolve it because, y’know, fuck ending things, I guess? But he did have that sweet fight with Saejima and can do shadow clones now I guess? Fucking ninja magic or whatever. Sure, Majima’s so OP he can do fucking shadow clones now. No, teleporting wasn’t enough, he can fucking shadow clone. That’s like a staisfying story arc right? ...right?

[therandomfish]

A Babysitters Guide to Monster Hunting- A Randomfish Review

Did you like the remake of Ghostbusters where there were female Ghostbusters? Well then you’ll love the all female remake of Monster Squad... 

Is that accurate? Kind of. It feels like that right from a main character who believes in monsters, a villain who wants to bring together an army of monsters and of course sometimes the most random of moments. Although it isn’t an actual remake and it is it’s own thing want to make that clear. 

What’s the story? Kelly Ferguson (played by Tamara Smart)  is the kid at school who is apparently tortured by the kids of the town because she apparently saw a monster in her room and everyone just calls her “Monster Girl” oh and she skipped a grade because she’s smart, thanks to the exposition teacher (or maybe he’s the math teacher I forget) 

Okay first thing to dissect is this..... WHY?! Why are the kids still torturing her about THAT? First off these are teenagers there would be plenty of gossip around town I’m fairly sure and secondly this doesn’t appear to be a massively small town so this type of thing wouldn’t be as well known as it is! There is the generic bully girl played by Anisa Harris who just picks on her coz she’s nerdy and weird but... again this feels very pointlessly generic... haven’t we evolved our bullies since then? 

Kelly then gets’ guilt tripped to babysit her Mum’s boss’s kid because her Mum just assumed that she would be doing nothing ever and that she wouldn’t be trying to grow up and move on with her life like going to a party that was randomly announced in the hallway by some dude... I mean I can’t exactly say that’s it’s a bad scene either just convenient and to be honest if we sinned movies for being convenient then we’d just hate all movies (right CinemaSins?) and that the dude that is clearly the hot guy at school said he’d go and Kelly now wants to go in order to impress him and steal him away from Anisa Harris (yes the character has a name but she is so bland and forgettable why should I remember that character’s name?) but she goes to the boss’s house to babysit the kid named Jacob Zellman (Wow, I’m starting wonder if his mother is anyway related to Zelda or Hilda Spellman and just changed their names out of embarrassment) with the mother leaving behind a massive set of insane rules. However we learn that Jacob sees monsters just like Kelly did and while Kelly didn’t end up being taken by the monsters Jacob definitely does... okay now with the designs of the “Toadies” as they’re called in the film that’s not bad... what makes me laugh however with the rise of the villain of the film called Grand Guignol played by Tom Felton (yes THAT Tom Felton as if there’s any other) being a leader of some kind of boogiemen type of monster I began to wonder if we were about to get a modern take on the song “Dance Magic Dance” all of a sudden. 

We then get introduced to the films’ resident badass on a scooter (not a motorbike because that doesn’t equate badass anymore apparently) who is Liz played by Oona Laurence who turns up with all the information and starts essentially dumping exposition on us! From names of monsters to the book that she has to read to understand everything about the monsters and all of this completely cavalier while carrying a baby on her back. After chasing down one of the toadies they bring it back to their headquarters where we actually get an idea why the film is called this; A Babysitters Guide to Monster Hunting where we learn that apparently this organization has existed for hundreds of years. We see pretty quickly that the writer of the book also wrote the screenplay as he just says things while assuming that the people who’ve read the book are watching and everyone else be damned.... well I am part of everyone else and I say “No! You be damned for once!” We then meet our resident variety of side characters who will do next to nothing; Fat Kid (I mean  Curtis Critter played by Ty Consiglio), Cassie Zhen (played by Lynn Masako Cheng) and Berna Vincent (played by Troy Leigh-Ann Johnson) I say their names and characters now because to be honest they do a little behind the scenes stuff and try to give themselves focus but the crux of the whole thing rests on Kelly and Liz (who if you couldn’t tell from the attitude and the “hog” has a dark backstory) so they go off to get Jacob back who is being forced to bring his dreams to life which is why Draco Felton was trying to get him and why he was trying to get Kelly all those years ago too (yeah, that was a thing apparently Draco Felton has been stalking kids for years, there there’s an image in your fangirl minds about Draco Malfoy stalking kids) and so they go off to try and get a creature that can help them get the pieces together to take on and destroy Draco Felton and so they go to.... any guesses anyone? Yes you are correct madam it was the party that Kelly wanted to go to! They go there, words are exchanged, the boy that Kelly likes is confused but impressed I guess with the way she is as herself, generic bully is put in her place by Liz and, despite her saying that she wouldn’t go to the party while she was supposed to be babysitting Jacob there are videos on Instagram of her jumping off of a higher floor in someone’s home... that’ll look great Kelly well done also you wanna relax after jumping down a floor and landing on your face? No? Okay what do I know? They collect what they need and the nerd crew at the base (told you I’d forget their names they’re so forgettable those.... who?) make a device that Kelly can use to essentially punch Draco Felton to death (PUNCHING PEOPLE: As long as it’s monsters, it’s okay) they travel to a cat monster type person who traps them, LIz gets taken away by Felton and Kelly, who has been shockingly okay with this whole ordeal just gets up and heads for the lair on Liz’s scooter (sure she wont’ mind, at least fill up the tank you greedy whatsit) where we had learnt previously that Liz lost her brother to Draco Felton (see? Dark backstory) and he had hypnotized her with his lullaby even though we were shown that NEVER HAPPENING until we got to Liz so SCREW YOU MOVIE! Kelly snaps her out of it, they punch Draco Felton to death, Jacob is reunited with his mum just in time (Ferris Bueller would be proud) and Kelly begins her initiation into the Babysitters club and the ending is her looking at a book one of Draco Felton’s relatives, not going to the movies with a boy (because girl gotta save the world yo) and she’s feeling happy about this life of danger and madness she must now lead..... obviously this is baiting for a sequel, will it get one? I dunno we got a sequel to the Kissing Booth for crying out loud, something that didn’t need to happen in the least yet it did! 

So what did I think of it? Well it’s trying to be like the monster hunting, wise cracking monster kid movies of old, hence why I referenced monster squad but does that make it good? I mean the acting isn’t awful, Tom Felton does a pretty good job with that role and it did take me a while to realise it was him under the makeup. Tamara Smart and Oona Laurence were fine as leading ladies although Oona felt like she should have been older when playing this role, just to show the difference in age and to show what the life could do to you. As it stands it feels like when Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy meet in Breakfast club if they went hunting for Judd Nelson after he turned into a werewolf or something. 

But with all of it being said, this film was funny in places, tried to offer a sense of scariness that needed to go a bit further with it’s ideas 

I’d say a solid 7/10 (yes I do ratings) 

Please like this and let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to review next 

[ts1989fanatic]

TS7 is finally here!

If you’re like me or any of the millions of Swifties out there, the arrival of this next era is just as exciting as a brand-new bookshelf full of reads you get to experience for the first time.

After listening to the album on repeat all weekend, I decided to celebrate Lover with a book roundup inspired by each of the songs (since it’s the only thing I’ll be listening to for the foreseeable future, don’t @ me.).

ts1989fanatic an interesting perspective well written obviously a swiftie.

1. “I Forgot That You Existed” (Best Friends Forever, by Jennifer Weiner)

You heard it from Taylor first: indifference is the new vengeance. This solid album-opener is upbeat and poppy, a nice contrast with the lyrics about the (final?) end of a broken relationship, friendship (or feud), when you actually forget that the person you once had so much ire for still lives. She transitions from “Your name on my lips, tongue-tied/Free rent, living in my mind” to “forgot that you existed/and I thought that it would kill me, but it didn’t” with ease. But of course, insisting that you forget someone existed while singing about them would introduce interesting tension into any relationship. It reminded me of Jennifer Weiner’s Best Friends Forever, about what happens when a former friend shows up on your doorstep in a crisis, insisting you’re the only one who can help them out of a tight spot (when you’d rather do anything but).

2. “Cruel Summer” (Do You Want to Start a Scandal, by Tessa Dare)

Lyrically and sonically, this is one of my favorites on the entire album (it’s so good it should have been a single!) It’s got an Out of the Woods meets Getaway Car vibe in terms of the melody. Wistful, a bit haunting, but also a total bop. “So cut the headlights, summer’s a knife/I’m always waiting for you just to cut to the bone” describes a low point in Swift’s life (Summer 2016, ugh), juxtaposed with the high of discovering new love. There are so many books I could have picked for this, but “I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you” reminded me of the Regency romance trope where the heroine has a secret, or finds herself in a situation where her reputation is at stake, but is still tempted by a handsome rogue who might lead her into temptation and true love. (Sound a bit familiar?) Do You Want to Start a Scandal by Tessa Dare feels like the perfect accompaniment to this song about a woman who must prove her innocence in the face of a sullied reputation or be forced to marry a man she doesn’t think she could ever love.

3. “Lover” (Roomies, by Christina Lauren)

The title track (and the one I’ve been singing in the shower for days) is a swoony daydream of a couple in complete harmony, as Swift spins wedding vow-like lyrics such as “With every guitar string scar on my hand/I take this magnetic force of a man to be my…lover/My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue/all’s well that end’s well to end up with you/swear to be overdramatic and true/to my…lover.” But Swift is all about balance in her songs, so imagery of keeping up the Christmas lights in “our place” is juxtaposed with suspicion that “everyone who sees you wants you.” This track reminded me of Roomies by Christina Lauren, with its musician main character and the trope of having to share a space while inevitably falling in love.

4. “The Man” (The Whisper Network, by Chandler Baker)

The double-standards between men and women have been explored in songs and novels since both art forms existed. Swift has already confronted the media’s perception of her as a victim, as a girl who goes on too many dates but can’t make them stay, etc. But in “The Man”, she more directly confronts how different she’d be treated if she were the opposite gender. How could I not think of the new thriller The Whisper Network, about a group of women who come forward about their male boss’ behavior of harassment in the workplace. Instead of continuing to suffer in silence, they tell the truth, resulting in an explosive conflict. I sort of saw the ending coming, but was very glad I was right.

5. “The Archer” (Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

Another slower, lyric-driven track on the album with gut-punching truths about love, friendship, and holding on to the one who has your heart. “The Archer” is associated with being a Sagittarius (which Swift is), but also her dynamic with the world. “Who could ever leave me, darling?/But who could stay?” is self-aware in a new way for Swift, as is “I never grew up, it’s getting so old” or “I see right through me.” This is one of my favorite tracks on the album, as Swift confronts her cultivated image as both archer and prey of fame and of love. Listening to the rising energy of the track as it builds to a anti-fairy-tale crescendo plus Swift’s lyrics made me think of Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth Bennet is forced to acknowledge how her own prejudices have made it difficult for others to love her, but that she is deserving of an imperfect love. (And how could “All of my enemies started out friends” not remind you of awful Mr. Wickham?)

6. “I Think He Knows” (The Duke and I, by Julia Quinn)

After a slower song, this heats things up a bit, describing the early sizzle of a relationship before it even starts. For an entire album that sings the praises of a man, I liked the moment in the pre-chorus where she says “He’s so obsessed with me, and boy, I understand.” Own your worth, girl! The bridge was my favorite part of this song (as it often is with Swift; girl knows how to bridge) as it played with tempo and rhyme. “Lyrical smile, indigo eyes, hand on my thigh/We can follow the sparks, I’ll drive.” Swift explores the tension of the moment between seeing someone and initiating contact—songs like these always sting with a bit of danger, too, because the man knows she wants him but neither of them say anything in public about it. She’s whispering in the dark, which gives me serious secret romance vibes. The Duke and I by Julia Quinn is about Simon, who is planning to propose to his BFF’s sister even though he doesn’t actually love her. It’s an arrangement that suits them both, but before they both know it, Daphne is giving Simon serious “I Think he Knows” vibes.

7. “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” (The Cheerleaders, by Kara Thomas)

If you don’t get the oft-spoken adage that “politics is like high-school,” this song takes the metaphor to the next level. Subtly political but 100% heartbreaking, Swift reimagines the political sphere (and her role in it) as a high school romance, moving from “American glory, faded before me,” painting the democratic 2016 election loss as a ripped-up prom dress (from Miss Americana, who assumed she would win.) Oozing drama and storytelling the way only Swift can, I love the moody elements of the brokenhearted girl contrasted with the new riff on a cheerleading chant (Go Fight Win!). This song is about mourning loss and then finding the strength to say “I know we’re going to win,” but it’s haunting melody and lyrics led me to pick a Cheerleader-inspired thriller. The Cheerleaders is about a string of cheerleaders murdered in a small town five years ago… and just when everyone thinks it’s time to move on, one girl becomes the center of a mystery that never truly died.

8. “Paper Rings” (The Royal We, by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan)

I’m on my fourth listen of the album and this might be my favorite track on it (though that changes minute by minute, with an album as dynamic as this—just to further accentuate the point, by the time of posting this piece, my new favorite might be I Think He Knows?). It’s a totally retro, ’60s style song—a totally fresh sound for Swift, and one that fits perfectly with her new aesthetic. (Makes me wonder why this wasn’t one of the singles released before the record.) It is a gold-mine for Swiftian lyricism, with so many gems I can’t possibly call them all out, and it moves so fast (like a good read) that you both want to cascade over them and pause to hear each line at least 5x before it passes you by. It’s an unabashed love song, relishing in the joy of knowing you’re with the one you love so much that “I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings”. The line that stuck out the most was “I hate accidents except when we went from friends to this,” which made me think of when Bex Porter goes to Oxford in The Royal We and, completely by accident, falls in love with the heir to the throne.

9. “Cornelia Street” (Passion on Park Avenue, by Lauren Layne)

“Cornelia Street” is sort of the antithesis to I Think He knows. It’s about remembering the early days of a new relationship (“We were a fresh page on the desk/filling in the blanks as we go”) and being more than willing to give up all the good that comes with fresh starts in order to settle into something real. It aches with melancholy, because any time we give something up should be a little sad—but it brims with hope and Swift’s trademarked optimism about love. “I hope I never lose you, hope it never ends/I’d never walk Cornelia Street again/ That’s the kinda heartbreak time could never mend.” I had to pick an NYC-set story for this, like Lauren Layne’s Passion on Park Avenue. The city is another character in the romance between a successful jewelry-business owner and the son of the woman her mother used to work for.

10. “Death By a Thousand Cuts” (Please Don’t Go Before I Get Better, by Madisen Kuhn)

Inspired by the Netflix movie Something Great, this is one of the few sad songs on the record, about a girl going through a breakup who can’t help but linger in happier memories. (For the record: “I dress to kill my time” is genius, as are so many of these lyrics.) Only Swift is so good at pairing such devastating messaging with a pop beat you can’t help but want to sing. This song was the hardest one to pick a book for (especially because it’s already inspired by a movie) so I decided to go with a poetry collection! Please Don’t Go Before I Get Better is all about the aches and sun rays of growing up, told in a staggeringly relatable voice that will make you want to curl up on the couch and cry your eyes out.

11. “London Boy” (Red, White and Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston)

This is 100% about Joe Alwyn, but also… Taylor dated at least two Brits that we know of before him, so this song is also about what we already knew (“the rumors are true”): she has a penchant for London Boys. Essentially a road map of her favorite places in the city, this indulgent ditty trades “Tennessee Whiskey” for “A gray sky, a rainy cab ride” and of course, her man by her side. Red, White, and Royal Blue is the perfect pick for this song, about two boys who fall in love (after a rough start where they were almost enemies) amidst those gray, rainy skies… but one of them happens to be the son of an American President, and the other, the current Prince of England.

12. “Soon You’ll Get Better (feat. Dixie Chicks)” (Swamplandia! by Karen Russell)

Of all the songs on the album, this one gave me the most vintage Swift vibes. There’s no denying that she is an astonishingly talented songwriter, especially when you listen to what is essentially her greatest fear laid bare on this track with just a bit of guitar and the Dixie Chicks harmonizing in the background. Here, the story shines: Swift’s mother has been sick for a number of years, and while they’ve mostly kept the details of that battle private, this is the most vulnerable moment of love for her mother on an album mostly about finding true love. “Holy orange bottles, each night I pray to you/Desperate people find faith, so now I pray to Jesus, too.” A friend of mine recently lost their mother just after getting married, and it made me marvel at how life often delivers us highs and lows to grapple with simultaneously. While all of this was going on—Kanye and Kim, Joe and London, another world tour, another album—in the background, Swift has been terrified of losing her mother. This song made me think of Swamplandia!, a novel about a young girl living in a gator-wrestling theme park where her mother used to be the main event, until she passed away. Now, in the wake of her death, the girl and her siblings must grapple with their mother’s legacy as a competing business rises up to swallow the success she built on the swamp.

13. “False God” (City of Girls, by Elizabeth Gilbert)

Is that a saxophone in the background of a Taylor Swift song? This slow, jazzy number is all about love and desire—and how we come back to it even when the world around us (and sometimes we, ourselves) put it in jeopardy. “And I can’t talk to you when you’re like this/Staring out the window like I’m not your favorite town/I’m New York City” and other lyrics referencing New York seem to be the grounding force in an otherwise tumultuous relationship. Multiple times on this record Swift has alluded to rough patches in her current happiness, but connection is always the solution to fixing it. She seems to say that if you treat your relationship like it’s your religion, you can get through anything. This is one of the sexier songs on the album, but it’s also got serious NYC vibes, so I’m picking City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert: a novel all about relishing romance in the glitzy 1940’s New York Theater scene, but also how desire can either set us on the road to ruin, or redemption.

14. “You Need to Calm Down” (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid)

This song has done what Swift does best: inspire conversation and a bit of controversy. Acknowledging that it was past time for her to be an outspoken ally for the LGBTQIAP+ community, YNTCD tackles the various ways communities are pitted against one another (especially on the internet.) The first verse examines her personal haters (“Say it in the street, that’s a knock-out/But you say it in a Tweet, that’s a cop-out), the second calls out homophobes (“Shade never made anybody less gay”), and the third examines how her relationships with her female contemporaries have often been antagonistic, something she herself has been responsible perpetuating in the past with songs like “Bad Blood” and “Better Than Revenge” (“We all know now, we all got crowns/you need to calm down.”) The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is about a famous actress who hid the great female love of her life behind multiple male partners and uses her platform to tell the truth (all while hiding one last devastating secret). While Taylor herself has not come out as part of the LGBTQ community, she has come out as an ally, and this book made me think about the issues of privacy, platform, allyship, and identity that the song also confronts. If there’s more to the story of Swift’s relationship to the LGBTQIAP+ community, she’s going to share it on her own terms.

15.“Afterglow” (Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams)

This song ranks high on my favorites from the album, and it’s a rare genre from Swift: the apology song. (The other famous one is Speak Now’s “Back to December.”) In this mid-tempo song with slamming drums and a breathy falsetto, Swift yearns for the partner she pushed away to meet her in the moments after the fight ends. “It’s all me, in my head/I’m the one who burned us down/ but it’s not what I meant,” she insists. There’s still hope here though, as opposed to earlier songs on the record that signal the doom of a friendship or a breakup after-the-fact. Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams, is a novel about a girl coming to terms with her role in a failed relationship, a career she can’t seem to succeed in, and friends she unknowingly betrays. “Why’d I have to break what I love so much?” is a question asked in this song’s chorus, and one Queenie must answer in order to find real, lasting happiness.

16. “ME! (feat. Brendon Urie)” (Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan)

This self-love anthem is bubblegum sweet and full of earworms: the “Shake it Off“ of the TS7 Era. It makes me think of lightning-fast beach reads that you can’t put down and that feel so good to read but also have a deeper meaning to them. Just because it’s not the most lyrically advanced of her songs doesn’t mean this bop doesn’t deserve to be celebrated— it reminded me of how romances constantly get a bad rep (lol, see what I did there?) as somehow lesser than other genres. I love that Taylor doesn’t care about what other people think and is 100% focused on being her authentic self— just like the heroine of Crazy Rich Asians, Rachel Chu. When confronted with the wealth and expectations of her boyfriend Nick’s family (who don’t think she’s good enough for him), she insists it’s her individuality that makes her the perfect partner for him.

17. “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” (This Love Story Will Self-Destruct, by Leslie Cohen)

This track might be my second favorite? It’s so different (Ukulele? Trombone? Is that what I’m hearing?) and such a contrast to the beginning of the album, the opener closes the door on a once meaningful friendship. It’s also a deceiving song, in that I’m still not 100% sure what it’s about. I think Swift is exploring the importance of friendship in all its forms: in childhood (“School bell rings, walk me home”) to adolescence “Something gave you the nerve/to touch my hand”) to romantic love (“Church bells ring, carry me home/rice on the ground looks like snow”). Ultimately, she may be saying that the most important thing about a romantic partner is that they make you feel like you have a friend—when you’re young, the thing that matters most is feeling seen by other people. If your lover is also your best friend, then you know they always have your back. A love story that takes place over two characters’ twenties, This Love Story Will Self-Destruct is about the missteps, betrayals, beautiful moments and connection that forms between two people over a decade.

18. “Daylight” (Evvie Drake Starts Over, by Linda Holmes)

“My love was as cruel as the cities I lived in.” What a way to begin this album closer. Swift’s last tracks have a tradition of being the ones that are most emblematic of her current state of mind, but they also have developed certain themes over time. Renewal, starting over, self-reflection, and hope are all subjects “Daylight” sheds a little light on. She acknowledges past failings (“I wounded the good and trusted the wicked”) and what she wants for the future (“I once believed love would be [burning red]/but it’s golden”). A book that feels like daylight on your skin is what’s needed for this song, and I think Evvie Drake Starts Over is the perfect pick: a story about a woman still grieving the loss of her husband but who finds herself moving on with a former major league baseball player. Both of them have pasts they are healing from, but together, they find hope for the future. “I’ve been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night/and now I see daylight.” And, unlike (I think?) any other song in her catalogue, she speaks in the end, not sings, in a direct appeal to her audience. Her very last words are “You are what you love.” Well, I love Taylor Swift. I love a good song lyric to sink my teeth into, or to sing. I love love. And I love a good story, whether it comes from a song or a book, and when you’re done with the album, I hope you find some here.

[popculturebuffet]

The Loud House review 4x29: Brave the Last Dance

In a months late review of a show I watch only on occcasion that i’m doing for some reason: Clyde gets the help of the rest of the Clincoln true to find out if his crush likes him or not: Hyjinks and my smouldring hatred of rusty insues. 

With Ducktales only arriving once a week, me missing reviewing and having a lot of time on my hands i’ve decided to branch out a bit.. maybe not a ton, but ocasionally review other animated shows and seasons. If you have any suggetions or any paticular episode you’d like me to look into, let me know. 

For now I decided to take a look at a show I mostly watch whenever the mood strikes; The Loud House. I do enjoy the series, but it’s a casual love... it also dosen’t help that I can’t go into the tags without finding reams of incest but I digress. I do still like the show and despite it’s ocasoinal terrible episodes and even worse creator, it’s still a solid series and deserves it’s spot as nick’s crown jewel.. I do wish nick would stop abusing everything ELSE in it’s lineup, but that’s a whole other story. The point is I like the show, but i’m not a super fan like I am for say Ducktales or Steven Universe where if there’s something new, i’ll go out and grabs it immediately. But I do like it.  And I do regret not knowing this episode existed for two months because 1) This is a holiday episode and I like to watch those around their holiday and 2) Because dance episodes are my shit. More often than not if i’ts a dance episode of a show, i’ts usually pretty good. Community, Big City Greens, Gravity Falls, She Ra, OK KO, Parks and Recreation.. I really COULD go on indefntiely, but I won’t.  Dance episodes usually bring out the best in a creative team, have adorable romance moments, or huge dramatic attacks and everything in between that just makes them awesome to me. So naturally I watched this as soon as possible and my thoughts.. well as with anything they take some context.    You see this episode follows a character who has kind of a .. problematic history to say the least and thus has kinda gone up and down in my opinon. Early on, as most of you probably recall, the series was more focused on LIncoln, the middle child and only boy in the the titular loud house among 10 sisters. And given it focused mostly on lincoln and his shenanigans and schemes to deal with living iwth 10 other siblings. Now the show has evolved since then and for the better in my honest opinon: now all 11 siblings share the spotlight and whose in an episode depends on whose needed, and thus each of the siblings has their own supporting casts of varying depths and episodes, sometimes with NONE of the other family members playing a signifgiant role. But since the show was originally Lincoln centritc, it also picked up an extra main character outside of the 11 loud kids and their parents: Clyde. Clyde is Lincoln’s best buddy, a glasses wearing awkward kid whose dad’s sometimes smother him but are still loving kind guys, and who often goes over to Lincoln’s to share in the feeling of having siblings outside of his surrogate brother Lincoln obviously. However early on Clyde, like most of the cast in the earlier days, had about three character traits: being an only child, being a dork and having a near pyschotic crush on LIncoln’s oldest sister Lori which gave him crippling nose bleeds.  This would’ve been fine, if a touch annoying, had it just been him fainting and nosebleeding.. but instead, it also causes Clyde to be kind of a dick. He perused her constantly despite her rejecting him for a number of obvious reasons, you know him being a decade younger, her being not intrested, him being more like a second kid brother to her, and of course the fact she has a boyfriend, Bobby. Bobby is the nicest guy around, was a great supporting character, and is probably the reason i’ll get around to watching the casagrandes on occasion. Clyde however treats him like garbage, tried to break them up, and in general was a dick to a guy whose only crime is being in a loving relationship with someone Clyde wants to be with but obviously can’t have. It was annoying with the only time it was tolerable was that episode where Bobby was mistaken for cheating and clyde spent an entire episode preparing to beat bobby up if it was accurate, then upon trying (It wasn’t it was just shenanigans), failed spectacuarlly. Bobby is nothing but nice to him by the way.  So yeah it was hard to root for Clyde for a while but eventually it stopped.. not because they had an episode of Clyde TRYING to get over it, they did it just didn’t resolve it, but it was just dropped.. likely because the writers realized it just wasn’t that funny and with bobby put on a bus to the spinoff, they had no real jokes for it and no one really liked the passing out gag. The fact that series creator Chris Savino got fired for sexually harassment is not lost on me and only makes the gag worse.  But thankfully the character did bounce back and by season 3, even before savino was thankfully fired, they put the joke to bed with Bobby’s exit, and it is thankfully buried deeper than the bunker where htey keep walt disney’s cryogneically perserved body... what you thought he just kept the head? Why woudl they? Disney was rich and belived in the future. He probably wanted his body merged with some sort of mechanical man. But with that gone Clyde thankfully became what he was in his better episodes: an adorable dork, with two loving fathers. Though now he’s not the only kid on the block with two gay dads.. he and Violet should get matching friendship t-shirts reading “Gay dad club”... and i’ll probably draw that at some point but I digress i’m several paragraphs in and I haven’t even gotten to the episode, and I STILL have one last bit of explostion for context that most of you may not need.  That last bit is that LIncoln’s episodes evolved a bit around season 3: instead of JUST being him and Clyde, though that can still happen, Lincoln soon got a circle of buddies, each of whom plays a role in the episode, for reasons i’ll get to in a bit, and part of my reason for reviewing it is to touch on my thoughts about them and my weird love of these episodes. So a breif overview since some of you may not know who they are.  Lincoln himself: The former lead and now one of 10, and a great character I enjoy following a lot even if I miss his Zack Morris-esque fourth wall breaks, minus the smug... no one can out smug or out sexually harass Zack Morris.  Liam: A country boy and the only one of the intial five besides Clincoln I actually like. He’s a kind hearted well meaning country boy and is always kind and friendly, and reminds me a lot of stinky peterson but with a tone down accent.  Zach:... I forget he exists, i’m not even sure this is his actual name. He’s just.. there for some reason and i’m not exactly sure why he’s been kept around now that Stella, who i’ll get to next, has been introduced. But he has goggles and wild hair and that’s.. it. Any of his lines could be said by the others without muchc hange.  Stella: My faviorite out of the group, a frieindly girl who was insitally introduced as Lincoln’s third love intrest.. before pivoting to have her not really WANT to be with any of the guys in an episode that’s really good and instead joining the group. She has more personality and energy than most of them, and thus I do tend to seek out an ep if she’s in it. I do also kinda lowkey ship her with lincoln, but only al ittle. her episodde was about hwo every girl who pays attention to you isn’t into you after all and it’s a lesson kids need. I wish I had it when I was that age honestly. Anyways... finally we have the bane of my existance.  Rusty: I hate this kid. I can’t stand his goofy face, and I love goofy goof so goofy faces are not a problem, obnovious wannabe ladies man smugness, or his basicaly being the useless asshole of the group. LIke Zach, I don’t get why he hasn’t been written out. Hell Zach I at least get as the generic guy they can slott in. Rusty is just terrible. it’s telling that his LITTLE BROTHER, who showed up in one episode as a love intrest for Lucy, is far more popular.. mostly because Rocky’s actually likeable and isn’t a dipstick. I just hate this kid and want this character written off already. He’s the weak link in the group and is SOMEHOW more obnoxious than Clyde during any episode bobby and him were in the same room. And tha’ts an acomplishment! Gah. I could rant about this little shit all day, but i’d prefer to move on.  The episode has a pretty basic setup: Clyde is on the dance comitte, and is a good chef which .. tracks. I do think h’es cooked before and his love of Dessert Storm, a in-series cooking show that the Loud’s love too, has been documented in one or two episodes and cooking does fit his personality: he’s a detail orinted kid, he has parents who have lots of money to spend and have been established to like coooking fancy themsevles, it makes sense he’d pick it up. But it’s the Valentine’s Dance and Clyde has a crush on Emma, one of the girls on the comittee. His friends pick up on this and stellas has an adorable “awww” type grin while the boys all have smug shit eating grins but are all willing to help. It’s part of why I like these eps: the 5 really seem to have a nice rapport and be genuine friends.. friends who all fought over a girl once, except Stella who was said girl, but friends nonetheless, who eventually put said friendship over that. Even if one of them’s a block of wood and the other the bane of my existance, you still get the sense their valued.  It’s from there the episode Segues into the standard loud house formula, which is one of the resaons I do only watch the show ocasionally: while the episodes can varry wildly, some just fall into a formula of “character or characters do various things in a row until they realize they were wrong or something”. Now the show HAS had good episodes out of this formula, L is for Love and Racing Hearts, and yes i’m a saluna shipper but the eps are good beyond that, but sometimes it can feel like padding. This is one of those times. Each of the squad tries something to help Clyde find out if Emma likes him or not, he’s too nervous to take it as a sign he should go for it, rinse and repeat 3 more times before the plot finally moves on. This is also why I went into detail on the Clinclon Crew: each one, except Zach because the boy is made of paper mache remember, gets a chance to try helping him out.  Rusty: As if you needed proof I wasn’t overreacting, Rusty SPIES ON EMMA WITH BINOCULARS for the plan.. he did not need them, and the joke dosen’t land like it should because Rusty sucks. And his plan is to drench Clyde with cologne and if she comments on it, she likes him. I do however like the joke about how clyde thinks Rusty’s cousin that gave him the plan, proving Dumbass is a genetic trait, had a girlfriend at a camp who probably dosen’t exist.  Liam: Liam’s plan is a bit funnier... not because of the plan which like the previous one not really that great but hey their 11 or 12 i’ll give all of them but rusty some slack, because he sucks. But the Clincoln Crew which i’m calling them now so there, head to the movies and Liam says ,d ue to a similar thing happening with his chickens, if a girl sits next to you, they like you back. It’s not entirelys ound but the chicken thing got a small chuckle out of me and LIam does have some odd charisma.  Lincoln: And Zach but i’m not convinced they didn’t just swap in a manquin with a tape recorder jammed inside for him for this or any scene. Lincoln uses one of lori’s magazines with some sounder, if flimsy but beliviebly for kids, logic: ask her for a pen: if it’s a regular one they have no intrest, it’s it’s fancy she likes you. like the other two it happens.. but in a resonable bit of writing like the last two Clyde isn’t sure due to a combinaton of insecurity and these plans being as flimsy as the paper they made Zach out of .  Stella: Whose grandma can read tea leaves and actually predicted her moving to royal woods, because stella is great. Stella is also damn good at it as she does predict Clyde at the dance, in a chef’s hat for reasons that i’ll get to in a moment. dancing with a girl. Tha’s lal he needs and this bit finally ends. As I said it’s the tedium. While what happens NEXT is intresting enough, you really didn’t need all of those or have enough jokes and were clearly padding guys, come on.  So Clyde, and crew, stages an elaborate frencha nd boat related danceposal.. that fails. As you probably figured. Emma is flattered, but shoots Clyde down gently. Clyde reacts as you’d expect: by fleeing the scnee as fast as possible, quitting the dance comitte off screen, and planning never to return, which while overracting, DOES feel realistic.  Clyde goes home for some mopey solo time and becomes a tad insufferable, ignoring his friend’’s texts and getting upset as his dad for watching the movie that clearly inpsiried his dance invite plan, depsite it being their valentine’s day he’s interrupting. It woudl’ve played better if he still got upset but iddn’t you know, run in front of their tv and call them out on something they coudln’t of known as he didn’t give them details.  Thankfully the mild annoyance is b roken when, after ignoring his friends texts, which granted for Rusty and Liam is probably normal as liam probably talks about drywall and Rusty uses the word dawg and unlike Lincoln dosen’t seem genuinely worried after Clyde, you know, got rejected in front of a large crowd.  He’s broken out of his mopey solo time by a call: the person he passed cake duty off to screwed up, and after some urging from Cheryl, the principal’s secretary who Clyde knows personally from past episodes and is head of the dance comitte and an utter delight this episode, Clyde does what any normal kid would do: dawn a flimsy disguise and sneak in there. We also get a cameo from Girl Jordan who hasn’t shown up in forever so that’s nice.  Clyde fixes the cake, and Cheryl compares his mustache to a dead caterpillar which was gold, and tries to sneak out only for Chole, another girl, to notice him and stop him. You can probably tell where this is going: She , rather than mock him finds what he did romantic, she also likes dessert storm, he asks her to dance, puts his chef hat back on because time loop,a nd the two dance and even have an adorable bit where they throw their hats to each other. Also Rusty is dressed like cupid and my eyes boil out of my head as the episode ends.  Overall it’s not a bad ep. Had a suprising amount to say about it, but overall it’s a decent, cute ep for valentine’s day with a nice amount of friendship and some nice character stuff for Clyde and plenty of gay dad’s and Cheryl. Overall not a bad way to spend 11 minutes in this ongoing apocalypse. Coming Soon: I feel like quacking so I think Iw ill.. take a look at an episode of quack pack that’s donsy related.  Until next time courage. 

[worddevdealswithml]

Side Effects Include: Empathy

Chapter 19:

Saturday felt inordinately long, possibly due to the fact that he’d almost died.  That said, for all it was hard to really maintain Kagami’s advice, the fact that he was at least moving towards something meant that he could leave behind the ennui he’d felt in the morning.

Moving towards something, in this case, meant that he’d contacted Nino, who had asked why he wanted to talk to Alya in person, and given the verbal equivalent of a shrug when Adrien had said he had some important questions she might have the answer to

Adrien got the impression that Nino was pretty sure he’d hear about it anyway.

In fairness, he probably would.

By Sunday, Adrien had already realized that it would have been simpler just to ask Alya to talk in person directly.  Of course, it was too late for that now, since Nino had already conveyed his request.

And simpler wasn’t the whole of it; Alya had sent a few questioning texts, which he frankly should have expected.

No, he couldn’t explain things now.  Yes, she’d have to wait until Monday.  Yes, he’d definitely be able to explain things in more detail then.  No, seriously, not yet.  Also, please don’t mention this to anyone until I’ve actually gotten the chance to talk to you.

Of course, the other issue he’d run up against…

The same one as ever.

He knew about Marinette’s crush on him.

He knew about his on her.

The only question he didn’t know was whether Alya knew about Marinette’s crush on him.

Of course, she probably did, but… The problem was, if Alya knew, she might conceal that she knew just so that if he didn’t know…

Alya definitely shouldn’t have known that he knew about Marinette liking him, which meant that because she didn’t know that he liked Marinette, she might hide that she knew that Marinette liked him, to avoid making things weird, except he did know that Marinette liked him, which meant that what he was really asking was whether she knew about Marinette’s crush on him, which meant that if he did use his empathy powers, the only question he’d be probing for an answer to was one that, if Alya had the whole story, she would want him to know the answer to.

Right?

So… He should use the empathy powers?

That was… That was what that meant, right?

He needed a diagram.

--

It was Monday, and Alya was filled with the low-level electric current she always got when she was following a lead.

Adrien Agreste, coming to talk to her, about something secret.

Now… If she was a suspicious girl, and she was, she’d say this might have something to do with the crush she was pretty sure Adrien had recently acquired on Marinette.

The problem, of course, was that, on the one hand, Marinette had been pining after Adrien for over a year, now, and it didn’t quite seem fair that he got to waltz in and get a free pass to be with her favorite girl in the city.

On the other hand, she didn’t exactly want to leave Marinette hanging any longer than she’d already been.

On the first hand again, if she pulled Adrien back a bit, he’d probably spring forward like a slingshot, directly into Marinette…  Metaphorically.

Actually, considering how often Marinette had tripped around him, maybe not metaphorically.

Ah, decisions.

She was faintly wobbling back and forth between the options, unclear on which of them she wanted to go with, when she arrived at school.

She leaned up against the wall outside the main entrance, and pulled out her phone.  She probably wouldn’t have much chance to work on it, but she had been planning a new article for the Ladyblog; a mostly joking article rating the odds of different people being Paris’ resident superheroes.

Adrien had a 7/10 to be Queen Bee.  The blond hair should have given it away instantly.

--

As Adrien stepped out of the car, he took a deep breath; he was going to have to be careful, but not so careful it crossed the line into cowardly.

Had it not been for the fact that he’d be asking for help with something that he knew was actively painful for her, he’d have wished that Kagami had been here to slap some of her trademark sense into him.

This was easy.  Alya was his friend, and she was Marinette’s friend.  Surely she’d be happy to help once she understood what was going on.

For a second, he wanted to just tell Alya that something had happened, and he didn’t need to talk to her anymore…

Except without Alya’s help, he didn’t know if he’d be able to talk to Marinette privately for a month, at best.

A second past, as the idea seeped into his head.

He felt his breathing speed up slightly.

He stepped forward.

“Alya.”

She froze, finger on her screen, seemingly typing, and looked up.

“Adrien?” she said, innocently.

“I…” he said.

“Mhm…?” she said, smiling.

He closed his eyes, putting a hand up to his face.

Why was this so difficult?  He wasn’t even talking to Marinette, yet.

“You had a question?”

His eyes flicked open, and his hand caught on her shoulder.

//

“It’s about Marinette.”

There was a certain satisfaction when he first made contact.  And now…

If satisfaction was a liquid, Alya is a rag that was just dropped into a bucket of it.

“Oh?”

Her expression is mild, but her mind is leaning luxuriantly back in an armchair, saying ‘go on?’

It’s all the information he needs.

//

He pulled his hand away, running his fingers through his hair.

“She likes me, doesn’t she?”

Alya’s smile seemed to split just a little wider.

“And what if she does… Agreste?”

She knew, and she was happy about it.  That meant… She knew… About Marinette.

“Good question…”  He said, and gritted his teeth.  “What about…  What if I like her?”

“Tossing around a lot of hypotheticals there, aren’t you?  I mean… If both of those were to be true, you’d just want to ask her out, wouldn’t you.  After all, if she, by some chance, liked you, she’d say yes.”

And that’s why needed the empathy powers, because…  That’s only a yes in context.

“And… Hypothetically, what if I almost never get the chance to talk to her alone?”

“Well… Have you considered getting locked in a cage at the zoo together?”

“And how exactly do you plan to have that happen?”

“Well, you can always text her.”

“Maybe…  That’s always a bit risky, though.”

Alya opened her mouth… And shut it.  “Your father monitors your texts?”

Adrien shrugged.  “Maybe?”

Alya let out a disdainful huff, and then shook her head.  “So…  You seem to be…  Excuse me, in that scenario, you would seem to be in a bit of a tricky situation.”

“Which is when I’d ask the person who knows her best for help.”

Alya raised her eyebrows, and the smile cracked wider.

“I’m listening.”

--

When both Adrien had come in simultaneously to first period, Marinette hadn’t thought anything of it. Just a coincidence.

When Alya had suggested they go eat in the park for lunch, Marinette had frankly thought it an excellent idea, and a fine change of pace.

When Alya had suggested they go again tomorrow, Marinette had readily agreed.

When tomorrow, which was to say, Tuesday, rolled around…

--

Some days, nothing seemed to go right.

--

As the hours of class before lunch went by, Marinette, when she wasn’t paying attention to class, was mostly idly contemplating the fact that Chat Noir hadn’t even come to visit. They went to the same school, but… Was he trying to make her forget about him, in the hope that it would keep her from connecting the identities if he introduced himself?  Or… Maybe he just hadn’t been up to it.

That was a sad thought. Of course, it was probably for the best that he didn’t visit too often, if for no other reason than that it was bad for her sleep schedule.

--

She wasn’t there, again.  It was a bad day when… She seemed to have a point.

--

Near the end of second period, her train of thought was derailed, when Nino had turned around.

“Hey, dudes, you mind if Adrien came along for lunch today?”

Alya had shrugged, but Marinette…

“Yes!”  She blinked.  “Ah- sorry, no.  I mean, no, I don’t mind.”

“Sick,” said Nino, turning back to Adrien, who had, of course, heard her.

“I guess my bodyguard doesn’t really mind me going places as long as I’m in a group,” said Adrien.  He sighed.  “Unfortunately, Nathalie and my father don’t share his trust in you.”

Adrien had turned back to the front, but he must have noticed Marinette blushing.

--

There was nothing to talk about.  Of course there was nothing to talk about; there was never anything to talk about with her.  No matter what she did, there was nothing to talk about.

All she wanted was for her to acknowledge it.  That would be enough.

--

Marinette laughed.  “Seriously, Alya?  A picnic blanket?”

“It seemed appropriate.”

“I mean… It sure is.”

Marinette gathered up her supplies.

The day was looking good.

She was going for what was basically just a picnic with her friends.  Adrien would be there.  Realistically, she didn’t know that she could hope for a better day.

“Is it new?”

Alya laughed.  “Not quite.  My mom’s been saying we should do a picnic one of these weekends, but this time of year there’s always a lot of stuff to do, so we haven’t gotten the chance.  We managed it last year, though.”

They made it to the bottom of the stairs.

“Maybe we should make this a regular thing.  I only came up with the idea because…” Alya laughed.  “Never mind.”

“No, no, I’m curious.”

Alya laughed.  “Well, I’ll put it this way; I’m doing a favor for a friend, and it got me thinking about picnics.”

“What kind of favor involves picnics?”

“Hey!” said Alya, by way of greeting Nino and Adrien.

Oh, of course, he was wearing the hat again, and now there were sunglasses.

Adrien waved, smiling.

Marinette… Couldn’t see his eyes, but for a second, she thought he was looking at her with that smile.

They made it to the front door.

The sun was shining, the air was fresh.

Marinette took a deep breath.

Lovely.

As they crossed the street, Alya was already preparing to unfurl the blanket.  “Now…  I’m thinking somewhere in the shade…” Her eyes darted around, before catching on… “There…”

It was a bit farther, but, Marinette had to admit, it was extremely scenic.

If she was honest, it put her in mind of…

She stifled the impulse to think about romantic dates.  She had already reacted a bit too hard when Adrien had been asking to come along, and if she kept that up…

It was like she’d been thinking, back home; she needed to keep her expectations low, both so that she didn’t get disappointed, and so that she could talk properly.

The blanket was laid out, and Marinette and Adrien were already sitting down, when Alya froze.

“Hold on.”

They stopped.

“Ah, no, not you two. Hey, Nino?”

“Yeah?”

“We were planning to study science earlier, right?”

“Uh…  Yeah, maybe?  I think I remember what you’re talking about, yeah.”

“I’m thinking… if we don’t go and do that now, we probably won’t get to before class…”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“And we probably won’t be able to do any studying out here…”

Nino seemed to be getting the gist of things, and started standing up.

Marinette was giving Alya a suspicious look.

Alya just flashed her a grin, and winked.

“You two can pack up the blanket when you’re done, right?”

“I… I’m not used to folding things, but I’ll try?” said Adrien.

“Oh, trust me, Marinette can show you how.”

“And you’d better be able to make it against next time we do one of these, dude,” said Nino.  “I haven’t gotten to do anything with you in way too long.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

And…

“Did they just… Leave, us, here?”

Adrien nodded, slowly. “I think they did.”

“Alya…” muttered Marinette.  On the one hand, she was flattered that Alya was trying to do this for her, but on the other hand, she had to know by now that Marinette was so much better at talking to Adrien in a group.

Wait.  ‘A favor for a friend.’  Had Alya been planning this from the start?

She leaned back.

--

“Wouldn’t you like to wake up, and find out that all of this was nothing but a bad dream?  Wouldn’t you-

--

It hadn’t quite hit her that it was just her and Adrien here, yet, but when it hit…

“So, Marinette,” said Adrien-

There it was.

She managed to stifle the gasp as her brain caught up fully with her surroundings.

She was on a picnic blanket, alone, with Adrien Agreste.

She’d had dreams like this, but reality had never cooperated until-

“It’s been, what, just over two years since we met?”

“Ah…  Y-yeah.  Yeah it has.”

He laughed, pulling the glasses away.  “It’s… Kind of strange, you know?  I feel like I should have known you for way longer…  And, at the same time, like the past two years have gone by so quickly.”

She let out a nervous chuckle.  “W- Well, I’m sure that villains attacking Paris could make everything a bit… surreal.”

“That’s true.  And, of course, I’ve never gone to school before, which has been a lot of new stuff.”

“Yeah…”  Marinette needed to contribute to this conversation somewhere. That was how conversations worked, after all.

“You’ve… You’ve made a lot of friends,” she supplied, “that must be nice, right?”

“Yeah…” he said, staring off into the distance.  “it’s… It’s a funny thing about friends though.”  He pulled the hat away.  “Sometimes, when you call someone a friend, you’re missing something important. Something that you need to realize.”

Marinette blinked.

Adrien turned to her.

“Marinette?”

“Y—” She cleared her throat. “Yes?”

He opened his mouth to respond, and-

The world seemed to melt, almost.

She groaned.  “What?”

He stood up, and swayed, strangely.  “Something’s wrong.”

“I… Yeah.  Yeah it is.”

Everything was there, but…   Nothing was right.

[probably-writing-x]

High Society (Chapter 1)

~A Tom Holland AU Series~

Tags: @imarypayne @sunshine112 @sleepwalkingdragon @supernatural-girl97 @vibhati123 @butithasntkilledyouyet @faefictions @carisi-sonny

Inspiration: It's interesting to see how the other half live, how their perfect lives are pieced together by secret scandals. It's beyond anything you can imagine until you're a part of it. It's High Society. (Based on the Netflix series 'Elite')

Warnings: Mentions of murder, language warning

Notes: So, since it's the new year I've decided to start a new series that I've been thinking of doing for a while now! I hope you like it as much as I do, please let me know x

~~~Friday 25th January 2019~~~

"(Y/N), we need to go, now!" Tom's voice was harsh and cut through you like a dagger, "Come on!"

"Tom-" You start but your body is shaking too much to answer properly.

His hand grabs yours forcefully and pulls you from this daze, "Now!"

And you're running. Your feet pound on corridor floors, out of that place just as quickly as you had entered. Though, the image of that lifeless body remained. And it wouldn't be going anytime soon.

~~~Monday, 3rd September 2018~~~

"Honey, it's your first day, you're bound to be nervous," One of your dad's points out, taking a bite of the toast in his hand and flicking through the newspaper absently.

"I'm not nervous," You lie, though the certainty in your tone was enough to hide it, "I just want to get on with it,"

"It's not easy to move schools," Evan, your other dad, encourages, "Especially considering the circumstances,"

"Guys, I know! I know I'm a state school girl going to a fancy private school because of a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity. But can we please, please just let me get on with it," You sigh, tugging on your shoes and grabbing your bag.

"Oh she's got sass now, has she?" Peter cocks a brow, "We're your parents, we're meant to be like this,"

"Of course," You shake your head, kissing them both on the cheek, "I'll see you later," And you're gone.

~~~

There were two of you joining today. They chose one boy and one girl from your school. So, you and Noah were now walking towards possibly the most intimidating place you'd ever been to.

"Miss (Y/L/N), Mr Andrews," The woman you recognised as principal greets you at the doors. She began to ramble about the history of the school and you took the opportunity to glance around at the setting. Small groups were huddled in gossip circles near the lockers, dotted all across the corridor and leading up to a grand staircase at the other end. What caught your eye most was the trophy that stood proud at the base of said stairs- one of peculiar shape but stunning beauty.

"Oh, and I'm Mrs Osterfield, I'll be your new Head Mistress," She extends a welcome to the two of you, "I'm sure you'll fit right in,"

"I wouldn't be so certain," You mumble to yourself, tightening the grip you held on your rucksack.

She directed you towards the senior class that you would be a part of, a small group of only fifteen.

"Mr Fitzgerald, these are your new pupils," Mrs Osterfield explains to a man you assumed would be your tutor before she exits.

The class already looked extremely intimidating. You could pick out the elite clearly, the ones who deemed themselves as greater than the rest. And they'd never deemed any two people more low until you two walked in. The scholarship stories.

"Everybody, please welcome..." Mr Fitzgerald begins before stopping himself, "Well, why don't you introduce yourselves,"

"Well, I'm Noah Andrews. And I'm hoping to be a chef when I'm older, so you're looking at the next Gordon Ramsey. I think I'm better than him already," He grins, flashing a toothy smile to the snickering group.

Brilliant, he'd already fallen into the role of an overly confident asshole.

"And you, Miss?" Your tutor encourages, noticing the blank look on your face.

"I'm (Y/N)," You say simply, "Is that enough?"

The group don't seem impressed, still chattering away about their own, more interesting gossip. You take the opportunity to sit down.

One of the boys keeps his eyes trailed on your movements, watching as you sit down at the back until your eyes finally meet his. He cocks a brow and you roll your eyes, looking down and hoping he'd do the same. It took a while before he did.

~~~

Your classes had been going well so far, you welcomed the more difficult calculus and the more complex Spanish lessons. You even found yourself annoyed when lunch arrived. The social side of this school was definitely what you thought you'd hate.

"Hey, (y/n), right?" A female voice says from beside you in the queue.

You turn to see one of the girls in your class, with black curly hair and in many ways beautiful.

"I'm Zendaya, most people just call me Z," She extends a hand to you.

"Hi," You smile politely, she didn't actually seem that bad so you wouldn't be rude.

"I know it's intimidating, but they're not that bad," She assures, "I'm actually friends with a lot of them,"

"Good for you, but I think I'll steer clear," You chuckle, smiling to the dinnerlady who passes over your food.

"Come on, at least come and sit with me. You don't have to talk to them," She encourages and her welcoming friendliness made it difficult to say no.

So, you find yourself walking towards the table where the elites sat- all of the main group from your form.

"Guys, be nice," She warns them, watching as they eye you when you take a seat.

There are six of them in total. And they all look ready to completely rip you to shreds.

"(Y/N)," Zendaya begins again, "This is Harrison, Harry, Sam, Imogen, Lily, and Tom,"

You look at each of them in turn, your eyes settling on Tom who you learnt to be the one gazing at you earlier. He had the girl named Lily hung onto him like his other half but he appeared to show her nowhere near as much affection.

"So, scholarship huh?" The one you knew as Harrison piped up.

"Ooh how lucky," Sam mutters under his breath, earning a laugh from Harry beside him. They mumbled something to each other that was inaudible to you. You were probably thankful that you didn't hear it.

"Yeah, well, I'd have preferred to stay at my old school in an ideal world," You admit ruthlessly, taking a bite of the salad on your plate.

"You're not at least grateful to be here?" Lily scoffs, pushing herself impossibly closer to Tom.

"You have to pick your battles, I chose to let them transfer me here," You shrug, "Grateful doesn't come into it,"

"Didn't they force you because you're like the smartest one from your school or whatever?" Harrison asks absently, wiggling his fork at you.

You don't respond, you hated your intelligence being centre of attention.

"Oh, please, she hasn't seen anything until she is against people here," Lily rolls her eyes, turning to her boyfriend for some sort of approval.

Tom simply eyes (y/n) with inquisition.

The rest go on to chatter about something bold that they've done recently that clearly deserves credit and you bathe in the lack of attention, thankful to be out of their spotlight.

~~~

With lunch out of the way, you welcome having a free afternoon. Extra curriculars were at the forefront of success in this school so you took the opportunity to make the most of the facilities, opting to go to the gym.

You were thankful when you found it empty, state of the art equipment all accessible without the burden of entitled teenagers in your way.

Earphones plugged in, shoelaces tied, you made a beeline for the boxing section.

It was in moments like this that you felt completely at ease. You weren't worrying about expectations and social hierarchy or acceptance, you could just hit the bag and not be anything else than that. The situation becomes so absent that you only stop when you realise the album has stopped playing. You pull the gloves from your hands and turn around to walk away from your bag-shaped opponent. It is only then that you realise you weren't actually alone.

"Shit," You mumble to yourself, a way of releasing the adrenaline that ran through you after Tom's presence made you jump.

He responds with a smirk.

"Do you enjoy just watching people in the gym?" You raise a brow at him, working to untie the tape from around your hands. Perhaps it was more to avoid eye contact.

"Only a select few," He responds, pushing himself from the wall, "You had good form, I'm impressed,"

"Well, thank you, your approval is really all I was doing it for," You respond sarcastically, taking your phone from the side and changing the song coming through your detached earphones.

"Shouldn't you be like reading books or something?" He asks, following you through the facility.

You ignore him for a moment, finding a spot on one of the yoga mats to stretch out.

"If you want to be the smartest in this year, you're going to have to do a lot more than you used to," Tom points out. There was a change in his demeanor compared to when he was around his friends, "And you're going to have to learn how to handle the people here,"

"Thank you for your consideration, Thomas," You smile at him before turning back to the toe touch that you had decided could take up all of your concentration.

"It's Tom," He responds but he knows it's futile, watching your body fold for just a moment before he leaves. Why did you have that effect on him? Nobody ever had that effect on him. Let alone some scholarship story that had only made an appearance today.

~~~

"Okay then, I want to know," You sigh, crossing your legs under you, "Who are they all?"

Zendaya raised her brows at you, shuffling in her seat beside you. The two of you were sat on one of the benches on the lawn of the school grounds, one that happened to be directed right at the group in question.

"Okay," She starts, "Imogen and Lily are best friends, no surprise. Imogen isn't anything special, just got a rich mummy that wants her daughter to follow in her footsteps. Apparently she likes Harrison but I don't know what's going on there. And then Lily, she's always top of the class, and always clinging onto Tom. They've been dating for a long time, but I'm pretty sure they're just together for the sake of it now, at least from his side,"

You find yourself looking directly at Lily. Her perfect makeup and her in-style outfit. Her manicured hands that clasped onto Tom's.

"Harrison is only really here because his mum is the head mistress, he's smart but he'd rather be focusing on acting than staying here," Z continues, working her way through the group, "And then the Holland brothers. Harry and Sam are twins, they're pretty harmless even though they can be dicks. They're ridiculously smart which is why they skipped a year and are now with us. And then Tom,"

You're looking at him now because you can't help it. He seems so different when he's around that group, nothing like the boy in the gym.

"He's kind of like the pack leader. The whole package. He's smart, rich, a fuckboy and even has time for sports. Everyone here worships him," She explains, "But I think there's more to him than that,"

"How come?" You frown, irritated by the lack of detail.

"Well, by the way he's looking at you, you'll probably find that out before I do," She smirks, directing your view to Tom's gaze that was solely focused on you once again.

But there she was. Lily's red lips pressed against his with enough force to encourage him to kiss back. And you went back to being the scholarship story.

"I'm not getting involved in that," You scoff, shaking your head, "Definitely not,"

~~~Friday 25th January 2019~~~

"They can't know we saw what we saw, okay?" Tom shakes his head, gripping onto you because he feared you would run if he let go.

"Tom she... she's dead," You say through trembles that were showing no sign of leaving.

"Shit, fuck," He mumbles, running a hand through his messy brown curls, "Who the fuck would do that?"

"I... I don't know. But we're witnesses... They're going to ask us why we were there," You shake your head, holding onto him because the wall behind you wasn't doing enough to keep you standing.

"And, when they ask, we'll have a story set out," He assures you, "But they can't know the real reason we were there, nobody can know, okay?"

You force yourself to nod and soon his arms wrap around you, both of you now embracing each other like it was the last time you ever would. It felt like it could have been.

(Thoughts?? Would anyone want to read more of this/be tagged in future posts??)

[emotionalgirl101]

Question | Chapter 2

Words: 2,104

Genre: college au, angst, fluff

Pairing: SKZ x reader

Summary: Your best friend, Minho, had been refusing to introduce you to his other group of best friends for months now, with no explanation as to why. One night after getting drunk after work together, he gave in to your pleas. Oops.

Warning: Contains mature content (such as coarse language, violent themes, etc).

A/N: SORRY FOR POSTING LATE! Just a quick reminder to check out the profiles post, and I’ll be making a Question masterlist for the series, too. In case you’re reading this first, I based appearances on the ‘I am who’ era. There is no real reason as to why apart from the fact that Jisung’s hair looks so fluffy and nice and oml I love it especially when he wears the cap in the ‘Awkward silence’ mv too I need help. Also, not edited because I felt bad about posting so late rip. Enjoy~

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

You weren’t far from the apartment, but not close enough, to your disappointment. You were sobering up and starting to regret the whole thing. You didn’t feel that confident walking in in your work clothes, you were still tipsy and looking like a mess, and your feet were fucking killing you. Curse your uniform meaning you had to wear high heels. 

Minho appeared to sense your anguish, cutting short his conversation on a stupid argument he overheard at the bar, and focusing in on you. “You okay? Seem kind of, I don’t know, out of it, I guess…” He let his words linger in the air. Once he got tired of waiting, he poked you in the arm so you’d give him attention. “I’m just worried I’ll make a fool of myself.”

“Ah,” he smirked, “someone’s sobered up, huh? Well, too late now. I’m a nice friend but not nice enough to walk all the way back in the other direction and catch a bus with you. You have no choice now.” He taunted, looking dead ahead. Although he didn’t say anything similar, ‘told-you-so’ energy was emulating from his aura. So, you did what anyone else would do in that situation. Hit him for being a teasing ass and pout. “Not helping” You grumbled. He let out small laugh, massaging the point of impact with his free hand. He had still insisted on carrying your bag. You couldn’t be that mad at him due to the fact, playfully or otherwise. 

He piped up again, just as the previously stirred silence was starting to settle. “I know. How about we come up with a list of things for me to stop you from doing, so you don’t embarrass yourself?” He looked over at you, hoping you’d like his suggestion, or at the very least, appreciate it. He had limited brain cells, especially after drinking and working at that bar for so long. Pay some credit where it’s due. 

“Like, a set of rules, or something?” You looked at him, waiting for a response. “I guess, yeah.” He shrugged back. You shook your head, the teasing tone rising in your voice again. “Rules? Nope, not listening. I’m not falling them. Never have, never will.” Shock flashed across his face, then recognition took its place.

“Dude, come on! I said that once, like a year ago. I was immature back then.” Minho huffed out. “Yeah, like you’re much better now.” You snickered under your breathe, but you both know he heard it. He charged at you without warning, and you squealed, running behind a light post to take cover from his playful abuse. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I give in, okay?” You put your hands up in surrender as you retreated from behind the pole. The boy was laughing, and then so were you. He swung your bag over his left shoulder, and pulled you into his right side. An arm was slung around your shoulder. You crossed the street, encompassed by the peaceful harmony of breathing and shared heartbeats.

“Okay, we’re almost at the house. You have 2 minutes to give me any instructions to help you out. If you say nothing, I get no blame if you make a fool of yourself. Now, shoot.”

You sighed. He was right. At a time like this, a strategy was important. Minho was your best friend, and you wanted to make a good impression, not only for the sake of Minho, but also your friendship. The only time you went to his apartment was when all his roommates were out for the day. If you were going to hang out, you’d have to be able to go to his place without any awkward encounters. It made the most sense. Besides, you were bound to meet them, anyway. Minho’s birthday wasn’t that far off, and if they were his friends, how bad could they be?

“Okay. Most important thing first. Do not let me pull any stupid stunt-“ “Like stripping?” Minho inquired innocently, remembering that one time you got blackout level wasted after your mid semester exams. You didn’t want to that about that, especially not right now. “I was thinking more like standing on the table, but yeah. Hopefully, I won’t get THAT drunk.” You emphasised. “Oh, with our group, it’s highly likely that’ll happen.” You rolled your eyes. “Next?” He urged.

“Under no circumstances will you let me, or you for that matter, tell any embarrassing stories. Like, really bad ones that you save for drunken nights with close friends.” He nodded, “Got it. Anything else?”

“I guess, just don’t let me do anything I’ll regret. Anything bad that I’d remember in the morning with a bad hangover and want to kill you over.” The sudden threat caused the raven haired boy to tense slightly, but you both laughed it off.

“Any warnings for me? Anything I should be aware of about these guys? Like, you know, homicidal tendencies?” He threw his head back, laughing at the way you put the question to him. “Nah, nah. They’re not anything like that. One thing, though. They can be loud. Like REALLY loud.” He kept moving forward. The door to his apartment was slowly appearing, but you weren’t focused enough on your surroundings to notice. “Like, worse than you loud?” You said in mock fear. He just smiled cheekily. “Worse.”

He came to a stop at a midnight blue front door, removing his arm from around your shoulders and fishing out his keys from his right pocket. The nerves hit you like a brick wall now. “I’m still way too sober for this.” You sighed, more to yourself than to the boy ahead of you, hands retreating to your jacket pockets as you said so.

He chuckled. “Don’t worry. We can fix that.” He winked and ushered you in.

You stood in the small entry way, looking around at the clutter, which strikes you as typical for an apartment of nine boys. You took a step further in as Minho manoeuvred from behind you, placing your belongings by the door. He slipped off his shoes, and you followed suit, as he dumped his keys carelessly on the table beside him. 

As Minho closed the door behind you, a loud voice came from the passage way to your left. The owner was hidden behind the wall, but it definitely belonged to a guy your age. 

“Hyung!” he called out, “Finally! I’m starv-“ His sentence was cut short when he rounded the corner, and his eyes met yours. His mouth fell open and brown eyes were grew wide. “-ing... You’re not...” his words faded as he finally realised Minho was, in fact, there. He recovered, smiling, as realisation adorned his feature. His smile was so warm when is gaze returned to you.

“You must be the one trying to steal him away from me.” The boy had no trouble teasing you, despite this being your first exchange. Minho smirked at the boy’s antics before introducing the two of you to one another. “Jisung, this is Y/n. She’s older than you so behave. Y/n this is my housemate, Jisung.”

You smiled, feeling comfortable around Jisung almost immediately. “Nice to meet you,” you waved.

“No need to be formal with him, don’t worry.” You laughed as Jisung acted offended by Minho’s words. The older moved towards him, throwing an arm lazily over the boy. Both beamed at you.

“Did I hear a girl’s laugh, or is Jisung flirting with Minho again.” a sharp-tongued boy emerged from the opposite hallway Jisung had appeared from. He looked pleased with himself when the colour drained from the two faces his eye fell upon. If all of Minho’s friends gave him this much shit, you could see yourself getting along with all the boys without trouble. He then turned to you, bowing slightly and introducing himself with a softer smile. “I’m Seungmin.”

“Y/n.” you replied. You soon found out just how blunt Seungmin could be. “So how’d you get stuck with him?” He pointed to Minho, who had a genuine expression of annoyance and shock. “Dude, I’m right here.” 

Seungmin continued to smile at him and shrugged. Then had a hand on his left shoulder gently usher him out of the hallway, revealing a smaller guy. He grinned just as brightly as the rest had when his eyes fell on you. He moved away from Seungmin and bowed, a small smirk gracing his lips. “I’m Changbin, Minho hyung’s good looking friend.” 

Seungmin rolled his eyes, mouthing a not so subtle ‘sorry about him’ at you, just before Jisung shut him down. 

“You wish, hyung” Jisung snorted. He looked proud when laughter erupted from everyone, with the exception of Changbin. He looked like he had no clue how to react, letting out a small, unsure laugh.

“I’m Y/n.” you smiled after calming down a bit. Changbin’s bright smile returned to his lips. Minho looked back at you, “Since you’re going to get sick of introducing yourself five more times,” he turned to face the large archway behind him, that appeared to lead into the main living area. Then he proceeded to shout notice of your arrival. “EVERYONE! MY FRIEND, Y/N IS HERE. YES, SHE’S A GIRL, AND IF YOU HURT HER YOU’RE NOT GOING TO WAKE UP IN THE MORNING. THANK YOU!” He huffed a sigh, turn back to you, then at the boys. They were all quiet, shifting uncomfortably at the thought of Minho’s shallow threat. You and he both let out a laugh, which was quickly halted when a shout came from the room beyond you.

“MINHO HYUNG HAS FRIENDS?!” Minho turned expressionless as the young boy’s voice had the rest of the entry way in stitches. Jisung leaned on Minho’s shoulder, which was aggressively pushed away by the latter. Jisung lost his balance, almost falling over completely, only egging on everyone else’s laughter. 

The boy, whom you guessed had made the comment judging by the huge grin consuming his face, entered with an older housemate in toe. They boys appearances made you feel as if you were being approached by a fox and a teddy bear. 

The younger boy waved at you, before the older began to speak. “Hi, I’m Woojin, and this is Jeongin. Welcome.” He turned to the other boys, “Ever thought about letting her further inside?” He raised his eyebrows, followed by Minho using the opportunity to usher you away. “Thanks, hyung.” he smiled up at Woojin as you passed through.

He walked you through the entry into the living area. It was an average size considering there were nine boys living in the house. Two boys were lazing on the couch in front of the large tv, eyes trained on the fantastical figures there were controlling on the screen. Jisung, Changbin and Jeongin headed their way after following you and Minho into the communal room. The kitchen linked in, more so hidden out of sight to the left of the entrance. Woojin headed there, Seungmin in toe. Minho guided you over there as well.

“So Y/n, how did you meet Minho?” Woojin smiles politely as he poured water for the four of you. Jeongin appearing behind him, making his way to the pantry before Seungmin grabbed him in a back hug. “Hyung~” Jeongin whined, resulting in Seungmin releasing him and turning back to the conversation. The others were watching the exchange, too, so you didn’t have to worry about replying right away. 

Everyone’s attention returning to the topic at hand, you replied with small “uni.” Minho took over the conversation to give a more in-depth explanation. You were so grateful he could read you so easily. Jeongin joined the conversation momentarily to make fun of Minho. Seungmin managed to grab a couple of chips from the bag in the Maknae’s hands before Jeongin was out of the kitchen. The boy proceeded to make a desperate run to save his snack from unwanted hands, leaving to the couch with his Honey Butter Chips. You laughed at their behaviour, more so when you shared a cheeky smile with Seungmin.

Steps were heard from yet another passage way, this time one that was located to the right of the kitchen. He emerged, a calm aura surrounding him. His hair was a brown, slightly fluffy mess, his fingers running through it. His over sized shirt hung on his frame nicely, partially exposing the left side of his collar bone. His eyes landed on you, just as quickly as yours had on him.

“Hi, I’m Chan.”

>>

[mst3kproject]

1205: Killer Fish

I saw this movie once before, decades ago – my mom taped it because ‘it sounded like something you’d watch’.  It came to mind back in January of 2017 when I decided to start doing Episodes that Never Were every ten days, but as of the trailer I hadn’t yet tried to find it.  It wouldn’t have been hard.  I couldn’t remember what it was called, but ‘Lee Majors fish movie’ would have done the trick, if I’d only been in enough of a hurry to bother.  The words Killer Fish did come to mind, but I felt like the title of a movie in which the Bionic Man fights piranhas had to be something cooler than that.

The word ‘piranha’ never looks correct to me no matter how I spell it, even with OpenOffice assuring me I’ve got it right.

We begin with the perfect crime.  A group of crooks break into a power plant somewhere in Brazil and steal a cache of jewels, which they hide by throwing them into a lake.  All that remains now is to wait for the police activity to die down, and then they can just send a diver down to get them back and leave the country.  Simple, right?  Well… maybe not so much.  When two of the gang decide they want all the treasure for themselves, they discover that the lake is infested with hungry piranhas!  Nor is this just a happenstance – the mastermind behind the heist deliberately released them there, lest anyone try to claim more than their share of the loot.  Boy, that must’ve seemed like a great idea, until a sudden storm leaves the entire cast stranded on a sinking boat in the middle of piranha-infested waters.

Piranhas are like ninjas, or black holes, in that most people probably have some vague idea that they don’t work in real life the way they do in movies, but nobody bothers to look them up and confirm this.  As the blogger I took it upon myself to do so, and learned that piranhas are actually omnivores who are as likely to use their powerful jaws to crack open nuts and seeds are they are to hunt small prey.  In the rare cases when they attack humans, the worst they do is nibble on your fingers and toes a bit.  Far from being likely to devour you, piranhas are considered a food fish in South America!  Reality, as usual, is far less gruesome and much more delicious than movies would have us believe.

But nobody wants to watch a movie in which people eat piranhas, so Killer Fish, here we go.

The first half of this movie actually feels like it’s got some momentum.  We get the heist and the escape, which are interesting even if they don’t make a whole lot of sense (if the movie ever explained why a power plant has a fortune in pre-cut jewels hidden in a basement locker, I missed it), and then the Italian brothers betray the rest of the gang and get eaten, and the Token Girl, Kate, starts to discover what an utter bastard the mastermind, Paul, is when she realizes he’s responsible for the deaths. We’ve got intrigue, infighting, and plenty of frothing red-stained water.  As piranha movies go, so far so good.

Yes, by the way, there is a scene in which Kate runs around screaming “PAAAAAUUUL!” I haven’t seen the episode yet at the time of writing this, but if somebody doesn’t holler, “you iz a werwalf!” I will be very disappointed.  (Future Me: referencing Cry Wilderness was not a substitute, damn it.)

The film starts to lose its way when we’re introduced to the people who I think are supposed to be our main characters.  That’s a bad sign.  Our male lead is Bob, a guy who’s connected in some way with the jewel thieves, although what his actual job was I have no idea.  In the opening heist scene everybody’s wearing masks so the only ones identifiable are Kate and the blond-hair-helmeted getaway driver.  Bob’s opposite number is Gabrielle, a model who has come to Brazil for a photoshoot with her bossy manager Ann and her gay stereotype photographer Ollie.  Bob and Gabrielle fall for each other right away for no particular reason besides that she’s hot and he’s the supposed hero, and the movie starts to wander off.

What we want during the middle of this movie is more information about the piranha repellent Paul has apparently developed, or about his health problems, both of which sound like they’re going to be plot points but neither are.  What we get is two different but equally obnoxious meet-cutes between Bob and Gabrielle, and scenes in which Gabrielle seems to think Kate is Bob’s Other Girlfriend and nobody ever bothers correcting her.  This leads to lots of the two women metaphorically putting their ears back and hissing at each other, while I roll my eyes because they literally have nothing to fight over.  Kate’s not after Bob, she just wants the jewels.  Gabrielle doesn’t even know about the jewels, she just wants some dick. Apparently movie writers consider a love triangle so essential that when there isn’t one, they fake it!

By the time we get to everybody on the boat, trying to figure out how to get off it without getting eaten, it feels like the writers have simply run out of ideas… and then there’s the ending.  What the hell is up with the ending?  Kate skips town with the jewels, except once she’s on the plane she’s shocked to find that Gabrielle stole them from her. Buuuut when Bob and Gabrielle open the case they find that Kate already took half the gems and left them a note!  Oh, and Bob and Gabrielle were secret agents or some shit the whole time, I don’t know, this is never explained or even hinted at, it’s just a gotcha ending. The end of the movie would have worked just fine had it simply been Kate escaping with the gems and Bob and Gabrielle eloping in Rio, but they had to throw this at us.

The reason ‘Kate gets away with it’ would have been an okay ending is because when I think about it, Kate has a much better claim to protagonist status than Bob does.  We never find out what Bob’s doing there or what he really wants, and the surprise ending only confuses the matter.  Kate, however, wants to be filthy stinking rich and run away with Paul, whom she has convinced herself she loves.  She undergoes an evolution over the course of the story, as she becomes increasingly aware that Paul is an asshole and that he’s just using her, until she finally reaches the point of wanting to shoot him, only to find he’s betrayed her one last time by giving her an empty gun.

Paul has treated Kate terribly throughout the movie. He manipulates her emotions, does things like forcing her to dive in with the piranhas while he pretends to be suffering from a heart condition, and finally abandons her while excusing it on the pretext that he assumes she was using him.  He’s such a jerk that his death and her victory feel like justice even though she, too, is a criminal.  But Kate can’t be the main character because she’s a girl, so we’re stuck with Bob, and half that victory is snatched from her at the last minute by Bob and Gabrielle doing… whatever the hell it was they were actually doing the whole time.

We know Bob’s the hero because he gets the girl (Gabrielle) at the end, and because he gets the Hero’s Battle Death Exemption – and the latter is a doozy. I’ve mentioned HBDE before, in my review of Blood Waters of Dr. Z.  In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, I believe it comes originally from Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension, and states that the movie’s monster (whether animal, human, machine, whatever) will have to spend far more time and effort trying to kill the hero or love interest than it will any other character, regardless of whether this makes any sense.  In Killer Fish, the piranhas devour almost all their victims in seconds, and the victims themselves are too busy thrashing in the water to swim or even try to accept offered help.

There are only two exceptions to this.  One is Ann, who manages to swim frantically for shore while the piranhas are busy devouring Ollie (I think we’re supposed to assume that since he’s The Fat Guy, he kept them occupied for longer than usual – nice).  The other is Bob.  The first time he dives in, trying to retrieve a sunken raft, the fish have been stunned by a depth charge.  The second time, he swims out to Paul’s raft, fights him, sabotages the raft, and swims back while the piranhas are supposedly nibbling on him the whole time, and yet he shows no evidence of injury!  Again, I haven’t seen the episode but the obvious joke is that since Bob is Lee Majors, the fish can’t eat the bionic parts.  (Future Me: at least they made a joke about that.)

The piranhas themselves look okay.  There are some scenes that appear to have had real piranhas in them and some that I think are puppets or other types of fish. Either way, the shots where they’re eating somebody never show their teeth sinking in, even to cloth.  People like Bob or Little Alex Kitner come out of the water, supposedly terribly injured, completely intact but with their clothing soaked in blood. We’re shown skeletons among the weeds, but the film totally fails to give us that scene that’s obligatory for any monster-in-the-water movie, where somebody hauls a body out and discovers it only exists from the ribcage up.  The guy who made the ‘Gable Film’ did that with paint and spray foam!  I waited the whole damn movie for that scene and it never happened.

My Mom was right, this was something I’d watch.  It’s something I’d watch and then complain about at length, leading people to ask me why I watched it, which would prompt me to reply that I watched it so I could complain about it!  As bad movies go, it’s reasonably entertaining and easy to heckle – so easy, it’s like shooting … well, you know the rest.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #359

Top Ten Future Transformers Spin-Offs

So I finally went to see Bumblebee, the delightful, charming, and utterly loveable Transformers spin-off/prequel from Travis Knight. It’s a great little film, on a much smaller scale than the other films in the series, offering some beautifully retro Amblin vibes whilst telling a more compelling and characterful story full of warmth, heart, and genuinely good performances. And as a great big Transformers fan (is there no Transformers equivalent of Trekkie or Browncoat I can adopt?) I got a huge thrill from the recreation of war-torn Cybertron, straight from the iconography of the classic ‘80s cartoon series. I spent the first ten minutes just cooing and bubbling, going “Look! Wheeljack! And Arcee! And Ratchet! And Soundwave! And Shockwave! And Ravage!” and so on.

Anyway, I think the film is all kinds of great, and captures the spirit of the brand and the stories much better (in my opinion) than the Michael Bay ones do. But if one spin-off could succeed where the “mainline” films failed, could that trick be repeated? And this got me thinking: what other stories and characters are ripe for the big-screen treatment? Where else can Transformers go cinematically, without doing any kind of real follow-up to The Last Knight?

Here, then, are ten suggestions. Rather than proposing any kind of reboot or reimagining of the property, I've tried to find stories that could exist within the loose canon of the movies (which, to be fair, is a fairly shifting proposition anyway, with several movies contradicting one another in large and small ways). So, inspired by my love of the original characters, and often by stories I’ve read in the meantime, and with the potentially large caveat that I’ve still not seen The Last Knight and therefore might actually be retreading story grooves already worn, here are ten suggestions for possible future Transformers spin-off movies.

Megatron: Dawn of the Decepticons: drawing heavily from both IDW’s Megatron: Origin and More Than Meets the Eye, this will be a biopic, essentially, of tyrannical baddie Big Megs. Although I know there’s a strong influence from The Fallen in Cinemegatron’s backstory, I don’t see how we can’t square this with the portrayal developed primarily by James Roberts. Megatron is a miner, struggling under a brutal regime on an off-world energon mine, who has the strength and smarts to lift himself and his co-workers out of bondage. But will he remain true to his principles or follow the advice of a mysterious old ‘bot (who turns out to be The Fallen)? Basically the tragic tale of a charismatic working-class leader breaking bad and becoming a monster. Could feature an Optimus Prime cameo – maybe as Orion Pax?

Last Stand of the Wreckers: a moderately-straight adaptation of the Nick Roche/James Roberts classic, one of the most beloved Transformers series of all time. Instead of Bumblebee’s delightful whimsy and Megatron’s tragic drama, this is a straight-up war movie. Obviously it’d have to be tweaked from the comic: no more Garrus-9 or Decepticon Purge. Perhaps tweak the last third to be a bit more like Rogue One or Seven Samurai; the Autobots decide to stay, and die, for a cause. I’d put some more mainstream ‘bots on the team, from the original cartoon and movie. Perhaps it could, like Bumblebee, even be set on Earth in the past, and end up being a story covered up by both the Autobots and Sector 7? That way you’d make it cheaper by having more humans and a little less CG. But the basic gist – an Autobot black ops squad is sent on a mission that goes very badly wrong and most if not all of them die whilst trying to work out what it means to be an Autobot in the midst of this war – should remain the same.

Windblade : whilst I don’t necessarily think the movieverse should adopt the “Thirteen Colonies” storyline from the comics – and I definitely don’t think they should adopt the “all the girls left” sausage-fest fudge that was required after Arcee was declared the “only” female Transformer, especially as Arcee herself and newcomer Shatter both feature in Bumblebee – I do  like the idea of Windblade as some kind of ambassador or diplomat, travelling the universe. Perhaps she left Cybertron before the war really escalated (with besties Chromia and Nautica too, natch) to pursue peace elsewhere? Part flashback to pre-war Cybertron, part  return-to-Earth narrative, it would be a great opportunity to focus on the often-sidelined female Transformers and  have a positive feminist message. I’d have them team up with a now-adult Charlie and her estranged daughter... Verity Carlo. The baddies should be combiners, to go with the “Combiner Hunters” toy set.

Beast Wars: at the risk of causing controversy, I wouldn’t make this a straight adaptation of the popular cartoon. Not unless they want to meddle in far-flung futures or alternate timelines (although, er, see below...). Rather, I’d introduce the concept of “Beast Modes” that mimic organic creatures perfectly (like the “pretender” Decepticon in Revenge of the Fallen that looks like a sexy human girl, because of course she does). So my pitch is this: a lonely Autobot scientist, on a research ship that has more-or-less escaped the war (let’s make him Perceptor, for kicks) has developed this “beast mode” technology that hides Transformers in organic shells. His ship is attacked by Decepticons, but he rockets his subjects into space where they follow Prime’s signal and eventually land on Earth, befriending a young boy (younger than Sam or Charlie; let’s say about 12). But Decepticon hunters (I’d go for Carnivac, Snarler and Catilla – who later has a change of heart – all of whom have inorganic beast modes) follow. So it would share similar tropes with Bumblebee and the first Transformers, but with three or four cute animals instead of robots. This would skew young, perhaps even younger than Bumblebee.

Rodimus Prime: I know Hot Rod is in The Last Knight, but from what I hear he isn’t really representative of the character of Hot Rod/Rodimus from across other aspects of Transformers fiction. Regardless, this film isn’t about him: it’s about Rodimus Prime. Set in the future, it tells a Next Generation-style story of a human/Autobot alliance. Very much a sci-fi space opera, it would feature Rodimus going on a quest to discover the roots of a mysterious force that is attacking human colonies, and its apart links to an ancient Transformer legend. But is he abandoning Earth at its darkest hour to go on a wild goose chase through space? Rodimus must battle his own self-doubt as a leader, as well as a growing number of humans and Transformers who question the alliance. It would have a similar tone to your average Star Wars movie.

Wreck-Gar: Transformers films often have funny moments, but you’d never call any of them a comedy. Wreck-Gar is a comedy, Deadpool-style (but without the filth). A severely-damaged Transformer who crashes to Earth no memory and manages to rebuild himself in a junkyard, Wreck-Gar is a crazy, pop-culture-spouting dervish who just trashes every room he’s in, even though he’s not malicious or a bad guy. Indeed, he is chased by a trio of Decepticons (Swindle, Brawl, and Vortex) who are cruel and unusual (and Swindle wants recompense for a deal gone wrong). An all-out wacky comedy is something not often attempted by big-budget action movies; I’d even go whole hog and get Ward and Miller on board to shepherd the humour to the screen.

Starscream: we’re always focusing on the good guys! Well, here you go: a story about a bot who’s born to be bad. Starscream would be set in the past (naturally, since he’s dead now) and follows Megatron’s least-reliable lieutenant as he heads to Earth to look for Megatron during the time when he was in stasis underneath the Hoover Dam. I can’t remember the chronology, but maybe this could even be set in the late 70s/early 80s, with Starscream  assuming a jet form more like his classic toy (and in that colour scheme, too). He’d be conniving, plotting, scheming, and essentially coming across like a giant metal version of Loki. Perhaps he’s playing a number of human “allies” off against one another, as well as some big Decepticons (Thunderwing? Tarn? Who haven’t we seen yet?) and even a troupe of Autobots he double-crosses. It could be darkly comic and incredible fun.

Hearts of Steel: Wild West Transformers! I mean, what’s not to love? Adapted from the IDW comic series (which was supposed to be out-of-continuity, but was so popular that writer John Barber retroactively incorporated it into the main Transformers timeline), this would need a bit of manipulation to change characters around (I don’t think Bumblebee should be in it, but given the often-contradictory nature of the movie timeline, I don’t see why we couldn’t bring back characters like Jazz, Ironhide, or maybe even Optimus himself). A rollicking steampunk adventure that hopefully would capture the freewheeling outback sci-fi tone of Back to the Future Part III, and hopefully not come across like another Wild Wild West.

Cybertron: I suppose this is a sort-of sequel to Megatron (see above). Set during the war, it’s a men-on-a-mission movie starring a young Optimus Prime (perhaps he could still be Orion Pax at this point). I don’t think we should worry too much about mythologies and intricacies of Transformer society the way James Roberts depicted it, but all the same they could do a lot worse than adapting his Shadowplay storyline, where Orion lead a team of misfit Autobots in an illegal heist to save the world. That kid of behind-enemy-lines vibe could give us a great Cybertronian war movie without wallowing in the grimdark explodey nature of Transformer combat. But especially if this was the movie where Orion earned his stripes and officially became Optimus, that might be nice. Like Megatron, of course, this would end up being an entirely CG affair.

Bumblebee 2: Energon Boogaloo? Look, the ending of the film – without wanting to give away spoilers – could be seen as neatly segueing into the 2007 Transformers film. One could imagine no additional adventurous meetings between Bumblebee and Charlie.  But on the other hand, let’s not rule it out. Perhaps Bumblebee has been on Earth, dicking around, since 1987, and during that time he got up to more mischief with his first best human friend. Some covert Decepticon invasion requires him to break cover, or he needs some kind of human contact to spy for him, and oh look he goes back to Charlie. I’d skip forward a little bit, to around ‘91 or ‘92, slap a bit of early grunge on the soundtrack. See what happens. Just bring back Travis Knight.

So there we are. My ideas for ten possible Transformers spin-off movies. I didn’t really intend for this to turn into ten pitches with little mini-synopses; it was really meant to just be a quick fun game of “stories or characters who’d make a cool movie” but then I thought about it too hard, as I tend to do where Transformers is concerned. Hey, look, some of these films could even tie together! Megatron and Cybertron especially, but you could scatter seeds of stories or references among the lot. Anyway. Wishful thinking. But hopefully a film like one of these will roll out before too long (see what I did there?).