#HYX IS COMING I CAN FEEL IT

[inthefaceofadaffodil]

The new HYX leak has 2hatwt in shambles so I thought I’d share it over here

#Immortality #haoyixing #The Husky and his White Cat Shizun #2ha #Chu Wanning #Taxian Jun #Mo Ran #Ranwan #Luo Yunxi #Chen Feiyu #HAPPY SATURDAY TO US #HYX IS COMING I CAN FEEL IT

[zucchan]

I miss Haoyixing

#I know it isn't even out yet #but the time when they were filming it was so good #and let's talk about the tencent all star night! (I watched because of xz and wyb and end up screaming because of my ranwan's feelings ) #and the time before april was good too #(ok #I'm joking #it was pure chaos. #but I'm still using the fanart posted by the director as my phone screensaver so I think we also got good memories in the end) #but now we are in a limbo 🥲🥲 #but being the rational adult I'm suppose to be if it's better for the cast and the drama I can wait forever #... #but I can still complain that I miss Haoyixing 🥺🥺🥺 #when you are ready and SAFE. please come home #hyx

[jjheejz]

About Internet Water Army in the case

This is an ongoing update about the case from start to development. List of all related posts can be found on this blog's pinned post (link provided at bottom of each post as well).

19 August 2021 update: Added the scale of his success for reference, before bonus below

18 August 2021 update: Added timeline of events, orange title in post, found out the official English term for Immoral Media = Internet Water Army)

Major updates since first draft: Added bonus, added disclaimer, certain info details

Originally posted on 16 August 2021

[The purpose of this post is to provide a perspective as to why the Media is raised/blamed regarding the issue. Especially for international fans, as all the encounters happened on Weibo. Also, those who were on weibo, do read through if you will. So although it's lengthy, do try to read all, at least if not the last two parts].

The Media referred by most, is not the common perception of the Entertainment Industry (celebrities, directors, shows, channels, staff etc), but the dark side of the Entertainment industry: Antis, toxic fans, toxic marketing accounts. They are called Internet Water Army💧.

Toxic Marketing Accounts is one of the things they do, these accounts on Weibo has millions of followers, each of their post likes are in the hundred thousands (buyable) to give credibility to passer-bys. Some use similar names to Official accounts, some use similar logos. Their posts are usually subjective or aims to steer view points of a certain celebrity/movie/show. Before the latest update of this post (18.08.21), I just group them all together and term them as Immoral Media*.

*Below is my original post using my original term because at point of first draft, I did not know the official term (so have changed/added the term from Immoral Media to Internet Water Army in content below but retain the content based off first draft).

If you have chased before celebrities, or just simply passed by an article about certain celebrities, recall how some title that caught your attentions were like. Clickbaits is one of the many things they do. If GZ is your first and you do not have Weibo, then this read(link) is good enough.

Just as the term Immoral Media (Internet Water Army), it’s immoral and unethical, but they exists because they are paid to do so. Who pays them? Entertainment Companies, and maybe other Organisations

Normal Media/Marketing vs Immoral Media/Toxic Marketing/Internet Water Army

When a show or movie comes out, the normal Marketing department will generate outreach and buzz so that people know a show is airing soon/know the show exists etc. Official announcements are not enough, because there isn’t much context (limited content to put up as well) so having some other Marketing accounts do the buzz in a planned period to gain awareness through posts, some articles about the casts, the plot summary, the production details etc is normal. This is Marketing, bigger companies will probably have stronger Marketing departments (aka influence) and can hire more Marketing accounts to generate buzz. Celebrities (aka casts) themselves, are also Marketing point.

Then we have the Internet Water Army/Immoral Media, these are what they mainly do:

Create Fanfiction-rumors: Creating rumors about celebrities to shift audience perception of them. [eg. XX was seen with XX leaving a hotel, XX was drunk on Event Y and did ZZZ to AA, XX is dating BB and has been in a relationship for N years etc]

Honing their brain degrading skills: Come up with titled clickbait headings/ trending topics with negative written contents. For articles, exceptionally out of heading content related to the celebrity. [Refer to Baidu, it’s a winner of these, feel free to Google Translate]

Regressing their common sense and understanding skills: Take everything a celebrity does completely out of context in a negative way and create a topic out of it [eg. XX said AA is a ---, “XX raised his finger, a sign of ---?”, XX pushed BB aggressively on Variety Show Y - A competition variety show, XX is in beef with CC because XX was caught giving CC the eye]

Using their fingers to stir shit and bathe each other in it: Escalate all smallest form of possible tension created by fans/themselves into a huge thing by acting as the fandom's fans/lurk in fandom chat groups, and voicing their disguised opinion to spread tension/exaggerate severity of the issue [eg. XX fans mocked AA - in groupchats: tbh I've never liked AA before, AA just gives off a vibe that I dont like and now this? It just disgusts me even more > Yea, i feel this way too. AA has problems / XX Lurkers expressing views on XX about NN, slowly to NNMHFXW - XX did NNMHGT - I cannot accept NNmHfHw, I'm leaving = multiply by 1000++]

Epitome of a self-deteriorate: Creating something out of nothing and react to that something negatively to gain massive attention/reaction [eg. “XX raised his hand on show Y” - dk what XX fans are thinking, are they literally blind? XX fans are tasteless just like XX hahaha / “XX did community service” - they are acting / “XX breathed” - From the start, i thought XX was NN, but I am so ZZZ that XX breathed. Goodbye fandom, i’m leaving. Those who still want to stay I urge you to rethink your life choices] - if I may add, Xiao Zhan’s fanfiction case as well. 

Metaphor - Ability to use bare hands to collect paychecks from the urinal/toilet bowl where their boss/client peed in: Doing all of the above.

Apologies for any term offense, but not apologetic of the term context. This is what they do for a living. Any normal human being who do not like anything, will generally not be interested at anything about it in the first place, so to have some antis/toxic fans knowing certain things and inside jokes/references in their posts questions their goal.

On involved in Internet Water Army/Immoral Media 💧

Fans on weibo during these few months witnessed many of the above on GZ. From rumored girlfriend (spammed with articles) to mean and nasty comments on trending topics, to bouts of insults and fake emotional cryouts by certain fan accounts that GZ's office has to release a number of Lawyer’s letter to them. 

Aside from WOH there were also a few other BL adaptation films that were actually released this year but they did not reach exponential success like WOH. BL adaptations are so highly followed by because this is the key to wealth. Literally. Successful BLs like The Untamed and  Dao Mu Bi Ji saw the amount of wealth fans are willing to spend on the celebrity as compared to say BG or idols (younger fan groups). This is why when WOH shot up exponentially, Immoral Media start to sweat.

Major anticipated adaptations were supposed to air this year eg. Hao Yi Xing(HYX), Sha Po Lang(SPL) etc but was severely held back due to the stricter change in BL adaptations submitting their scripts for approval regulations (WOH manage to submit earlier before the change). Because of this, most final films were rejected and they have to keep re-editing, by then WOH was already months into reaping tonnes of major brand endorsements, shows/movie casting, variety show appearances etc, something that is seen as too successful in the Immoral Media’s eyes, because they have to create buzz for other celebrities, some are specific celebrity oriented and thus circulate rumors about having endorsement opportunities shifted from celebrity X to GZ (think fanfiction-rumors and shit stirrer) causes tension in celebrity fandoms. - A real event just in July:

The Untamed’s cp fandom is called BJYX which had always been in the Top 1 of Cps for 2 years dropped for awhile to Top 2, over taken by LLD. Both of them had a war and hated each fandom, one fandom is somehow not allowed to like the other fandom even casually after everything broke out because it started out with some BJYX toxics photoshopped GZ on of portraits .

Also another case of which he wore the same costume as WYB did in a previous photoshoot and it became a useless comparison of who wore better, who looks better, degrading the other. (Finger stirring shit).

Now apply all of the above things the Internet Water Army do and we have them earning money, while both fandom reacts and hate each other.

In LLD, our own fans started suspecting each other on who is a spy from BJYX and what not.

The first few months of Internet Water Army saw LLDs mostly mocking them because the average age is 30-40s, they know and see through all of their intentions so nothing was big. They were trumpeting and LLDs didn’t even care, what with all the doing tedious stats was not even important to them.

Over time, as the issues they create became more and more serious LLDs did start to care, reporting Toxic Marketing accounts/toxic fans became a daily task, go vote for GZ at certain polls etc, solo fans, and LLD fans also split apart. Solo fans think cp fans use GZ to furnish their fantasies, and cp fans thinks they are the ones furnishing their dreaming-girls fantasy with (aka my boyfriend).

There was also a period where LLD had a habit of continuously mentioning “we are in the 30-40s so we can see through everything about the media, we are all fans for the first time, we are good at spending money (because of purchase power compared to other fandoms)” it was prevalent for so long it felt odd, ‘chasing celebrities the first time’ in particular sounds more vulnerable as a weakness than a strength / sth to be proud of.

Gradually, more secretive/insider confirmed ‘sweets’ were flying around. Fans advised each other to not circulate, and the mindset of “if you know, you know, dont tell.” (This is a problematic mentality, of which fans will still be curious to know and search for it themselves, but this secretive hook is unhealthy. Over the long term, it becomes hard for existing fans to know a lot of things properly to judge for themselves, especially those who knew and publicly reacted, but blasting those who ask and telling those who know to keep quiet, this did not help some to understand why on certain things, even so for international fans, dont know and dont understand, causing misunderstandings. Yes, certain information should not be shared, so why should you react about it publicly in the first place? - Internet Water Army effect)

The last few months (for example the July fan war) created a tonne of seriousness and anger. A period even broke out with a tonne of ‘insider confirmed sweets’ (which is LLD’s daily dose of happiness), it was hard to tell what was real and what was fake. Trending topics became negative and everyone warned each other not to enter because it will give the trends ‘views’ and trend statistics, in reality entering there is to enter an exhibition by the self-deteriorates, collecting the fandom's traffic data (it's a sure lose for fans each time they enter the topic). Everyone even starts thinking that the trend’s popularity was caused by each other (it's true but it can be bought daily and not caused by fans). There was a raise in the number of fans who were getting emotional because they want to protect but Internet Water Army kept coming and got worse, because fans, tbh, not just GZ fans, every other celebrity’s fans are always fighting with an Army, getting played and plotted in that Army's calendar.

Even so, despite all of these, LLD is actually a fandom Internet Water Army may find the hardest to break because they understand GZ so much, they could tell what are fake news regarding GZ, because among everything above, there are still plenty of logical fans to stop many fans from drifting too far and debunking them. Why? 30-40s are grown up adults.

Why 13.8.21 and the Japan issue is plotted?

First of all, in the political climate of China, there are many political dates in a month that is NO-Entertainment news. Because it’s the honoring of certain important political events. It’s like Remembrance Day, thus the sensitivity is higher. On these days, there are usually no news and even the Internet Water Army zip their pants. This year also marks the 100th year of the Chinese Communist Party(link)

Secondly, he had no work schedule on 13 August 2021. A great full day to focus on any other news (because if he had schedules, everyone will turn their attention to his events, what trumpeting outside is just bird chirps). 

Thirdly, when the news broke out, especially about the shrine, the reception was actually quite serious within the fandom so the scale of this might be big but to what extent in reality?

Lastly, 15.8.21 marks the 76th anniversary of the announcement of surrender of Japanese in World War 2(link). Also a day of NO-Entertainment news. 

Timeline of events:

13.8.21 - [His rest day, Eve of Chinese Valentine's Day, Japan News broke out] His rest day, no schedules = increased attention about him online. Lowered guard among fans because they are getting ready for tomorrow's Chinese Valentine's sweets = Caught off guard = Huge break out of fans' reactions

14.8.21 - [Chinese Valentine's Day, Eve of the 75th Anniversary of the announcement of Japanese surrender] Keep a wishful and happy demenaor to not destroy the mood, suppressed thoughts about ZZH's Japan news

15.8.21 - [75th Anniversary of the announcement of Japanese surrender, Official announcement of ZZH's boycott and all China social media account ban] NO-Entertainment news day, Solemn day, not allowed to voice anything so the fandom can only wait for tomorrow to start voicing out/debunking but before they can wait out, the boycott and social media ban happened, every official accounts about him was gone overnight, fans had no time to react

17.8.21 - [All official fandom accounts related to ZZH and JunZhe were locked/removed]

Forced to be silent since the day his matter broke out, over the course of official news release with everything taken down in a day because of the Japan correspondence, his accounts banned overnight across the Chinese media and the overnight cancellation, fans could not speak anything about it. Overnight cancellation like this scale happened for the first time in China, leaving no time to react by the fandom, by the time they can, they are silenced.

When the period of events occured within a set of special dates, it’s not coincidence.

Conclusion

Because he was too successful and had many actually honorable past things, and a hard to influence fandom, Internet Water Army view him as a huge threat enough to want to destroy him, because it’s hard to defeat. With a chance they have, they will hold it till the end, bringing up this issue to the Government during this period also shows a sign of how scared they were of him and perhaps his fandom to plot something like this.

Updated on 19 August: Here's a screenshot of assumed calculation on the scale of GZ success for reference while chatting with a fellow fan, assuming GJ also has 27 brands, and there are 1000 brands. Rationale of numbers used: Only big brands can hire big celebrities.

Bonus

Mentioned in the first post, will mention again in case. After the news broke out within 2 days, there was a drop on his weibo followers from 18.9mil to 18.7mil. 200k+ drops, if the politics was such a big national issue, there should at least be a huge drop, even at least a million right? Because weibo is a China-Chinese majority right? Nope, we get a puny 200k drop.

What's funny? The self-deteroriates:

Translation: "Are his fans bought? Why didnt he drop fans? Those people got brainwashed to this point?" / "I've never entered his weibo and today i feel like having a look yet it showed I've followed him. All his fans were bought right? It disgusts me, i immediately unfollowed. This kind of process is worse than WYF..." / "i dropped fans because of him...no...I just reposted 2 posts and I've dropped 4 fans?"

Isn't the tone and regressing brain cells, all too familiar and same?

//

Added above, will remind again to read this link. It has an even more in-depth knowledge on who are paying them.

So what should we do? Link here

Related posts 🛏️:

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

Anon: What do you think of Shi Mei/Hua Binan? I’m a Shi Mei stan too but I can't really explain why I like him so much so I was curious, can I ask for your thoughts on him (or both of them)? Especially Hua Binan - for a main villain he doesn’t get that much thought. What you think Meatbun’s message with them was, and how do you feel about their endings?

Oh, I’d be happy to answer, anon. Long, very long post and SPOILERS under the cut!!!

So. Shi Mei. Shi Mei is the character I obsess over the most in 2ha. Like, I like my favorite three (Mo Ran, Chu Wanning, and Shi Mei) about the same, but Shi Mei has many interesting implications to his character that cover stuff that I like to think about. He (both Hua Binan and Shi Mei 2.0) checks a lot of boxes for something that I, just as a matter of personal taste, really like in a character. (Not in a person, mind you; Shi Mingjing is not someone you want to be looking up to.) 

First of all, morally dubious. Extremely so, in this case. I tend to gravitate towards characters like that - I think because it provokes thoughts about the darker, messier side of the human psyche that I wouldn’t deeply consider otherwise. I mean, most characters, even the legitimately good ones, do that, but antagonists have a special flavor. 

Secondly, he’s canonically really pretty, and he canonically used that to his advantage to craft that kind, harmless, demure façade that, like, fooled everyone. (I prefer Shi Mei as a man because I think it’s interesting how he relates to toxic masculinity despite his delicate appearance - he hates being feminized or seen as frail - but the fact that HYX is making him a woman? The fact that she’s gonna blindside all the guys, the fact that she’s gonna have everyone dancing in the palm of her hand? *sweating* I tremble. Anyway.) I really like how Meatbun unraveled that mask of meek, helpless purity to reveal what’s underneath - an individual who is extremely calculating, ruthless, and capable of being shockingly cold-hearted. Shi Mei is someone who manipulates other people like they’re tools, someone who takes actual enjoyment from trampling over human beings. The juxtaposition of someone who looks so dainty and fragile and lovely yet is capable of being incredibly cruel and vicious... I love that. I always have, and I love it even more in this case because of how much of a point Meatbun made to let us know how beautiful Shi Mei is. 

Thirdly, and this is just personal taste, but there is something that I legitimately admire about Shi Mei: how determined he is, and how utterly dedicated he is to his goals. His plans were... horrific, obviously, but the fact that he even had the audacity to dream that big, the fact that he even decided to take it upon himself to rescue his people who’ve been brutally oppressed for thousands of years, complete with an evil chessmaster-esque plan, and all when he was a teenager, too... and then being able to maintain that determination, and actively continue working to further it, for years? It’s appalling and cutthroat, but takes such serious guts, and such an insane amount of willpower, that I can’t help but respect. If Shi Mei had dedicated that intense resolve to another, less homicidal method, I honestly would have loved to read about him as a protagonist.

Fourth, and this is what ties it nicely together: I can somewhat... understand where he’s coming from, despite how barbaric and cold-blooded he can get? His people brutalized and oppressed for thousands of years, used as sex slaves and literal nourishment for cultivation... this is in no way a direct “comparison”, and I’m not inviting anyone to start making “parallels” between fiction and actual history that real-life people had to suffer through, but as Korean diaspora, who learned about Japan’s occupation of the country, I can’t help but feel sympathetic to Shi Mei’s desire to end all that exploitation of his people. All the resentment and hatred and anger he has in regard to the suffering of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts, is, in my opinion, more than valid and more than justified. He is furious about it and he has a right to be. (What’s not valid or justified is how he acted in response - I’ll get into it later.)

Aside from his outrage at the situation of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts, I also I think that how sadistic Shi Mei can get also has some foundation to have gradually developed as a part of his personality, rather than just a cliché “Yeah he was just born dunking puppies under water and stuff.” I talked (at excessive length) about it in the tags of my reblogs of @moransumbrella​’s post about how it’s unfair to expect Mo Ran to never forgive himself, but I’ll explain in more detail here.

So obviously, Shi Mei went through it as a child, watching his own father kill and cannibalize his mother, and then he had to run like hell away from his home lest his father do the same to him. As I’m sure you can guess, that... will seriously fuck a person up. And it happened only because Shi Mei and his mother were Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts; they did literally nothing else wrong (at that point). It would be a horrible pill for anyone to have to swallow, let alone a kid. And he keeps seeing it and hearing about it around him; how other Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts are being r*ped and eaten so that people can raise their cultivation levels. How he and his mother and anyone like them aren’t people in the eyes of the world that they live in; they’re even less than animals. And this has been happening for thousands of years, with no one bothering to stand up to it, no one even questioning it. 

That is heartbreaking. That’s repulsive. And I can only imagine how bitter and hateful it would make a person; not just at the people responsible, but at the world in general - for letting this continue, for never raising a finger to help. Of course, it’s not everyone’s fault that the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts have to suffer. There are probably more innocents than there are guilty. But when you’re one of the people under the threat of being r*ped and/or cannibalized, with society as a whole deeming it perfectly acceptable that those things are done to you, it is... not easy, lol, to think, “Yeah but it’s not all of them, let me keep that in mind!” 

And I think Shi Mei’s cruelty, and the glee he shows at other people’s suffering, is a subconscious way of lashing out at everything around him. The world hurt him and his people horribly -> this person whom he’s hurting horribly is part of the world -> retribution. And he’s happy to think that he’s getting back at the world for everything that he and the other Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts had to go through. 

It’s an illogical thought process, obviously. The people who really deserve his anger, and the people whom I would not feel sorry for even if he happily hurt, are the people in the upper cultivation world, who promote all the brutalization of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts. But Mo Ran? Chu Wanning? Xue Meng? Also people who were devastated because of Shi Mei’s plans? They don’t at all deserve what he does to them. (Especially Mo Ran. Jesus Christ. Shi Mei fucked him up.) But as unreasonable as that flow of thought is, it’s also not one that’s completely incomprehensible. There are legitimate explanations (not justifications) for Shi Mei’s sadism, and I certainly like it a lot better than just “well he was born that way.” 

Back to understandable motivations. Shi Mei was right to want change. He was right to think, “I have to put a stop to this.” What he wasn’t right in was how he went about it. The Path of Martyrdom is... terrifying, and it requires so many innocent deaths. And not only the Path, but the plan that Shi Mei had to build his corpse bridge; the Flower inside Mo Ran, twisting up his entire psyche, turning him into Taxian-Jun, and subjecting Chu Wanning to r*pe and abuse in the process... you know what I’m talking about. None of that is justifiable. It’s, to put it mildly, horrific. Ideally, what I think Shi Mei should have started by doing is talked to someone. Chu Wanning explicitly states that he sees the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts as people; he wouldn’t have just thrown his disciple to the wolves even if he knew that Shi Mei was one. At the very least, Shi Mei wouldn’t have had to stomach all of that trauma by himself, and he and Chu Wanning could cooperate, try to work out ways to start helping the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been easy - and in fact it may have still involved violence, because horrible injustice in society, as sad as it is, doesn’t just go away. But it wouldn’t have needed to be as nightmarish as the 0.5 timeline became, and it wouldn’t have involved destroying the mental state of an innocent teenager (and that’s just brushing the tip of the iceberg). 

But here’s the kicker, and again the thing that I like most about the way Meatbun wrote Shi Mei: I can’t entirely blame him for believing extreme violence is the only option. I can, and do, still condemn him for the things he did to achieve his aims, but I also... really do understand why he never saw talking as a possibility. Because even if he heard Chu Wanning say that he believes the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Clan is human, Shi Mei has absolutely no guarantees. He has to simply trust that the people who care about him won’t turn on him when they find out about his origins. And when your own father was easily willing to murder your mother, how much does it seem to you like affection is worth? When the brutalization of your race has been going on for millennia, how likely would it seem that talking is going to change anything? As far as Shi Mei knows, he is in the same position with the people of Sisheng Peak as his mother was with his father, and his father immediately turned on his mother. I wouldn’t be too keen to take my chances, either, no matter how many times the other people have said/shown that they care about me. Fear like that is just not something that can be shrugged off. 

Shi Mei is a very nicely written antagonist - and a scary one, imo - because it’s not as if his actions, or his thought processes, are particularly confusing. In fact, there’s some really solid ground on why he acts, believes, thinks, the way that he does. I truly applaud Meatbun for doing that; I also think it makes Shi Mei scary because this is someone who orchestrated mass murder, was planning to orchestrate mass murder again (at least in Hua Binan’s case - I’ll talk about the distinctions between 2.0 and Hua Binan a little further down), and yet he’s not... alien. He’s not exactly relatable either (at least I hope not), but it’s not like you look at him and think, “Well, here’s a guy that was just born evil.” Even though his bad choices (and boy, there were a lot of them) are entirely his own responsibility, they didn’t just come from nowhere. Villains aren’t born, they’re made - even ones as horrifying as Hua Binan. 

Speaking of Hua Binan, let’s get into the distinctions between him and Shi Mei 2.0. When we get to Hua Binan specifically, he did some things that 2.0 didn’t, including trying to r*pe Chu Wanning, multiple times. Before I get into this topic: r*pe is r*pe, and it’s monstrous, regardless of the context, regardless of the situation, regardless of anything, and I am in no way going to be challenging that notion. No one should. 

So. It’s also been noted in one of the reblogs of the post I mentioned above that Hua Binan doesn’t seem to have any personal grudge with Chu Wanning; his only attitude towards what he’s trying to do is, “You’ve had him for a while, it’s my turn now.” Chu Wanning, whom he supposedly ‘loves’, is not a person in his eyes. He’s a thing, an object that can just be passed around regardless of what he wants. 

You might be thinking, “well, that just goes to show that Hua Binan doesn’t really care at all about Chu Wanning.” But I think that on some miniscule level, Hua Binan did. It’s nowhere near actually valuing him as a person, but he isn’t, like, easily replaceable in Hua Binan’s eyes. Let me explain.

When Mo Ran begs Shi Mei (0.5 and 2.0) to give him the Flower instead of Chu Wanning, his reasoning is that Chu Wanning has no resentment. Shi Mei takes it, and gives the Flower to Mo Ran, but it struck me as odd that he just. Listened. Because the idea that a human being has no resentments is unrealistic, imo. Shi Mei is pretty in tune with people’s feelings, especially the darker ones, as little as he tends to care about them - he wouldn’t be as successful a manipulator as he is if he wasn’t. And Chu Wanning does have resentments, as much as he tries to rein them in; so why did Shi Mei acquiesce so easily? Honestly, I think it’s because subconsciously, he didn’t want to spoil Chu Wanning’s kindness and righteousness. He “fell in love” (cough cough) with him because he was a good person, after all, and a part of him wasn’t eager to ruin that. So when Mo Ran offers himself instead, with the flimsy reasoning that Chu Wanning has no resentments for Shi Mei to twist, Shi Mei accepts it, and gives Mo Ran the Flower instead. (I could also get into how he disdains Mo Ran immensely, but that’s going off topic.) 

So it’s not like Chu Wanning means nothing to Hua Binan, and Hua Binan just wants to have him just to, well, have him. But he still tries to r*pe him with the incredibly, nauseatingly objectifying attitude that, “it’s my turn now.” He’s flippant about Chu Wanning’s agency and will, just like the cultivation world is flippant about the agency and will of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts.

And I think that apathy that Hua Binan has towards Chu Wanning’s desires stems from the brutalization of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts. (Once again - this is not an attempt to justify Hua Binan in any way for doing what he tried to do. There is never anything like a good reason for r*pe; there is never even anything like a reason for r*pe. It’s inexcusable, plain and simple.) 

Hua Binan lived the majority of his life knowing that he and people like him are objects in the eyes of society. It’s hard to get a healthy relationship, built on mutual trust and affection, with anyone, with that kind of knowledge. Hua Binan (and Shi Mei 2.0 too, but we’re focusing on Hua Binan here) does not know what a proper relationship is; since after his mother’s death, he has had no frame of reference for his emotional range to develop healthily, and no concept of love and/or affection. The people around him, such as Xue Zhengyong, Chu Wanning, Xue Meng, cared about him and wouldn’t have abandoned him if they knew he was a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast - but he doesn’t know that, since he never even tried testing the waters. He simply operates under the belief that they’d turn on him if they found out (and again, I don’t blame him for thinking this, or not trusting them enough to open up). If he’s honest about himself and who he is, then, in his mind, he’ll immediately become a thing to be oppressed to everyone around him, just like his people are things to be oppressed to the cultivation world. 

What I’m saying is, Hua Binan only knows objectification. It’s what the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts have gone through for thousands of years, and it’s what he thinks he’ll go through if he reaches out to someone. He doesn’t know how to connect with another person, only how to dehumanize and demean them. And this manifests in his attitude towards Chu Wanning, who is arguably the one person he cares about outside of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts. Hua Binan treats him like an object, because it’s what he knows best, what he’s familiar with. His apathy towards Chu Wanning’s consent isn’t just “ah yes, let me disregard it to make things extra horrible and traumatic” - there is some extremely twisted reasoning going on there. 

This doesn’t mean that Hua Binan isn’t aware of how abhorrent objectification is. In fact, I’m sure he understands intimately on some level, being a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast and all. But he does not use that understanding and make the connection that hey, it feels horrible when you’re treated like this - as he should know, and knows, from personal experience - I shouldn’t do it to the person that I have romantic feelings for. Instead, he chooses to perpetrate the brutalization and dehumanization that was so unfairly brought on him and his people by treating another person the same way. 

That’s another reason why Hua Binan is a villain to me: he prolongs and carries on the cycle of objectification. No doubt he suffered; no doubt he’s a victim of an inhumane world that refuses to see him and his people as human. In the same way; no doubt he’s a perpetrator, who intentionally inflicts horrible inhumanity on others. Being a victim, with valid anger and valid resentment, does not excuse hurting people who don’t deserve it. And the fascinating nuance is that he does want to break the cycle of abuse - he wants to take the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts out of the human realm entirely - but he shows some massive cognitive dissonance regarding the abuse and objectification of other people who are not Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts. In fact, he actively works to abuse and objectify those people; his entire plan is hinged on disregarding their agency, purposefully ripping apart their mental state, and using them as tools to further his goals. And he doesn’t feel bad about it. 

That brings me into another point on why I consider Hua Binan a villain: the man is remorseless. Utterly, utterly unrepentant. He truly thinks that there’s nothing wrong with what he’s doing. When Shi Mei 2.0 brings up just how many blameless people will die in their endeavors, Hua Binan dismisses it as easily as breathing, saying that it’s “normal”. Once again, I don’t think this complete lack of guilt was always a part of Hua Binan; I think it developed with time. As you can tell by now, I see him as someone who became progressively colder and colder as time passed. Partially it was circumstantial, as anyone would become jaded and pretty ruthless if they knew they and their people were condemned to dehumanization and oppression just for being born, but he also just consciously dove right into his resentment and frustration and let them consume him. We can’t control what emotions we feel, but we can do our best to restrain them if they hurt other people, and pull them in if they start tempting us to do things that seem wrong. Hua Binan, though... I don’t think he ever chose to try to restrain himself. I think the second he had the thought, “What I’m doing is justified, the lives lost don’t mean anything,” he just took it and ran with it. 

His frame of mind started as “alright, I’ll do what I need to do for my clan; innocent lives might be lost, but I’ll try not to hurt people who aren’t involved.” But then, hey - what you’re trying to achieve seems like the right thing to do! (Hua Binan definitely believes that his goal is just, and in fact I can’t exactly argue that it isn’t, though the things he did to bring about that goal are, well. Lol.) Someone like Hua Binan, who doesn’t understand what true affection is, who has been bombarded with the implication that half-measures are unacceptable (his father went all the way and outright murdered his mother instead of, like, talking), who hasn’t had time to develop any extensive moral framework before his mother’s death - I think it would be easy for him to begin to see innocent deaths as an increasingly necessary part of his plans. His frame of mind became “whoops, looks like that family will die. Oh well, it has to happen.” And when you start thinking that, particularly when you don’t try to challenge it as I imagine Hua Binan didn’t, you get someone who thinks like he does by the time of the novel: “It doesn’t matter who’s hurt, or who dies, because of my plans. It’s only natural, so why should I feel bad?” 

Furthermore, I think it’s especially likely that you’d go down a moral slippery slope like that when the idea that “innocent deaths don’t matter” is reinforced by the society that you live in. Something like, “Clearly the world doesn’t care about the innocent Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts being r*ped and cannibalized left and right for existing, so why the fuck should I care that I’m killing and hurting people?” There is once again more cognitive dissonance at play here: rather than connecting the injustice of what’s being done to his people with the injustice of causing the deaths of blameless bystanders, Hua Binan instead uses it to reinforce his notion that innocent lives mean nothing, and justify the fact that he’s stepping all over others. It’s nasty and hypocritical, but I think people all tend to be that in some way or another - I’ve certainly found some hypocritical thinking from my part - and would be extremely prevalent in someone like Hua Binan, who responds to brutalization of his people with the intentional brutalization of other, uninvolved people. 

Once again, though, it being nasty and hypocritical does not mean there aren’t reasons for why he’s the way he is. I like that Meatbun did that. I like how she gives us a villain who, as a person, is monstrous, but you can see some kind of process in why he became so horrible. While Hua Binan is still responsible for the decisions that he made, and the blood of every death he caused is still on his hands, there were circumstances that pushed him into developing the views that he had, and making the choices that he did. If the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts weren’t treated as pieces of meat, if his mother hadn’t been killed by his father and he had to live with the knowledge that he and his people meant literally nothing in society’s eyes, what kind of person would he be? Would he still be as cruel, unscrupulous, spiteful, and brutal as he is? Honestly, I don’t think so. I think Meatbun is trying to say that human nature is something that’s shaped; no one is born inherently good or bad. The conditions that you’re thrown into influence what you become - and yet you are still making choices, even if those conditions are horrible, as Hua Binan’s were. Like, do I agree with him that it’s horrible and unjust, what the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts had to endure? Of course. Do I agree with him that it needed to be stopped? Of course. 

But do I agree with the choices he made to stop it? Betraying the people who cared about him, causing an enormous number of innocent deaths, violating people in such a personal and intimate way? And being so completely unrepentant as he does? No. Like, I might be more inclined to if he was something like, “I know what I’m doing is horrible. I still have to do it anyway.” But that’s not what he’s like - he does not even care to acknowledge how horrible his actions are. If anything, he knows they’re horrible, he knows that he’s hurting people, and he savors it. Which goes back to what I said about how I think he developed that cruelty - I understand why he thinks like that. It’s still atrocious. 

I’m no expert, but I don’t personally think that Hua Binan is a clinical psychopath. If he was, I don’t think he’d care so much about getting the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts to the demon realm. I don’t think he’d be so angry about what he and his people have to suffer. I think he would have just fucked off by himself, maybe did bad things for his own sake and for the sake of hedonism. Not all psychopaths are serial killers or mass murderers; they simply lack the ability to have empathy, and don’t see others as people, but that doesn’t immediately mean they start doing bad things. In Hua Binan’s case, he does seem to have capacity for empathy, but as I’ve said before it’s extremely conditional, extremely twisted, and extremely limited in a self-centered way as a result of the life he lived, and the choices he made. 

Speaking of being self-centered, I think that there’s a prevalent streak of sociopathy to Hua Binan’s worldview. I believe that he cares about the other Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts, and genuinely wants to get them to safety. Again, I don’t think you could muster up that much determination, and continue working for that long, doing things that extreme, if you were apathetic towards the people you’re trying to protect.

But I don’t think that he cares much about them individually. We see what he did to Song Qiutong - he used her and let her die in order to fulfill his plans of opening the gate to the demon realm. She’s a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast, one of the people whom he’s set out to protect, yet her life is just a tool for him. If it’s for the greater good of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts, he has no qualms manipulating and discarding individuals. And that echoes the “sacrifices made for the greater good” mentality that is not only condemnable morality, but something that I personally have a problem with. Like, what is the good of doing things for the “bigger picture” when you’re throwing individual people under the bus? What “bigger picture” is there that’s not intrinsically built and dependent upon every single lone person? I have true sympathy for Hua Binan’s ultimate goal of getting his people to safety - in fact, I think it’s an explicitly heroic desire (though the man himself is... not heroic, lmao). But when your people are only a collective whole that you need to save, and you don’t see each of them as people in their own right, whose lives and desires matter... that’s a problem. That’s not okay. Does it mean you shouldn’t be trying to protect them? No, but it doesn’t mean you’re not wrong for using and throwing away the individuals’ lives to achieve your goals. 

And so, even the other Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts, who are, like, the driving motivation of Hua Binan’s life, are not people he entirely cares about as, well, people. *Honestly, the person in the world that Hua Binan genuinely, wholeheartedly cared about may have been his mom - and she died before he had a chance to interact with her after being traumatized and going down a villainous path. 

*Edit: I forgot to talk about Mu Yanli here, and Hua Binan’s relationship with her. Given his reaction to his sister’s death, I think it’s indisputable that Hua Binan cared about her a lot; Mu Yanli might have actually been the one single person that he legitimately loved, and she clearly loved him back. Which, to me, seems like further confirmation that Hua Binan isn’t a clinical psychopath, but his empathy and his capacity to value others as people have become extremely limited over the course of his life. 

I also think there’s another element of sociopathy in him in that he has absolutely no sympathy for Mo Ran, despite both of them having been subjected to horrible circumstances when they were helpless children. In fact, Hua Binan (and Shi Mei 2.0, at least referencing when he gave the Flower to him) seems to enjoy watching him suffer because he looks down on him. I think if Hua Binan was a kinder person, he might have been fond of Mo Ran for their similarities. But he isn’t. If there’s anything that’s really frightening about Hua Binan, it’s the sheer disregard and disdain that he has for someone who has unfairly suffered as a child, like he has. And it really makes me think that Hua Binan has absolutely no sympathy to extend to anyone who isn’t a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast (unless you’re Mu Yanli). Ironically and unbeknownst to him, Mo Ran actually is... they’re not exactly the same, since Mo Ran is the rare kind who doesn’t have golden tears and has a high cultivation level - but I think the point is that it doesn’t matter! Hua Binan should have sympathy, regardless, for someone who was once powerless and afraid like he was. He doesn’t. As far as he’s concerned, if your experiences weren’t exactly like his, if he can’t see a part of himself in you (the threat of being r*ped/cannibalized for your race), then you don’t matter. You aren’t a person, your life means nothing, and it’s all in a day’s work for him to trample all over you to achieve his ends. And once again, even if he’s this cold-hearted... you can see how he turned out that way. It’s fascinating.

Now, getting into Shi Mei 2.0. 2.0 can be similarly callous, but he does evidently have a stronger conscience than Hua Binan. Hua Binan doesn’t care how many people he has to hurt or kill in order to get to the Path of Martyrdom, and in fact has hurt or killed an enormous number of innocents (directly or indirectly) for that. On the other hand, Shi Mei 2.0 does feel guilt, for causing so much death, and for betraying the genuine kindness that Chu Wanning showed him. It eventually prompts him to free Chu Wanning and break away from his cooperation with Hua Binan. 

Shi Mei 2.0’s choice actually is, to me, reminiscent of the justification that the curse he put on Mo Ran ultimately didn’t matter, because Mo Ran always had that capacity for horror and violence inside of him, and the Flower just brought it out. Bullshit, baby ♫♫ Everyone has dark and violent thoughts, it’s just a matter of how well you understand that they are wrong, and choose not to act upon the - or in Shi Mei 2.0’s case, choose to stop acting upon them. Shi Mei 2.0 is motivated by the same hatred, bitterness, and anger that Hua Binan is - but in the end, Shi Mei 2.0 made the conscious decision that “no, this is wrong, and I’m not going to do it anymore.” That rage and acrimony doesn’t go away; he’s still furious, and he’s still right to think that the world has wronged him (although by that point he’s also wronged others maaany times over). But Shi Mei 2.0 suppresses it, because that particular expression of his anger is hurting innocent people, and he ultimately decides that he doesn’t want that. (I hope he finds a healthier way to relieve all his resentment. Like... scream into the night if you have to, Shi Mei. Punch a pillow.) 

Because he makes that choice, he has the opportunity to keep going, make amends as much as he can for what he did, and live a life not tied down by the determination to save his people. He’s out there doing good in the world and trying to atone, which I think will give him fulfillment in the end. And I don’t think Shi Mei 2.0 doing good things will all solely be for atonement? In his first appearance, he stands up to the people trying to pass off those children as some sort of demon species (I’m blurry on the specifics), subjecting the children to horrible objectification in the process. As far as I can remember, there really was no pragmatic reason for him to be doing that - no one else that they know was around, and Mo Ran didn’t realize it was him until some time later. Perhaps this is just me being a Shi Mei stan, but I think that Shi Mei had some sympathy for those kids, and powerlessness of their situation. (Which is an interesting contrast to Hua Binan and his complete lack of empathy for anyone who’s not a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast.) What I’m saying is, I don’t think Shi Mei 2.0 is a rotten, irredeemable person, or someone who has to force himself to do good things in the name of atonement. I think there was already some capacity for selfless kindness in him - insofar as it doesn’t jeopardize his plans, of course. And as there’s no longer any plan to jeopardize, means he can legitimately focus on doing good things.

And yet, it’s interesting that even with Shi Mei 2.0’s decision to abandon the destructive path he chose, I think Meatbun was still subtly pushing the message about the importance of circumstances. Shi Mei 2.0’s goal was also to get the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts to the demon realm, which is why he allied himself with Hua Binan. But even if he broke away - and he did - there is still someone else carrying through with the plan. Choosing a different path, for Shi Mei 2.0, does not mean that he’s necessarily abandoning his people to a sure fate of continued brutalization, because Hua Binan is already there, doing what is needed (at least in his mind) to put a stop to it. Hua Binan, though, doesn’t have someone else to leave the job to. If he stops, there would no longer be anyone making the moves to open a way into the demon realm. Now, considering Hua Binan, I don’t think he would have made a different decision even if there was someone else to take his place. He obviously thinks his actions are justified, and is single-mindedly dedicated to his goal. But I also think... Shi Mei 2.0 had the opportunity, the space, to think about the horror of what he was doing and ruminate on his guilt because Hua Binan was there directing things to a certain extent. If it had all been up to Shi Mei 2.0, would he still have stopped? Knowing that he’s letting his people’s last hope crumble? I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t think he would have. 

All in all, though, I think Shi Mei 2.0’s message was fairly hopeful. He’s come a long way in his goal to save his people, enough so that you’d think there’s no turning back after everything he did - but he does turn back, he does decide to take a different path, and that decision gives him a future. While the bias in me is chanting “Shi Mei baby Shi Mei baby Shi Mei baby,” of course I know that he’s done abhorrent things, especially (imo) to Mo Ran. But he’s not, like, 100% irredeemable as a person. He admitted that he was wrong, rejected the path he’d been following for so long out of a sense of morality, and I do see eventual peace ahead for him. And since he despised having to fake being so frail and altruistic during his time at Sisheng Peak, I’m glad he now has the space to be his authentic self. While I do find it sad that he’s the only person who hasn’t found a home, I also think it makes sense. Shi Mei still needs to live for himself outside of his self-imposed goal to save his people, and make a life that doesn’t revolve around penance and penance only. I hope he’s able to understand, one day, what it means to have a genuine, loving connection with someone, and I hope he finds his place in the end. The only thing that worries me is the thought of what would happen if people discover he’s a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast... which wouldn’t really be that difficult, since he seems to be using bits of himself to make medicine... other than that, though, I’m pretty happy with his ending. He’s alone, he has no home, but he’s, as he put it, “finally free.” And he’s alive, which means there’s still plenty of opportunity ahead for him.

As for Hua Binan... all in all, I think Hua Binan has some traits and goals that you could ascribe to a traditional hero. I even think he’s capable of being truly selfless! He fought the demonic guardian and then held the doors open while the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts passed through, giving his life for them in the process. His last thought before he’s crushed is relief that all of them made it. So he’s: righteously angry at a rampant injustice in society, wants to protect his people and take them away from the brutalization that’s being forced upon them, driven and determined and diligent in his efforts to do that, sacrifices himself to ensure that his people all get to safety, and his last concern is even about them as he’s being squashed. 

And it’s not enough. He’s still manipulative, unabashedly remorseless, and astonishingly cruel. He still extends zero empathy to anyone who isn’t one of his people, he still has no regard for the consent and autonomy of the person that he’s supposedly in love with. You can have good, even commendable traits - the heroic traits I listed above are certainly things I find commendable of him - and still be a very, very, very nasty person. I understand why the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts see him as a hero - I probably would too, if I was one of them - but the narrative makes it very clear that he is a villain, and I agree with the narrative. You can have sympathetic goals, justified rage, and genuine selflessness; it doesn’t mean you’re good. The process is as telling, if not more telling, than the result. And I do think Hua Binan’s final result was a good, even wonderful thing - the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts no longer have to suffer thanks to him - but the process was absolutely horrible. So did he do a good thing? Absolutely. Does that make him a good person? Absolutely not. 

As for his ending - honestly, I think the narrative gives him as peaceful an end as is possible for a villain like him. His death was brutal, but he does get closure, and he does get the satisfaction of knowing that he achieved his lifelong goal and his people are safe. I also think it’s quite fitting thematically for his character - someone who has never entirely been able to see other people, even other Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts, as people with their lone, individual lives, gives his lone, individual life to make sure that the other Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts make it to safety. For the terrible things he’s done, he’s never able to see the paradise that he envisioned and worked so hard for - yet he was okay with his final lot. I was always sure that he wouldn’t win - that would have just been bleak and probably made everyone punch their screens in rage - but a part of me was expecting him to cry and scream about the unfairness of being unable to pass through the gates, after all the work he did. (And it is unfair that the one reason for his denial of entry was his divine heritage, which was entirely beyond his control, instead of, you know, mass murder, betrayal, attempted r*pe, psychological manipulation, etc., all of which were entirely in his control.) He didn’t, and instead his concern was his people. Meatbun, imo, gave him a pretty graceful sendoff. 

#shi mei #hua binan #mo ran #chu wanning #2ha #2ha meta #tw r*pe #tw s*xual assault #i ramble #shi mingjing #2ha tag

[skullsandwineglasses]

Someday or One Day (2019) - First Impressions

So after finishing Rainless Love in a Godless Land, I was suddenly in the mood to see more Greg Hsu and Alice Ke, so I started SOOD, and boy am I so confused yet so drawn in. Cried within the first 10 minutes.

I’m only 2 episodes in, but I feel like I need to draw a character map, even though there are only handful of characters. 

Wang Quan Sheng (WQS) is presumed dead after a plane crash 2 years ago. His gf, Huang Yu Xuan (HYX) is devastated and can’t move on. 

On her 27th birthday, she sees a guy on the street (while taking the 32 bus) who looks like her dead bf. In an earlier scene, we see this man looking at her instagram, and he’s wearing a wedding ring. 

The next day, he leaves a package at her client’s place for her to pick up. It’s a birthday cake. 

HYX finds a picture of a high school-aged boy who looks like WQS with a girl who looks like her. After some investigating, she learns that the girl’s name is Chen Yu Ru and died in 1999. She and WQS would have only been 6 or 7 years old then, which means that the boy in the picture can’t be WQS. 

When HYX thinks back to how WQS pursued her, she’s confused by how quickly he fell for her. She remembers a painting he did of the first girl he loved. The girl in the painting was in a school uniform. 

WQS’s parents finally decide to hold a funeral for him. When HYX comes home with them, there’s an anonymous package for her. It’s a walkman with a cassette tape. HYX listens to it on the bus home and falls asleep. 

(Side note: the man with the cap and glasses sitting behind her looks vaguely like Greg Hsu. Is this supposed to be a hint?)

HYX travels back in time into CYR’s body while listening to the tape. She now has all of CYR’s memories. 

This is where the drama is similar to Stephenie Meyer’s The Host, where you have 2 consciousness’ living in the same body. Both HYX and CYR are in CYR’s body, but HYX is the more dominant one. Her personality takes over, and we see her confront CYR’s mother, which CYR never had the courage to do. This sudden personality change throws everyone off. 

When asked if she remembers how old she is, HYX (in CYR’s body) says that she doesn’t know if she’s supposed to be 27 or 17. Every time someone asks her a question, there are multiple possible answers that pop into her head, but she doesn’t know which one to say. That gave me a chuckle. 

CYR is in the hospital after what she believes to be a car accident. However, it is later revealed that her injuries look more like she was assaulted from the back with an object. 

During these 2 episodes, in parallel with HYX’s grieving storyline, we also see CYR’s storyline, where she has a crush on Li Zi Wei, but LZW’s bff has a crush on her, so LZW won’t reciprocate her feelings. CYR’s birthday wish is to become the woman LZW likes. 

So, we see 4 completely different people. 2 couples. The 2 couples are only 10 years apart, so this is a body switching/time traveling story, not a reincarnation story. The question is, how and why are these 4 non-blood related people entangled with each other across time? Why are they connected like this?

The other question is around the WQS/LZW duo. HYX and CYR are inhabiting the same body, but does WQS also time travel to past to inhabit LZW’s body? Or, does LZW fall for HYX in CYR’s body, and he somehow time travels to the future to inhabit WQS’ body, and then pursue HYX in the future?

WQS’ mother mentioned that he had a major personality change when he met HYX. He used to be very quiet, but he suddenly became more bubbly and talkative when he started dating her. Could this be an indication of body switching?

If this is true, then it means that LZW, a 17 year old, falls for a 27-year-old woman, which is a little weird. That power dynamic though. And it also wouldn’t be fair to CYR, whom LZW was already starting to fall for before HYX time traveled back. 

I just have so many questions. There are so many directions this story can go in. 

And not to mention the subplot of who on earth whacked CYR from behind and why. Who has murderous, malicious intent towards her? Was it someone we haven’t seen yet? There’s only been a very small cast of characters so far, especially in the 1999 timeline. 

And also, why the number 32? Is it just because it happened to be the unit number of CYR’s music store, or is there another meaning?

I also loved seeing Joanne Tseng again and her being the one to give Alice Ke the biggest clue about the number 32. 

A mysterious romance to keep you on your toes. 

#someday or one day #greg hsu #cdrama #twdrama #想見你 #taiwanese drama #alice ke

[thegreymoon]

hi! feel free to ignore this if you don't want to get into it, I totally understand. but I'm confused why some people are feeling certain i*mmortality (or any bl in fact) won't air anytime soon? of course I've seen some of the unfortunate news lately, but nothing specific about bl has been mentioned right? wouldn't t*gcf not continue filming then? sorry if this is annoying haha I'm just confused 😅 thanks for reading whether or not you answer! 😊

Hey, anon!

I think that it's highly unlikely that HYX will air this year. It very obviously was supposed to air, but things are what they are and all we can do is be sad and disappointed about it now.

With that said, I do think it will air eventually, once things settle down. I believe that the current situation in the c-ent industry is unsustainable in the long run and that it will go back to being (somewhat) normal, but that this initial phase is dangerous, so everybody is laying low. The fact that TGCF is still filming definitely tells me that the people who know way more about the situation than you and I are also expecting things to settle down.

I think that Tencent got the wind of what was coming back in April, which is why HYX was delayed. It is expected that there will be a fandom meltdown when this drama airs. The fandom in China is frankly insane and the few BL fandoms that I've been involved in and have seen up close are easily the most toxic disasters that I have ever encountered (the i-fans are also doing their best to compete with their Chinese counterparts in this respect). Exposing the actors to all that in the midst of a CCP crackdown on toxic fandoms and the entertainment industry in general would be the same as painting a target on their backs.

Tencent sunk a lot of money into HYX and even if they were willing to throw the actors under the bus, they would not risk the drama itself, considering how much profit it is expected to earn them, provided it doesn't get banned. Another thing that makes me hopeful is the fact that this CCP crackdown is not aimed at dangai in particular, but is way more widespread and also political in nature. However, if HYX was to come out and start making waves in the middle of all this, I have no doubt they would not hesitate to make an example of everyone involved. It is simply not safe for the drama to air until the Chinese government is done with whatever they are doing right now.

Please take anything I say with a grain of salt, though, I'm not from China and I am nowhere close to being informed enough about the whole situation to give any kind of intelligent commentary on the subject, but with that said, I personally don't think that things are completely bleak.

Please don't listen to the shit-stirrers (especially on Twitter). There are all kinds of insane people congregating to cause panic and fandom infighting. Some simply thrive on the drama and want to see the world burn. The especially toxic side of the S/HL-only fandom is hurt and vengeful because their own faves got nuked and other BL adaptations are a convenient target to vent their hate, since CCP itself is off limits. Then there are antis of all kinds taking advantage of the situation in a multitude of ways. Also, there are trolls patrolling everywhere, at all hours. And last but not least, there are simply fans who are stressed themselves and are unloading their own existential dread by spreading hysteria.

Let's just wait and see. HYX cost a lot of money to produce and is set to earn back even more. That makes me super hopeful that it will not stay buried for long.

#c-dramas #c-ent #hyx spam #anti nonsense #fandom drama

[shijiujun]

guys, i’m deleting all asks that mention cql in comparison for any sort of reason. mostly because i disagree with a lot of takes but also don’t really know how to put it into words properly without offending like a bunch of people and also while certain asks and comments are factually correct on some level, there are a bit more factors to things than just the statistics itself, and am also done with how ppl entirely miss the point of some of my posts (not eaxctly for the anon who just messaged asking me about why i posted their ask on my twitter but for all the asks i’ve gotten and had to delete)

yes i do post some of the anon asks that make me go ?????? on my Twitter :D and I will continue to do it, I leave my Tumblr MOSTLY fight free but some asks really make me go ???? and then i leave that to Twitter where fights are more easily processed basically :D 

also some of you might not mean it, but i swear the way some asks come off, it inevitably is read in a certain way. i can’t figure out if you’re praising CQL against all other shows or what because of the way the ask is written, so I tend to delete - and then rant on Twitter XD i’ve deleted that post but yep :DDDD 

inevitably if you mention it or put it in the same sentence, people on both sides are going to be really unhappy, it’s unfortunately the byproduct of dedicated and sometimes opposing fandoms even if unnecessarily opposing - emotions and tensions run high. better to just avoid it entirely especially for me on tumblr where it’s supposed to be clean and nice and :DDDDD

to the anon, please feel free to head to my twitter! i agreed with the second part of your ask, but the first part had me going like :/ it might not have been intended that way but it did come across as that so :D sorry in advance if you did not mean it that way and i misconstrued your intentions, but yeah my fight response when i see CQL and then in comparison with even like guardian is like :/ i have a lot of opinions on that, so XD

so i apologize if i overreacted and misunderstood your ask, i do admit i am definitely quite a bitch. no excuse if i hurt you but yep. please also yeah, unfollow and feel free to like rant back about me here, wherever you’d prefer for that (as you can probably tell mine is twitter), if I’m not the person you thought I was XD I’m not being sarcastic here haha like truly, from the bottom of my heart. A lot of content and asks bring out my fight response and I really am not nice, in any sort of way. I think a lot of you might actually already feel this from the way I answer some asks XD

this is NOT a CQL hate post. i love CQL, which makes it even harder to like answers asks because i inevitably end up hurting a lot of my CQL moots as well even indirectly, so yeah i’m just DONE okay hahaha

(i did compare shl/spl/hyx but that was a factual comparison of sorts, no hate on all the content, it’s just some arguments really have no basis and coming as a cross fandom fan it’s like are we even in the same fandoms sometimes)

#rambles

[firstsensibility]

Hyx please come home so that I can finally feel motivated to make gifs again. 😭

[bookfangirler]

HYX Synopsis Theories (Edited and Extended) *Spoilers*

It should be noted that this is pretty much the same as my other post expect this one has been rearranged and edited for clarity. And the first theory from the other post has been fleshed out.

This is all based on the synopsis I have seen floating around. (If it turns out that the one I saw was fake or outdated, you can go ahead and disregard this entire post)

These theories are more focused on the actual structure of the drama and less on Ranwan. Sorry, I might make another post about that later.

From what I gathered from the synopsis the story line of the drama will be different (but not completely) from the novel, yet it is a difference that I am very interested in. Unlike in 2ha (from here on out I will be differentiating between the novel and drama by calling the novel 2ha and the drama HYX), HYX!Mo Ran will not have all of his memories from his time as TXJ. Instead, he gains pieces of memories of a different version of his timeline. Now, I’m pretty sure this will be handled in a way that MR thinks they are ‘premonitions’ and not really ‘memories of a different life’. But already, that very drastically changes the dynamic between MR and CWN in the beginning arc of the story because MR is suspicious and wary of CWN rather than TXJ’s outright hatred.  But that's not what I want to focus on just now.

Let’s focus more singularly on MR. At the start of HYX, MR is not TXJ. TXJ never reincarnates into his younger self like in 2ha.(I’m pretty sure the reason behind this is that censors don’t allow reincarnation/rebirth. I could be wrong though). This changes things. Early plot wise maybe not so much, because in 2ha our reborn TXJ was hiding himself as MR 1.0 and not doing anything to change the timeline. He was more along for the ride with the singular goal of only changing one key event. But, the change does affect character development which I’ll get into in a moment. Since early HYX!MR is not TXJ and the audience doesn’t start knowing TXJ is a terrible dude, we still have to be introduced to him, and then later see more of how awful he is. I have two theories on how HYX will do this.

The first theory has me rubbing my hands together. Looking at the posters, we know TXJ is still in the story in some way. So, I think that we will get to see HYX!MR become TXJ. This idea excites me to no end and makes me want to write a 100k+ fic (but alas, I am working on one for a different fandom and I. Will. Finish. It.). In 2ha we saw snippets of TXJ (excluding the ending), but 99% of the time were tied to CWN. For 2ha this makes sense and I don’t blame meatbun, because we really only needed to see what TXJ did, and not the build up to it. More specifically, we only needed to see what he did to CWN, the Rufeng sect, and XM. If meatbun had written everything in between that, as well as how exactly he became Emperor, then we really would have been reading two different story lines in an already lengthy story. But I digress.

My main excitement from this idea comes from the fact that everything TXJ does will have consequences in the world HYX!MR 2.0 lives in. Think about it, outside of his relationship with CWN and end novel events, 2.0 faces absolutely no repercussions from his actions as TXJ. 2ha!2.0 grew and healed in a world that only saw him as a mildly unruly disciple that saw the error of his ways when his Shizun died for him. But can you imagine HYX!2.0 trying to grow into Mo-zongshi in a world that knew him exclusively as TXJ? The man that killed thousands, put everyone under his thumb, and held his Shizun prisoner for a decade??? Who would believe him when he then ran around trying to earnestly be a good man? Hoooooo, and then the differences in a post-canon world! 2ha!MR has the benefit of having a well established name as zongshi, but my theorized HYX!MR would only have the established name of TXJ. More exactly, the people of HYX would have heavy experience with TXJ, and not just him only being a short-lived bad guy with the whole merging of worlds thing like in 2ha (because that was a rather short period considering the literal years 2ha!TXJ controlled things in the first world).

The second option is that we assume that HYX!MR sees multiple premonitions. That would allow for TXJ to only be exclusively seen through the premonitions until the time of the merging.

To clarify,  HYX!MR of the main world (the one that we’re watching) would be seeing the premonitions/visions of himself in the other world (the background world with TXJ). That other self would devolve completely into TXJ. Our MR in the main world, however, will not become TXJ, but he will come dangerously close to it. I reckon that the thing that will hold him back from completely becoming TXJ is him learning the truths that the other HYX!TXJ never did. Mainly the truth being that Shizun was never the bad guy and that he actually cared deeply for MR.

Of these theories I, I’d say that the second is the most likely one even if I do have a soft-spot for the first one. Why? Like I said earlier, the first theory is lengthy.

All of this having been said, these are only my early theories based on one synopsis and my own wandering mind. Feel free to send me your thoughts to chew on.

#2ha #2ha spoilers #hyx #hyx spoilers #ranwan #hopefully its more understandable now #ill prob delete that first post here soon #but if my words still arent clear just send me a message and ill try again #i know i get wordy and a lot of times it gets confusing so im used to explaining my thoughts a few times

[razberryyum]

More 2HA Live Action (Hao Yi Xing) Thoughts

(potential novel spoilers)

I’m still trying to resist the urge to repost leaked photos/videos since the paparazzi and fans taking them are actually disrupting production, so they're really not a a good thing to be encouraged, but damn, with each new image that gets leaked my resolve is being tested (and just in case it’s not obvious, the images above are from other shows the actors were in). The ones that kill me is of course when RanWan are shown side-by-side...the height difference is just too adorable!! I really wish Team HYX would release official stills or bts vids soon since that should discourage the hunger for these sneaked glimpses and I can FINALLY openly salivate over HYX without feeling guilty.

That being said, from what I've seen, RANWAN LOOKS SO DAMN GOOD. Luo Yunxi really is a dream-come-true Chu Wanning!! The more I see of him the more perfect he is. As expected, it's literally like Shizun coming to life!! He’s so beautiful, it’s unreal.  Chen Feiyu is really handsome and physically-speaking he definitely is giving off strong Mo Ran/Taxian-jun vibes. I’m just waiting to see him in action to be completely sold. I'm at 70% now: I just need to hear him say "Shizun" and see how his Mo Ran looks at CWN to go to full 100%.  If after all this they don’t have any chemistry, ngl, I’m gonna be pretty devastated. It’s like, how can two people who are so visually perfect for their roles NOT work out on screen? That would just be so beyond disappointing I don’t even want to think too much about that possibility lest I end up jinxing it. 

The ladies look so awesome too. Chen Yao as Shimei looks beautiful and elegant, and Song Jiutong (actress Huang Yun Yun according to dramawiki) looks stunning. I’m still unsure about Xue Meng and probably will continue to feel that way until I see him in action. I can’t help it: the way I pictured Meng Meng is just really not what Zhou Qi is bringing to the table so I’m almost fascinated by that unexpected choice and I’m dying to see why they chose him. I look forward to apologizing to him for ever doubting his suitability. 

I think we’ve seen the back of someone who could be Nangong Si...he just seems tall. That’s really the only impression I have of him right now. There’s strong indication that both little Mo Ran and Xia Sini has been casted (according to the two young actors’ weibos) but Team HYX oddly has still not made any official announcements on them yet. I’m just happy that baby Mo Ran and Xia Sini are a part of the show; these two little actors are going to have to shoulder some pretty dramatic scenes and since they’re already so adorable, if they are even remotely good actors, I have no doubt that they will be breaking our hearts into a million pieces. 

I love all the ensembles everyone has been wearing, especially CWN and Mo Ran’s. They need to release a coffee table book with all the actors in their different outfits. I also hope that they will have Luo Yunxi and Chen Feiyu perform a duet as RanWan, a beautiful, heart-wrenching duet, in addition to individual character songs, much like The Untamed did. If Team HYX handles the show like Team CQL, then we 2HA fans can really finally breathe a sigh of relief. 

Oh! Another leak that got my heart racing were the hints of Butterfly (Caidie) Town, since Butterfly Town means RanWan makeout session and WEDDING. Of course I’m not insane and think they’re gonna actually be able to keep the make-out scene in the show...there’s no way that would pass censorship unless there’s a HUGE policy change in China all of a sudden...but they definitely can keep the wedding part since it could be all played off as one big misunderstanding. LYX as CWN in red wedding robes? Holy crap, I might not survive that. 

One last note, regarding the title “Hao Yi Xing”: I always thought it meant “Follow the White Robe” since the Chinese characters could be interpreted that way. I thought it was actually a really romantic title since I figured it was intended to represent Mo Ran’s obsession with Chu Wanning as he’s always following that person in white. But then a fellow fan offered an even better explanation of the Chinese title (@shizunwontons on Twitter):

The title seems even more beautiful now.  How all that then translates to “Immortality”, which is the English title? Not really sure; but I just really appreciate the thought that Team HYX put into the Chinese title. I will take it as further indication that the show is indeed in good hands and continue to have faith.

#2HA #Hao Yi Xing #Dumb Husky and His White Cat Shizun #RanWan #Immortality live action #ErHA

[haitangblossoms]

Weibo update from HYX’s music director, Mak Chu Hung (200813). Here’s a rough translation of the caption (please feel free to correct it!):

“When it comes to music creation, I don’t need my original intention but to just follow my heart. The inspiration is taken from the people and returned to the people. As long as your love for Xianxia music remains the same, I will always send notes to your ears. . . So please, fasten your seat belt with high (sad) energy ahead. This is a music for hugs. You can find the "taste" of home and the "scent" of food in the melody.” (x)

#hao yi xing #hyx #hyx ost #mak chun hung #I have two theories #the first is of course chapter 104/the wonton scene #perhaps all wonton scenes #the second is xue meng getting drunk in which case it is not okay #regardless the music is beautiful and I can't wait to listen to all the tracks #video post

[jjheejz]

What is Fate?

[Part 2/5] During filming

*I'm sure much crucial events happened here, they practically started online interactions within the first month of filming. But I don't have much resources/info for this period, so there's more inferences on fate here. I mean until YouKu decides to release all the BTS scenes, this is all I know.

- Since nobody cared much about WOH during filming, not a lot of photographers went to take their photos/videos. But beside them, was a more anticipated and hot drama in filming (HYX). Because it was so popular, tonnes of photographers were there, and the reason why there are generous amount of photos and videos of WOH BTS despite that was because there were so many next door, some of them just decided to come over to WOH as passer-by photographers.

= Some sweet moments of them got captured. You practically have solid evidence of their cute interactions taken because chance happened.

- Not much expectation from the audience sometimes means less stress for the crew, more fun and exploration in filming. Aka, the freedom for the crew to blatantly tell GJ "Your wife is outside." Aka, this is just the tippest tip of the iceberg. Aka, I would say, a support for them to accept their characters are lovers (and in turn on to themselves).

- If "your wife (your lao po)" was thrown around like a name by the crew, then "husband" is definitely hurled around like circus balls. The fact that Gong Jun's surname, Gong, is pronounced almost the same as husband (lao gong), is just...yea, coincidence.

= Fate is already written in his name

- Add on to point above, ZZH and GJ were pushed to warm up to each other because of their tight filming schedule and the drama's theme. The atrociousness of the words the crew threw around and even what these 2 used is beyond what we currently see and know, it's just pure crazy atrocity. (Calling GJ 宝-babe, is just the tippest tip of the iceberg, imagine that). The term used among Chinese CPfans for this period is "WenZhou accelerating temperature (温周急速升温)" (as in rapidly warm up to each other).

= This is like fate being impatient, right in front of our salad

- Summer filming: Share umbrella, WKX fanning and blocking the sun for ZZS, summer but wearing winter clothes together, hide in the same caravan alone cooking for each other/hide from the rain etc. [Umbrella saga], [Rainy night in a caravan saga], [GJ's vlog cooking saga], [Cook for each other saga]

= Small shared moments that leads to big feelings.

-  [ZZH’s Weibo rebellion saga] = This saga relates to Part 3

- It was Covid period, both actors didn't have other schedules (GJ probably only had 1, out of the 4 months there). Stuck together = Bond together.

- Music also bonds people together. Especially when both of them likes the same group of singers (when I mean 'group' I mean the era of famous singers at that point) eg. Jay Chou, JJ Lin, Wang Li Hom, Li Rong Hao etc. The way ZZS falls for WKX is probably paralleled to ZZH falling for GJ's singing.

- An experienced actor (ZZH) and a high willingness to learn actor (GJ). One is willing to teach, one is open to learn. Both are main characters, both have a lot of scenes together (aka, time spent together exploring their character and practicing with each other increased).

- Let's dedicate to the fated crew members: Producer Ma, Directors and Assistant Directors, Costume Designer, Script writer, Guo Lao Shi (Actor of Duan Peng Ju) for recommending ZZH as ZZS, the entire production team, the entire cracky supporting cast. For something to be successful, it takes a full team's healthy mindset and attitude, and most importantly, the correct people for each role.

Bonus

- For both GJ and ZZH, this script was the best they ever had. It was the first time they had a very good script. So they poured a lot of effort into ZZS and WKX.

= Looking at GJ's past works, they were mostly around the same theme, but still pretty decent works (still, praise the fact that he has variety in style: cross-dressed twice, a cool & calm senior - cutest character, a naive and innocent prince, a loving husband, uke - yes, I knew him from this show etc).

= Looking at ZZH's past work, all I can say is that his style was almost always the same (I looked at the spread and question if these are really not a compilation from one drama). Character wise, it's just like he said during WOH Concert's interview. He knows he has the potential to act a more diverse role, but the scripts just doesn't accept him. Because his portfolio is stuck with that manly image/style the agency had built for him, until ZZS happened. But his past works are generally quite good overall compared to GJ's, character style variety is limited.

The contrast above also shows the difference between an independent studio vs being signed under an agency.

🌻To returning readers: Updated info are in purple for your easy references!

🌸Part 1 - Before filming here

🌸Part 3 - After filming, before broadcast here

🌸Part 4 - Broadcast/Promotion period here

🌸Part 5 - WOH concert and after here

🌻[Ongoing updates] Will add if I remember or found new ones

🌻For long posts like this, I tend to look back for grammar and phrasing mistakes (sometimes info updates), so when you reblog for future references, do keep in mind that there may be updates in the original post! :)

#shl #woh #langlangding #zzh #张哲瀚 #junzhe #zhang zhehan #龚俊 #gj #gong jun #lld

[dangermousie]

I like how you said if by some miracle the 2ha drama is good, ha. I also just want it to come out because I feel like there is no way it can't be a terrible adaption but they casted so well it is giving me false hope and I just want the disappointment to happen sooner rather than later because I keep accidentally having expectations.

Yeah, I will happily eat a giant bowl of crow-filled wontons if this is a good adaptation of the novel, but I honestly cannot imagine how it could be - it’s literally everything that gives the censors fits in one package, even leaving aside the BL aspect. Yuwu could be pretty easily adapted faithfully (just run with the shidi/shixiong thing like Word of Honor and all you need is to remove the make outs to be set) but 2ha? How?!

But to me whether it’s a good adaptation is a different question as to whether it can be a good drama. Like I don’t think The Untamed is a particularly good adaptation of the novel but it is an amazing awesome drama. So while I don’t have much hopes for HYX as an adaptation, I do have hopes for it as a drama.

The thing is - their casting is on point not just for RanWan (it basically never happens when they cast the OTP and I don’t just go “these are the best choices available” but the much more rare “these are perfect choices per se”), but for the rest too. Like the actors they got for Mei Xanxue or Nangong Si are on point and if they had to turn Shimei into a girl (which they did), Sebrina Chen is also on point. And the concept art is amazing and the little clips we’ve seen are bristling with the novel vibe (the cynic/pessimist in me is wondering if they leaked some of those because they couldn’t get them into the main drama to go “don’t hate us we tried” but either way it’s awesome.)

I am 100% sure that if the censorship office didn’t exist (and unicorns roamed the land), with that cast and concept art and if they put care into the script, they could make a truly perfect 2ha adaptation but the world is what it is.

So yeah, all I am hoping for is a solid drama on its own merits, Chen Feiyu being feral, Luo Yunxi being intense, a lot of whump, beautiful visuals and design and some images to take for my imagination when I reread again. This is not that much so I am hoping I am granted that but either way, I just want to KNOW! I am not a Schroedinger’s Cat, and I don’t like uncertainty. 

(To a less intense degree, that is all I expect from Winner Is King as well since it’s a favorite of mine, though not as much as 2ha and is much more adaptable with a cast I also like. But keeping expectations low when a fave book gets adapted, let alone when a fave danmei gets adapted in China, is the key to me keeping my sanity.)

#asks #2ha #hao yi xing

[minijenn]

Universe Falls, Chapter 50, Part 1

AHAHAHAHAH ITS HAPPENING! THE END OF ARC 5 IS AT LAST UPON IS AND IT KICKS OFF WITH A FUCKING BANG! For reals I’m very pleased with how this chapter turned out so hopefully you all enjoy it too! And so without any further ado, here you go! :D 

Previous: http://minijenn.tumblr.com/post/171070315639/universe-falls-chapter-49

Chapter 50, Part 1: Not What He Seems

IVV WAJ WOJ VOXT, HYX TTBS ZL HPGS KAE QTOIEEDH QFGMLC'G XKELISJM FPPF WHR EWSD MO WTOIG HTH GVVRPI GF LTCPBXX FZG SMXRJIVZGG TH OSHUE IC TAAYVS

In the very early hours just past midnight, the bulk of the residents of Gravity Falls were tucked in their beds, fast asleep as they should have been. The town was quiet, the summer night warm and starry as both the natural and the supernatural got their night’s rest. However, there was no such rest for the conman hard at work in the basement tucked away underneath the Mystery Shack, especially since he was so incredibly close to achieving exactly what he was working so hard for.

“Come on, come on…” Stan muttered as he watched the machine’s nearby energy tanks fill up with the hazardous liquid he had just acquired. “That should be just enough to finish the job,” he said with a nod of satisfaction, briefly removing his fez to wipe the sweat from his brow only to wipe a bit of toxic waste across his forehead in the process. “Whew! Can’t be too careful with this stuff.”

The conman’s attention was quickly diverted by a flash of vibrant light from the machine itself, followed by the telltale buzz of the countdown timer right above his head. Its screen blared read with the messages ‘event initialized’ before switching to a countdown of 18 hours. Stan couldn’t help but grin proudly upon seeing this, knowing that after years of waiting and working towards what had always seemed like an impossible dream, the end was finally in sight.

Of course, as close as he was to that end, Stan still took the time to once again briefly glance over what the first journal had to say about the machine’s operation. “Warning,” he began, though he quickly grew bored of the book’s wordy advisory. “Blah, blah, blah, ‘extreme usage could result in minor gravity anomalies.’ Aw, can it, poindexter!” He slammed the journal shut in aggravation. “I’ve come this far, I’m not giving up now!” And he meant exactly that. Not only had he been working tirelessly on this project for 30 years now, but he had done so in complete and total secrecy all that time. He had dutifully kept this momentous machine hidden, his life’s work unbeknownst to everyone: to the town, to the Crystal Gems, to even his own niece and nephew innocently sleeping upstairs. Still, the conman knew that secrecy was set to end roughly around the same time the countdown above him did, something he admittedly didn’t feel fully prepared for, especially when it came to his nibblings. There would be no avoiding telling them the truth, Stan knew, but at least he still had a few hours left to mentally prepare himself before he finally told them everything. Everything that he had hidden and everything he had hoped for, all at once.

But he had no time to plan his strategy on that front now; now was the time to set it all in motion once and for all. With the push of a button, the machine roared to life, sparking with its usual blue, vibrant, clarion glow that completely illuminated the darkened basement. “Yes!” Stan cheered excitedly, remembering that same kind of glow well from 30 years ago, though back then it had been under much different circumstances. “This is it!”

Amidst his growing elation, the conman hardly noticed the journal’s warnings start to come true as his fez slowly began to lift a bit off his own head on his own accord. Likewise just outside the shack, a few stray rocks and pebbles gradually came to levitate, Gompers the goat raising up a few inches off the ground right along with them. But the effects of these gravity anomalies were hardly limited to just the Mystery Shack. Up at the Crystal Temple, the patio furniture lightly hovered, and inside, with Steven, still totally asleep, rising a bit off his bed on the loft as Lion did the same off the couch below. In town itself, several cars were gently removed from the ground, sidewalk benches and unattended bicycles experiencing the same phenomenon. The anomalies spread even as the junkyard, where McGucket snoozed with his racoon wife, unaware that the repaired laptop was flashing red with an ‘active’ warning as it lifted off his desk. Back at the shack itself, even Dipper and Mabel remained fast asleep, unaware of the fact that they were lightly lifting off their own beds, unaware of the unearthly blue glow bleeding up to the attic through the floorboards, unaware of just how many things were about to change in the next 18 hours alone.

And, just as soon as gravity began to disappear from the unsuspecting town, it all came rushing right back.

Stan barely even heard the resounding thunk that echoed around the shack as everything landed back in their proper places. Instead, his sights were focused solely on the machine, solely on the dream that was so close, so very, very close to finally becoming a reality. “It’s gonna be a bumpy ride, but it’ll all be worth it,” he assured himself, firmly believing that as he synchronized his watch to match up to the countdown timer. The conman took in a deep, resolved breath as he shut the other journal he had in his possession, knowing that soon enough, he’d have no need for them at all. “Just eighteen more hours. Finally, everything changes, today.”

An early morning for Mabel almost always meant an early morning for Dipper, whether he liked it or not, and this morning was no exception. As she cheerfully rushed down the hall, he tiredly followed after her, hardly paying his sister’s energized excitement much mind.

“Ah! Here it is!” Mabel exclaimed brightly as they arrived at one of the shack’s less-opened doors. “Ok, so I was opening random doors—because I’m a creep—when I found something amazing!”

“If it was worth waking up at 7 AM for, then it really will be amazing,” Dipper deadpanned, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

“Oh, trust me, bro-bro, it will be,” Mabel assured as she began to open the door. “Feast your eyes!” she boldly proclaimed, motioning to the box loaded with all manner of fireworks and pyrotechnics resting on the closet floor.

“Whoa! No way!” Dipper exclaimed, now just as equally impressed and invested.

“Bro. Bro,” Mabel began, slinging an arm around her brother’s shoulder. “We’re both thinking it-”

“Crazy rooftop fireworks party!” both twins cheered daringly, though their plans were seemingly ruined as Stan happened to overhear them.

“Not so fast, kids!” he exclaimed, sending the startled pair a staunch glare. “There is no way on earth you’re setting off those dangerous, illegal fireworks…” Upon trailing off, the conman broke into a wide, mischievous grin as he placed hands on each of his nibblings’ shoulders. “Without me!”

The twins shared an excited gasp at this, one that Stan merely chuckled in warm amusement over as he pulled the fireworks stash out of the closet and led the way outside. The family decided to take to the roof platform, dragging both the fireworks as well as a cooler filled with ice cream up with them before the intentional explosions began. While Stan mostly hung back and let Dipper and Mabel have their fun with the fireworks, he was more than happy to help them out by lighting their fuses up so they could freely set them off.

“Here ya go, sweetie,” the conman grinned as he used a sparkler to ignite the skyrocket Mabel was holding. “Set something on fire for your Grunkle Stan.”

“I am the god of destruction!” Mabel shouted at the top of her lungs, wildly shooting the firework off into the sky without any restraint at all.

No sooner had the burst of fiery color exploded in the morning sky then Steven and the Gems arrived from the temple, all of them curious as to what all of the noise and excitement was about.

“Heyooo, Pines fam!” Amethyst greeted casually as she rolled up to the shack alongside her teammates. “What’s happenin’?”

“Are you guys having a crazy rooftop fireworks party?” Steven asked with intrigued stars in his eyes. “Can we join in too?”

“Eh, sure,” Stan shrugged with an amicable smirk. “Pretty sure we’ve got enough of these babies to go around. Ya know, as long as we don’t end up blowing up the entire box at once somehow.”

“Now, hold on a minute,” Pearl cut in, hands on her hips as she sent the conman a disapproving frown. “Stan, are you sure you should be letting children play around with such dangerous explosives?”

“Uh, I dunno,” the conman retorted, his tone slightly teasing. “Are you sure you should be totally lame, Pearl?”

As the white Gem let out an appalled scoff at this, both Stan and Amethyst burst out laughing, the kids all quickly joining in. Even Garnet got a good chuckle out of this as she placed a hand on her disgruntled teammate’s shoulder. “He’s got a bit of a point,” she remarked wryly, which ended up being enough to get break Pearl’s stoicism and elicit a small laugh from her as well.

From there, it didn’t take long for the Gems to get in on the fun. Everyone hopped up on the roof, shooting off what was left of the fireworks and cracking jokes among each other all the while. Steven leapt right into waving around sparklers and eating ice pops with Dipper and Mabel while Garnet was able to use just her fingertips to give a spark to most of the fireworks Stan, Amethyst, and even, despite some initial hesitance, Pearl were blasting off to the sky. In the colorful radiance put off by the explosions, no one was able to deny that they were enjoying their early morning party immensely, even if it was somewhat destructive. For by the time the fireworks had all run out, small, controlled fires had broken out across the perimeter of the shack, though fortunately none of them were too serious.

“Woo!” Mabel cheered as she finished sending the last firework flying. “This whole place is on fire!”

“Literally,” Dipper noted, glancing down at the flames dotting the shack below them.

“Well, I suppose that’s the risk you run when you set off literal explosives this close to a wooden structure,” Pearl said with something of a bemused grin.

“Eh, this is far from the worst this whole shack has seen this summer alone,” Stan remarked, taking a swig of his cola. “But seriously though, we should probably clean this mess up.”

“Oh! I have an idea!” Steven chimed in. “We can use water balloons to put all these fires out!”

“…I don’t see why not,” the conman shrugged, with the twins and Amethyst eagerly getting on board with this idea.

In no time at all, thanks to Garnet, a whole bucket of water balloons had been filled up, and the purple Gem and the kids were all more than happy to partake. Stan, Garnet, and Pearl hung by on the porch, watching in apt amusement as the kids ran about, pelting each other with water balloons and laughing all the while as they tried to dodge Amethyst’s direct onslaught with the garden hose.

“Honestly, Amethyst, isn’t using the hose cheating?” Pearl asked as the purple Gem laughingly sprayed both Steven and Dipper down, easily blocking off the water balloon Mabel tossed her way before doing the same to her.

“Honestly, Pearl,” Amethyst mocked playfully. “Isn’t sitting on the sidelines like that boring?” At this, the purple Gem turned the hose on her teammate, effectively soaking her and eliciting plentiful laughter from everyone else.

“Ha! Nice one, Amethyst!” Stan exclaimed, readily chuckling at the white Gem’s unserious frustration.

“Ya think so?” Amethyst asked with a mischievous smirk. “Cause I this one will be even better!”

“Hey!” the conman exclaimed, unable to hold back another laugh as the purple Gem sprayed him down as well. “Alright, now you’ve done it! I’m gonna… eh forget it,��� Stan shrugged. “You’re just lucky I’m too lazy to get up outta this chair.”

“Well I’m certainly not!” Pearl huffed, standing as she grabbed an armful of water balloons as Amethyst hurried off. “Amethyst! Get back here! It’s payback time!”

“Hey, Pearl! Wait up!” Steven called after the white Gem as him, Dipper, and Mabel readily followed after her.

“Yeah! We wanna get some payback too!” Mabel proclaimed with a wild war cry, already launching a water balloon in Amethyst’s direction.

“Ah, this is what Saturdays are for,” Stan remarked contentedly as he reclined into his seat. “Doing dumb things forever.”

“Dumb things forever!” all three of the kids echoed in a triumphant shout as they jumped into a pile of left over water balloons together. Somewhere behind them, Pearl was still in hot pursuit after Amethyst, tossing balloons at her while the purple Gem occasionally aimed her hose back at her teammate, both of them laughing all the while.

“This is the life, ain’t it, shades?” Stan asked Garnet as she leaned against the nearby porch post.

“I’d say it is,” the Gem leader replied with a small smile. She paused for a moment, said smile disappearing before it returned a bit more genuine than before. “Actually, Stan, I’ve been meaning to offer you an apology, one that’s not just from me, but from Amethyst and Pearl too.”

“Uh… for what?”

“Before this summer began, we had all seemed to live under the unspoken rule that we’d avoid each other whenever possible,” Garnet began to explain. “And when our paths did cross, we usually only met each other with hostility and suspicion. But then…” She looked out towards the kids, who were engrossed in their own miniature water balloon battle. “Steven met Dipper and Mabel, and the close friendship they have now sparked almost immediately after they did. And in a sense… they were the ones who brought all of us together, who helped us realize that there’s more to you than we thought, Stan.”

“O-oh really?” the conman asked, glancing away in slight nervousness upon hearing all this.

“Really,” Garnet confirmed, placing a friendly hand on his shoulder. “And so we’re sorry for however unfairly we might have treated you in the past. But its good to know that we can all finally get along. For the kids’ sakes.”

“Uh… y-yeah,” Stan took in an anxious breath. Normally, he would have been somewhat surprised, even grateful even, to hear such warm sentiments from any of the Crystal Gems really. But in light of the massive secret he had been keeping from them for years now, a secret that was very close to being brought to light, he couldn’t help but feel rather uncomfortable, to the point of near guilt, as he weakly returned the Gem leader’s smile. “F-for… for the kids.”

“Hey, Mr. Pines!” Steven exclaimed as him and the twins ran forward, all three of them equally cheerful despite being soaking wet. “We just wanted to say thanks for all the water balloons and popsicles and fireworks! This has been so much fun!”

“It sure has!” Mabel readily agreed, holding her popsicle up in a “toast” of sorts. “To Grunkle Stan! Not just a great uncle-”

“The greatest uncle!” Dipper finished as they all playfully tossed a round of water balloons at the conman as he put forth a weak effort to shield himself from them.

“Alright, alright,” Stan chuckled as both him and Garnet got the watery brunt of the kids’ attack. “I tell ya,” he said to his nibblings in particular. “It’s unnatural for siblings to get along as well as you two do. Heck, its honestly crazy just how great all three of you get on with each other even though this whole little ‘group’ of yours only started this summer.”

“Well, they don’t call us the Mystery Kids for nothing!” Steven exclaimed with a warm smile.

“Ha! Yeah!” Mabel grinned, pulling both boys in for a sudden hug from their spot on the ground. “And don’t worry! We’ve still got plenty of summer left to drive each other crazy!”

“Ugh, Mabel!” Dipper groaned as Mabel pulled on him a bit too tightly, prompting him to push her away and resulting in another water balloon falling on both her and Steven.

“Heh, yeah…” Stan said with something of an anxious laugh. “Plenty of summer left…” He paused briefly, glancing towards his nibblings in particular as he realized that he needed to stop beating around the bush. He had clearly already warmed them up enough by giving them this morning of blissful fun. He could only keep it going for so long before the truth came bursting through, which meant that it would be for the best if he was the one to reveal it instead, on his own terms. “Uh… kids? There’s something I, um, s-something I should tell you. It’s, um… well i-its complicated… I-” The conman hesitated as he looked back to the trio of curious kids before him, noticing that they weren’t the only ones listening. Amethyst and Pearl had just happened to finish their ongoing chase as they happened to overhear Stan, and of course, Garnet was still standing right next to him. And just like that, his own terms had turned into everyone else’s terms instead. “…I-I gotta go refresh my soda!” he quickly improvised, throwing on a casual-enough smile. “B-be right back!”

At this, the conman quickly stood and walked over to the far side of the shack, away from the scrutiny of both the kids and the Gems. He let out the breath he had been holding in for some time now, briefly glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one had followed him. “Enjoy it while you can, Stan,” he muttered to himself, glancing over at his own reflection in the window nearby. “They’ll all find out sooner or later. After all, today’s the day…”

And indeed it was. For in just a few hours, just about everything would change in ways no one could really expect, Stan included. But how could he just say that to everyone, right out of the blue? How could he tell the Gems about the real reason behind his longstanding conflict with them, just when they were all finally starting to get along? Or even beyond that, how could he possibly even begin to describe any of it to his nibblings? To the two kids who looked up to him, who believed in him, even when he didn’t always believe in himself? Who had managed to work their way so deeply into his heart that he would do anything, anything for them? Who he was constantly putting in danger by simply working on the massive, potentially catastrophic machine that had been resting just under their feet the entire summer?

In truth, Stan hadn’t the faintest clue about how he was even going to start to explain any of his age-old secrets to anyone, Gems and kids included. But when it came right down to it, it would turn out he wouldn’t even have to. Because everything was about to be revealed in the very last way he had wanted them to.

Stan was broken out of his ongoing musings as he happened to glance up and notice what looked to be a strange red dot resting on his fez. “Huh? What is that, a ladybug?” he frowned, reaching up a hand to slap it away only for it to remain where it was. In fact, several of more dots appeared in quick succession, all of them aimed directly at the confused conman. “What the—oh no!” Stan barely even had time to let out a gasp before he was abruptly tackled by a formerly-hidden man in black.  

Countless more similarly-dressed man, or agents, rather were quick to follow the first out of their hiding spots in the nearby woods. “Target secure!” one of the leaders of the invading bunch shouted over his walkie-talkie. “Take the house!”

The agents did just that, still pouring out of the forest as they rushed forward to form a perimeter around the Mystery Shack. Somewhere overhead, a helicopter buzzed overhead, several more agents repelling down from it and bursting into the shack itself through windows and doors. Several teams filled into almost every room of the house, from the gift shop, to the den, to even the attic were Waddles had been napping peacefully. “Pig secure!” one of the agents called through the intercom upon embracing the unwitting pig tightly. “We have secured a pig!”

Outside, things were still in absolute chaos, the ground agents rushing to surround the quite startled group of kids and Gems in the front yard. Steven, Dipper, and Mabel all bunched up close together, the Gems standing over them protectively as they took up an offensive stance, ready to summon their weapons at a moment’s notice if they needed to protect the kids. “Kids and aliens are secure!” another agent called to his superior as he cocked his weapon as a precaution.

“A-aliens!?” Pearl huffed, offended by this derogatory title.

“Technically, we are aliens,” Garnet corrected, though all the same, she was rather baffled as to how she hadn’t seen this strike coming through her future vision. Really, she hadn’t been getting any clear, concise visions all day, which, considering how peaceful things had been thus far, she hadn’t really put much thought into. But now, with the peace abruptly shattered and replaced by an all-out government raid, the Gem leader was immediately thrown off by her foresight not properly working for some unknown reason, especially at an integral moment such as this.

“Don’t move!” one of the agents shouted at the Gems in particular, the entire legion circling them keeping their weapons trained on the trio. “Or else!”

“Or else what?” Amethyst brazenly challenged, ready to draw her whip. “You’re gonna shoot us with those dinky little water guns of yours? Pffft, as if!”

The agent in question was quickly provoked to action at this as he aimed his weapon at the purple Gem and opened fire. The gun’s stunning blast was quickly deflected by Steven, however, as he summoned his shield and jumped in front of Amethyst at just the right time. “Whoa! Hold on!” the young Gem exclaimed, just as alarmed by this dramatic turn of events as Dipper and Mabel were. “I-I don’t know what’s going on here, but can’t we all just talk this out without shooting each other with lasers?”

“Whoa, the chief wasn’t kidding,” one of the other agents whispered to his nearby teammate. “The kid really is one of them too!”

“One of them?” Steven frowned in apt confusion, though he never received an answer.

“But what about those other two?” the other agent nodded towards the equally bewildered twins.

“Nah, they’re normal, I think. Pretty sure they’re related to the old man.”                    

“Old man?” Dipper asked, exchanging a worried glance with Mabel as they quickly figured out who that was. “Wait! Grunkle Stan?!”

“Ugh! Hey! Hands off, you stooge!” the aforementioned conman shouted as he was dragged up to the front of the shack, securely handcuffed. The pair of agents roughly pulled Stan up to one of the countless government vehicles surrounding the shack, pressing him firmly against it as they patted him down for any hidden weapons. “I-I don’t understand! What did I do that warrants this much arresting?!”

None of the lower level agents bothered to explain this as their pair of superiors stepped forward, both of them quite familiar to everyone present: Agent Powers and Agent Trigger. “The government guys?” Dipper interjected in confusion upon seeing the pair of agents alive and well again. “I thought you guys got eaten by zombies!”

“We survived,” Trigger remarked curtly. “Barely.”

“I used Trigger as a human shield,” Powers said, just as dryly as ever. “He cried like a baby.”

“What? Hey!” Trigger exclaimed in embarrassment. “Not in front of the special-ops guys!”

Wanting to get right to the point, Powers stepped up to Stan, pulling out a government tablet which was currently displaying footage of what appeared to be a person in a hazmat suit hauling away barrels of some unknown substance. “This is security footage of a government waste facility. A o’four hundred hours last night, someone robbed three hundred gallons of dangerous toxic waste.”

“What? You think that’s me?!” Stan asked, seemingly appalled by such an accusation, especially as the kids and the Gems all looked to him in surprise.

“Don’t play dumb with us, Pines,” Powers warned as he motioned for his fellow agents to take Stan away.

“But I actually am dumb!” the conman pleaded as he was shoved into the backseat of the government vehicle. “Last night I was stocking the gift shop, I swear!”

“Wait!” Mabel shouted as her and Dipper broke out of the barricade of agents to rush forward on Stan’s behalf. “You’ve got the wrong guy! Our Grunkle Stan might shoplift the occasional tangerine, but he’s not some evil super villain!”

“Listen, kids,” Powers began sternly, kneeling down to the twins’ level. “We’ve been watching your family all summer, and we’ve seen some disturbing things, but nothing as dangerous as what your uncle his hiding. Somewhere hidden in this shack is a doomsday device!”

Needless to say that neither of the twins were able to suppress a gap upon hearing such an incredible accusation, one that couldn’t possibly be true. As they glanced over at Stan himself, he gave them a look that was telling that he had no idea what the agent was talking about, one that carried a good amount of pleading for them to believe him in his innocence, which they readily did, no questions asked. After all, there was no way someone like Stan could ever be harboring anything like a doomsday device right under the Mystery Shack. Certainly, the agents had to have been mistaken somehow, in more ways than one.

“Yo! What about us?!” Amethyst asked, still scowling fiercely at the agents surrounding them. “What’s the deal with you losers holding us up if you’re only here for Stan?”

“That should be obvious,” Powers remarked evenly, glancing over at the Gems. “You so-called ‘Crystal Gems’ are being detained by order of the U.S. Government for being a highly dangerous extraterrestrial threat to planet Earth.”

“Threat?” Steven asked, exchanging a baffled glance with his guardians. “No, you guys have it all wrong! The Gems protect the Earth from all sorts of stuff, even if they are from outer space!”

“That’s right!” Pearl staunchly agreed. “All of this is complete, absolute nonsense! You have no right to ‘detain’ any of us considering the fact that all we’ve ever strived to do is keep you humans safe for centuries now!”

“Then how do you explain all this?” Powers held his tablet once again, swiping through a collection of pictures. Pictures of various Gem monster attacks, of Peridot’s robinoids, of meandering Gem mutants, and the highlight of it all: of the menacing hand ship descending upon Gravity Falls. “We have substantial proof that all of these disasters, and several more, are directly connected to the four of you, and as such, our orders are to bring you to our maximum security research facility for extensive testing and experimentation.”

“Painful experimentation,” Trigger added sharply.

“Mm… yeah, that’s not happening,” Garnet concluded, pulling her arms around all three of her teammates. “Sorry to disappoint.”

At that moment, the tables abruptly seemed to turn as Powers gave the preemptive command for the agents surrounding the Gems to surge them, only for Garnet to act before they could even think. With a tight hold on Pearl, Amethyst, and Steven, the Gem leader leapt high, temporarily blinding the nearby agents with a burst of lightning aimed for the ground. By the time things had cleared, the Crystal Gems and their young ward were all but gone, leaving not so much as even a trace behind.

“Steven!” Dipper and Mabel exclaimed in surprised unison at the daring escape they had just witnessed. Still, they were both somewhat relieved to know that the young Gem and his guardians had given the agents the slip, even though it looked as though Stan wouldn’t be so lucky.

“Ground team! Form a search party and go after those Gems now!” Powers ordered, frustrated that they had all been so easily outsmarted. “They couldn’t have gotten far. Raid their base up the hill if you have to, use of force and weapons is completely authorized! Leave no stone unturned until those aliens are found!”

A fraction of the agents immediately acted upon their chief’s orders, taking their weapons as they hurried up the hill towards the temple in search of the Gems. “In the meantime,” Powers continued, calming down somewhat as he turned to his partner. “Trigger, you take the children. I’ll talk to the old man. Sorry to break it to you, kids,” he said to the twins as he put his darkened sunglasses on. “But you don’t know your ‘neighbors’ or your uncle at all.”

By this point, both Dipper and Mabel were far too stunned by everything that was all too quickly unfurling to say much at all as Trigger motioned a pair of agents over to escort the twins to another nearby government vehicle. Stan grew quite distraught upon seeing this, knowing that the last thing he ever wanted was for his nibblings to get dragged into all of this mess. A mess that he had done everything in his power to try and avoid, but in his assurance that he wouldn’t get caught, he had gotten sloppy and careless to the point that the consequences could very well be severe if he couldn’t think of a way out of it in time. “Kids!” Stan shouted, beating against the window of the car he was in with his handcuffed wrists to catch his concerned nibblings’ attention. “You gotta believe me! For once, I’m actually innocent! Kids!” The conman left off on this final desperate plea as the vehicle drove off, taking him with it. Dipper and Mabel only had time to exchange a bewildered glance as they were also hauled away against their will, neither of them having the faintest clue as to what was really going on or what they could possibly do about any of it.

It turned out that Powers hadn’t been wrong in his assumption that the Crystal Gems hadn’t gotten far, for they had taken refuge up on one of the temple’s outstretched hands thanks to Garnet’s quick thinking. Still, it was clear they wouldn’t be able to hide out there for too long as the agents were already beginning to swarm the temple, busting into the house and raiding everything therein as they tried to beat the temple gate itself down to no avail.

“Oh, this is a disaster!” Pearl huffed, tucking back behind one of the stone hands’ fingers. “For over 150 years, we’ve operated out of Gravity Falls without being bothered by any of Earth’s governmental bodies, and now all of the sudden, here comes a bunch of agents trying to arrest us simply for being here! It’s completely absurd!”

“Ugh, this is just like what happened with those stupid society jerks!” Amethyst growled, kicking another one of the fingers petulantly. “It’s like nobody around here appreciates just how much we do for them! So what if we lure a few dumb monsters or Homeworld ships around here every now and then, we always make sure to clean up whatever messes we make when it comes to those things!”

“Y-yeah, we do!” Steven exclaimed with a small, assured smile. “After all, we’re the Crystal Gems! Helping people, helping the Earth, is our job! If only we could make those agents realize that too... Maybe if we try talking to them, they’ll realize that we’re not-”

“That’s not going to work,” Garnet shook her head, watching with scrutiny from above as more agents piled into the temple. “I have a feeling these agents aren’t going to listen to reason.”

“S-so what are we going to do?” Steven asked anxiously.

“Well, it seems as though we only have one choice,” Pearl remarked with an aggravated sigh. “We’ll need to leave Gravity Falls, possibly even the country, until further notice. At least for 100 years or so until all of this nonsense dies down.”

“Ugh, darn it!” Amethyst moaned in protest. “But I kinda liked it here!”

“Well its not like we have any other options, Amethyst!” the white Gem argued back, though it was clear she wasn’t too keen on the idea herself. “Those agents won’t let up, no matter how many times we drive them away! Of course, it’ll take some time to sneak past them and get everything out. We’ll have to find a way to move all of the bubbles, and pack up Steven’s things, but-”

“Wait!” Steven interupted, distraught even by the suggestion of leaving alone. “Pearl, we can’t just leave Gravity Falls! This place is my home, our home! Everyone we care about is here: Dad, Mr. Pines, Dipper, Mabel, we can’t just leave them all behind!”

“Steven’s right,” Garnet firmly agreed. “We are not leaving.”

“B-but the agents-”

“We’ll figure out a way to get rid of them,” the Gem leader interupted Pearl. “But we’re not going to let them drive us out of our home. This is where Rose wanted us to stay, the place she wanted us to protect, after she was gone, and we’re going to do exactly that, agents, or no agents.”

“Yeah! That’s the spirit, G!” Amethyst cheered, giving Steven a celebratory high five. “Always the rebel against the system! I love it! But uh… speaking of rebels… looks like they’re in the middle of hauling Stan off down there…” The purple Gem’s smile quickly faded as she glanced down towards the shack, where the vehicle Stan was in was just starting to pull away.

“I hate to say it, but that’s also rather odd that they’d want to arrest Stan, of all people,” Pearl mused. “True, he’s committed many illegal activities in the time that we’ve known him for alone, but nothing on the level that the law of the land would have any reason to go after him for… And all that talk of a ‘doomsday device’? It sounded way too far fetched to me…”

“So that means Mr. Pines has gotta be innocent, right?” Steven asked, his tone hopeful. “Then we need to do something to help him! And Dipper and Mabel too!”

“Uh, normally I’d be down for a good old-fashioned jailbreak, Steven, but… we should probably be keeping a low profile for now with all these agents running around,” Amethyst said with a pitied frown.

“Amethyst’s right,” Pearl nodded. “Knowing Stan, he’ll be able to figure his own way out of all this mess. And as for the twins, I… um… w-well I’m sure those agents won’t do anything to harm them, so-”

“No!” Steven protested, his hands clenched in tight fists at his sides as he looked to his guardians intently. “Dipper and Mabel risked their lives helping us break out of Peridot’s ship; it’s only fair that we save now in return! We owe it to them, you guys know we do! That’s why we have to go bust them out and do anything we can to help them and Mr. Pines! They’re our friends, heck, at this point it’s almost like they’re our second family! So, who’s with me!?”

“I am.” Garnet answered immediately, putting her hand on top of Steven’s outstretched one. “Steven’s right, we owe it to the twins, and in a way, to Stan too to help them.”

“Oh, you better believe I’m in!” Amethyst grinned daringly, slapping her hand down as well. “It’s jailbreak, part 2, baby! C’mon, Pearl, you know you want in on this action!”

“Ugh, I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this but… fine,” Pearl consented, well aware of just how risky this endeavor would be as she added her hand to the pile. “Though let’s please try to be careful about this, alright?”

“Great!” Steven sent a grateful grin to all three of his guardians, confident in the believe that together they could do this, no matter what obstacles were put in their way. “Then its all settled. It’s time for the Crystal Gems to save the day!”

As part of their intensive investigation, the government agents had taken up shop at the Gravity Falls police station, turning it into a temporary headquarters of sorts until they could take both their findings and their new convict back to Washington with them. Still, as eager as the agents were to book Stan and put him away, he still had to be properly processed first, including fingerprinting, mug shots, and of course, a proper round of scrutinizing interrogation.

“Stanford Pines,” Agent Powers began authoritatively as he stood before the detained conman. “You stand accused of theft of government waste, conspiracy, and possession of illegal weapons. How do you plead to these charges?”

“Uh, g-guilticent!” Stan exclaimed, his nerves driving him more than common sense. “I-I mean, innoguilty! I-I mean, uh… c-can I have my phone call now?”

Fortunately, Powers conceded to this request, allowing the conman to dial up whoever he chose. Of course, Stan was going to make this call count, and though he had been half tempted to call Greg up and ask for help giving the former rock star’s knowledge on the matter, he decided to go down a less incriminating route as he dialed up Soos instead.

Normally by this time, the handyman would have shown up for his shift at the shack, but of course, word of Stan’s arrest had already spread far and wide throughout town. Soos was practically in the midst of a meltdown over the news as he pulled up to the drive through at Yumberjacks, though he managed to compose himself just enough to place his hurried order. “Ok, gimme whatever you got that comes with a free toy.”

“Soos!” The handyman gasped upon suddenly hearing Stan’s voice out of the blue, and his initial assumption jumped to the restaurant’s lumberjack-shaped drive through speaker.

“Mr. Pines?!” Soos exclaimed, leaning out of his truck a bit to pat the speaker down. “Is this some sort of… possession situation?”

“Just pick up!” Stan shouted, the handyman realizing that his voice was coming from the walkie talking on his dashboard.

“Mr. Pines, what happened?” Soos asked, deeply concerned as he picked the walkie talkie up. “I heard you got arrested or something? I-I had to go get some panic food before heading over, but I-”

“Never mind that now,” Stan quickly interupted, knowing that he had to talk fast, lest the agents right on the other side of the door overhear him. “Listen, I need you to do something for me. You know that vending machine in the gift shop? I need you to guard it with your life. No matter what happens, no matter who talks to you, do not let them touch that machine!”

Before Soos could even think to ask any questions on this strange request, the walkie talking cut out, leaving the handyman a direct order from his boss that he was obligated to carry out, regardless of how odd it was. “Time for repair guy…” he began firmly, adjusting his hat. “To become a repair man.”

“Sir, your Junior Yum-Yum Baby-Time Kiddo Meal?” the drive through employee asked as Soos sternly pulled up to the window.

“Just put it in my mouth,” he commanded resolutely, gripping the steering wheel tightly as the employee pulled a fry out of the box and put it in the handyman’s open mouth. “Let’s do this.” With this steady proclamation, Soos set forth, driving straight through the nearby hedges as he sped off towards the direct of the Mystery Shack, determined to do as his boss had said down to the very letter, no matter what.

As caught off guard by the raid on the shack as they were, Dipper and Mabel were none too happy about being abruptly hauled away in wake of their uncle’s supposedly uncalled for arrest. But even still, very few of their questions and concerns were answered as Agent Trigger drove them away from the shack, stoic as always as he conversed with his partner through the vehicle’s video screen.

“We’ve got Mr. Pines in custody,” Powers reported from the police station. “Our men are searching the shack for that device and we still have a team hunting high and low for those Crystal Gems. You take care of those kids, Trigger.”

“Right,” Trigger staunchly nodded as the video feed cut out, leaving the twins to begin their ongoing barrage of questions anew.

“What are you gonna do to us?!” Mabel demanded as both her and Dipper sent the agent in the driver’s seat defiant glares.

“We’ll be taking you to child services,” Triggers remarked, not even bothering to glance back at the twins.

“Boo!” Mabel goaded crossly at this.

“Wait, that’s it?” Dipper asked incredulously. “Are you sure you guys don’t wanna, you know, interrogate us? See what we know about this whole ‘doomsday device’ thing?”

Trigger let out something of a mocking snicker upon hearing this, rolling his eyes at such a suggestion. “Kid, please. If we thought either of you actually knew anything about this, we would have pulled one of you aside for questioning a long time ago.”

“B-but what about all of the Gem stuff?!” Dipper protested, rather frustrated by this dry response. “We know about all of that. Heck, we were even there for a lot of it, and we-”

“Just quit while you’re ahead, kid,” Trigger cut him off, clearly disinterested as he pressed a button up front. “Here, enjoy some mindless reality TV, designed to pacify you and make you stop asking questions.”

As disgruntled as both twins were, they briefly glanced at the screen in front of them where a surgeon was just starting an operation on an unconscious patient. “I’m about to make the incision…”

“KER-PRANK!” a flamboyantly dressed young man suddenly jumped out from behind the nearby potted plant, aptly startling the focused surgeon.

“You’re watching KER-PRANKED with Justin Kerprank!” the announcer for the show exclaimed as the logo popped on screen.

Of course, the twins were quick to lose interest in this rather silly program, both of them well aware that they had much more important matters to discuss, especially now that Trigger seemed to be distracted. “I can’t believe it,” Dipper said quite petulantly as he crossed his arms. “These guys still won’t take me seriously, even though they know about all of the supernatural stuff in Gravity Falls now! How much more is it gonna take to get them to finally just listen!?”

“Dipper, who cares about getting these stuffy dodoheads to listen to anything?” Mabel asked with a huff of exasperation. “What matters right now is Grunkle Stan. There’s no way he was stealing hazardous waste! We gotta clear his name somehow! And we have to find a way to help keep Steven and the Gems from getting caught too! They don’t deserve to be experimented on in some creepy government lab!”

“…You’re right,” Dipper sighed, anchoring himself back to the matter at hand. “I don’t really know what we can do about the Gems at the moment, but as for Grunkle Stan…” he trailed off, pausing to glance around the vehicle for any kind of inspiration, only to get one in the security camera positioned near the driver’s seat. “Oh! Wait a minute! The security tapes! Didn’t Stan say he was restocking the gift shop last night? If we can get the Mystery Shack’s surveillance tapes, we could prove he’s innocent!”

“Great idea, bro-bro!” Mabel exclaimed, instantly on board with it. “Now we just need to think of a way out of here. Think, Mabel… think…”

“Uh, actually, it looks like you won’t have to think too hard over this one,” Dipper said, glancing out of the car’s back window.

“Why not?”

“Because our way out of here is coming up right behind us,” he nodded back to the window, prompting Mabel to look out as well. And indeed, rushing up along the road from behind was none other than Lion, toting Steven and all three of the Gems on his back as he fiercely raced after the vehicle.

“Go, Lion, go!” Steven cheered his pink pet onward, Amethyst chuckling wildly behind him as Pearl held tightly onto Garnet to remain on his back. “Aaaaand get ready with a portal in 3… 2… 1!”

At this command, Lion let out a piercing roar, a sonic blast ripping forth from him into the open air ahead, creating a tear in space time large enough for them all to get through. The portal reopened on the path ahead of the car, and the pink beast stopped squarely just several feet in front of the quickly approaching car.

“W-what the-?!” Agent Trigger exclaimed in alarm at the pink animal in his path, but before he even had time to slam down on the breaks, Lion roared once more, this time sending out only a simple sonic blast. The burst hit the front of the car squarely, sending it spinning off of its path and into the forest on the side of the road. “Mayday! Mayday! Agent down!” Trigger shouted through his com as the car sped down the hill, completely out of control. In the chaos, Dipper and Mabel were equally as frightened as they held onto their seats for dear life, until the car finally came to an abrupt, crashing halt courtesy of a cluster of well-placed trees. Fortunately, no one was harmed in the accident, though Trigger was quick to find that his door was jammed shut by the nearby trees, while the twins were able to easily slip out of the vehicle just as Lion arrived at the bottom of the hill with Steven and the Gems in tow.

“Dipper! Mabel!” the young Gem cried, hopping off the pink beast’s back to give both of his friends a relieved hug. “I’m so glad you guys are ok!”

“You’re glad we’re ok?” Dipper couldn’t help but let out a small laugh at this. “Steven, you guys are the ones who are technically on the run from the U.S. Government, aren’t you?”

“Technically,” Garnet cut in with a small smile.

“Still, you two aren’t hurt, are you?” Pearl asked the twins, concerned. “We apologize for our rather… unorthodox way of rescuing you two. It was Amethyst’s idea…”

“Hey, it worked, didn’t it?” the purple Gem shrugged.

“Backup! Requesting backup!” Trigger exclaimed to his com, sending an alarmed glare the Gems’ way. “The Crystal Gems are right here at my location! I require at least an entire support squadron in order to neutralize-”

The agent was abruptly cut off by Dipper, who ended up swiping Trigger’s earpiece away before defiantly crushing it on the ground in order to keep the agent cut off from the rest of his team. “Nice one,” Garnet remarked, sending Dipper a nod of approval.

“Grrr, you aliens will never get away with this!” Trigger shouted, infuriated. “And neither will you kids for siding with them! They’re a dangerous extraterrestrial threat and they’ll end up destroying this entire planet if they’re not taken care of immediately!”

“Geez, calm down, dude,” Amethyst rolled her eyes. “What, do you think we’re gonna like ‘abduct’ you onto our ‘spaceship’ and ‘probe’ you or something like that? Ha! Come on, man, get real.”

“Thanks for bailing us out, you guys,” Mabel said to the Gems with a grateful smile. “But we still need to do the same for Grunkle Stan.”

“And fortunately, we have a plan about how we’re going to clear his name,” Dipper assured confidently.

“Really? That’s great!” Steven beamed, already hopping back onto Lion. “So, what are we waiting for? Let’s go save Mr. Pines!”

“Oh, you poor kids. Do you really think your uncle’s innocent?” Trigger shook his head sympathetically. By now, Steven, the Gems, and Mabel had already moved on to head back to the shack, but Dipper happened to linger back a bit as the agent continued his almost rather sincere appeal. “I’ve seen it all before. False names, double lives… One minute they’re playing with water balloons, the next they’re building doomsday devices. Your uncle scammed the whole world. Are you really gonna let him scam you too?”

Dipper took pause upon hearing this, somewhat jolted by everything the agent had just said. Stan had to be innocent, it just made no sense for him to be the mastermind behind a villainous plot as massive as a doomsday machine. And yet… how did any of them really know that for sure? After all, the conman was a proven pathological liar when it came to his business practices; who was to say he hadn’t lied about other things? Much more important, potentially life-threatening things?

Yet certainly, even if he was involved in some notorious scheme like this, Stan would have told at least his nibblings. If he was transparent with no one else, he was with them. And even beyond that following the zombie incident weeks ago, Stan had promised he wasn’t harboring any other secrets concerning Gravity Falls, a promise that Dipper wanted to believe, that for the most part, he did believe. Which meant that despite the agent’s warnings and his own fledgling doubts, Stan was innocent.

Right?

“You… you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dipper finally said, the hesitance in his tone clear as he briefly glanced back at Trigger before staunchly moving on to catch up with the others.

“You’re gonna regret this!” Trigger shouted after the entire group prior to his airbag bursting out and uncomfortably trapping him in his car even more.

Stan huffed impatiently as he sat alone in the interrogation room, his hands still cuffed tightly behind his back, making any real movement largely impossible. Powers and his cronies were off somewhere handling the proper paperwork to formally put him away, which left the conman with some much-needed time to try and come up with a way to escape. It was true that Stan had been in some tight spots before, but he had never gotten himself in enough trouble to be wanted by the whole of the U.S. Government itself. He had also never been arrested at such an integral time before, which meant that his escape would have to be both quick and discreet. There would be time to deal with the consequences later; now was the time for action.

“Only five more hours till it happens…” Stan muttered to himself, glancing back at his wristwatch as it continued to count down. “I gotta be there! Come on, Stan, you have to think of a way outta this...” Frustrated, the conman pounded his head against the table in front of him, hoping it could get his jumbled thoughts flowing. “Think! Think!”

Stan was quickly caught of guard as his watch suddenly beeped, a warning reading ‘anomaly in progress’ coming with it. Alarmed, the conman lifted his head off the table, only to see the coffee few feet in front of him begin to lift up out of its mug on its own accord before the mug and everything else on the table did the same. They came crashing back down a moment later, but still, the abrupt reversal of gravity on display surprised Stan nonetheless as he noticed exactly what kind of effect the machine was having on the world around it, just as the journal had warned.

“They’re getting stronger…” he noted before letting out a gasp of realization as to how he could end up using this to his advantage. “Of course! That’s it!”

What the conman didn’t put much stock into as he began to plot out his jailbreak was the fact that these gravity anomalies spread far beyond simply the police station. The entire town took notice when, in the middle of their daily activities, they were suddenly lifted off their feet and into the air several inches, cars and bikes and even some trees being uplifted along with them. As everything and everyone clumsily fell back to their usual spots on the ground, a ripple of apt confusion seemed to ripple through the townsfolk on main street in particular as they picked themselves up off the ground.

“Is it just me, or did the entire world just hiccup?” Tyler Cutebiker asked Lazy Susan as they helped each other back up.

“I’m sure it was just a baby-sized earthquake,” the waitress smiled with a wave of her hand.

“Aw, baby sized!”

“That was no earthquake!” Ronaldo shouted as he frantically ran out of Gravity Fries. “It was the Sneople! They’re back and they’re reversing the sky and the ground in order to suck us into their reptilian trap and devour us all!”

“Ronaldo, for the last time!” Fryman scolded, pulling his frantic son back into the shop. “There are no Sneople!”

“Sneople or no Sneople, I am not closing my restaurant and evacuating again!” Kofi scoffed, stepping out of Fish Stew Pizza. “The last time I lost three days’ worth of profits! It was ridiculous!”

“So… we just don’t do anything then?” Kiki asked as she stood alongside her father. All of the others gathered nearby casually shrugged in muted agreement with this plan, none of them too keen on fleeing town again, especially since this strange occurrence didn’t seem to be anything too dangerous or severe.

However, not everyone thought so, for over at the junkyard, McGucket was in an absolute frenzy, the laptop blaring bright red with a steadily decreasing countdown. A countdown that was ticking down to nothing less than complete and utter devastation. “It’s happenin’!” McGucket cried as he rushed to pack up his few belongings and flee while he still had a chance. “The end times! When that machine activates… I gotta get out of town! Get in there, racoon wife! Git!” he shouted, shoving said racoon into his knapsack before rushing out of his hut, the laptop in tow. And with that, the hillbilly made his hurried, fearful flight, desperately searching for any place of refuge from the disastrous end he knew was coming.

Traveling on Lion made getting back to the Mystery Shack quite quick and efficient as the collective group of Gems and kids traveled through the woods rather than by the road to avoid detection by any agents. As they approached the shack, they all gathered behind a row of trees on the boarder of the property, which was essentially swarming with agents both standing on guard and investigating just about everything in sight. The shack itself had been roped off with police tape, and it was easy to tell, even from the outside, that the building was infested with investigators, all of them in search of any further clues about that supposed doomsday device they claimed was hidden somewhere inside.

“Alright, so here’s the plan,” Mabel began, tucking back down behind the trees as she addressed the others. “I’ll start by taking out those two guard guys, then Dipper, you find a stick or something to use as a sword and chop that other due in the neck with it, then Steven, you can use your shield to cover us from behind as Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl beat up any of the other guys who try to stop us until we backflip through the front door!”

“Good plan,” Garnet nodded in stoic approval.

“I like it, but… do you think there’s a way we could get in there without hurting any of those agents?” Steven asked with a frown. “They are just here to do their jobs after all.”

“So are we, Steven,” Pearl reminded, glaring towards the temple up the while, which had been completely taken over by agents at that point.

“So, are we gonna bust these guys up and sneak in there or what?” Amethyst asked, already summoning her whip. “Cause I’ve been wanting to do knock their heads in ever since they rushed the place this morning.”

“Uh, actually, aren’t you guys forgetting the simpler solution?” Dipper asked, nodding up towards the open attic window.

“Oh, right,” Mabel said, understanding his intent as she pulled her grappling hook out. With a well-aimed strike, the hook latched onto the side of the window, allowing Dipper, Mabel, and Steven to slide up along its rope while the agents who should have been standing guard were fortunately distracted by the rock-that-looks-like-a-face-rock. Once all three of them were safely inside, the Gems followed, Pearl deftly walking across the cord like a tightrope while Amethyst rowdily climbed up it and Garnet swung across it up to the window. Knowing that they had to be stealthy and discreet to avoid detection, everyone was as quiet as possible as they crept downstairs from the attic, following the twins’ lead as they narrowly kept out of sight of the agents in the living room before making it to Stan’s office.

“We made it!” Steven grinned, exchanging a three-way fist bump with the twins as they made sure to lock the door tightly behind them. “So now that we’re here, what’s the plan?”

“We need to find where Stan keeps the shack’s surveillance tapes,” Dipper explained, already starting to look for them at the conman’s desk. “If we can find the tape from last night, then we’ll be able to prove to those agents that he didn’t steal that illegal waste!”

“Wait, that’s what you guys are digging around in here for?” Amethyst asked with a wry grin. “Pffft, you should have just said so. Luckily for us, I know all of Stan’s tricks...” The purple Gem’s smile widened as she stretched her hand up towards the jackalope head hanging from the wall, pushing its bent antler into place. With this hidden switch activated, the bookshelf on the far wall suddenly flipped over, revealing the shack’s extensive collection of security tapes as well as a tv to view them on.

“Yes!” the kids cheered as they ran forward, perusing through the tapes for the most recent one.

“Well, Amethyst, I have to hand it to you,” Pearl remarked to her teammate with a satisfied smile. “I never thought your rather… bizarre camaraderie with Stan would actually end up coming in handy.”

“Hey, what can I say?” the purple Gem smirked with a shrug. “Paling around with the old guy has its perks. Plus, I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he realizes it was my know-how that bailed him out again, it’ll be hilarious!”

“Aha! Here it is!” Mabel interupted, holding one of the tapes of. “The one from this week! Here we go!” Without any further hesitation, she slid the tape into the player, only for it to open up on a clip of Mabel, Soos, and Wendy in the gift shop, with Garnet leaning against the counter and nodding her head in time to the music the handyman was wiggling on the floor to as the girls cheered him on.

“Someone yelled ‘wormy dance’,” Mabel explained to the others, who were giving her a rather curious look.

“It was me,” Garnet grinned slightly, raising her hand in admittance.

“Ha! I knew it!” Mabel exclaimed, snapping her fingers until she met Dipper’s impatient expression. “Oh, right. Go ahead and fast-forward.”

Dipper did so, zooming through the tape by several days until it at last reached an image of Stan at the counter, peacefully piling up knick-knacks as he often did. “Ha! There it is! Stan restocking just like he said!” Dipper said with a satisfied smile. “And the date shows it was last night! This is proof that he’s innocent!”

“So that’s it then,” Steven smiled brightly. “This was all just one big misunderstanding! We just gotta show this to those agents and they’ll let Mr. Pines off the hook for sure!”

“Uh… not so fast, kids…” Pearl frowned, nodding back up to the screen. Stan had stopped stocking around 7 PM, casting a careful glance around the shop before stepping outside. Fast-forwarding an hour revealed that the conman still hadn’t returned, something that set the entire group watching on edge as they wondered exactly what he could have been up to for so long.

“Um… m-maybe he’s just going to the bathroom outdoors,” Mabel suggested with an uneven smile. “The way nature intended?”

“For an hour?” Dipper asked, raising a doubtful eyebrow.

‘O-or he might have just gone on another one of those Revenge Trips with Amethyst!” Steven added looking over to the rather alarmed purple Gem. “R-right?”

Amethyst hesitated, biting her lip anxiously as she looked screen, where the hours continued to go by, with no sign of Stan returning in sight. Still, she quickly forced a smile as she glanced back to the kids, all of them looking to her almost desperately for a confirmation that the conman had been with her last night rather than the suspected alternative. “Uh…. S-sure!” she shrugged awkwardly. “We… we’ll go with that!”

“Amethyst…” Garnet shook her head disapprovingly at her teammate’s idea to cover for the conman.

“O-ok, so… he wasn’t hanging out with me…” Amethyst admitted sheepishly, shrinking back somewhat. “B-but he totally could have been! If he had, ya know… asked me to go with him…”

“Well, if he wasn’t with you, then where was-” Pearl was cut off as the tape arrived at 5 AM. Exactly at that point, an unknown figure walked into the gift shop, fully clad in a hazmat suit and wheeling in a large barrel that was clearly labeled as radioactive waste.

“Oh no, Stan, you didn’t…” Dipper said, his hopes for the conman’s innocence sinking immediately upon seeing this.

“D-don’t panic!” Mabel quickly reassured as everyone else simply watched the figure pull more barrels into the shack in apt dismay. “That could be anyone in that suit!”

This theory was instantly proven wrong, however, as the figure on the tape accidentally dropped one of the waste barrels onto his foot, eliciting a familiar cry of pain in an unmistakably familiar voice. “Augh! Hot Belgian waffles!” he shouted, gripping his injured foot. “Wait… I’m alone! I can swear for real! SON OF A-”

At this, Pearl rushed forward to shut the tv off before the kids could hear said swear, while everyone else shared a disturbed, uncertain glance in light of who’s voice they had just heard. “Well, there’s no doubt about it, that’s totally Stan,” Amethyst shook her head incredulously before letting out a frustrated huff. “I don’t get it though… If he was gonna go as far as to pull a crazy heist like that, why didn’t he come and ask me for help, just like he always does!?”

“Amethyst, that’s not important right now!” Pearl scolded. “What’s important is that Stan seems to be every bit as guilty as those agents said he was! And what really is baffling is how he thought he could possibly get away with pulling a hairbrained scheme like this off without getting caught! Of all of the ridiculous capers he’s pulled over the years, this one by far is the most nonsensical!”

“You’re right, Pearl,” Garnet mused, a hand to her chin as she continued looking to the security footage. By all accounts, her future vision was still strangely static, refusing to give her the answers she was looking for in regards to all this, but she didn’t see the need to inform the others of that. At least not yet. “It doesn’t make any sense as to why Stan would do something like this…”

“W-well… what if he had a really good reason for why he needed all that stuff?” Steven asked, his tone undeniably apprehensive.

“S-Steven’s right!” Mabel chimed in just as anxiously. “So what if Grunkle Stan stole a little toxic waste? That doesn’t mean he’s leading a nefarious double life!”

“Uh… Mabel?” Dipper spoke up as he pulled out the box that had been tucked away underneath the shelves of security tapes. “I’m not so sure about that…”

As soon as they had hoisted the box onto Stan’s desk, everyone curiously began to look through it, only to be unanimously stunned by what they found. It was filled to the brim with all sorts of documents, from driver’s licenses to passports to newspaper clippings and everything in between, all of them connecting back to Stan somehow, though no two of them were exactly the same.

“W-what is all this?” Mabel asked, picking up one of the countless drivers license inside of the box. “‘Stetson Pinefield’?”

“‘Hal Forester’?” Dipper read off another license, growing steadily more confused and suspicious. “‘Andrew ‘8-Ball’ Alcatraz’? You guys, these are fake IDs! You wouldn’t need these unless you were trying to hide your real identity!”

“B-but why would Stan do that?” Mabel wondered, shaking her head incredulously.

“Guys, look at these,” Steven cut in, holding up a stack of official documents. “Legal Notice: Stan Pines is hereby banned for life from the State of New Jersey. And Pennsylvania… And Delaware… And Ohio… And Texas… and a bunch of other states too! But why?”

“Amethyst, did you know about all this?” Pearl asked the purple Gem, clearly unnerved.

“Uh, o-of course I did!” Amethyst quickly replied, her manner tense as everyone looked to her. All the same, there was a hint of betrayal in her tone as she looked between the box of fake IDs and the rest of the group, none of them really believing her and her lack of a conviction on this lie. “I, uh… S-Stan’s told me about all of this stuff a super long time ago! A-after all, w-why would he hide junk like this from me? I-I know him better than anyone!”

“Amethyst, now isn’t the time to lie for Stan,” Garnet advised. “We need answers and we need them now.”

The purple Gem flinched at just how serious her leader’s tone was, and its harshness was more than enough to get her to cave. “Ok, fine! I’ve never seen any of this stuff before, alright?!” she exclaimed, running a hand through her hair as a sign of her severe stress with these unfurling revelations. “I… I-its just, why wouldn’t he tell me about at least some of this stuff?! I thought the two of us were a team, we have been for the past 22 years! What could be so huge and so important that he’d need to keep it a secret from me?!”

Mabel quickly caught everyone’s attention as she let out a stark gasp of alarm at the newspaper clipping in her hands, her eyes wide as she stared down at the headline before handing it off to her brother. Likewise, Dipper froze in equal shock at the headline, though he managed to regain his bearings just enough to shakily read it aloud to everyone else. “‘S-Stan Pines Dead’?!”

“What?!” everyone else asked in apt surprise upon hearing this, all of them crowding around the twins to see what else this article had to say.

“H-how can Mr. Pines be dead!?” Steven asked in complete disbelief. “We just saw him a few hours ago and he looked pretty alive then!”

“T-this is from almost 30 years ago!” Pearl exclaimed, shaking her head as she read the article’s date. “Which… if I remember correctly… is about the time Stan showed up here in Gravity Falls, i-isn’t it?”

“I… I think so…” Garnet said, placing a hand against her temple. “But… its foggy for some reason… And I certainly don’t remember anything about him dying…”

“‘Foul play suspected in Pines’ death’,” Mabel read from the article, gripping the clipping frantically. “‘Fiery crash, breaks cut…’ By who?”

“‘Unnamed grifter at large’?” Dipper read from yet another clipping showing a picture of Stan. “Why would they call him unnamed? Unless Stan isn’t actually…”

“Stan?!” everyone questioned in nervous unison as they glanced behind them at the large portrait of the conman hanging right on the wall behind them. His grin was wide and proud, something that usually no one would have ever thought twice about but now, it seemed so much more mysterious and sinister as it left all of them, kids and Gems alike, wondering exactly what his true history and motives were. In their search for Stan’s innocence, they had stumbled across something that seemed to incriminate him much more than before, putting into question literally everything they knew about him, from his past, to his intentions, to even his identity. To the Gems, these revelations were incredibly alarming on their own, seeing as how they had lived next to the conman for years now, but none of them, not even Amethyst, had ever had any inclination to his seeming double life. But to the kids, everything they had just uncovered was far more baffling. Steven always saw the best in everyone and Stan was certainly no exception to this, given his father’s camaraderie with the conman but despite the apparent tension between him and his mother. However, it seemed as though Stan seemed to harbor just as many dark secrets as Rose herself, something that left the young Gem completely uncertain on where to stand amidst it all. Dipper and Mabel, on the other hand, were even more torn over the matter, especially considering this was their uncle, of all people. Or maybe he wasn’t their uncle at all, if his false identities were any proof to the contrary. True, they had never really known too much about Stan’s past, but up until now they had never thought they really needed to. And now it was quite clear as to why the conman never spoke too much about it in the first place: because the secrets buried within it were some of the most incredible and sinister they had ever uncovered.

“None of this makes any sense!” Dipper exclaimed as he began pacing, trying his best to calm down amidst all of these increasing bombshell revelations. “If Stan isn’t actually Stan, then who have we been living with for the entire summer?!”

“Y-you’ve been living with Stan, duh!” Amethyst snapped, her hands clenched in tight fists at her sides. “The fake IDs and junk are all whatever! It’s still him, I know it!”

“Do you, Amethyst?” Pearl asked rather coldly. “Do you really know its actually him? Or are you sure he’s not really a master criminal who really did build some kind of doomsday machine and plans on using it to wreak havoc across the entire planet!?”

“Don’t be dumb, Pearl!” the purple Gem shot back just as fiercely. “Stan would never, ever do something like that! Even if it totally sucks that he hid all this stuff from me, I know him! And so do all of you guys!” she glared over at the startled trio of kids beside her. “So back me up on this! Stan’s not some crazy psycho villain, right?!”

A brief bout of silence passed between the kids, with Dipper not offering a response at all as he instead looked away rather bitterly, lost amidst doubts and frustrations that were too much to simply suppress by this point. Steven was also silent, biting his lip as he glanced down apprehensively, not having the faintest idea about what to say at such a tense juncture. Mabel, on the other hand, was just as adamant as Amethyst was when it came to Stan’s innocence, and she had no qualms about showing just that. “Right,” she nodded firmly before looking back to the stack of evidence against the conman they had compiled. “Still, there has to be some kind of explanation… Maybe we’re getting Ker-Pranked! Justin Kerprank is gonna jump up from behind one of these plants any minute now!” she quipped, glancing behind the nearby potted plan in the desperate hope that her rather weak theory was somehow true. “A-any minute now, Justin…”

“I-I can’t believe it…” Dipper muttered, just as dedicated to this resolve for the truth, even if he was still a bit wary of discovering it. “All summer I’ve been looking for answers, and the biggest mystery was right under our noses this whole time! This could be bigger than anything we’ve discovered so far!”

“And that’s why can’t keep jumping to conclusions or making excuses,” Garnet said, her tone rigid as she glanced over at her teammates. “Whatever’s going on here, we need to get to the bottom of it, whether Stan really is Stan or not, and whether he’s responsible for a doomsday machine or not. We have to find the truth, no matter what it might be and how much might change as a result of it.”

“W-well, maybe there’s something we might have missed in here that’ll fill in all the holes!” Steven suggested, rifling through what was left in the box on the desk until he found something of note. “Huh? What’s this? ‘Secret code to hideout’?”

“Hideout?” Amethyst raised a confused eyebrow. “Stan doesn’t have a hideout. Well… at least I thought he didn’t… Guess that was just another thing he never bothered to tell me about…”

“Let me see that,” Dipper said, taking the slip of paper from Steven and holding it up against the journal’s code page for comparison. “‘A1, B… C3’? I’ve never seen a code like this before…”

“Wait! I have!” Mabel exclaimed with a gasp of realization and hope. Hope that whatever this was, it would bring them closer to the answers they were all so desperately searching for. “You guys, it’s the vending machine in the gift shop! Come on! Let’s go check it out!”

As Mabel was quick to lead the way, the others all readily followed, knowing that they had no choice but to take this new lead, as odd as it was. Still, none of them were really sure what they were going to find, if anything at all, as they continued unraveling this massive web of lies and deceit that Stan himself had apparently entangled them all within.

Stan shifted restlessly in his seat as he looked back at his watch again, a spark of dread filling him as he saw that only a mere 13 minutes remained. 13 minutes until everything finally came together and here he was, trapped in a police station on the other end of town. But not for too much longer, he reminded himself. For as Powers and a few other officers entered the interrogation room, the conman knew that his daring escape was in sight.

“Alright, Pines, playtime is over,” Powers remarked as stoically as ever. “The chopper’s ready to dust off to Washington. I’ll enjoy putting you away.”

“What?” Stan balked, not ready to be hauled off so soon seeing as how his plan was so heavily dependent on proper timing. “Uh, c-can’t we stick around for maybe one more minute? O-one minute thirty seconds?”

“We’re not falling for your games, Pines,” Powers staunchly refused. “You’ve been running your whole life. Your time is finally up.”

“B-bathroom break?” Stan continued to plea as he cast an anxious glance up at the clock. “Just give me fifteen seconds!”

“Sorry, but you’ve got a flight to catch,” Powers said as he moved to unlock the conman’s cuffs.

Stan prepared to make another last ditch appeal before his watch happened to beep at just the right moment. “Oh yeah?” he asked with a wry, confident smirk, knowing that everything was finally going according to plan. “So do you.”

“Huh?” Powers only had time to ask before gravity abruptly began to reverse itself, the effect stronger than every this time. All of the agents let out startled gasps as they were picked up from their spots on the ground, unable to regain their grip on the world as they floated about the room in absolute upheaval. And while they were lost amidst the newfound chaos, Stan used it to his advantage as his chair also rose up into the air, allowing him to kick the free-floating table at the row of agents in front of him. As Powers frantically attempted to anchor himself to something behind him, Stan acted quickly, ramming the head agent with the back of his chair hard enough to knock him into the wall. As his chair happened to flip over in the gravity-free air, the conman grabbed the keys right out of Powers’ hands, uncuffing himself and finally freeing him up from his restraints as he made his escape.

“Hey! Get back here!” Powers shouted hotly from his spot against the wall. “Men, get him!”

The other officers attempted to do so, clumsily swimming through the air as Stan easily evaded all of them. The conman ended up using one of the agents as a boost, jumping off of his chest and claiming his lost, floating wallet in the process as he launched himself towards the door while Powers angrily shouted after him the entire time.

“No! You won’t get away with this!” he yelled, pushing himself off the wall after Stan. The conman was ready for him though as he slammed the door squarely in the agent’s face just as the gravity anomaly ended. As everything fell back to the ground, Stan locked the door to the interrogation room with a satisfied grin as he landed on his feet, though he knew he had no time to waste in holding his victory over their heads, especially with only about 10 minutes left on the countdown.

While the rest of the police station was still in a state of confusion over gravity’s recent reversal, the conman rushed outside, fortunately finding a taxi sitting right outside. Stan hadn’t exactly planned that far ahead, but he was quick to improvise as he rushed up to the idling cab, knowing that this would help him get back to the shack exponentially quicker. “Hey, do you know where the Mystery Shack is?” the conman asked the driver breathlessly.

“Uh, yeah?” the driver responded, somewhat confused by Stan’s seemingly frantic manner.

“Ok, here’s a hundred bucks,” the conman pulled a hundred out of the wallet he had stolen from one of the agents. “Drive as far away from the shack as possible and don’t stop when the cops start chasing you!”

The driver took pause at this, giving Stan a somewhat bewildered glance, but even so, he shrugged in acceptance at this strange request before taking the money and speeding off. The conman acted quickly after this, hiding behind a nearby overturned car as Powers and the other agents emerged from the station.

“He’s getting away!” Powers shouted upon spotting the retreating taxi. “Obviously, follow that cab!”

Stan smirked as he watched the agents follow the bait he had set for them, leaving him free to hurry back to the shack on foot. Still, things were far from over; with less than 10 minutes left, the conman had not a second to lose, or else everything he had worked for over the past 30 years would be all for nothing. Which meant he couldn’t waste a moment thinking of anything else, not the agents, not the Gems, not even his own nibblings as he raced back to where everything he had ever hoped for, everything he had ever dreamed of, was about to become wide open. Literally.

The majority of agents who weren’t currently on the hunt for the Crystal Gems were still scouring the shack, searching it high and low for any further relevant clues, a search that, by all accounts, had been rather futile thus far. However, their investigation was quickly brought to an end as Agent Trigger pulled up to the shack, having been rescued from the crash by a few other agents, to report the latest news Powers had just passed along to him.

“Stanford escaped!” Trigger shouted to all of the other officers. “He’s at large! We need to sweep the town! And keep looking for those Crystal Gems while you’re at it! They’re still out there somewhere too! Move! Move! Move!”

The agents were quick to file out at this command, piling into vehicles and choppers as they dispersed to track their assigned targets down and subdue them once and for all. And fortunately, they left at just the right time, for as soon as they had vacated the premises, Soos happened to arrive, slipping in through the gift shop’s open window to carry out the odd responsibility Stan had entrusted him with. “Alright, Soos, remember the plan,” the handyman said to himself, firmly planting himself in front of the vending machine. “Protect the machine, earn Stan’s trust, get legally adopted by Stan, change name to Stan Jr.”

“Soos?”

“Ah!” Soos let out a fearful shout, only to calm down upon seeing that it was only the Gems and the kids had just entered the gift shop. “Oh, you guys! Where have you all been?”

“Just about everywhere, it feels like…” Steven said, somewhat exhausted by the barrage of revelations they had been faced with in the past few hours alone.

“Soos, what are you doing here?” Dipper asked, aptly confused by the handyman’s rather random presence.

“Stan gave me a mission to protect this machine,” Soos informed with a proud smile. “Ha! And I thought I loved snacks.”

Upon hearing this news, the Gems and the kids all exchanged a concerned glance, all of them realizing that if Stan had specifically asked Soos to guard the vending machine, then certainly it must be yet another piece of this quickly growing puzzle after all. “Soos,” Garnet stepped forward, her tone authoritative. “We need you to step aside and let us see that machine.”

“U-uh, well…” the handyman flinched, quite intimidated by the Gem leader’s rigid manner. “I-I can’t… Mr. Pines said-”

“Listen, Soos,” Dipper interjected earnestly. “Something huge is going on here. If Stan is hiding some dangerous secret, we need to find out what it is!”

“And based on what we’ve uncovered thus far, that vending machine, of all things, may very well help us do just that!” Pearl added with apt resolve.

“Yeah, just let us through so we can prove this is all just a big misunderstanding!” Mabel encouraged, offering the clearly anxious handyman a reassuring smile.

“Guys, I-I know this seems crazy, but I promised Stan I would guard this with my life,” Soos contested with a fretful frown. “I can’t let him down on this!”

By this point, the Gems were at something of a loss over what to do; while they wanted to access the vending machine, it was clear that the handyman was heavily intent on doing whatever he had to to protect it under Stan’s orders. The kids, fortunately, had a plan of their own in mind, one that they acted upon, one that they wordlessly put into action as Mabel stepped forward.

“I’m sorry, Soos,” she said, pulling her hands out from behind her back before blowing a handful of glitter right into the unsuspecting handyman’s face.

“Ah! Attack glitter!” Soos cried, trying to wipe the sparkly substance out of his eyes as Steven and Dipper both rushed forward. “It’s pretty but it hurts!”

At this juncture, Mabel joined the boys in pouncing on the handyman, trying their best to either pull him away from the machine or press their way past him to get to it as the Gems stood by, watching the scene before them in apt bewilderment. “Aw, c’mon! I don’t wanna fight you guys! This hurts me more than it hurts you!” Soos exclaimed, struggling to pull the kids off of him only to end up accidentally getting kicked in the face. “Ow! Seriously it hurts me way more than it hurts you!”

“Sorry, Soos!” Steven sincerely apologized amidst the ongoing struggle. “But we gotta get to that machine!”

“B-But I gotta keep it safe, dudes!” Soos argued, not even noticing Dipper leaning over his shoulder to input the code on the keypad. He barely managed to do so, but the moment it was fully entered, the entire machine swung forward, as if it was a door, knocking Soos and the kids back into the Gems and knocking them all to the floor. And when they glanced up at what lay just beyond the machine, they were all unanimously shocked by what the saw.

The vending machine had indeed acted as a door, one that opened to a short, hidden staircase leading down to what looked like an elevator. As everyone gathered around this new, mysterious opening, no one really knew what to say, seeing as how literally anything could be waiting at the end of this newfound path.

“W-what’s down there?” Pearl asked in a tense whisper, gripping onto Garnet’s arm tightly.

“I… I-I don’t…” the Gem leader trailed off as everyone looked to her for answers. Answers that her failing future vision failed to provide her with. Still, she tried, so very hard, to break past the wall of fog that was keeping her away from her usual foresight, that was blocking her from seeing the dangers that might await them all below. Yet in the end, she still saw nothing, leaving her in complete and utter darkness at the very worst of times. “I-I don’t know!” Garnet finally shouted, pounding her first against the backside of the vending machine in apt frustration.

“W-what do you mean you don’t know?” Dipper asked, alarmed that Garnet, of all people, hadn’t the faintest clue about what they were about to find. “What about your future vision?”

“It’s not… it’s not working,” the Gem leader shook her head she placed a hand against it. “It hasn’t been all day. I don’t know why… It hasn’t done this since… since that puppet show a few weeks ago…”

“What?” all three of the kids asked in startled unison, their eyes wide as they exchanged an alarmed glance. Of course, they instantly had a theory as to why Garnet’s future vision might have failed to function that day, but they weren’t able to even voice it as Amethyst spoke up instead.

“S-so… I guess we’re goin’ in blind then?” she asked apprehensively as she nodded towards the staircase.

“We have no other choice…” Garnet confirmed, adjusting her shades as she took the lead into the unknown.

“Dude… its like something out a video game…” Soos muttered as they descended down the rather dark staircase.

“Or a dream…” Mabel whispered just as tightly.

“Or a nightmare…” Dipper shuddered, realizing that with Garnet’s future vision out of the equation, there was literally no telling what they were about to find.

“I-its so strange…” Pearl said as they reached the elevator at the bottom of the stairs, as well as the code panel resting on the wall beside it. “It’s like… all of this is… familiar somehow… Almost as if… I know this…” Absently, the white Gem’s hand went towards the keypad of odd symbols, her fingers lightly pressing several of them in a very specific order. An order that ended up being the exact keycode needed to open up the elevator before them.

“Whoa!” Steven exclaimed, absolutely amazed by this. “Pearl, how did you know that code would work?”

“I-I didn’t!” the white Gem shook her head, her eyes wide as she looked between her hands and the elevator. “I… I just… i-it… it’s like I… r-remembered it somehow…”

“You remembered it?” Dipper asked, before looking to all three of the Gems incredulously. “You guys don’t think all of this could have to do with your missing memories… do you?”

The Gems all looked to each other, their expressions mutually torn and tight as they considered this possibility and everything it could possibly mean. “N-no, no way,” Amethyst shook her head, refusing to believe that Stan had anything remotely to do with their lost memories. “I-it’s gotta be some kind of weird coincidence! Now, come on. Let’s just go down here already and see what’s really going on.”

Knowing that there was no point in standing around and deliberating the matter any further, the others agreed, packing into the elevator and descending down even further to what was apparently the very bottom floor. And when the doors slid open, not a single one of them was able to explain what lay before them.

Upon a first glance, it seemed to be some sort of technological lab, with strange machines and monitors of all sorts lining the walls on either side of the long, narrow room. And at the end of it, on the other side of a large glass window, was a radiant, glowing blue light, one that poured into the darkened room as the group cautiously stepped inside of it.

“W-what is all this?” Steven wondered in a muted whisper, hanging close by his equally stunned guardians as they approached the light before them.

“Guys, are we dreaming?” Mabel asked, every bit as apprehensive. “Someone wake me up…”

“I-I don’t understand,” Soos shook his head as he looked to a nearby scanning machine. “Why would Mr. Pines have all this?”

“This can’t be real…” Dipper remarked, his tone both tense and incredulous as he was still trying to soak it all in. “It’s just like that bunker in the woods…”

“B-but what on earth would all of this be doing under the Mystery Shack, of all places?” Pearl wondered, absolutely baffled.

“Everyone,” Garnet spoke up, standing at the desk at the edge of the room and looking to what lay beyond it. “Look at that…”

The others turned their attention to the room just past the apparent lab they were in, which was much more open and cavernous. However, no one paid that as much mind as its central feature: an enormous metallic structure, one that was in the decisive shape of an inverted triangle. It was the source of the piercing blue glow, which came from the large circular hole in its center and seemed to grow brighter and more blinding by the second. But what was by far most alarming was the fact that, fixated to the edges of this machine were replica gemstones, very familiar ones to everyone present.

“Guys! Look!” Steven exclaimed as he pointed them out. “There’s Pearl’s gem! A-and Sapphire’s! And Ruby’s! And Amethyst’s! A-and… and mine?” He froze upon getting a glimpse at the undoubtedly familiar pink gem resting near the foot of the device.

“No,” Pearl whispered, placing a tight hand on her ward’s shoulder as she noticed the rose-shaped symbol right above it. “Rose’s… T-that’s Rose’s gem! All our gems! W-what are they doing on… on that thing?!”

“What’s this thing even supposed to be in the first place?!” Amethyst asked, her hands in tight fists at her sides as she was struck by a crushing realization. All this time Stan had not only been keeping such a huge secret from her, but now it seemed as though it was a secret she was somehow involved in herself, without even knowing it. And the feeling of betrayal she got from that alone was almost enough to drive her mad.

“Whatever it is, I feel a massive amount of power coming from it,” Garnet said, her tone gravely serious. “It looks like we may have just found that doomsday device after all…”

The kids all let out a startled gasp at this, but even so, Mabel in particular refused to believe it so readily. “O-ok, ok,” she cut in with a very forced smile. “L-let’s not jump to conclusions here. So he’s got a huge underground lab and a weird glowy machine with the Gems’ gems on it for some reason. That doesn’t mean anything bad! Everyone’s got secrets!” At this, she grabbed the picture of both herself and Dipper that Stan kept on his desk, taking it as a much needed sign that the conman’s intentions were still good, despite all the evidence pointing against that. “It’s still Stan, and he loves us! A-and we love him, right?”

“…Y-yeah,” Steven hesitantly agreed with a small, supportive smile. “Yeah, you’re right, Mabel. All of this stuff is… kinda crazy, yeah, but there’s gotta be a good reason behind all of it. M-maybe we just need to get his side of all this and we can finally figure everything out! Don’t you guys think so?”

The Gems all met the hopeful, encouraging grin their young ward was offering them, but none of them bothered to return it. Garnet’s expression remained tight and stoic as she looked back to the machine, Pearl’s eyes wide and full of dread and fear as she continued glancing around the lab, and Amethyst bitterly glared down, hugging herself tightly as a sign of how hurt by the lies Stan had told her for so long she really was. Steven took pause at this, his smile faltering as he began to wonder exactly how all of this connected back to his guardians, given their apparent unknown involvement in it. However, this stilted, uncertain silence wasn’t interupted by the young Gem’s pressing questions, but rather by Dipper as he happened to make what was by far the most startling discovery yet.

“I-I can’t believe it…” he whispered, completely shocked as he saw the two unquestionably familiar books laying on the desk right in front of them. “It’s impossible… The other two journals?!”

“What?!” the others all asked in unified surprise as they also took notice of journals 1 and 2, both of which had been unanimously thought to be lost. After all, Gideon had formerly had possession of the second one, but the general assumption had been that it had been confiscated from the child psychic at his arrest. The first one, however, had always been a mystery, its location and any proof of its mere existence always unknown until now. And yet, as Dipper pulled journal 3 out, here they were, all three journals, finally united in the least likely of places.

“All this time…” Dipper muttered, though his volume quickly grew along with his rapidly rising anger. “All this time, Stan had them!? I can’t believe it! He said he didn’t want us looking into all this supernatural stuff, but then he ends up having the other two journals, and this huge machine, and this deep, mysterious past!” As a show of his severe infuriation, he kicked the nearby desk, not even really feeling the rattle of pain through his leg as it connected with the hard metal amidst his betrayed rage. “Was that just to throw us off his trail?! Was anything he said to us even real?! Why would he have those journals!?”

“Dipper, please, calm down!” Steven urged, aptly concerned. “M-maybe the reason why Mr. Pines didn’t tell any of us about the journals is because he was waiting for the right time!”

“Yeah, or maybe he’s the author,” Soos suggested just as amicably.

However, as outright angry as he was over this revelation, Dipper was having none of it. “Or maybe he stole them from the author! Maybe the reason he has all those fake IDs is because he is a master criminal, and this machine is his master plan!”

“Augh! No, he’s not!” Amethyst protested fiercely. “We don’t even know what this machine does, much less why he has it or those dumb old journals!”

“That’s exactly it, Amethyst,” Garnet said tightly. “We don’t know about any of this. Stan never told anyone about any of it, not even you. He kept all of this so well-hidden for who knows how long now.”

“But one would have to wonder…” Pearl continued, a suspicious scowl crossing her features. “Why he would go to such great lengths to hide all of this in the first place?”

“I-I… I think this might be why…” Dipper said with a stunned gasp after having opened all three journals. He had arranged all of their connected center pages into what locked like the highly complicated blueprints to the very machine in front of them, and while that was alarming enough on its own, what the trio of books revealed as the blacklight was directed upon them was even more horrifying.

“I was wrong the whole time,” Dipper read from all three journals as everyone tensely crowded around them. ‘The machine was meant to create knowledge, but its too powerful. I was deceived and now it is too late. The device, if fully operational, could tear our universe apart! It must not fall into the wrong hands. If the clock ever reaches zero, our universe is doomed!”

A collective, fearful gasp rose up from the group upon hearing this, all of them taking in the journals’ dire warning at the exact same time. Clearly, whatever the machine before them actually did and what Stan or the Gems’ connection to it was, its purpose was a sinister one, meant to cause severe and absolute destruction on a very wide scale. And in everyone’s minds, the need to keep the universe safe and surviving far outweighed anything else, especially as they all looked up to the countdown timer right above them reading only one minute and thirty seconds.

“It’s the final countdown! Just like they always sung about!” Soos cried in apt terror.

“W-what do we do?!” Pearl exclaimed in sharp alarm. “How do we stop it?!”

“Like this!” Dipper pointed to another page of journal 1, which told of a manual override for shutting the machine off. “Come on! We have to shut it down!”

No one argued with this resolve as they all rushed into the massive room the machine itself was contained it. The swell of power emitting from it was becoming strong enough to result in miniature earthquakes, throwing the entire group off a bit, though that hardly deterred them from their incredibly essential mission.

“There! Quick!” Dipper exclaimed as he pointed out the override switches on the far side of the room. They were set up as a row of four keys, and as uncertain as they were in light of everything that was going on, Steven, Mabel, and Amethyst hung back from them as Dipper, Pearl, Garnet, and Soos readily ran up to them. The four of them turned the keys in exact unison, resulting in the machine’s overall switch to rise up from the ground in front of it in the form of a tall pole with a bright, glowing button resting on top of it. “That’s it! The shutdown switch!” Dipper shouted as everyone rushed over to it, knowing that they quite literally had not a second to waste. “This all stops… now!”

“DON’T TOUCH THAT BUTTON!” Everyone was quick to turn towards the door upon hearing this only to find none other than Stan himself standing there, breathless and alarmed at the sight of his nephew’s hand positioned directly over the switch that could very well end up ruining everything. For a moment, the room was filled with tense silence as the group looked to the conman none of them knew as well as they thought, their expressions mingled with distrust, anger, uncertainty, dread, and grief. Stan couldn’t help but feel somewhat guilty as he gaged all of these varying emotions, particularly those coming from his own niece and nephew, but even so, he knew there would be time to sort all of them out later. For now, the machine came first, no matter what. “Dipper, just back away,” Stan advised cautiously, taking a step forward. Dipper paid him no mind, keeping his hand poised above the switch as he sent his uncle a bitter glare, one that, at the very least, Garnet and Pearl shared as they shook their heads at the conman disapprovingly. “P-please,” Stan continued his appeal, his tone deeply earnest as he slowly approached the others. “Don’t press that shutdown button. You gotta trust me.”

“And I should trust you why?” Dipper asked caustically, only moving his hand away from the switch for a moment. “After you stole radioactive waste? After you lied to us all summer? I don’t even know who you are?!”

“Look, I know all this seems nuts,” Stan said as evenly as he could, though he couldn’t deny his nephew’s harsh words stung somewhat. “But I need that machine to stay on!”

“And why exactly would you need that?” Pearl asked quite crossly. “So you can sit back and laugh as the entire universe falls to complete and utter ruin thanks to your little doomsday device here!? A universe that Garnet, Amethyst, and I have dedicated our entire existences to protecting?! Oh but of course you wouldn’t care about that, now would you, Stan—if that is your real name—seeing as how you don’t care about anything, not even the wellbeing of our reality itself?!”

“W-what?” Stan asked, taken aback by such bold accusations. “No! You’ve got it all wrong! That’s not why—I’m not… T-that isn’t what I’m trying to do here, I promise. I just need a chance to explain, a-and you guys gotta believe me when I do! A-Amethyst!” The purple Gem flinched as he called her out, her expression incredibly hesitant as she finally made eye contact with him. “You’ll believe me, won’t you?”

Amethyst said nothing at first, especially as the others quickly glanced over at her, clearly putting her on the spot. The purple Gem shook her head as she gripped her arm, looking away from the conman uneasily as betrayed tears started to well up in her eyes. “S-Stan… I… I don’t-”

She was abruptly cut off by the sharp beep from Stan’s watch, eliciting a startled gasp from the conman as he knew what was coming. “O-oh no! Brace yourselves!” he warned just as another gravity anomaly began, by far the most powerful one yet.

In fact, this reversal was so strong that it was felt essentially all over town as the sun set over a landscape where almost nothing at all was properly tethered to the earth, almost as if it was a sign that the end was nigh. Yet the surge was by far the most powerful near the source of this anomaly itself: the machine. Stan, Dipper, Mabel, Soos, and Steven were all completely powerless to keep themselves down as they were lifted up freely into the air without any rhyme or direction at all. However, Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl managed to maintain their footing, their gems instantly adjusting to the shift in gravity around them as they watched the chaos unfurl above them.

As the machine’s computer announced that only 35 seconds remained, both Stan and Soos were pushed towards the far wall of the room while Dipper managed to land against a support beam and Steven found himself pressed against the side of the room. As he “landed”, the young Gem happened to notice a panel right next to him, one that bore his own, or rather, his mother’s gemstone upon it, with a large hallow right below it with the pattern of his shield imprinted on it. Despite everything else that was going on around him, Steven took pause upon seeing this, his eyes widening as he realized, beyond any shadow of a doubt that his mother, that his guardians even, had been involved with this machine at some point. But exactly what that involvement meant at such an intense, decisive moment like this, the young Gem had no idea.

Meanwhile on the ground, Garnet and Pearl both gasped as they looked back to the shutdown switch, which was still right in front of them. The pair nodded with firm resolve, before the Gem leader stepped forward, raising her hand to turn it off once and for all. “It’s time to end this,” she said brazenly, however, before she could slam her hand down on the switch, it was halted in the most unexpected of ways.

“Stop!” Amethyst shouted, throwing herself between Garnet and the switch and holding her arms out wide.

“Amethyst, what in the world are you doing?!” Pearl exclaimed in utter disbelief. “Let us get to that switch!”

“I-I…” the purple Gem hesitated, glancing back to the switch and then up to Stan as he continued wildly sailing through the air above. She took in a sharp breath as she pushed her pressing tears away, her hands in tight fists as she glared up at her two teammates fiercely. “N-no! I won’t! Yeah, I don’t understand any of this, and I really don’t understand why Stan never bothered to even tell me about it, b-but I know him and I know he’d never try to just… destroy the universe like some kind of crazy supervillain! He was always there for me, even when you guys and Rose weren’t! He’s like… o-one of the only people I can actually be real with, a-and even if he wasn’t real with me about all this, I still want to trust him!”

Upon hearing this, Stan glanced over in Amethyst’s direction, his eyes wide as they met the purple Gems’. While her expression conveyed plenty of grief and anger, she still offered him a small nod of confirmation, showing that she meant what she said and that she was willing to stand against even her own teammates to prove it. And while the conman wanted to give her all of the thanks and gratitude he could for this show of loyalty, he didn’t get the chance as Garnet stepped closer to Amethyst, her imposing form towering over the smaller Gem as she spoke rigidly.

“Amethyst, move, now.”

The purple Gem shook her head slowly, her glare returning as the gemstone on her chest as she realized she had just crossed the point of no return. Still she hardly cared; she had made her choice, and even if it was one largely based off emotions and little else, she was going to follow it, no matter what the consequences might be. “Make me!” she growled, pulling her whip out and lashing it out wide enough to entangle both of them before tossing them against the far wall hard. And as confused as Garnet and Pearl were by this, Amethyst rushed forward all the same, ready to do whatever she had to to keep them away from that switch in what little time was left.

As the Gems were lost amidst their on conflict on the ground, up in the air, things were still in absolute upheaval. However, as he tried to regain some semblance of direction, Dipper happened to notice that, only a few feet above the switch, Mabel had gotten herself tangled by the ankle by a stay chord, conveniently enough putting her in the radius of the switch in place of the Gems being displaced from it. “Mabel!” he shouted over to her as she looked to him amidst trying to untangle herself, clearly alarmed. “Hurry! Shut it down!”

While still rather lost amidst everything going on at once, Mabel nodded, doing as her brother had instructed as she crawled along the wire down to the switch itself. “Huh?” Amethyst glanced over her shoulder with a gasp just as Garnet and Pearl were picking themselves up off the ground. “W-wait! No! Mabel, don’t!”

“Y-yeah, stop!” Stan shouted from his place in the air. “Please, Mabel, you gotta-” The conman was cut off as Soos suddenly barreled into him, pushing him back even further to keep him from reaching the switch. “Augh! Soos! What are you doing?!” Stan growled as he struggled against his rebellious handyman. “I gave you an order!”

“Sorry, Mr. Pines—if that is your real name,” Soos apologized as he continued shoving Stan back. “But I have a new mission now! Protecting these kids!”

“Soos, you idiot! Let me go!” Stan yelled, though his struggle was made even more difficult as Dipper launched himself off the wall towards him and joined Soos in restraining him. At the same time, Amethyst turned back towards Garnet and Pearl as they stood, both of them looking to their teammate in staunch disapproval. Even so, the purple Gem kept a firm hold on her whip, returning their glare as she steeled her resolve to stand against them, no matter what.

“Amethyst, this is ridiculous!” Pearl huffed hotly, though she still didn’t summon her weapon. “You saw what the journals said: that machine could destroy the entire universe if we don’t stop it! Your friendship with Stan doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as keeping the planet safe!”

“W-what the heck do those dumb journals even know!?” Amethyst protested harshly. “Our gems are on that machine! If that’s not proof we had something to do with it, then I don’t know what is! So why would we wanna shut it down if its something we were apart of!?”

“Because it’s a mistake,” Garnet said coldly. “A mistake that should have never been allowed to get this far.”

“A mistake?” Amethyst growled, shapeshifting into her much larger Purple Puma form so she could take them both on at once. “You mean like me?!”

In her torn anger, the purple Gem attacked, launching herself at Garnet and Pearl in an attempt to pin them to the wall. The Gem leader was the first to summon her weapon, sending a brutal punch Amethyst’s way, though as furious and passionate as she was, it wasn’t enough to knock her away. Pearl nearly summoned her spear as well, though she stopped short upon noticing journal 3 lying on the ground right at her feet. The white Gem gasped as she managed to tuck out from underneath Amethyst’s hold, though she wasn’t able to fully break past her as she narrowly grabbed the journal, frantically flipping through it for any other options. Fortunately she quickly found exactly was looking for in the form of a page detailing a backup override switch, one that, based on her quick reading of the page, could only be activated by a certain magical shield that had once belonged to a certain pink Gem. Or rather, a shield that now belonged to said Gem’s son.

“S-Steven…” Pearl whispered, her eyes wide as she looked up amidst Garnet attempting to push Amethyst back. The white Gem was quick to find Steven, still stuck against the side wall as he anxiously watched the ongoing midair struggle between Stan, Soos, and Dipper. And, conveniently enough, he was positioned right next to the shield switch the journal detailed. “Steven!” Pearl shouted to him, still trying to break beyond Amethyst’s steadfast hold. “On the wall next to you is another shutdown switch! Use your shield and turn it off, now!”

“W-what?!” Steven asked over the growing din coming from the charging machine behind him.

“Shut it off, Steven!” Garnet ordered fiercely, landing another blow against her indignant, rebellious teammate.

“Wha—S-Steven, no!” Amethyst cried, looking to the young Gem desperately. “Don’t do it!”

“I-I… I don’t-” Steven attempted to protest, absolutely torn between the intense conflict between his guardians. However, Stan was quick to cut him off upon realizing exactly what position the young Gem was in.

“K-kid!” he yelled over Soos and Dipper pushing him away. “Listen to Amethyst! Do not throw that shield of yours into that switch!”

“Steven!” Dipper shouted down to the young Gem. “Listen to Garnet and Pearl and turn that thing off!”

“B-but… but I…” Steven trailed off, clearly afraid and distraught as he looked back to the machine, only mere seconds away from activating at this point. The young Gem knew that no matter what choice he ended up making, no one would be left happy from it, whether he left it alone as Stan and Amethyst hoped he would, or he followed Garnet, Pearl, and Dipper’s orders to knock his shield into the switch. In fact, he was so torn that he couldn’t even think of so much as summoning his shield as he instead stared at the switch, as if it had the conclusion that he would ultimately have to reach for himself.  

“Oh for crying out loud!” Dipper groaned in severe aggravation upon noticing Steven’s clear hesitance at the exact wrong time. Fortunately though, he wasn’t their only option. “Mabel! Press the red button! Shut it down!”

“No, you can’t!” Stan protested, pushing his nephew away as he looked to his niece pleadingly. “You gotta trust me!”

For a moment, Mabel was silent as she looked between her brother and her uncle, both of them fighting against each other as she found herself metaphorically caught in between. Clinging onto the switch as she was, the button was right within her reach; it would be so incredibly easy to just reach out and press it. And yet… as much as she knew she should press it, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. At least not yet. “G-Grunkle Stan…” she let out a small, choking sob, one that showed every bit of confusion and heartache she had been holding in for the past several hours. Her tears were unrestrained by gravity as they floated up, the brightness of the machine behind them making them almost glow as they rose into the open air. “I-I don’t even know i-if you’re my grunkle!”

Stan let out a small, ashamed sigh at this, hating that the kids had found out about all of this in such a way, hating that he had lied to them for so long about it all in the first place, and mostly hating himself for putting them in such a terrible, terrible spot at all. “Then listen to me,” he began, his tone firm yet clearly remorseful. “Remember this morning when I said I wanted to tell you guys something?”

Before the conman had a chance to elaborate any further a sudden burst of energy pulsated from the machine, knocking just about everyone back, save for Mabel and Steven as they managed to hold onto their respective switches. Still, the Gems were thrown against the wall, with Amethyst still keeping Garnet and Pearl held back, while Stan, Soos, and Dipper landed high against the exact same way, the lack of gravity keeping them pressed tightly against it. Upon seeing the ferocity of the machine’s power, both Steven and Mabel were quick to react, with the former finally working up the nerve to summon his shield as the latter slowly, shakily raised her hand over the button.

“Steven, please!” Amethyst begged the young Gem as she watched him position his shield near the backup switch. “You just gotta listen to me and Stan on this one!”

“Yeah, kid, just hear me out!” Stan assured as he looked between both Steven and Mabel pleadingly. “This morning, I just wanted to say that you’re gonna hear some bad things about me, a-and some of them are true. But trust me. Everything I’ve ever worked for, everything I care about, its all for this family!”

“Your family?!” Pearl scoffed harshly at this claim, glaring up towards the conman. “You put your family, this town, the entire universe in danger with this… this doomsday machine, and you expect anyone to believe an appeal like that!”

“Exactly!” Dipper readily, angrily agreed. “Mabel, Steven, what if he’s lying?! That thing could destroy the universe! Listen to your heads!”

“look into my eyes, both of you!” Stan said, far less incensed than the others as he glanced between the conflicted pair. “Do either of you really think I’m a bad guy?”

Mabel and Steven both froze as they did just that, both of them making eye contact with the conman and seeing not anger or vengeance in his eyes, but rather desperation, vulnerability, and sadness. Sadness was among the chief of these, a type of inner grief and guilt that seemed to be decades old and carried some kind of story behind it, though what story that was, neither one of them knew. Still, it was all nothing less than completely genuine, especially as they noticed, for perhaps one of the first times to their knowledge, desperate, pleading tears start to well up in the conman’s eyes. Tears that were enough to at the very least, convince Steven to go with his gut instinct rather than the command of two out of three of his guardians. No matter where that instinct might lead.

“N-no…” the young Gem whispered, his eyes wide as he kept them on Stan rather than even glancing over to his guardians as his shield dissipated into thin air. “No, I don’t…”

“Steven, you can’t be serious!” Dipper snapped hotly at such a foolish decision. “He’s lying! Why can’t you see that?!”

“Honestly, Steven! You’re being just as outrageous as Amethyst about this!” Pearl exclaimed, making her disapproval quite clear though even so, Steven didn’t retract it. In fact, he didn’t say much of anything at all as he looked back to the switch, at his own mother’s insignia resting upon it, and choosing, just this once, to go with what he felt was right. Not what the Gems believed, not what his mother would have believed, but what he believed.

And as far as Steven was concerned, that was the absolute best he could do.

“There’s not much time left!” Garnet warned as the countdown clock began audibly counting down.

“10.”

“Mabel! You can still stop this!” Dipper implored his sister, hoping that she’d make the right choice where Steven hadn’t. “Shut it down, now!”

“9.”

“M-Mabel, please!” Stan begged, a few of his tears starting to fall down, or up, rather as he realized he could very well lose 30 years of tireless work in a single, sorrowful instance.

“8.”

“Hit the button, Mabel!” Pearl shouted to Mabel as her and Garnet pushed against Amethyst harder than ever.

“7.”

“D-don’t listen to them!” Amethyst yelled back, finding it harder and harder to keep her frantic teammates at bay.

“6.”

Mabel sucked in a tearful breath as she looked back to the button, knowing that everything now rested solely upon her shoulders. Once again, she looked over at Steven, who simply returned her distraught expression solemnly, not bothering to tell her what to do as he knew just as well as she did that this was her choice to make alone.

“5.”

And so instead, she glanced back up at her brother. His hands were in tight fists and his expression was intense and hostile as the current from the machine blew his bands up just a bit to reveal his birthmark. Overall, his entire manner adamant and angry as he nodded with the silent command to hit the switch. She understood well just how betrayed and infuriated Dipper was likely feeling; after all, she felt quite betrayed herself. Yet as she looked back to Stan, she found that she couldn’t share her brother’s anger, no matter how hard she tried. Because regardless of his darkened past or his menacing machine, this was still Stan. This was still the conman who flashed tourists goofy, winning smiles and won just about everyone over with his charm and wit. This was still her uncle, who rustled her hair and laughed at her jokes and encouraged her silliness and creativity. This was still Stan, who gave her some of the warmest, most affectionate hugs she had ever known, who still beamed at her with pride of her accomplishments, who comforted her and did everything he could to make her tears stop whenever they showed up. This was still her uncle, and he still loved her.

“4.”

And if there was nothing else that Mabel knew at such a stark, intense, impossible moment such as this, it was that, and that alone.

“G-Grunkle Stan…” she began, looking to him with tearful eyes before lifting her hands away from the switch entirely, making her choice as she floated up into the open air before the machine in complete acceptance of it.

“3.”

“I trust you…”

“2.”

“Mabel! Are you crazy!?” Dipper shouted fiercely, unable to believe that Mabel would, after everything that had happened and everything they had seen, still decide to side with the lying, duplicitous conman, of all people. “We’re all gonna-”

“1.”

“No!” Garnet and Pearl shouted in unison, finally breaking past Amethyst as they rushed forward, leaving their teammate fallen, exhausted and unable to do anything else to keep them back. However, there was no time left for them to reach the switch as the counter finally hit zero.

And then, all at once, everything exploded.

Before anyone could even think, a blinding, incredibly powerful light ripped forth from the machine, one that filled not just the basement, not just the shack, but Gravity Falls entirely. Those in the room themselves only had time to let out fearful screams as they were swallowed up by this light, tossed about by its intensity to the point that none of them were even aware of what came next.

In the span of what seemed like ages, the entire world seemed to be consumed by white nothingness, with everyone hanging adrift in its sway. Still, somewhere amidst it all, a treasured photograph shattered, kids, Gems, a handyman, and a conman all floated about freely, and a machine—or rather, the very fabric of reality ripped itself apart. And yet, reality was not so easily strewn to pieces. For as quickly as it had erupted into chaos, it wove itself right back together again, leaving only minor rips and tears in its wake as everything at last came to a standstill.

Gravity resumed its place in nature, dropping everything roughly back into their proper places. Within the shack’s basement, however, everything had been completely undone. The machine had torn itself to pieces of nothing more than battered metal and broken wires, though it was somehow still operational as its center glowed in an eerie blue light. In the aftermath of the chaos they had all just been consumed by, it took everyone a second to reacclimate themselves, but when they did, it was still something of a struggle to pick themselves up off the floor to see what was happening before them.

For within the light of the machine itself, the silhouette of a single figure soon appeared, one that steadily approached it until it finally emerged. He was consumed by the shadows of the room as well as his own heavy, dark, tattered attire, which included a mask, hood, and scarf, all of which concealed his identity completely. The entire room was held in a tentative silence as they watched this mysterious stranger walk forward, not saying anything to anyone as he walked up to the fallen journal 1. As he reached out to pick it up, he first paused, placing a six-fingered hand against the one on the book’s cover before claiming it and slipping it into the pocket of his long overcoat. The Gems shared a soft gasp as they watched it, gaining the first inclinations as to who exactly this mystery person was, but even so, everyone else was largely lost as the looked to him in apt confusion as he prepared to remove his face coverings.

“W-what…?” Dipper whispered, almost too afraid to break the ongoing silence amidst his own disbelief. “W-who… who is that…?”

“The author of the journals…” Stan answered just as starkly, his eyes wide as the figure finally unveiled his face, revealing something none of them had been expecting. He was rather old, roughly in his late 60’s or so though he hardly looked it based on his relative lack of wrinkles and rough, rugged 5 o’clock shadow. His hair was greyed and somewhat unkempt, with a lighter streak of silver near his ears and long sideburns framing his face. He wore a pair of worn glasses with a crack in one of the frames and his expression was serious, almost gravely so, though even beyond that one thing was alarmingly clear:

He was almost identical to Stan.

Which of course, the conman gave as brief an explanation for as any as he confirmed exactly who the mysterious, long-elusive author really was. “My brother…”

To be continued…

 Next:

#jen writes #universe falls #gravity falls #steven universe #crossover #au #fanfiction #not what he seems #dipper #mabel #steven #stan #garnet #amethyst #pearl #soos #ford #mystery shack #crystal gems #other characters are in here but whatever #keyword is portal #my body and soul are wrecked rn #imma take a break and chill for a bit

[thegreymoon]

Broker

God, I love her 🤣🤣

The best advice! She’s my idol! 

***

Oh my God, please be the second love interest for her and not her idiotic sister 😭😭

He’s a hilarious dork and I like him a lot, but the idiot sister ruins all good things. 

***

LYX who?? Because, god, she’s beautiful and I’m in love with this outfit 😭😭

(Sorry, LYX, baby, I still love you, but HYX will be your time to shine and be the prettiest in any given room!)

***

LMAO, these are the pettiest, most toxic people 🤣🤣

She’s having afternoon tea!! HOW DARE!! 😱😱

Anyway, no wonder this show got itself endlessly cut and delayed. There they are, with the premise of how Chinese labs are just as good and even better than the Western ones, and then they dumped their lead character in a workplace that is just as toxic and as corrupt, but the harassment this time is of the domestic variety. I can’t imagine the censorship board was too pleased. 

***

They deliberately did not tell her about the important meeting, smh 😠 Can’t wait to see them all eventually get fired. 

***

God, I want QJN to grab that imbecile of a secretary by the hair and slam her stupid face into the table. This show is making me feel an unhealthy amount of rage. 

***

I love him so much 😭😭

I mean, I realise he has ulterior motives but he is still the only one looking out for her in this vipers’ nest.  

***

THEY ARE KILLING MEEEEEE 😭😭

***

I WILL CELEBRATE WHEN YOU ASSHOLES GET FIRED/REPRIMANDED/DEMOTED 😡😡😡

Who else is watching this show????? PLEASE COME AND SCREAM WITH ME!! 

***

Oh, baby 😢

Do you need help disposing of the bodies of your enemies? BECAUSE I CAN MAKE FREE TIME AND GET MY HANDS ON A SHOVEL 🤬🤬

***

So, what prevented her ridiculous sister from calling her back to tell her that she needs an invitation when she hung up too fast on her? Or, idk, texting her, like a normal person would do? 

No love for nonsense. 

***

Ooh, looks like Su Qian is going to get into trouble sooner than I thought! 😋

***

LMAO, shut the fuck up, bitch.

I can’t believe she brought out her stupid sob story as validation for bullying and literally sabotaging a colleague in order to cover up falsifying information for her own personal gain. 

***

Oh, you can shut up too. 

How was your little interrogation in any way relevant to this situation? And if you must know, yes, you are wrong. Yes, you may have your reasons that make lying, stealing and manipulating honest people worth it to you, but just because the end justifies the means for you, that does not make it right. 

***

Tell him, Queen!

Here, you dropped your crown while shutting down the bs 👑

***

Careful, cutie, your mental instability and questionable morality are showing 🙄

Nobody was holding a gun to anyone’s head, they falsified data for their own material benefit, wtf. Also, nobody held a gun to their head to force them to alienate a new colleague and create a hostile working environment for her. Also, Jianing is right. She can understand why she did it, but that doesn’t mean that she should let her get away with it. 

***

OK, so my attraction to him is dead in the water. Stick to the mentally unstable sociopath, Jianing! 

The idiot sister remains disgusting, though. Filming someone in a compromising situation without their knowledge and consent to post and mock them online is absolutely repulsive and should be very much illegal. The least she deserves for this is to get fired and blacklisted. 

***

The fact that we are supposed to read her as ~cute~ and ~fun~ and ~quirky~ while this repulsive violation of privacy is played off for laughs is beyond disgusting. 

This show is lucky the main storyline is not just watchable but actually good, or I would send it straight to the bin. 

***

Bye, asshole.

Don’t let the door hit you on your way out. 

***

Oh, well, you will certainly be well matched!

There is so much academic misconduct that you can get up to together! 

***

LMAO, I very much doubt she will be losing any sleep over shutting the likes of you down.

Go fuck yourself. 

***

I can’t stand this spoiled, repulsive brat who has never faced a single consequence in her entire privileged life. 

***

LMAOOO, they are making his spying so easy for him 🤣🤣

#luo yunxi #victoria song #broker #broker spoilers #broker ep03 #broker ep04

[jjheejz]

What is Fate?

[Part 3/5] After filming, before broadcast

*Rather than pointing out what fate pointers there were, will just point out the internal process building up on this Fate of a real life novel*

- Two actors, who went deep into their character, ends up probably having feelings for each other, as themselves. Take a quote I came across in fanworks when I was into The Untamed, "It just happens that the person I fell for, is a guy."

- Filming ended on 23 September 2020. Immediately, both of them went to opposite directions in China for holiday. Yea. Holiday. Separately or together, it's probably the latter... To take a breather departing their characters, or actually went on a date together [Dong Yang Lake saga].

- Because of [ZZH’s weibo rebellion saga], it was probably the reason why GJ did not attend ZZH’s first (mini) concert on 18 October 2020. There might also be other reasons/factors eg. GJ being affirmative (for someone who can’t lie) in the interview later that he had work that day, still it was broad daylight obvious what state ZZH was in at his concert. 

- ZZH is called 'princess' for a reason as well. He wore branded clothings, has houses in different states, picked up a we-all-know-is-expensive sport etc, has one of his best buddies be his personal assistant, is under the care of Zhao Wei etc. Was so extremely passionate in basketball, he won MVP, got injured but had to film another drama and missed the crucial period for recovery, it became a permanent damage and he could no longer play basketball. He is a man with huge achievements and money, but with both emotional and physical scars.

GJ on the other hand, can share with you when is the best promotion period to buy something, bargain for a 50% cut and regret not cutting more, has a "发财" phone case for years (aka get rich, this word has connotation of 'suddenly get rich' as well, believe it or not, Chinese New Year's default greeting literally is not "Happy New Year", it's "恭喜发财 (Gong Xi Fa Cai) Hope you get rich" - Yes, 'Gong' is also inside that greeting) and specifically advice you that a red cover is much 灵 (will come true) than a green one. Has a box of facial masks and only use the expensive ones for big events, which he had yet to finish using in his 5 years after purchase. He is a happy go lucky man with little achievements but a big appetite for perseverance.

= There is a feeling of not being up to ZZH's standard, so GJ mentioned before he feels like he is Nobita, ZZH indirectly mentioned before he is Shizuka [Doraemon saga]

= This is also another difference between starting out as an independent studio and signing under a big agency (during filming, ZZH had already moved to an independent studio, what I'm referring here is before he was independent).

- But still, despite these differences in background, they accepted each other, and their own feelings. [One night in Nan Jing Saga] + [Blue heart Saga] + [Blue boy aka the drama: Love, Simon saga]

Summaries for sagas mentioned above can be found in link here

- However, this is an industry and country that does not tolerate this kind of relationship. [Cross reference to Addicted's real life actors Saga - 5 years ban from contacting each other] + [Cross reference to The Untamed Saga, where solo fans expect their bias to be completely torn away from the other actor]

- So both of them had to be low key. And act like they weren't close. In this pre-broadcast promotion interview especially. (But it's also the interview with the most ZZH cuts - ZZH probably was on daredevil mode. Also had the most decipherable body language showing they had a thing).

Bonus

- The production budget for WOH was a mere USD7.8mil, in comparison to other production budget: HYX is USD38mil, The Untamed was USD46.5mil. This also meant that WOH had limited Marketing and Promotion, so the drama quietly went up on YouKu.

🌻To returning readers: Updated info are in purple for your easy references!

🌸Part 1 - Before filming here

🌸Part 2 - During filming here

🌸Part 4 - Broadcast/Promotion period here

🌸Part 5 - WOH concert and after

🌻[Ongoing updates] Will add if I remember or found new ones

🌻For long posts like this, I tend to look back for grammar and phrasing mistakes (sometimes info updates), so when you reblog for future references, do keep in mind that there may be updates in the original post! :)

#shl #woh #langlangding #zzh #张哲瀚 #junzhe #zhang zhehan #龚俊 #gj #gong jun