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hxlyhead-harpies · 3 years

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Eventuality (C.D.)

Requested: Yes

Pairing: Cedric Diggory x Reader

Summary: The reader pretends she doesn’t care that her best friend has moved on

Warnings: None

Word Count: 1.6k

A/n: this gif of cedric tho.... i fell in love

You watched as he broke the surface, gasping for air and pulling her along with him. The crowd roared as he was pulled from the water with his hand wrapped around her waist. He pumped his fist in the air in victory, him having been the first out of the lake. She threw her arms around his neck in celebration and you pretended that it didn’t sting. You looked away with your arms crossed, not being able to bear the sight before you.

Cedric and you had a complicated past. You had been friends, though that was hardly the proper word to describe it, at some point. But as of late you were strangers. The friendship had always been dysfunctional as you were in a different house, but it had always been special. Slytherin and Hufflepuff friendships were always unique but steadfast as both houses highly regarded loyalty. The difference between your houses had always been apparent in your relationship with Cedric but it was valued. You taught a young and shy Cedric how to stand up for himself and he reminded you that you were not like your parents and that you could choose your own path.

There had always been an underlying tension in the friendship. Lingering stares and hugs that lasted too long indicated that there may have been something more to it. You had always assumed that you and Cedric would be an eventuality, that someday you would finally make your way to each other. But the beginning of sixth year had proven you wrong.

Cedric had boarded the train with a lovestruck look in his eyes and began telling you stories of Cho Chang. The whole ride to Hogwarts he described her long, shiny hair and her beautiful amber-brown eyes. He spoke of her intelligence and wit, describing her grace and humor. You sat through it all in pain, a fake smile plastered across your face. You tried not to cry when he told you that he planned on asking her to Hogsmeade and you tried to act happy for him.

Your friendship had become strained in the following weeks. He spent every waking moment with Cho and you pulled away, not being able to bear watching the boy you loved chase someone else. The final nail in the coffin was when he told you that he was entering his name in the goblet.

“You can’t honestly be serious,” you had practically shrieked. Cedric furrowed his eyebrows.

“What? Do you not think I can handle it?” he asked, anger seeping into his voice.

“No, it’s not that! It’s dangerous you idiot, you could die,” you responded. Cedric scoffed.

“It’s not that serious, I probably won’t get chosen anyway,” he said, crossing his arms angrily.

“It is that serious you git! Did you not hear Dumbledore,” you replied, “And of course you’ll get picked. It couldn’t be anyone else.” Cedric had rolled his eyes.

“I think you’re overreacting,” he said, his voice venomous. You huffed and stepped forward, pressing your finger to his chest.

“You do not get to tell me when I am overreacting,” you growled, “And I am just trying to tell you that-”

“You don’t get to try and tell me what to do! Not after avoiding me!” he had shouted back. You looked away and bite the inside of your cheek, trying to hold back your anger.

“I haven’t been avoiding you, you’ve just been busy running around with your little girlfriend,” you spat out. It was a lie, you had been avoiding him. But you wanted to say something that might urge him to apologize. You had no such luck.

“Don’t talk about her like that,” Cedric said, narrowing his eyes. You shook your head and looked away.

“Whatever Cedric,” you said. His eyes widened and he stepped back. You hadn’t called him by his full name in years. You had a vast array of silly nicknames you used instead, and it was a low blow to use his given name.

“Whatever,” he said before shaking his head and storming off.

The two of you hadn’t spoken since then, only glaring at each other in the halls. You truly and deeply missed him but he seemed fine without you. He was doing well in the challenges, he and Cho seemed to be attached at the hip, and you had watched him smile and laugh at the Yule Ball. It was obvious that he had never needed you in the way that you needed him.

Once all the other champions came out of the water everyone began to vacate the stands. A crowd formed around Cedric and he was smiling wide, basking in the attention. You rolled your eyes, remembering all the days you had teased him for being an attention hog. Cedric thrived on validation and you assumed that his ego was receiving a hefty boost. Cedric turned and his eyes snapped to yours for a quick moment. He seemed to have frozen in place, his mouth hanging open slightly. You couldn’t bear to look away, your heart still yearning for him. Someone grabbed his shoulder to congratulate him and he tore his eyes away. You sighed and began your trek back to the castle.

You were in the library later that day, avoiding the sounds of celebration coming from the Great Hall. All anyone could talk about was Cedric and you didn’t think that your heart could handle it. You were reading when you sensed someone watching you. You turned around quickly to see Cedric idling by a bookshelf, seemingly debating whether or not to talk to you. When he noticed that you saw him he sent you a brilliant smile that made your heart clench. But you knew him too well and you could sense his lack of confidence.

“Hey,” he said softly. You gave him a curt nod before turning back to your book. “I saw you by the lake today,” he said, looking down at his hands.

“Yes, Fleur and I have developed a nice friendship and I went to support her,” you explained stiffly. It was true, you and Fleur were close, but you truly went to make sure that Cedric would be okay. But you’d never let him know that. He blinked in surprise.

“Oh. I just thought- never mind,” he said, looking away. You snapped your book closed and looked up.

“Thought what?” you asked sharply. Cedric rubbed the back of his neck.

“I thought that you might have come to watch me,” he admitted sheepishly. You scoffed and crossed your arms.

“You thought that I was watching you? Don’t flatter yourself…” You said. Once again it was a lie, but you desperately felt as if you needed to shield yourself from the boy in front of you. Cedric frowned and looked away. He stood up and rapped his knuckles against the table.

“Well um… Sorry to bother you then,” he said. He turned to walk away. He lingered for a moment by the shelves. “What happened to us?” he asked softly, not turning back to look at you. You sniffled and looked down, fiddling with the pages of your book.

“I thought that we were something that we weren’t,” you said softly. Cedric slowly rotated so that he was facing you.

“What?” he breathed out softly. You sighed and avoided his gaze.

“I thought… I thought that we might have been more than friends. But I was clearly wrong and I let it ruin everything,” you answered. Cedric’s face seemed to break and he ran a hasty hand over it.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said softly after a moment of silence, “I thought my feelings were one-sided so I tried to move on.” His confession hung in the air as you tried to process what he said. “I thought that you could never love me back so I chased Cho instead,” he said. You furrowed your eyebrows.

“But you like her. You pulled her out of the lake today,” you pointed out, unable to believe him. He sighed.

“It’s not like that. She and I are friends. And after you stopped talking to me, she’s pretty much the only real friend I have. She’s important to me, but not in that way,” he explained.

“But she’s so perfect! How could you not like her?” you exclaimed, “She’s smart and she’s so gorgeous,” you said. Cedric took a step closer.

“But she’s not you. And you’re all those things too. You are so unbelievably smart, smarter than I’ll ever be and you’re beautiful you know that?” You just gaped at him. “Please believe me,” he pleaded, walking to stand directly next to your chair. You pushed out your seat suddenly and stood chest to chest with the boy.

“I want to believe you,” you said softly, “But how can I know for sure?” Cedric rested his forehead against yours and cupped your cheek.

“Let me prove it,” he murmured. You nodded softly, staring into his beautiful gray eyes. Slowly, he leaned forward, brushing his lips against yours. He tilted back, a question in his eyes asking if it was okay. You grabbed his collar and pulled him back down towards you, years of pent up longing finally surfacing. The kiss was sweet and tender, his love shining through. You wished that you hadn’t spent months apart and that you had been able to tell him how you felt earlier. But it turned out that you had been right all along; no matter what separate roads you and Cedric traveled down, you’d always find each other eventually.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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newcaptainofsquad9 · 3 years

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I Can’t Handle You Being Back~Chou Tzuyu x black! fem! reader {4}

Parts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Pairing: Tzuyu x reader

Summary: You’re still acting careful around Tzuyu as the both of you start to practice more and grow closer as you both had did five years ago. Your rekindling friendship starts to bloom to something more as you guy's duo performance at JYPEs showcase crawled closer, your feelings start to grow into something more until someone gets in the way.

Word Count: 2, 917

Writer's Note: Chapter 4! I hope yall enjoy and keep the comments coming, I'm glad you're loving the fic. If you have any requests send them my way and if you sent some in I'll get to them soon.

Another music show performance of I Can’t Stop Me drained me for the entire day. We arrived back to the dorms and I collapsed in my bed immediately and groaned while Jeongyeon flopped on right beside me.

“So, how’d I do this time?” I asked with a muffle caused by the pillow.

Jeongyeon nudged her shoulder against me.

“You did amazing as always,” she said. “Now are you really going to stay in bed? It’s not even eight yet.”

“No, no! Y/N the day has just begun!” Sana shouted, jumping onto the other side of the bed, squishing me in between her and Jeongyeon. “We’ve got so much planned!”

I’m able to turn onto my back to meet Sana’s face clouded in over excitement.

“Like what?” I said.

The moment the words leave my mouth, Dahyun and Nayeon strolled into the room with huge grins on their faces.

“We’re all playing games!” Nayeon announced. “Mina’s getting her switch step up now!”

“You got to join us Y/N!” Sana said as she wrapped me in her arms.

“Fine!” I said as I struggled a bit in her grip. “Just let me get up already.”

Jeongyeon’s already on her feet, pushing a giggly Sana playfully while she helps me to my feet.

“So,” I said as the five of us trek down stairs. “What are we playing?”

“Well, I kind of stalked your Instagram again and found your Twitch account,” Sana said, rather innocently with her hands behind her back. “I found that you love Dragon ball fighterZ so I begged Mina to buy it!”

“We both found it Sana,” Nayeon groaned.

They both bicker a bit; Jeongyeon and I met eyes with faces matching in confusion.

“You could have just asked instead of stalked,” I said.

“I know,” Sana said. “I just didn’t know how to ask. I know you’ve been with us for almost a month now, but it’s pretty crazy to have you here after five years.”

Sana’s eyes cut to the floor. Her excited demeanor now replaced with something more reserved and sheepish. I take her hand with a grin before shaking her gently.

“And I’m not going anywhere anytime soon OK?” I declared.

Sana nodded and pulled me into a bear hug before she skipped over to the carpet of the living room where Chaeyoung and Mina sat putting the Switch together.

Tzuyu, Jihyo and Momo sat on the couch facing Mina, Chaeyoung and the television. My eyes landed on Tzuyu, nothing but a smile spreads across her face. It’s not huge or anything, yet I still don’t know how to act around her. She defended me a few nights ago, not only in front of Onces but the entire world: it set the entire internet a blaze. Of course the loyal Onces stayed true and cheered Tzuyu and I on in helpful ways. (There are some that are already shipping us and dubbing us “Rush Hour line” due to whatever reasons, even though Tzuyu’s not from China and---they got the spirit but it’s still tone deaf and a bit racist on both of our parts.)

Then of course the netizens had their take on it, but I don’t pay attention to them that much anymore.

“You could sit here if you want, Y/N,” Jihyo said as she gestured to the spot between her and Tzuyu.

Tzuyu nodded, solidifying my decision as I take the seat.

Nayeon sat beside Momo and purposely covered the gap of space between her and Jihyo while eyeing Jeongyeon.

“Oh, Jeongyeon no more room,” Nayeon said. “Guess you’ll have to sit in my lap.”

Jeongyeon shook her head, yet the redness of her cheeks remained. She slapped Nayeon’s arm.

“Quit playing,” she whined, then whispered something to Nayeon, who moved her arms immediately and smirked.

I look between Jihyo and Tzuyu, trying to ask what’s the deal between those two. Jihyo caught on as she leaned in towards me with a giggle.

“They’ve somewhat had a thing since pre debut,” she explained. “They love each other to death, but it’s really complicated at times.”

“Oh, makes a lot of sense,” I whispered.

The living room filled with the opening music to Dragon Ball FighterZ blasting around us.

“All right!” Chaeyoung announced as she hopped up. “Who’s ready for the greatest tournament the world will never witness?”

“Why would it be never Chae?” Tzuyu asked with a snicker.

“Because we aren’t playing it for Time to Twice or V live or anything,” Chaeyoung said. “Unless you guys want to.”

A collective unit of no’s came from everyone.

“Week got a week off before that stupid KBS JYP special we have to rehearse for,” Nayeon groaned. “I need time off from the cameras and time to get drunk.”

She rose to her feet, and disappeared in the kitchen.

“Grab me and beer too!” Jeongyeon called.

“Are you guys even playing?” I asked.

“Nope,” Nayeon and Jeongyeon said in unison as they each cracked open their beers respectfully.

“What about the rest of you?” I said. “I know Sana happened to spur this on during the last minute.”

“Oh I’m defiantly playing,” Chaeyoung said as she wrapped her arms around Mina. “Mina is too, right babe?”

Mina giggled and nodded.

“I’ve been playing since the game dropped, but I only played it with my brother back in Japan so I haven’t tried it out on Switch yet,” Mina explained. “Playing on camera won’t be a bad idea for future uploads for Once.”

“I’m playing too!” Sana said with a grin. “What about you Dubu?”

Dahyun shook her head.

“Nope, I think I’ll kick back, and cheer you on as much as I can,” Dahyun said as Sana wrapped her arms around her.

“I’ll sit this out too,” Jihyo said. “It’ll be interesting to see how long Nayeon and Jeongyeon stay sober this time.”

Nayeon gives Jihyo the finger; Jihyo pushed her playfully and I turn to Tzuyu, who’s eyes were on me then averted to the TV.

“You playing too?” I asked, while trying not to seem like I caught her wondering eyes.

Tzuyu shrugged.

“Why not?” she said. “As long as I can play against Chae first.”

Chaeyoung let out a roar.

“You’re on Tzu!”

***

A few hours crawled past: Dragon Ball FighterZ night escalated with Mina and I going up against each other with a tied set. It’s 3 to 3, this game would settle. Sana, Jihyo and Tzuyu huddled up behind me while Dahyun, Chaeyoung and Momo rallied behind Mina; Jeongyeon and Nayeon were slumped on the couch, cheering us both on when they could.

“C’mon babe, you got this!” Chaeyoung shouted.

I bit down on my lip as Mina zoned out my final character, Goku with her own, Vegeta. This was not only a stressful, but the final fight was reflective of Goku and Vegeta’s rivalry that ran deep in the anime. My heart pounded in my ears as the time of the round continued to slip by as I waited for any mistake. Mina didn’t yield as she fired the energy blasts my way. I blocked every one, even through Chaeyoung’s insistent cheering. My hands started to twitch and I took a deep breath.

“You got it Y/N! Just focus!”

My body jolted at who shouted just as loud as Chaeyoung: Tzuyu.

I moved, jumped over Mina’s blasts and then she vanished. Vegeta appeared behind Goku, aiming to make the finishing blow. My finger almost slipped from the analog stick, but I blocked and reflected the hits Mina tried. There’s the opening I needed! I struck. Getting Vegeta up in a simple combo and ending it with a level 1 special move to ensure victory.

“Nooooooo!” Chaeyoung groaned.

“Damn,” Mina said. “Great stuff Y/N. Good games.”

We shook hands, then giggled it off with a tight hug.

“Great job Y/N!” Jihyo cheered as both she and Sana took me a bear hug.

I melted into them, even allowing Sana to kiss my cheek before she pulled back with a chuckle. Jihyo kept her arms around me however, and whispered a quick ‘I’m so proud of you’ before slinging off to deal with Jeongyeon and Nayeon. They’re already asleep: Jeongyeon’s head laid on Nayeon’s chest as they snored softly.

“Can someone help me get these two to bed?” Jihyo asked.

Mina, Sana and Chaeyoung helped upon request as a confused Nayeon grumbled over who won.

“Congrats Y/N!” Nayeon shouted with a smile.

I mumbled a thank you and watched everyone file out the living room. All except Tzuyu, who took my hand--and I froze. My heart pounded yet again, proof that I’m still alive and Tzuyu hasn’t crushed me. Dahyun caught my gaze, then threw a wink my way as she left the room arm in arm with Momo. I’m not even going to ask what they’ve got going on. It’s complicated and I’ll figure out with time.

“I knew you could win,” Tzuyu said. “I doubted it a lot since Mina’s so good.”

I shivered as she walked around to face me; she looked nervous too.

“You sure you believed in me till the end?” I asked.

Tzuyu nodded sharply.

“You have this face where your entire body goes still and you just become sharper,” she explained. “You look pretty--ah! Pretty lame when it happens.”

Tzuyu’s face grew red; I scratched my arm in embarrassment. Maybe this is real after all. Still same Tzuyu being sly when giving a compliment.

“Yeah, and it was totally lame cheering me on right?” I countered.

Tzuyu shrugged and turned away.

“I-I should let you go rest,” I said. “Pretty long day, right?”

Her head whipped back to me, the red color in her face left.

“I-I wasn’t going to yet,” she said. “Um, is it OK if we talk? I-It’s about our KBS performances in a few weeks.”

“Oh, yeah. Of course,” I said.

Tzuyu let go of my hand and gestured to the couch. We sat, giving us enough space between but not as much as we gave a dew weeks prior. This is the first moment we’re alone, no other members or managers among us. Just Y/N and Tzuyu. I can’t help but think back to five years ago: how exhausted we were in the JYP dance rooms at 5 a.m. as sweat clung to us. We didn’t care though; the smiles continued even through the hardships until--

“Y/N,” Tzuyu said. “Are you all right?”

I met her confused gaze and I couldn’t help but think back to the days of Sixteen, my elimination and eventually her own elimination. The tears that she shed, begging me to stay on Korea and breaking her heart by saying no.

I shook my head at her question.

“What about you? Tzuyu?” I asked. “You were right about before, I have no idea how much I hurt you while leaving.”

“Y/N--”

“I’m so sorry Tzuyu,” I said cutting her off.

Tzuyu destroyed the space between us and hugged me flush to her, shocking me in the process.

“I’m sorry too,” she whispered. “I frightened you, didn’t I? You’re back now, that’s all I ever wanted was my best friend back.”

Her voice shook. A hint of tears threatened to spill but I pulled back to cup her face. Our eyes met again, even through the emotion that clouded and covered her face, she still looked beautiful. She leaned in, making my heart pump faster and faster.

“Your heart is so loud,” Tzuyu said with a giggle.

I inhaled as she pressed a firm kiss to my forehead.

“I-It’s just excited to know we’re on good terms, right?” I said.

“Yes,” Tzuyu groaned. “What else do I have to do to prove it to you?”

Her question made me blush a bit at how close she once was. Tzuyu must have picked up on it as her face grew red.

“You don’t have to do anything else,” I let out quickly as I grabbed her hand. “Well, you could help me brainstorm what we could do for our KBS performance.”

Tzuyu nodded, her face brightened up.

“Yeah! Well, Momo unnie is doing a solo so that leaves the nine of us. I think Chaeyoung, Dahyun and Sana are doing a set. We could pair up together if that’s OK,” she suggested.

I nodded as Tzuyu rubbed her thumb over the back of my hand.

“Yeah, we should pick a song. What about something from Rihanna,” I said.

Tzuyu chuckled as a wistful look overtook her face.

“Oh gosh, do you remember our performance on Sixteen? What song was it?” she asked.

“Oh my God, I remember!” I said. “We were too young to be dancing to S&M anyway!”

Tzuyu fell into a fit of laughter that I thought I wouldn’t have been able to see ever again. It’s like she said, we’re best friends again and I can’t help but feel like I can’t function from all the excitement bubbling up inside.

“Would you want to do that song again?” she asked.

“Not really--”

I was cut off by a yawn that forced itself abruptly.

“We’ve got plenty of time,” Tzuyu said as she stood. “You need to rest.”

“So do you,” I said as she took my hand and led us up stairs.

The door to Jeongyeon, Momo and I’s room was shut, so I had to be a bit careful of stepping in to not awaken them.

“Well, thank you for believing in me,” I whispered. “And becoming my best friend again.”

Tzuyu only nodded and brought me into her arms again. I hugged back, burying my head against her chest. She had hints of perfume from earlier, along with the warmth that she always carried whenever I needed her. Now she’s back and I didn’t need to worry anymore; I could breathe around her. I relaxed in her arms so much so that I didn’t want to let go; Tzuyu didn’t either as she gently rubbed my back.

“You sure you’re all right?” Tzuyu whispered, the sensation of her words warming my chest.

She pulled back to examine me, her arms not yet leaving my back.

“Y-Yeah, I just miss your hugs is all.”

Tzuyu smiled, kissed my forehead and squeezed me tightly again before letting me go.

“Goodnight, Y/N.”

“Goodnight,” I said, leaning the frame of the door until she disappeared in her own room.

I did the same, albeit, carefully in case Jeongyeon and Momo were asleep. My hunch was right: Jeongyeon was snoring softly on her bed and Momo laying on her own while scrolling through her phone.

“So, did you kiss her goodnight?” Momo teased.

My breath caught in my throat even at the mere thought.

“N-No, “ I stammered. “We hugged. W-We’re friends.”

Momo shrugged.

“So were Mina and Chae and now look at them.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered as I got in my own bed. my mind still on how warm Tzuyu felt.

We just got back to being friends again, but I couldn’t help but think about how it would be if I did kiss her. No, she’s my band-mate. I can’t think like that, not anymore.

***

Morning arrived quickly, even through the nonexistent dreams I still thought of Tzuyu and Momo’s words. Maybe I should talk to Jihyo about how Mina and Chaeyoung happened, even with Nayeon and Jeongyeon’s situation there had to be some agreement between the other members.

I waited until one groggy and hungover Jeongyeon rolled out of bed to help with breakfast, and for Momo to slunk behind her groaning about food. I shot a text to Jihyo for her to meet me here to talk privately. A knock soon came, forcing me to sit up and take a deep breath.

“You can come in!”

Jihyo entered with a toothy grin and a sigh.

“Sorry, I had to make sure Momo didn’t take all the food again,” she said as she sat beside me on the bed. “What’s up? Are you holding up OK?”

I nodded sharply; Jihyo noticed the nervousness and slid close to put an arm around me.

“Breathe Y/N,” Jihyo reassured. “We didn’t overwhelm you yesterday, did we?”

“No, of course not. It was really fun!”

“Yeah?” Jihyo said as she squeezed me gently. “What about the other members?”

“Ah, about that!” I said. “It’s about a member uh, Tzuyu.”

Jihyo nodded. The smile dropping from her face.

“She hasn’t been giving you hard time, has she?”

“N-No, actually the opposite,” I said. “She’s been really cool. So cool in fact that I-I- our friendship picked up right where it left off five years ago. Jihyo I think I might like Tzuyu. Like her in a romantic way.”

Jihyo nodded throughout every word, but stopped once I finished.

“Yeah, I had a feeling,” Jihyo said. “She always had eyes for you only, you should have seen her whenever you sung or performed five years ago. Saying she was mesmerized would be too simple.”

My face grew hot.

Really? I saw pieces of it last night, but to this level?

“Nothing’s simple with any of us, is there?” Jihyo asked. “That’s why I’m going to let you do what you think is right as long as it doesn’t hurt either of you emotional, physically or harm your public image. However, I do have to let you know one thing before you let Tzuyu know anything.”

“W-What’s that Jihyo?” I asked.

“I like you too.”

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fireinmywoods · 4 years

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the heart of the matter (is Leonard McCoy)

Followers...friends. I come to you today, hat in hand, to ask for your support in a certain fandom matter, a trifling concern of little real consequence which nevertheless has been driving me absolutely cross-eyed bonkers for some years now.

Simply put: can we please all agree that Bones is the heart of the Enterprise???

In AOS, I mean. I’m not aware of any debate over this when it comes to TOS, where the roles of the triumvirate have always been explicit, though there are a few different ways to identify them:

Spock = logos = superego = head

Bones = pathos = id = heart

Kirk = ethos = ego = soul

So clear! So clean! So universally accepted by Trek fandom at large!

Oh, but things get murkier in AOS, and there are plenty of posts floating around which suggest that it’s Kirk, not McCoy, who serves as the heart in the Kelvin timeline. Even the writers of the first two AOS films have outright stated that their interpretation of the triumvirate had the original roles switched, with Kirk as the highly emotional one and McCoy as the arbiter between Kirk’s passion and Spock’s logic. It’s true that this technically counts as a Word of God pronouncement by the actual creators of 2/3 of the series thus far, which some would argue renders it canon. However, it’s equally true that those same creators also felt that Kirk was a fuckboi and that Benedict Cumberbatch wonderfully embodied their vision for Khan Noonien Singh, so honestly, who gives a hot hollerin’ fuck what those dingdongs think. This seems as justified a time as any to invoke Death of the Author, and in fact, it’s my firm belief that despite the writers’ intentions, Star Trek and Into Darkness both support the original triumvirate breakdown.

Under the cut you’ll find a long-winded and self-indulgent ~*~character analysis~*~ of the Kelvin-timeline incarnations of Jim Kirk and Leonard “Bones” McCoy, reviewing why Leonard is still unmistakably the heart, unpacking what the hell Jim’s deal is, and finally taking a look at some key examples from canon, because ya girl believes in showing her work.

Let’s get down to business.

[A quick warning, as this is starting to spread beyond my own followers: if you don’t like McKirk as a romantic pairing, you ain’t gonna like part IV, so I’d bow out before then or just take your leave now.]

i. Leonard

Independent of Jim’s characterization, it should be blindingly obvious that Leonard is the heart. He’s by far the most nakedly emotional of our seven core crew members, a trait we see writ large and small throughout the films. He’s reactive; he’s passionate; he’s humane. He cares, first and foremost.

Not about Starfleet, of course. Leonard doesn’t give a damn about playing the game or advancing his career, or even really about the Enterprise’s mission - he has no desire to explore strange new worlds, he’ll pass on seeking out new life and new civilizations, and he spends half his time trying to convince everyone else that boldly going where no man has gone before is a great way to die horribly. Fuck exploration, fuck space, and fuck the Federation while we’re at it. Leonard is perhaps the most improbable of the Enterprise’s senior officers for the simple reason that he seems to resent everything about the job.

Well. Almost everything.

See, what Leonard cares about is people. He cares about their lives, about their stories, about their hopes and dreams, about their suffering. That’s why he entered and has stayed in an extremely taxing caring profession, and it’s why he’s still on the Enterprise despite his incessant bitching about everything they do. He wouldn’t trust anyone else to take care of the crew he’s become so attached to, and he finds fulfillment in helping the people they encounter out there in the nightmare of space.

In every timeline, Leonard McCoy defines himself by what he can do for others: the pain he can ameliorate, the wounds he can heal, the diseases he can cure, the small amounts of good he can bring to a galaxy filled with so much absolute horseshit. Unlike most of his colleagues, he’s not motivated by curiosity or an adventurer’s spirit or a burning desire to make sense of the universe. (Fuck the universe, too, as a matter of fact.) Instead, he’s driven by the incredible depths of his compassion and empathy and concern for the people he serves alongside and those they meet along the way.

Sure sounds like the heart to me.

ii. Jim

I actually totally get why some people characterize Kelvin-timeline Jim as the heart. He’s quite literally a different man than the original timeline’s Kirk, and he definitely has more of the pathos qualities to him. Early on, he’s a total spitfire, fierce and hot-blooded, quick to anger and other sharp-edged emotions we’re not used to associating with James T. Kirk. Even as he grows into himself and leaves some of those traits behind, he remains spontaneous, passionate, protective, and self-sacrificing - easy enough to mistake for the heart if you squint.

But let’s not confuse having a heart for being the heart. Sure, Jim is more openly emotional and reactive than his TOS counterpart, but there’s still a marked difference between the way he and Leonard express and act on their emotions.

AOS Jim definitely has a lot of feelings - big ones - but at the end of the day, he’s not driven by his heart. He’s driven by his gut.

Whenever there’s trouble, Jim makes a beeline right for the center of it. He’s impulsive as hell, rarely pausing to think past his first instinct, because he just wants to be doing something, no matter the odds, no matter what it costs him. He explicitly calls himself out on this in ST:ID when arguing with Spock: “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. I only know what I can do.” He doesn’t have the patience or the constitution to sit and debate all the options, either internally or with his crew. If there’s a path forward from where he is, even a bad one, Jim’s gonna take it.

[Sidebar: One could make the case that the roots of Jim’s instinct to act reach back to his childhood traumas - canonically ignored abuse and neglect on the one hand, and the Tarsus IV famine and massacre on the other - but that’s a whole post on its own and we ain’t got all day here.]

Jim can’t not act, and while that gets him into a lot of trouble, it also saves lives. Sulu probably appreciated that Jim’s gut drove him to leap off Nero’s drilling platform without a moment’s hesitation after a man he’d only just met. He may have been a real shithead about it, but Jim’s impassioned insistence on going after the Narada and not wasting time on the possibility of a better option was key to saving Pike and Earth itself. And I don’t know why Spock was so surprised that Jim intervened to save him on Nibiru, considering that the reason they were there in the first place was because Jim couldn’t sit back and watch the Nibirans die when there was something his crew could do to help them, even if it meant risking a violation of the Prime Directive.

Jim is a good man with a big heart, and he cares about people, absolutely. But he cares most of all about Doing The Right Thing - which in the heat of the moment often translates to Doing Something, Anything, Hold My Beer.

iii. heart vs. gut (i.e., time for some receipts)

I think one of the main reasons Leonard and Jim’s characterizations get confused is because they both tend to act on instinct, only lightly informed by higher reasoning. However, I’d argue that their motivations and the nature of those actions are super distinct, and those distinctions remain relatively consistent throughout all three films. (And y’all know I really mean this shit if I’m out here calling ST:ID consistent.)

Jim is a big picture guy, figuratively and often literally heaving himself full-body into the mix of whatever problem the crew has encountered for lack of any better alternative. That energy propels the plots of all three films: the chaotic path he carves through the events of Star Trek and ST:ID, and the slightly calmer but still undeniably bananas course he charts for himself and his crew in the second half of Beyond.

As the heart, Leonard operates on a more micro level. His concern invariably lies with the individual people caught up in those grand events Captain Chaos is busy dragging them all through. While Jim’s zooming around flipping plot switches, Leonard can always be counted on to bring it back to the personal.

We frequently see this juxtaposed right there on film. Think of that slow pan through medbay in the first movie after the Narada’s ambush and the destruction of Vulcan: while Jim is stewing over what to do about the Big Bad, Leonard has stepped into the CMO role without fuss or fanfare to care for the wounded crew and traumatized survivors.

Or jump ahead to Beyond: during Krall’s attack on the Enterprise, there’s a gorgeous cinematic shot of Jim sprinting down the corridor with two crew members to take on the invaders - and then we cut to Leonard moving slowly through those same ghastly red-lit corridors, searching for casualties in need of help, visibly affected by what his scanner is telling him about the downed crewman he tries to save.

Actually, Beyond as a whole does terrific justice to each of their roles. (Perhaps because it was not written by dingdongs.) The first act finds Jim flailing around for a sense of purpose and forward momentum - an understandable consequence of a gut-driven character having stalled out for too long - and he ultimately gets his mojo back by spending the rest of the film careening through one insane seat-of-his-pants ploy after another. Meanwhile, in the quieter moments between all the mayhem, Leonard serves as the empathetic sounding board for both Jim and Spock as they struggle with deep emotionally charged secrets and Big Life Questions, helping them untangle their feelings and reminding them of the emotional attachments which are ultimately key to their respective decisions to stay on the Enterprise.

More examples, you say? Don’t mind if I do!

Star Trek

GUT: Jim hurtles around the Narada, improvising almost every step of the way and paying the price for his and Spock’s scheme in bodily harm, and ultimately succeeds in rescuing Pike. HEART: Leonard calls out for Jim as he runs into the transporter room, overwhelmed with relief that he’s made it back, and takes Chris Pike’s weight literally and figuratively onto his own shoulders to begin healing him while Jim runs back off to the center of the action.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

GUT: Jim argues with Leonard, Spock, and Scotty in quick succession as he’s preparing to drag them all off to Qo’noS, immune to their attempts to reason with him because, unraveled as he is by grief and pain, he can only focus on his visceral drive to Do Something. HEART: Unlike the others, Leonard is upset not about the larger moral questions of whether it’s right to go after John Harrison or bring torpedoes aboard the ship, but about the fact that Jim himself is hurt and hurting and won’t accept help.

GUT: Jim makes a snap decision to sacrifice himself by hurling his body against the warp core to realign it and save his crew. HEART: Shellshocked by the emotional grenade of his best friend’s death, Leonard suddenly realizes, through the haze of his own numbness and upswelling grief, that he might still be able to do something for this lonely radiation-ravaged body he’s been brought and the life it represents.

Star Trek Beyond

GUT: At the tail end of an improvised plan to out-maneuver Kalara, Jim quite literally shoots first and asks questions later, igniting a fuel tank and setting off an explosive series of events which he and Chekov just barely escape. HEART: The next time we see Leonard, Spock is opening up to him about Ambassador Spock’s death and his own plan to leave Starfleet for New Vulcan - and while he’s empathetic toward Spock (I can’t imagine what that must feel like), Leonard’s thoughts go immediately to the emotional impact of Spock’s plan on the other people he’s closest with. (I can see how that would upset [Nyota]. / I can tell you, [Jim]’s not gonna like that.)

GUT: Jim frantically strains to reach the final switch in the life support hub, believing that he’s going to die either way since the vent has already opened, but spurred on by the knowledge that his ability to move that switch is the only thing standing between Yorktown and annihilation. HEART: Knowing exactly what’s at stake, with the fate of the station and millions of lives hanging in the balance, Leonard’s greatest concern is that Jim won’t make it out in time.

iv. never bet against the heart

Let’s wrap this up with a deep dive on one of the absolute best examples of Leonard as the heart: his decision to sneak Jim onto the Enterprise in the first movie.

As relentlessly as I drag him for the, you know, poisoning and kidnapping aspects of that whole deal, there’s no denying that it is a god-tier heart move. Is it logical? Absolutely not. Is it really the right thing to do for either himself or Jim, as far as he knows at the time? Nope. It’s 100% the wrong choice for his own job security, reputation, and relationships with his fellow crew, and it’s almost guaranteed to get Jim into even worse trouble. Leonard is a smart dude who must understand that this course of action will likely end up coming back on them both in a real bad way. For someone who argues loudly and often in defense of self-preservation, this is a shockingly bad idea.

But none of that matters, because Jim shakes his hand and tells him to be safe with that horrible empty-eyed smile, and it gets him right in the heart, one-two-three.

One: sympathy, worry, and affection for Jim - his best friend, his wild and troublesome stray, his only family.

Two: guilt over adding onto Jim’s pain, and the instinctive urge to fix whatever‘s hurting him.

Three: fear of heading out into the unknown by himself, the agonizing uncertainty of not knowing what’s coming, craving for the security and reassurance Jim’s presence would give him.

“Dammit,” Leonard says, as his heart wins out over his brain. He knows this is a garbage plan, and he doesn’t care. His heart chooses Jim. That’s all that matters.

So he goes back for Jim, and to his own surprise it turns out that this Very Bad Idea was actually a Very Good Idea because Jim’s impulsive instincts end up saving Earth, and Leonard’s not in the habit of fixing what ain’t broke so he figures he may as well keep on chasing Jim’s crazy ass around the galaxy for a while, through jungles and off cliffs and into the goddamn afterlife when need be, until finally one day Jim’s gut drives him right into Leonard’s arms and he suddenly realizes that this is what his heart was choosing all those years ago: Jim’s wide terrified eyes, Jim’s voice breaking over his name, Jim’s hand pressing hard against his chest, reaching out for what’s his.

But that’s another story.

#mckirk #otp: bedside manner #fic related #palimpsest verse #@animetrashmuffin is a gift #several people messaged me when i vague-tagged about this a while back #but you're the one who had to listen to me rant at great length about this while i was sick so CONGRATS PAL THIS MESS IS FOR YOU #mccoy #kirk #star trek #aos #long post

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dreamylyfe-x · 3 years

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heyo i've been watching the eps in real time, but i only got around to watching the gallavich hall of shame today and i loved all of it except the beg which i was really hoping you could help me with cuz i've been extremely upset by it (literally crying oops). so, why would the writers possibly use the phrasing "piece of my heart" and act like what ian felt for his other bfs is in any way comparable to mickey, only on a much lesser level? cuz we've seen it play out that that's just false [pt 1]

Hey! Sorry about not getting to this right away -- real life has been extreme today -- but I wanted to make sure to reply to this ASAP because it clearly bothered you a bunch. This ask has several parts and I’m going to pull the questions from the others so that I can best answer. And I may sound a little glib because I know this really, really bothered you, so I want to make it clear: I completely respect your feelings about this... but I don’t think the show was thinking about how people who love Gallavich would feel about that line. Because they had a brief and it was “write a clip show.”

First: why would the writers make ian flat out tell mickey that doesn't have his whole heart WHEN THEY'RE MARRIED for god's sake.

So that they’d have a fight through which they would introduce themed clip packages that had already been decided on.

Second: i'm just so confused and upset about what the writers were trying to accomplish with this?

Completely understandable that you’d be confused by it, because the primary thing they were looking to accomplish was to have snippets of conversation that would introduce themed clip packages.

Third: why'd the writers chose such vague flowery BS wording for this? plz help me get it

Because nothing in the Hall of Shame episodes can actually add up to anything significant, because they’re clips shows that were put together entirely because Showtime needed to fill time while the show -- which is still shooting -- finishes up.

A few things about the Hall of Shame episodes. The first and the most important: It’s pretty much impossible to write a good clip show. They are creative black holes. I shudder to think how much time the writers were even given to do these things. They all -- All! -- exist solely to fill time. So it’s always “The Golden Girls sit around a table and eat cheesecake and then reminisce about all the times they ate cheesecake.” One of the very worst episodes of Star Trek: TNG exists solely because they ordered another episode at the last minute and it’s -- you guessed it! -- A clip show. The best -- and I use that term loosely -- clip shows are the ones where the have some Voice of God narrator say “Mickey and Ian are the romantic heart of the show, but they don’t always get along! Cue clip package where Mickey and Ian fight about stuff. Voice of God: “But they sure do enjoy making up!” -- Cue clip package of Ian and Mickey making out.

That still sounds pretty terrible. The best idea for a Shameless clip show is to do some sort of Frank-at-the-bar-talking-shit thing and I’m sure they thought of that and then I'm sure they were like “Fuck. We can’t spare Bill for that kind of time.” -- and then they had to do this. This whole thing is born of scarcity -- of time, of means and of new things to put on the tv -- And given the choice, having seen what came out of it, I think I opt for what they did because I truly do believe the Mickey gifs that the Fiona one produced have restorative properties and I am very grateful that they exist.

The Hall fo Shame episodes giveth, and they taketh away. So my advice, in how to approach them is just this:

They aren’t canon

Nothing that happens in them matters

But the parts you like can be as real as you want them to be

So take what you like and throw the rest away

But again, this might be easier said than done, so let me dig a little deeper into what bothers you so much about this line in the context that it happens.

The 87% line is patently ridiculous and I reject its premise. Love is not finite. You do not divide it between people. You love the people you love, the way you love them, and if someone else showed up you’d love them in whatever way you love them and that would not lessen the love you feel for anyone else. You do not suddenly love your child 50% less because you had another child. That is insane. You just love the other child also.

That said, the 11 seasons in which we have seen Ian love Mickey more than he loves anything -- his freaking words -- cannot be undone by one line of dialogue in a clip show. First, because clip shows are innately flawed, but also because 11 seasons are more important than one line of dialogue. Even ONE episode of Not a Clip Show is more important than what happens in a clip show. Every single episode of Shameless is trying to do something much more valid and important with the characters than introduce a clip package.

This problem is also not restricted to the Gallavich episode -- People do a whole bunch of stuff in the HoS episodes that they’ve never done on the show. Carl and Debbie don’t punch each other in the face. Lip doesn’t completely and totally discount every single thing his sister did to keep a roof over their head. Mickey doesn’t act like Ian’s sexuality is a lifestyle choice and Ian is smart enough to know that Mickey Milkovich -- who he loves more than anything -- doesn’t want hear about the mathematical breakdown of how much Ian cares about Other Men.

now i desperately need the writers to fix this and say mickey has ian's whole heart.

This is probably not going to happen because I don’t think Actual Shameless considers that to be a thing that happened. On Actual Shameless Ian watched Mickey beat Ned up and then ran away with him when the cops showed up looking DELIGHTED that Mickey had beaten Ned up. On Actual Shameless Ian can barely stand to have Kash touch him once he’s been with Mickey, because Mickey is all he wants. On Actual Shameless Ian’s most viable non-Mickey relationship crumbles the second Mickey shows up because there’s just no comparison for him. Ian loves Mickey. He doesn’t stop. If something happened to Mickey he wouldn't look vaguely disconcerted and then get into an argument with some third party about whether or not it’s valid to be weirded out when someone you had sex with dies. You know that line, “show, don’t tell”? There’s reason that’s considered better storytelling -- because the stuff you show is the stuff that the audience feels and experiences. If Ian had said he loved Ned in any capacity I would have laughed out loud, because what I was shown was Ian mostly hanging out with Ned because he was missing Mickey, wanted a distraction, liked room service and the occasional nice gift, and... it made Mickey jealous. None of that was about Ned.

And in the end: Ned’s dead, baby. Long live Gallavich.

(it would of course be very nice if Ian would tell Mickey he has his whole heart, partly because it’s true, but also because Mickey deserves to hear these sorts of things, and we all want Mickey to be happy. And I do think Ian probably does tell Mickey that, after the clip show is over -if we acknowledge that this happened at all- because ultimately Ian’s whole life is about Mickey. Mickey is all he ever talks about. Even when he’s being pissy it’s all about how things are going with Mickey and how they are GOING to be going with Mickey. How he feels about his job, how he feels about himself, what his life plan is -- all depends on what is up with Mickey. Mickey is everything to him, and I’m going to assume Ian both shows and tells Mickey that in key ways, because Mickey sure seems happy in the Fiona HoS.)

Anyway -- I don’t know if that helps at all, but that’s my take on this mess. Thank you for asking!

#asks #shameless hall of shame #hall of shame: daddy issues #the only good clip show was #Community's fake clip show

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theherocomplex · 4 years

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I'd love to know your answer to 1! Please and thank you :D

@servantofclio also asked for 1. :D

1. How do you approach worldbuilding (if it’s an AU) or research (if it’s an established canon)?

I used to rely on my memory when it comes to established canon which definitely would come back to bite me because said memory is not perfect, but what is perfect is my ability to convince myself that I know exactly what I’m writing. I’ve gotten much better over the years at research -- though I tend to rely on my memory for first drafts, unless it’s something major. In that case, I’ll do a quick wiki dive to make sure I’m basing my writing on something accurate; if I need to confirm quotes from the source material/correct titles/place names, I’ll highlight them in the text and keep writing -- it’s all too easy to fall into a rabbithole of aimlessly clicking around, when I need to focus on momentum to get me through the draft.

If I’m working on a mostly-canon-verse story, like A Lesson in Drowning (which, aside from the eldritch sea-abominations and the hungry garden, could fit into DA2′s third act), I try to focus on a few specific elements from the canon to keep my research scope fairly narrow. For ALID, early on I decided to focus on blood magic, the Gallows and the mages within it, and Hawke’s imprecise position within the city; I also ended up doing a lot of research into Orsino, possession, and the Band of Three, even though that last bit only became relevant in the last few chapters.

As for AUs, I focus more on whatever elements I’m bringing into the story. For my MXTX Exchange fic, Synced (which is a scifi AU of The Untamed/MDZS), I took a deep dive into a bunch of my favorite scifi stories (The Expanse, Mass Effect, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “The Inner Light”, Revelation Space), and adjusted the canon-verse elements to fit (the cultivation sects became exploration groups, transhumanism became cultivation’s analogue). I still double-check the source material to make sure it’s still plausible (as in, that characters are still true to their personalities and behaviors, that the world is still recognizable, that sort of thing), but it’s not as do-or-die as when I’m writing canon-verse material.

My general approach to worldbuilding, in both fic and original work, is “connect the dots”. As long as whatever’s happening has narrative integrity, and obeys the laws you’ve created for the world (or canon’s laws, or whatever combination of the two you’ve created, for AUs), then you can essentially do whatever you want. Research is still important, but I’d argue internal consistency is just as vital, if not more so.

[fanfic writer asks]

#meme replies #thank you! <3 #ferociousqueak

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therealjambery · 4 years

Text

Long fics rec post is long

What better way to while away the time than fanfiction? Long fanfiction! And when I say long, I mean long, like so long it is three novels put together, how on earth did you find time to write this, so long it takes even me more than one day to read long. I'm irrationally jealous of all of these writers, as I am the type of writer who has a hard time dashing off 10,000 words in a timely fashion, let alone writing anything longer.

I'm using the SFWA's definition of a novel here, which is anythiing over 40,000 words.

These are all stories I've loved, and most of them I've actually got saved as PDFs so I can re-read them wherever I want. I'm digging pretty deep into the archives for this one, kids, so hold onto your hats.

Fandoms: Avengers/Marvel, Firefly, Inception, Leverage, Merlin, Stargate Atlantis, Star Trek AOS, Supernatural, Torchwood

Fandom: Avengers/MCU/Marvel/Whatever we're calling it these days

in deep with you darling by topaz Author's Summary: Darcy could have, under normal circumstances, resisted the aesthetics (however awesome they are, and holy crap are they awesome), but there's an itch under her skin—apparently, nearly dying by giant, fire-breathing robots from space in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico will start you questioning your life choices. Who knew? Main Pairing: Clint/Darcy Words: 48024

runaways are running the night by anothercover Author's Summary: Clint did like that the photo stayed private. He’s shit at social media, only on it because, you know, he has to be, but even Clint knew it was the kind of candid that was Instagrammable - #queen, #legend, #rawmemama, etcetera, ad nauseam, he’s pretty sure he could predict the comments before anyone actually typed them. (Bucky once said “raw me, mama?” to her with a goddamn straight face and Natasha’s expression of abject horror while she tried to work out if he meant it had made Clint laugh so fucking hard he was certain he’d ripped an organ in half. He still wants to find a way to work that story into his act, because on the one hand, people love it when he talks about his marriage, but it’s hard to find a way into it that doesn’t sound like he’s making fun of their fans, and that’s a big no-go.) AU: Natasha's in a band, Clint is basically John Mulaney, it's great Main Pairing: Clint/Natasha/Bucky Words: 53873

Ready, Fire, Aim 'Verse by gyzym Author's Summary: There's no "I" in "Avenger." Main Pairing: Steve/Tony Words: 63019

Ain't No Grave (Can Keep My Body Down) by spitandvinegar Author's Summary: It's six in the morning, and Steve is heading out on a run when he nearly trips over a bouquet of sunflowers on the front steps of his brownstone.

For a second paranoia takes over, and he kicks the flowers a little, waiting for them to explode. They don't. They also came with a card, which he picks up. The front of the card has a tasteful picture of the Brooklyn bridge at sunset. It's very nice and sedate, like the kind of card you would buy to give to your boss. On the inside someone has written a short message in big, shaky block letters.

I AM SORRY FOR SHOOTING YOU.

Steve sits down hard on the steps. Main Pairing: Steve/Bucky Words: 107076

Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail series by owlet Author's Summary: The mission resets abruptly, from objective: kill to objective: protect Main Pairing: Steve/Bucky Words: 264438

Clint Barton's Super Secret Snipers' Club by sara_holmes Author's Summary: Clint Barton's Super Secret Snipers' Club. (Invitation and pending mental health evaluation required.)

"When Steve brings Bucky back to the tower for the first time, Clint’s first thought is that Tony Stark’s pride and joy is quickly becoming a less of a very tall and expensive ‘fuck you’ in the faces of investors who don’t believe in self-sustaining energy, and more of a superhero rehabilitation center."

Boyfriends, compromises and learning to like oneself. Main Pairing: Clint/Bucky Words: 67059

Nobody Lost, Nobody Found by ClaraxBarton Author's Summary: "Look, dude, I get it. You’re fucked-up. HYDRA fucked you up. I’ve been there. But you’re my fucking Soul Mate!"

“I can kill you. I could kill you without even realizing what I was doing. I’m not fucked-up, I’m a monster. I’m a nightmare. You can’t be here. You can’t- All the people I’ve killed- I will not murder my Soul Mate too. Not after everything else I’ve-”

Clint worked his left hand between their bodies and managed to land a punch to the man’s right side, forcing him to shift his weight, and Clint brought his right hand down on the place where the man’s metal arm met his torso - hidden by the shirt he wore, but on full display in the video Clint had watched.

The man released Clint with a grunt of pain, and Clint pressed his advantage, landing another punch to his abdomen, backing him up against the opposite side of the RV and then pressing the kitchen knife he had pocketed while cleaning up earlier to the man’s throat.

“Like I said, I’m not a Boy Scout. I’m plenty dangerous myself. We clear on that?”

OR:

This looks bad, because it is.

OR:

How Clint Barton met his Soul Mate AU: soulmates! Main Pairing: Clint/Bucky Words: 108331

Ronin!Clint 'verse by shatteredhourglass Author's Summary: “Who the fuck are you and how did you get this line?”

“I have my ways,” the voice says, amused. “Don’t worry, I’m just enjoying the view, Captain America.” Main Pairing: Clint/Bucky Words: 63266

Fandom: Firefly/Supernatural

Weight and Motion by sevenfists [note: the podfic by dodificus is excellent] Author's Summary: The pears were ripe, Kaylee told him, but Mal wouldn't eat any of them. They were a present, nestled all sweet and green in a wooden crate that a grateful passenger gave them right before they left her on Greenleaf. AU: Crossover, Dean ends up on Serenity, just roll with it Main Pairing: Mal/Dean Words: 43117

Fandom: Inception

All the World is Bullet Shaped by pushdragon Author's Summary: If Arthur thinks that, just by waving enough money around, he can get Eames to risk his life and reputation to rescue him from a death sentence, he's got another thing coming. So Eames sets a malicious, undignified price on his services, one he can be certain that a man like Arthur would never condescend to pay. It turns out to be the first of many mistakes. Main Pairing: Arthur/Eames Words: 76656

I Seem to Be a Verb by Aja Author's Summary: Arthur owns a quirky hipster science bookstore. Eames is a world-famous mega-celebrity.

Clearly this calls for a meet-cute. AU: Notting Hill AU Main Pairing: Arthur/Eames Words: 93837

In Medias Res by starlingthefool Author's Summary: What's the most resilient infection? What's more infectious than a cold, deadlier than cholera? What lingers in your blood forever?

Love, of course. Mal has always known that. Her pointman Eames may dismiss her for a romantic, but for better or worse, love has gotten her this far. AU: Mirror-verse Main Pairing: Arthur/Eames, Mal/Dom Words: 52662

The Music Makers by mami_san Author's Summary: A. Graham Cole was twenty-one years old when he was killed in action in Iraq. This is the official story. The truth is, of course, somewhat different. Main Pairing: Arthur/Eames Words: I dunno, because it's not on AO3. But my PDF is 451KB so it's over 50k, most likely.

Presque Vu by rageprufrock Author's Summary: Or, "on the tip of the tongue." Arthur meets Mal first. He inherits Dom, after. Everything else is on him. Main Pairing: Arthur/Eames Words: 69588

Wherever You Will Be (That's Where I'll Call Home) [The DomesticVerse] by gyzym Author's Summary: People you kiss in an airport baggage claim and then don't talk to for thirteen months shouldn't be able to exist, let alone make your chest do the things Arthur's chest is doing. There are rules. Main Pairing: Arthur/Eames Words: 74828

Fandom: Leverage

Psychic AU series by Laughtsalot3412 Author's Summary: He had a sniper rifle scoping the girl’s bright eyes and the guy’s smile. AU: They all have psychic powers Main Pairing: OT3 Eliot/Parker/Alec Words: 89955

Fandom: Merlin

[note: look, I don't even go here. I've never watched the show. But.]

Drastically Redefining Protocol by rageprufrock Author's Summary: In which Prince Arthur meets Merlin and all hell promptly breaks loose. AU: Modern AU Main Pairing: Arthur/Merlin Words: 46,059

The Student Prince by FayJay Author's Summary: A Modern day Merlin AU set at the University of St Andrews, featuring teetotal kickboxers, secret wizards, magnificent bodyguards of various genders, irate fairies, imprisoned dragons, crumbling gothic architecture, arrogant princes, adorable engineering students, stolen gold, magical doorways, attempted assassination, drunken students, shaving foam fights, embarrassing mornings after, The Hammer Dance, duty, responsibility, friendship and true love... AU: Modern AU Main Pairing: Arthur/Merlin Words: 145222

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis

Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves by auburn Author's Summary: Vala Mal Doran and her partners, renegades Jehan abd-Ba'al and Meredith McKay, hijack the Tau'ri ship Prometheus and leave the Milky Way behind in search of the Lost City of the Ancients, Atlantis. AU: Space pirates! Main Pairing: John/Rodney Words: 180299

The Price That Life Exacts by cathalin Author's Summary:When John disappears without a trace during a routine mission, people in a beleaguered Atlantis eventually have to try to move on. Rodney never completely gives up hope of finding John, and though he soldiers on to help Atlantis, a year later he still lives every day with his grief. Main Pairing: John/Rodney Words: 63369

Written By the Victors by Spreranza Author's Summary: Caroll, Franklin R. Atlantis Revisited. New York and London, Routledge, 2011. Chapman, Denise. Several Kinds of Genius: The Life of Rodney McKay. NY: Harper Perennial, 2015. Croft, Rosalind. City of Spires: A Memoir. Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2009. Dugan, Paul. A Political History of Atlantis. Oxford: OUP, 2012. Main Pairing: John/Rodney Words: 52843

Tongues of Men and Angels by Mad_Maudlin Author's Summary: When SG-4 is ambushed offworld, an injured Major John Sheppard must put his trust in a Tok'ra agent named McKay to survive. But what secrets is McKay keeping about his mission, the planet, and his own motives for helping John? AU: They didn't go to Atlantis Main Pairing: John/Rodney Words: 58523

Fandom: Sherlock (TV)

The Least of All Possible Mistakes by rageprufrock Author's Summary: If ever a people deserved tasering, it’s Holmeses. Main Pairing: Lestrade/Mycroft AU: Genderbent Lestrade Words: 118096

Fandom: Supernatural

Red by Big Pink [note: seriously, this is one of my favorite fics/series ever and I have the ebooks if you want to not read this on LJ or FF.net] Author's Summary: Something evil is killing treeplanters in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, possibly the same predator that Dean narrowly escaped years before. How Grimm will things get before the brothers figure it out? Main Pairing: none Words: 81839

Fandom: Supernatural/Stargate Atlantis

And All the World Beneath by seperis Author's Summary: Dean remembers Texas as blackland stretching in marker-thick strips of vivid brown and black, broken with the sprawling metroplexes of Dallas and San Antonio and Houston; farms spread with the yellow tops of maize waving in pre-autumn winds, threshers moving complacently through the fields with drowsy men in hats waving at the road. He remembers green and gold fields dotted with cows, half-year calves running on the outskirts of the herds. He remembers these were what he saw between jobs, lives being lived that had nothing to do with creeping twilight and sleeping only behind salt circles and ritual wards. AU: Cthulhu mythos Main Pairing: Dean/John, John/Rodney Words: 67279

Fandom: Star Trek AOS

Leave No Soul Behind by whochick Author's Summary: If you're Starfleet, you spend your whole life wishing you never see an EPAS uniform right up until the moment they become your only hope. Whether you're dying a slow, cold death in space, or a long painful one on some godforsaken planet, they're going to come for you. So count your last breaths, son, and hold on tight. They leave no soul behind. AU: Spock did not join Starfleet, he joined the Emergency Personnel Ambulance Service (EPAS) Main Pairing: Kirk/Spock Words: 258951

The Lotus Eaters by aldora89 Author's Summary: Stranded on the planet Sigma Nox while searching for a missing away team, Spock and Kirk find themselves pitted against a disturbing native life form. With the captain out of commission on a regular basis and Spock struggling to preserve his stoicism, staying alive is difficult enough – but when a slim chance for escape surfaces, their resolve is truly put to the test. Together they must fight for survival in the heart of an alien jungle, and in the process, uncover the mystery of the planet’s past. Main Pairing: Kirk/Spock Words: 93594

Only Good for Legends by leupagus Author's Summary: Detective Spock, born on Vulcan and resident of San Francisco, is assigned to the Midwest police bureau. I think everyone can guess what happens next. AU: Spock is a Detective. Otherwise it's pretty much the same, including Kirk's petty criminal tendencies. Main Pairing: Kirk/Spock Words: 149640

So Wise We Grow by Deastar Author's Summary: "Commander Spock, we have located your son," the Vulcan lady on the screen says, which would be great, except Jim can tell by the look on Spock's face that he's never heard of this kid before in his life. "If it is expedient, the child will be sent to join you on the Enterprise within the week." AU: kidfic Main Pairing: Kirk/Spock Words: 81248

Switch by Ceres_Libera Author's Summary: The life and times of Leonard H. McCoy MD/PhD … If Leonard McCoy's life could get any fucking weirder, it would be … Jesus, he didn't even want to think what that could possibly mean, because it's already been too fucking weird to make any kind of rational sense. Main Pairing: Kirk/McCoy Words: 230867

Fandom: Torchwood

The Rose of Jericho by kaydeefalls Author's Summary: Post-CoE. When Martha Jones encounters a dark UNIT cover-up in the wake of the 456, it's up to Gwen's new Torchwood team to bring the truth to light -- and save Ianto. AU: alternate ending post Children of Earth Main Pairing: Jack/Ianto Words: 62606

That should keep you busy for a while, right? If you have other long fic recs, let me know in the comments/with a reblog!

#fic recs #long post is long #fanfiction #fanfic #avengers #marvel #mcu #firefly #inception #leverage #merlin #stargate atlantis #star trek #star trek reboot #star trek aos #supernatural #torchwood

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elizadoolittlethings · 5 years

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MG - The Man Behind The Genius

(via Get Ready to Love Mark Gatiss)

“Can we just sit here and watch this Spider-Man cartoon?” Mark Gatiss smiles slyly but it’s not clear if he’s completely kidding. We’re sitting on a couch in The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York where a small retro-TV is playing an appropriately retro episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. “I love cartoons,” Gatiss tells me. “Did you ever see the old Star Trek cartoon? It’s brilliant. It’s basically like season four.”

The guy sitting next to me might look like Mycroft Holmes, but he barely sounds like him at all. This guy is softer, more childlike, more down to talk about whatever, so long as those things are James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, superheroes, Star Trek… In short, if you meet Mark Gatiss, you want to be best friends with him instantly.

For the uninitiated: Mark Gatiss is the co-creator (with Steven Moffat) of Sherlock. He’s also an actor IN Sherlock as Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s snippy, brilliant older brother. He’s written for Doctor Who numerous times, including last season’s “Robots of Sherwood,” as well as the classic Dickens 2005 episode “The Unquiet Dead.” He’s got a recurring role on Game of Thrones as Tycho Nestoris of the Iron Bank, but has roots in the famous British comedy The League of Gentlemen. In short: he’s done some things that are beyond impressive.

Our chat is talking place two hours ahead of The Museum of the Moving Image’s special screening of the Doctor Who episode “Sleep No More,” which is the one Mark wrote for this season. And yes, I can call him Mark, because he told me to. Glancing over at my open-notebook, full of my chicken-scratch questions, he spies the word “Gatiss,” at the top of the page complete with a frantic double underline. “Don’t say ‘Moffat’ or ‘Gatiss,’” he coos. “Say ‘Mark.’”

To say Mark Gatiss is disarming would be an understatement similar to saying Sherlock Holmes is smart. It’s not that Mark is disarming, it’s like you and he have been exchanging dog-eared paperbacks for years and this conversation about the animated Star Trek from the 70s is old hat. After we talk about how great the writing is on that cartoon Trek, I ask him if he’d ever want to write for Star Trek.

“The new series?!!“I love Star Trek, so yeah, I wouldn’t say no. Simon Pegg’s writing the new one [Star Trek Beyond]. So yeah. You never know!”

Is there anything else—any other established universe—Mark Gatiss would like to write for other than Star Trek?

“Nooo…No. I want to do something new. But it’s so hard to get it off the ground. I’ve said this many times, and it’s absolutely true. That there is a reason why people revisit brands that are so familiar; it’s because they’re so familiar! And it’s getting harder and harder to try and convince people to take a punt at something new. So, that is absolutely vital. Otherwise, there’s no blood in it—and I say this knowing that I’m associated with two of the biggest reboots in history—and people will always revisit Sherlock Holmes. And I think that now that Doctor Who has really returned after its absence, Doctor Who is imperishable. It will probably stop again one day and then come back again, because that’s what it does. Like anything. But, I would love to do something that people look back on fondly, because it was a brand new thing. But it’s terribly difficult—A. to think of it! B. To get it off the ground. What is the new thing! Sherlock Holmes himself said there is nothing new under the sun!”

What if Steven Moffat left Doctor Who? Would Mark still write for Doctor Who?

“Of course I’d still write for Doctor Who! If they’d have me! It’s a continuing honor and thrill! I would say that unlike Russell [Davies] saying ‘that’s me, done,’ I think that if Steven were to leave, he’d still come back after a few years and do another one. Because he loves it. I mean, Russell loves it too! But, I think Russell saw it as his take on it and that was it. Which is a very grown-up way of moving on. But I can’t resist the urge.”

When you’re hanging with Mark Gatiss, who wants to be a grown up anyway?

Would Mark want to be the showrunner of Doctor Who if Steven Moffat left?

“The truth is I know how incredibly demanding it is. And one of things that makes it very difficult to see is the sort of casual attacks Steven has had to put up with over the past few years. It’s incredibly hard work and they care so much. It’s a 24 hour job. And when people say ‘why can’t you make more episodes!?’ I mean, the episode we’re watching tonight: I was sent the final effect shot the day before I left for New York. That episode is just complete and it’s on this Saturday. There are so many things to consider. But to answer your question, I know how hugely demanding [showrunning] is, but also how hugely rewarding it would be. It’s a huge, life-changing decision. I’m an actor and a writer. I couldn’t act if I did it. Because I wouldn’t have time. The only thing I could act in would possibly be Doctor Who. WAIT A MINUTE! I’ll DO IT!”

At this, Mark begins giggling like a madman, throwing his head back and repeating “I’ll do it! This will effect my whole life? HA HA HA HA! I’LL DO IT!!”

The comedian, the sketch-comedy writer version of Mark Gatiss has emerged! Fittingly, we switch our conversation to the importance of humor in his writing. How and why is he just so damn funny? Is Doctor Who and Sherlock nothing without humor?

“Humor is fundamental. I couldn’t agree with you more. There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of why we love these shows. Essentially from slightly humorless people who thinks it needs to be po-faced all the time. The man who created the Daleks—Terry Nation—was Tony Hancok’s writer. He was a very, very funny man who could also write great science fiction. That’s what Russell is. That’s what Steven is. What I am. Lots of people. Humor is bound-up in the DNA of [Doctor Who]. ‘Robots of Sherwood,’ for instance, is a straightforward romp. But, you should no more criticize a show for being too funny—what’s wrong with too funny, anyway? You hear that a lot. Someone says ‘it’s too funny.’ WHAT? Too funny? Would your prefer it was moderately funny? I’d go for much too funny any day. That doesn’t mean you’re messing with the format, that you’re spoiling it. And if you look back at the history of the show, that’s what it’s always been at its best. It doesn’t get much grimmer than “Genesis of the Daleks.” But of course there’s humor. Of course there is. It might be pitch black, but it’s there. And sometimes the level is pitched one way and sometimes the other. But to me, it’s absolutely quintessential to Doctor Who, it’s a fun show.”

Though I would have loved to talk to Mark for hours only about Sherlock Holmes and his favorite stories and which movies are his personally, secret preferences, I decide that since we’re already best friends, we’ve had that conversation in some alternate world. Instead, I’m interested in continuity. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle flippantly didn’t care about continuity. Does Mark Gatiss care about continuity?

“Because we live in such an overly-examined age, in which everything is easily consumed and spat-out, everything has taken on a ludicrous level of importance. If Conan Doyle hadn’t had his famously lax attitude toward continuity, we wouldn’t be able to have the fun we have. From speculating on the strange fact that Professor Moriarty and his brother have the same Christian name, that Watson’s war-wound moves about, that Mary calls John “James”! I’m sure people did write to [Doyle] and complain, because there were always fans! But the thing is, it’s fine. My attitude is this: get it right if you can because if you’re perversely getting it wrong, it looks careless. But. Absolutely frankly: if someone came up with an idea for Doctor Who that flatly contradicted something that happened in 1967, fuck it. Of course fuck it! Someone once said to me ‘six months ago is ancient history,’ in terms of television. That’s true, because you’re talking about the general audience and not the fan audience. AND if you flatly contradicted something that happened in 1967, the fans would find a way of explaining it. I remember—in talking about Star Trek—someone telling me that reason William Shatner has so much eye shadow on in “Journey to Babel”—more than ever—is because Star Fleet officers are allowed to wear a certain amount of make-up during formal ceremonies! WHAT?!! I mean you don’t have to explain it! The Master was a snake at one point!”

Looking smooth, and talking smooth are something Mark Gatiss knows how to do, and that’s partially because he’s a big Bond fan. Could secret government mastermind Mycroft exist in the Bond universe?

“He does exist in the Bond universe! We made an explicit reference. In ‘His Last Vow,’ I say ‘As my esteemed colleague is fond of pointing out, what the country needs sometimes is a blunt instrument. Which is M! From the books! And of course I’d love to write a Bond film. It’s the one that’s eluded me. Me and Steven we both wanted to do Bond. I did From Russian With Love on radio!”

As our time comes creeping up on us, and the Spider-Man cartoon winds down, I ask Mark if there’s a world for a gay Bond? What about a straight Sherlock? The last one gets a guttural laugh from him, and we launch into the territory of diversity among established characters and fandoms.

“The point is to me, none of these things should be done because anyone feels pressure to tick a box. A show like Doctor Who has brilliantly celebrated gay people, incidentally, which to me is proper progress. But I think personally, there should absolutely be a female Doctor, a black Doctor, an Asian Doctor, but it’s because someone comes along who is absolutely indisputably the person for the job. With James Bond, it’s a literary antecedent. If you were for reasons of box-ticking made James Bond gay, that’s not James Bond. By all means have a gay spy! I’ve written about one myself! [Mark’s Lucifer Box novels] If you want to do a gay British Spy, adapt my books! That’s my advice. Do a franchise based on my books!”

Will Mark Gatiss fulfill his dreams of creating the next “new” thing that we will all love and obsess over? What is the future for our beloved Doctor Who/Sherlock writer? In addition to a film, more Doctor Who and the three new Sherlocks, that is. What is Mark’s secret project he hasn’t talked about yet?

At this he narrows his eyes, pats my leg and says with a Mycroft twinkle and almost a sneer:

“Can’t talk about it.”

Mark’s Doctor Who episode “Sleep No More” airs this Saturday.

#MG #mark gatiss #interview #all things MG

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sweetboybucky · 6 years

Text

Strawberry

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Word Count: 2100

Warnings: Some language

Summary: Bucky comes home sore from a morning of training. You help him out.

A/N: I’ve finally broken through my worst case of writer’s block to date and written this. Honestly, I just wrote this because I need a massage. And a Bucky. The summary is... not good. There’s basically no plot here, so I really didn’t know what else to say. This a little rough around the edges, maybe a little messy, a little different than what I usually write, but I hope you enjoy it regardless.

(And a quick thanks to my lovely friend, @marvelous-avengers for being absolutely amazing this past week. I love you with all my heart, and this one is for you.)

My Masterlist

***

Bucky had greatly overestimated the super soldier serum.

When Steve found him in that POW camp, tall and muscular, he assumed it was the stuff of fairy tales. Some magical potion that granted his friend the power to lift buildings and be nearly unfazed if said building fell on him.

He wasn’t wrong about it being powerful, about it making people stronger. Healthier. It did the trick on Steve, certainly. But he was sure that it did more. That it made the people who got it strong beyond belief.

Now that he has it - and can still feel the growing ache in his back as he lies on the training room floor - he realizes he was very, very wrong.

“Had enough yet, pal?”

He can hear the smile in Steve’s voice. Feel the looming presence of his body above him as he remains motionless. Doesn’t even bother to open his eyes and send his friend a glare.

Bucky won’t let him win, though, even if he can’t feel his legs and his spine might be minutes from snapping in half. So he settles for grumbling, “I should be asking you.” He lets his eyelids flutter open. Squints up at Steve’s smug face.

“Sure,” Steve chuckles. He sticks his hand out for Bucky to grab. Pulls back and helps him sit up and then stand. Steve claps his shoulder before pulling away. Turning to his bag and fishing out two little towels. Throws one over his shoulder and tosses the other to Bucky.

“You trying to kill me, Rogers?” Bucky asks, wiping his brow. He can feel his hair sticking to the back of his neck with sweat and his back really starting to protest. He has to hide a wince when Steve looks at him over his shoulder.

“Wasn’t the plan, but if it happens it happens.”

Bucky chuckles, low and deep. “If you kill me, you won’t have anyone else to put up with your shit.”

Steve steps over to him again. Fixes his blue eyes on Bucky and purses his lips to hold in his amusement. Tries to fake an expression of betrayal.

“Sam would,” Steve argues.

“Wilson would not,” Bucky reminds him. “Not all on his own. You can’t expect one person to handle all this stupid.” He gestures lazily toward Steve’s body before crossing his arms over his chest.

Another laugh. A little shove before Steve starts walking out of the training room and waves for Bucky to follow, his body aching and his muscles tightening with each step.

“And,” Bucky starts, glancing at him as they make their way toward the elevator, “if you kill me, you’ll have my girl to deal with.”

Steve bristles. Sucks in air through his teeth and says, “Oof. You’re right. Can’t kill you now.”

Laughter fills the elevator as Bucky lets loose. Lets himself imagine what that would look like - you going after Steve and Steve not having the heart to even pry your body off of him. He knows you would do it, too. That only makes it funnier.

It makes the ache in his body fade just a little. Makes the trek to your bedroom much shorter than usual. It makes him smile instead of punching him when Steve nudges him toward your room, says, “Go on. I know you’re dying without her.”

He doesn’t have anything to refute that with - it’s true.

The bedroom smells like you when he pushes the door open. He can hear you humming in the bathroom. Spots you eyeing yourself in the mirror.

It feels so natural. So domestic it makes his heart ache.

He watches you for a moment, waits for you to look up and see him. And when you do, he can’t really remember how mad he was at Steve for waking him so early to train. He can’t remember anything that doesn’t have your smile.

“Hey, Buck,” you say, turning back to the counter.

“Hey, darlin’,” he answers.

He wants to walk over to you. Stand behind you and hug you. Kiss you and nuzzle your neck and hear your laugh when you say his beard tickles.

But his back has decided that it’s time to start screaming again. And just standing is hurting him so much he can barely focus.

Soft sheets meet his skin when he flops down onto his stomach on the bed. Shoves his face into his pillow and sighs. The shirt on his body sticks to him. Pulls at his skin in the most uncomfortable of ways. It makes him grimace.

“I missed you this morning,” you tell him.

Affection blooms within him. “I missed you, too.”

“How was training?”

Bucky groans. Hears you laugh and can’t help but smile just a little at the sound. When he speaks, his words are muffled against the pillowcase under his cheek, “That punk nearly killed me. Made me do his stupid sets.”

“Oh, you poor baby,” you tease. Footsteps fall along the floor. And then the bed is dipping next to him, a hand ghosting over his hair and then down his back. “Do you want me to beat him up for you?”

Flashes of the images he got in the elevator come back to him. He wants to laugh at it, go along with your little act. But he knows it’s just that - an act. And his back hurts just a little too much to find anything particularly funny.

“You mocking me, Y/N?” he asks, voice gravelly, lips moving against the pillow.

“Not mocking,” you answer, voice a little more serious now. “Just teasing. Did you hurt yourself or something?”

His first instinct is to say no. To roll over and pull you into his arms. Kiss you until you forget about anything he said. Until midday comes around and you both have to pry yourselves out of bed.

But your fingers are so gentle as the ruck up the material of his shirt. As they start peeling the damp material away from his skin. He doesn’t want to hide his pain anymore. Certainly not from you.

“Just my back,” he tells you, finally settling on an answer. “A little sore is all. I’ll be okay.”

“Want me to give you a massage?”

It’s so sweet. So sincere and kind. It makes his heart feel warm and his lips curl up in a grin. It makes him feel happy in a way that’s not unwelcome but still slightly foreign.

He settles for teasing you instead of letting the mindless strings of affection fall out of his mouth, though. Whispers, “A massage, huh?” Turns his face enough to look at you without moving the rest of his body and wiggles his eyebrows. “Now that sounds nice.”

You throw your head back and laugh. Bucky catalogs it as one of the best things he’s seen. Smiles a dopey smile at you and lights up when your eyes turn back to him.

“You’re something else, Barnes,” you breathe.

He settles back into the mattress. Closes his eyes. “And you love me for it.”

“Yeah,” you answer, voice quiet and hands gentle as they run along his back. “Yeah, I do.”

The bed shifts again when you stand. He groans a little before he feels your hands on his shoulders. But when he realizes that you’re trying to get him to sit up, he whines again.

“If you let me take off your shirt, I’ll use some of that lotion you like.”

He grins. Lets his eyes fall on you again. Now that might be worth it. “The strawberry stuff?”

“Yup,” you answer, pulling at his shoulders again. “The strawberry stuff. Now come on, help me out here. I don’t have the super soldier strength to lift you up.”

He follows your movements. Lets you turn his body enough for him to sit up. Raises his arms above his head and lets out a content sigh at the feeling of the cool air on his sweaty skin once his shirt is off and settled on the floor.

Flopping back down, he shoves his face into the pillow again. Wiggles a little until he’s comfortable while you get up to grab the lotion. He can smell it as soon as you uncap it, the sweet scent of strawberries making him relax even further.

You laugh, settling yourself onto the mattress and straddling his hips. Your weight is nice against him. Grounding along with the feeling of your warm fingers on his skin.

“Can’t believe I’m using up all of my good lotion on you,” you say.

He hums. Says, “It smells good. And I can buy you more.”

A chuckle. A gentle prod against his side. He squirms against you, finds his own chest rumbling with laughter as you add, “What would the world say if they knew the former Winter Soldier was so in love with strawberry scented lotion?”

“Don’t care. I don’t need to be scary anymore. I can like whatever I want now.”

It’s not the first time he’s thought about it, but the words still leave an unfamiliar taste in his mouth. They still feel a little hard to get out, a little difficult to admit. As much as he knows that he’s free to like strawberry lotion and the soft sheets you bought for the bed, saying it still sends that mixture of thrill and fear through him.

You must know what he’s thinking, though, because you don’t miss a beat. You just lean down, kiss the spot between his shoulder blades and whisper against the skin there, “Yeah, you can.”

Before he can say anything else - if he could speak, that is, because his throat is feeling pretty dry at the moment - your hands are on him. The pads of your fingers are massaging the lotion into his back. Digging into the muscled flesh and working out every last knot.

The noise that rises from his chest is completely obscene. Something he would be embarrassed at letting out if it didn’t feel so damn good. And by the sound of your laughter, and the way you lean down and kiss his hair, he knows he doesn’t need to be embarrassed, anyway. Not with you. Never with you.

He holds still. Closes his eyes and revels in the affection. The press of your lips every now and then, the gentle way you move your hands against him. It makes that comforting warmth spread through every inch of him.

“When did you get so good at this?” he questions. His words are slurred and punctuated by more happy sounds. “You been practicing on someone else?”

A laugh falls from your lips. Bucky loves the sound more than he can explain.

“No one else, Buck,” you say. “Only you. Always you.”

He hums. Lets a lazy smile curl his lips up and rubs his cheek against the pillow. Gropes back to let his hand rest on your thigh. Squeezes you there.

Your hands still for a moment as you ask, “You feeling any better?”

Steel blue eyes flutter open. Lock on you and take in your sweet smile. “Much better.” Another squeeze of his hand on your thigh.

The bottle of lotion makes a little clicking noise when you set it on the nightstand. And then you’re slipping off of his back. Laughing at his annoyed sound of protest and settling next to him. Lying on your side to face him.

He looks at you for a minute before throwing his arm over your waist. Bringing you closer to his side and kissing your hair.

“Thanks, doll,” he whispers.

You chuckle into his shoulder. Mouth at the skin there. “Anything for you.”

You’re both silent for a stretch. Bucky lets himself close his eyes. Lets himself breathe in the sweet smell of your shampoo and soak in your warmth. He lets himself feel happy. Truly happy with you next to him.

He feels you inhale against him. And then: “You smell like strawberries.”

“I would hope so,” he chuckles. His grin grows. “You practically used the whole bottle on me.”

“It was worth it,” you tell him. Your fingers are gentle as the brush along the stubble on his jaw, your smile even more so as you murmur, “My strawberry.”

He smiles, wide and unrestrained. Pulls you into him and kisses you, a long and sweet press of your lips. He feels warm. Safe. Loved in the most wonderful of ways.

Maybe the super soldier didn’t cure all of his problems, didn’t make him invincible. But he has you. And that’s enough.

“I am your strawberry.” He brushes some hair out of your eyes. Presses his lips to your brow and says, “All yours, darlin’.”

He means it. He’s all yours.

MAIN TAG LIST:

@solarbarnes II @akamaiden II @my-meant-to-find-blog II @marvelous-avengers II @jack4xx II @buckyforbreakfast II @theglowstickofdestiny II @bucky-at-bedtime II @notimetoblog II @estelgilvala II @teawithbucky II @veronicalei II @part-time-patronus II @thunderous-flower II @thelostverse II @delicatecapnerd II @pizzarollpatrol II @laurfangirl424 II @stevieboyharrington II @yknott81 II @bucky-smiles II @buckysb-tch II @a-watson-in-search-of-a-sherlock II @heartssick

#Bucky Barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky x reader #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes fluff #reader insert #reader #fluff #oneshot #bucky x you #My writing

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nerdylittleshit · 5 years

Text

Thoughts about Spn 14x20

SPOILERS AHEAD! BEWARE!

WHAT. A. SEASON. FINALE. I admit I wasn’t that invested in season 14, mostly because Michael as a villain didn’t spark my interest. I was curious to see how they would handle the situation with Jack and what the stakes would be going into season 15, knowing it would be the last season. And the show went into a direction I did not see coming (and thankfully I had managed to avoid any kind of spoilers) and I am super exited to see where they will be going with this next season. Is this officially the most meta episode now? I think so. And I love it.

But, as always, let’s take a closer look.

You’re my favourite show

We start the episode with Jack escaping from the bunker and his wish for everyone to stop lying. Lies and truth are a big theme of this episode, so much that we are told twice that writers lie. The writer within the episode of course is Chuck but it also a meta reference to the writers of the show.

For a brief time Jack’s wish comes true and nobody can lie anymore. Which of course created some comedy gold (Trump’s deal with Crowley, Queen Elizabeth is a lizard etc) and a missed opportunity for Dean and Cas to talk about their feelings for each other (I guess this was the closest we could get to a truth spell). But we see the chaos it created, that we need lies to live peacefully together and the amount of power Jack has. And of course arguably the wish had no effect on Chuck, and yet by the end of the episode he is forced to reveal the truth.

A lot of what we see then felt to me like things we have seen before on the show. A family member that turns into a monster, making a hard choice or rather the feeling of having no choice, the brothers fighting, one of them wanting to sacrifice himself, a magical weapon. It is familiar because we have seen it before. And naturally a show in its 14th season is repeating some of their storylines, but it felt a bit like lazy writing to me, and I think that was actually their intention. We as an audience are meant to be reminded that this a story, because in the end it turns out it really is just that: a story.

I still think Jack is a rather unusual villain (if he is a villain at all) and that is what makes him so interesting. He still has the best intentions, he says that all he ever wanted was to do good. Despite his grandmother yelling at him he only tells her to stop and doesn��t repeat what happened to Mary. But he knows that he can no longer feel anything, he even tells Dean that he is a monster, and in the end he is ready to die. Despite Chuck killing him I think we will see him again. Billie visiting him in the Empty makes sure of that.

Dean’s decision not to kill Jack is interesting as he does indeed follow the script, at least as far as the biblical story of Abraham goes, who could not kill his son Isaak either, and despite Chuck claiming that this is not how the story is supposed to end. If we look at Supernatural one of its biggest themes has always been free will/choice. Sam even said so to Dean, that it always came down to them having a choice. Chuck himself, long before he was revealed to be God, even said to Dean and Cas “you are not supposed to be in this story”. The story of Supernatural is built on these characters having a choice. And Dean obviously uses his choice not to kill Jack.

Chuck is interesting as he is both the writer/creator of the story as well as the audience. He is both active and passive. He has created the story and he has the power to intervene, yet for the most part he decides to watch what he calls “his favourite show”. And of course as an audience we can only take the story as it is – we can like it or dislike it, but we can’t change it. And this isn’t even “choose your own adventure”. Chuck can intervene and he can manipulate the characters to do what he wants (he sure tries) but he can’t force them. And by forcing the story into the direction he wants he reveals his true nature. That he always had the power to kill Jack, but thought that Dean killing his own son (and by that killing himself) would be more dramatic. Or simply the better story. And that all the pain the Winchesters had to endure was nothing more than entertainment for him. And that is of course where the show calls out its own audience. Of course we did not choose that Sam and Dean had to suffer that much, but we watched them all the same, we used their lives as entertainment as well. This isn’t the first time the show has broken the fourth wall but I don’t think they have ever done it so clever before.

The question is where will we go from this. Not only was Chuck/God revealed to be the villain all along, as it seems he also undid everything the Winchesters have ever done, bringing back every monster they ever killed. Will they try to kill God in season 15? So far it didn’t seem like the CW had the guts to do something like that, but perhaps with the show’s final season they will. It would certainly be the ultimate act of free will. How will Billie and Jack fit in this? Was Sam perhaps right that Chuck was afraid of Jack? Did he willingly arrange the story in a way that would result in Jack’s death? Did Chuck realize that Jack is too powerful, that Jack perhaps has the power to kill God/replace him? Because as Chuck said, if he dies existence dies as well (then again writers lie). Can the Winchesters kill God without killing the universe? Is it Jack’s role to replace Chuck? Is Billie on their side because Chuck meddled with destiny? She told Dean there was only one way to defeat Michael (trapping himself in the box), because it was written in her books, and yet we saw a different outcome, suggesting perhaps that Chuck changed the story because he didn’t like what was written in Billie’s books. And we know from the old Death that one day Death would reap God as well. Whatever will happen it is going to be a very interesting final season. I’m pumped.

Some other things:

Sam finally calling Dean out to be a nerd. We knew it all along but it is good to hear it anyway.

The company named “Mirror universe”. The Mirror Universe is a big thing in the Star Trek universe. Of course we have already seen one other universe in the show and Chuck confirmed that there are many other universes. I wonder if they will play a role in season 15.

Chuck calling the British Men of Letters weak, aka Andrew Dabb’s way to apologize for season 12. Though I personally liked them.

#supernatural #spn 14x20 #moriah #spn meta #my meta #spoilers

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bluephoenixdruidicprincess · 5 years

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Shadowhunters 3x12, Original Sin -- Review

Welcome to another Shadowhunters review. 3x12 Original Sin, left me with the overall feeling of , "what was the point?"

I would like to preface this review with saying that I am NOT a huge supporter of this show. I do enjoy certain elements of it but I'm not what would be classified as a devoted fan. For me, Shadowhunters is not a good show and I do get very critical of the show in my reviews. Honestly, for me, I watch the show because 1) I'm too curious not to and 2) I find that this show can be so bad its funny and that's how I reap enjoyment out of it. I am not at all invested in this show or its characters anymore. I'm just watching to see what happens. If you're a die hard fan and you lash out at everyone who has a different opinion than you, you might want to skip these...I'm just saying. My reviews may not be for you. If you do decide to be a total troll, well then pay attention to the below disclaimer.

This is going to be an honest review of my thoughts and feelings regarding this episode. If you're the kind of Shadowhunters fan where you only want to hear positive things about the show, this is not the place for you. If you decide to stick around and get offended by what is said, then that's on you. I warned you. Just know that if you send me any rude comments or messages, I will 100% ignore you. I find that's the best way to deal with bullies. I work 14 hour days. Do you really think I want to waste my incredibly valuable free time dealing with derogatory comments? Hell no. This review will consist of my honest opinions. Opinions are never right or wrong. I'm not telling YOU how to think and feel. I'm telling you what I, quirky and socially awkward me, think and feel. So please, lets discuss with dignity and respect. If I'm critical about this show, it's only because I want it to get better. There is, in fact, a difference between hating a show and being critical of it. I do not hate Shadowhunters, I am being critical and analyzing the flaws as I would with any other show. There are positives but there are also negatives. It's great if you want to promote positivity with this show (and I encourage you to do so) but that doesn't mean I'm not going to point out the things that are legitimately wrong with it. Also, keep in mind that despite the fact that I do like the books, me being critical of this show has nothing to do with my fondness for the books. I don't really care if the show deviates from the source material as long as the changes are good, it makes sense, and it doesn't create plot holes within the confines of the world the show has created. My problems with this show are problems I would have with any show or book for that matter. I think it's perfectly reasonable to take issue with a show that has plot holes, shoddy world building, and inconsistent characters. There will be spoilers for the books and movie.

So yeah, I was not a big fan of this episode. Basically, this episode is just a bunch of plots mashed together that played out in a timespan of 42 minutes and the writers called it an episode. It has no structure, no flow, it's just a compilation of moments, no connecting themes are ever really introduced and oh my god, the acting in this episode was atrocious. It's like everyone forgot how to emote and was just collecting a paycheck, they were only there because they were being paid to be there. The acting in this episode is what's known as "phoning it in". There was no spark to the acting, no charm. At least, for me. Others may have thought the acting was great and they're allowed to think that. I’m just of the opinion the acting wasn't that great and I'm allowed to think that, as well. I shudder to say it but the acting featured in early Season 1 is Emmy worthy compared to what we got in this episode.

And the A-Plot is Back to Being Dull

You know what really would've been an interesting character arc? Jonathon being a dark mirror for Clary and Clary having to really evaluate herself and acknowledge the dark parts in her and realize she has both of her parents in her. What did you say, Freeform? Character development is for amateur writers? Your main character, the character that's supposed to carry the story should remain a cardboard cutout with no complexity? Okay, then. Cool. My mistake. I suppose it was asking a little too much for you to do character development on this show. It's nice to know that this entire plot with Jonathon featured in the previous episode and this episode was completely meaningless, a waste of time the show doesn't have, and was probably only here to showcase Jonathon's incestuous feelings towards Clary...because he's evil so of course he's in love with his sister. Now, I am in no way saying I like the whole Clace incest vibe from the books. I found it creepy and I generally didn't like it but later on in the series, I was more okay with it because of Jonathon and his feelings being a dark mirror for Clace, there was a story-telling purpose for it so I can't really fault the books for that. But the show doesn't have that. They didn't really go for the Clace incest so all we're going to get is an evil dude in love with his sister, it's basically going to mean little to the overarching themes of the story. It's more like, "Does this really need to be here? Does this really need to be explored?"

In this episode we have Jonathon and Clary just chilling in Paris, France. Although it is quite concerning just how few people there actually appear to be in Paris France, the romance capital of the world. But anyway, in preparation for leaving the apartment and experiencing Paris, Jonathon has Clary change clothes before they go out which thank god for that. She has supposedly been wearing that same outfit for days now, she even trekked through the snow in it in her attempted escape wearing that outfit. All I'm saying is those clothes must be soaked in sweat and oil by now. Honestly, I'm surprised Jonathon can be in the same room as her, her BO must be pretty rank by now. But Clary's clothing issue has been solved by Lillith conveniently being the exact same size as Clary. I'm just going to ignore the part where Lillith is technically a demon, human isn't even her true form so I don't know why she has such an extensive wardrobe. Clary and Jonathon hang out in Paris for a little bit, all the while they're trying to get the other to trust them and while they're doing that, Luke and Jace are actively trying to find our Mary Sue. They eventually end up in Siberia where Jace finds a clump of hair so that definitely means that clump of hair is Clary's and in all future scenes I became obsessed with trying to find Clary's bald spot because that clump of hair was huge. Clary notices a shadowhunter and picks his pocket for his stele. Apparently, the shadowhunters take missing steles VERY seriously because the guy reports it and Jace finds out through some sort of criminal report database so they hypothesize Clary is in Paris. I don't know why the shadowhunter would automatically assume a rogue shadowunter stole it. It could just have easily been a pick-pocket or it could've fallen out of his pocket, Paris is a busy place. Jonathon and Clary end up in some sort of store because Jonathon has heard that the shopkeeper might know of the Morganstern sword. And I'm instantly appalled that Clary is supposedly a seasoned, fully-fledged shadowhunter and she doesn't appear to know about the different classes of demons. I guess Clary is all brawn no brain. But the shopkeeper refuses to do business with Jonathon while Clary's there because he can smell the shadowhunter on her. Jonathon lets Clary leave the shop and Clary uses the stele to, I guess try to escape but the shadowhunter she stole it from conveniently finds her, she tells him who she is and I'm even more appalled at just how self-absorbed Clary is in this moment. She undoes her magical wig and just assumes that's enough to prove that she is who she says she is, she just assumes this guy knows what Clary Fairchild looks like. I mean, clearly the entire world should know who she is, she's the Mary Sue main character after all. But Jonathon figures out something is wrong when the shadowhunter twists Clary's arm and Jonathon feels it which is weird on how this whole bond thing works. Because when she passed out in the snow, nothing happened to him. So just like the parabatai bond, I think this is going to be a very selective plot device, it's only going to matter when the narrative needs it to matter. Jonathon kills the shadowhunter and after exclaiming that killing someone for Clary must be what love is, Jace, Alec and Luke show up. Clary tells them not to kill Jonathon as it'll hurt her as well but she does stab herself in the leg and that causes hurt to Jonathon which spurs him to run away. I don't know why a stab in the leg is enough to deter him considering he grew up in a demon realm and no doubt faced much worse torture. But whatever. Clace gets their reunion kiss, and by the way to no one’s surprise hopefully, time away has not built their chemistry in any way so they still feel awkward. And the episode ends with Jonathon back in the episode screaming his frustration. It was an interesting director’s decision to have the scene completely silent in that moment. It might’ve been effective except I think it went 5 seconds too long. They probably could’ve trimmed that down a little and it would’ve felt more organic. But after a while, it was like, “okay, when is this scene going to be over?”

Quick sidenote before I move on. In this whole plot to find Clary, why didn't anyone even once try tracking her? I mean, it wouldn't have worked, but still, they don't know that and tracking is their default response to everything...Jace misplaces his hair gel and I’m sure he’s knocking at Magnus’s door to get Alec to help him parabatai-track it down.

The Sizzy Plot (Can we just not, okay?)

So the Sizzy plot is still happening and it still feels very forced. I think the issue that I've really been having with show!Sizzy, much in the same vein as Clizzy as well, we're shown that Simon and Izzy are friends but we don't get any sort of understanding as to why they're friends. The thing that makes me care about any relationship in a story -- whether it be romantic, platonic, whatever -- is the personality of the relationship. I need to be able to distinguish why this relationship exists within the context of the characters and the story. Why do these characters have the relationship they do? Why do they want to be around each other? And there's none of that with Sizzy. Really, there's none of that with any of the relationships on this show but that's beside the point. And yes, I'm even talking about Malec with that statement, their relationship also has no personality. The only relationship on this show that's even close to having a personality is Saia. I've said it before, while I adore Sizzy in the books, I don't want it in the show. The show has stripped away everything that made Sizzy interesting and fun and what Sizzy has left in the show is just really dull and bland and I don't care about it. The show's better off to quit while they're ahead and keep Saia.

But anyway, the Sizzy plot starts with them walking through the sewers of New York in their search for the oldest vampire and one of Izzy's first lines is she knows these sewers through and through as she used to sneak down here to hunt as a child. So we get the scene where Izzy hides behind Simon because she saw a rat and first off, I find this extremely out of character for both book!Izzy and show!Izzy. While it’s believable she may be afraid of rats, I don't think she would cower behind someone. She would probably kill it on instinct. Izzy is not someone who cowers in the wake of her fears, she faces them head on and makes those fears fear her instead. She would take a dagger and just throw it at the rat or use the whip and slice it into little bits and pieces and serve it to her most recent ex for breakfast. Secondly, I'm confused, she says she knows these sewers through and through but rats populating the sewers is not a recent development. If she's this afraid of rats, how on earth has she gotten through these sewers before. Also, is this fear of rats thing kind of like a nod to the books wherein Simon gets turned into a rat? Is this the writers saying they found that plot repulsive and that's why they didn't use it? Just a casual observation there. But anyway, they continue their search and as they get deeper into the sewers, Simon asks if they're going the right way and Izzy responds with she doesn't know because she's never gone this deep...which again, confused. Izzy said she knew these sewers through and through -- clearly, she doesn't and that line was stupid. But anyway, Simon meets this vampire, it turns out to be Cain. The story goes that Adam broke up with Lillith back in the day because he wanted to be with Eve and the whole Cain and Able story happened because Lillith compelled Cain to kill Able. Yeah, just effectively taking away responsibility of one's actions, that's what these writers do best. I bet when they were in school, they used the classic “my dog ate my homework” excuse all the time. Lillith turned Cain into a vampire and daylighter because he drank Able's blood, I guess, which eww, I certainly never heard that part of the story in church. And Cain got the mark from the Seelie Queen so we still don't know anything about the mark, why it was created, how it was created, nothing. But we did get a magical rock that can apparently take away the mark, the rock not being Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson -- although that would certainly be cool and he is very magical to me -- but being The Rock that was used to kill Able by Cain. Simon and Izzy go to the Seelie Realm to get the mark removed and there's one scene I did like where Meliorn asks Izzy if she and Simon are dating and I don't understand what would make him think that but whatever. But that's not the part I liked. When Izzy tells Meliorn no, she and Simon aren't a thing, Meliorn responds with ok cool, in that case we should totally hang out again and you can bring your friend along as well. Now, that would've been an interesting dynamic for this show to get into. A polyamorous situation between Izzy, Simon, and Meliorn. And you know what? When it comes right down to it? I would even be happy if Izzy and Meliorn were endgame as opposed to Sizzy. At least there's been development for these two. The mark gets removed using the rock but it's excruciatingly painful for Simon, more excruciating was watching how this scene was directed. Was Simon floating in the air really necessary with shimmering cgi white lights underneath his skin? I really don't think so. It would've been just fine if he was just on the ground feeling this pain and considering this was effectively getting rid of all of the blood in his system, it might've been cooler to see shimmering blood-red cgi underneath his skin. And as I said, after this process ends and the mark of cain is no more, Simon is dying slowly because he has no blood in his system so Izzy cuts her hand and offers hers but it isn't enough so she has Simon bite her and take however much he needs. Thus, ending her sobriety.

Now, I'm less bothered by the whole drug aspect of Sizzy that a lot of people dislike in this episode. I do think this is a real sacrifice Izzy is making to save Simon and it'll be interesting to see 1)if there are any consequences to this and 2) how she faces those consequences. After some amount of time of being sober, she's now got the taste again so we'll see. Is she strong enough to overcome it or is she going to fall apart again? My issue with this mark of Cain plot seemingly being a lead-in into Sizzy is that's it's not based on any sort of character dynamic. Again, it all ties into the personality of a relationship thing I've been talking about. Izzy, at least from the development we've gotten of Sizzy, doesn't really have that strong of ties of Simon. She like him as a person, probably, but if he were to actually die in this moment, she might be sad and there's certainly going to be repercussions with her friendship with Clary but she's been around death her whole life, death is something she more or less accepts. The relationship she has with Simon is really nothing more than a working relationship she has with those nameless shadowhunters in the Institute. I'm sure she likes them well enough, can even hold a conversation with them, but it doesn't really go beyond that. So, what happens in this scene just makes the moment, as well as Sizzy in general, feel just really hollow.

The Malec Plot

See what I mean about this episode just having random stuff happen that doesn't really connect with each other. Well, we're about to get into more of it.

So Malec has a training fight scene, it's alright. It's nothing great nor is it horrible. It's just kind of there. I'm normally a fan of Shadowhunter training fight sequences, they're pretty fun to look at and they deliver nice exposition in a way that isn't boring to listen to. I do wish they would cut out the alternative pop music though, it's very distracting. And I typically like fight scenes being used as a way for characters to flirt with each other but unfortunately, Shadowhunters is not great about that aspect of it. Whenever there's flirting involved in these fight scenes, it just always comes off as super cringey. But my problem in this scene lies more in how unequal the fight is. Magnus is on the offense primarily the entire time and Alec is defensive and just kind of taking it and letting Magnus beat up on him, which by no means is a bad thing, it's just a little unbelievable considering Alec has been trained to be a warrior since a young age so you would think he would have a little more fight to him. I thought it would’ve been cool after Magnus bragged about all this fight training he's had and throwing down Alec, Alec then throws down Magnus and is all, "you have your tricks, I have mine" and the entire fight scene is all about these two trying to prove which fighting style is more effective and then it eventually escalates to the bedroom scene where it's revealed that despite them having different fight styles (which is also sybolism for their very different personalities), that's what makes them a perfect fit for each other. That's how I would've written it but I'm not the writers and that definitely isn't what happened. Magnus beats up on Alec some, Alec gets turned on and they move things to the bedroom. That's basically what happens. We see them again just at the tail end of their sexual escapades, which was cool. And this is something I've been noticing and I can't seem to un-see since 3B began. The chemistry with Magnus and Alec just doesn't feel like chemistry of lovers. I've never felt like they had amazing chemistry before but I always felt it worked, but coming back from this year-long hiatus, the chemistry just isn't there for me. I even looked at previous seasons and I'm seeing a lot of what I saw here that I just never noticed before. Just the rigidness these two people have whenever they're in a scene together just makes me feel really awkward. I think the year hiatus is causing me to look at this show with fresher eyes so that’s why I’m noticing it now. Time sometimes changes your perspectives on things. They had one moment of passion in this episode where I almost believed them and that was the kiss at the end of the fight scene. But in the next scene where they're laying in the bed, I felt nothing and I certainly didn't believe for a second they just had sex. And the immortality talk was alright, I guess but I really just found it more out of place than anything else.

Really, this entire Malec plot didn't need to be in this episode. I don't necessarily mind that it was, but there was no purpose to it for the episode's overall plot. Like, the fight scene is fine but I don't really understand why it's there or why Magnus feels like he needed fight training when he clearly knows how to fight. It just makes this sub-plot feel pointless. I would've much preferred Malec playing a bigger role in discovering where Clary was and being more central to that plot.

So there you have it. Overall, I felt like this entire episode was just generally kind of pointless and a mash-up of plots that would’ve been better served in their own episodes where more attention could’ve been given. But as the episode stands now, it really didn’t accomplish a whole lot. And the things it did manage to accomplish, I feel it accomplished in very shaky ways that didn't really develop the characters in any way so again, really, what was even the point? That's what I kept on asking myself the entire episode. And as I said before, the acting was pretty bad. It really gave the impression that the actors didn't care. I don't know if anyone else saw what I did but that's what I saw and the general impression of what I got from this episode. There were so many line deliveries that felt flat, there was no facial expressions and a lot of the episode, it just felt like I was watching people say lines they had memorized. I'd give this episode a C-. It's still fine but it just leaves you feeling hollow.

#shadowhunters #shadowhunters 3b #shadowhunters original sin #shadowhunters 3x12

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plotlinehotline · 6 years

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"Overused” is Overused: Understanding Clichés and Tropes in Your Writing

I hate writing advice.

That’s my little tongue-in-cheek joke for this post, because the irony of what I’m doing literally as I type that statement is not lost on me. It’s true, though— I honestly think that advice is one of the most damaging things to a writer’s mindset. It makes them second-guess their methods, their ideas, and even whether they truly have what it takes to be a *~*writer*~* in the eyes of the rest of the world.

It’s a truly unfortunate thing, because it’s so important for writers to be able to share their experiences and successes. The problem is that these experiences get passed around in a game of It’s-Been-Ten-Years-Since-This-Essay-Was-Written Telephone, and the original intent of the advice (and sometimes its actual meaning!) gets lost along the way. They become these overarching blanket statements that offer broad limitations without reason or potential alternatives.

One of the greatest offenders of this is the idea that you ought to avoid clichés in writing. I’ve been part of online writing communities for a while now, and by far the most common concern I see is some variant of, “I’m thinking about doing [x], but I’m worried it’s too cliché”. It’s an epidemic amongst writers, and it absolutely infuriates me that so many writers have come to doubt their own work just because some vague internet grapevine has told them that clichés are to be avoided at all costs.

Because I’m so infuriated by this (and because I’m super extra and actually have a relevant platform on which to discuss this), I’m going to take some time to explain the actual meaning of this particular piece of “advice” and why it’s far less of a concern than you’ve been lead to believe.

To begin, it’s very important to address the fact that there’s a fundamental misunderstanding surrounding this idea. This starts with the fact that the terms cliché and trope are mistakenly thought to be synonymous, or otherwise become confused with one another. Before I move forward, I want to offer the proper definition for both.

A cliché is a particular phrase that’s been used often enough to become commonplace. In writing, they’re generally used to create a specific image or tone that we can take for granted that the reader will recognize.

She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. It was raining cats and dogs, but she still stood with her arms to the sky, laughing like she didn’t even notice. She turned to me and winked, and I felt my face go as red as a beet. In that moment, I knew that I’d give my right arm to be with her.

A trope is a convention used in writing to give meaning to aspects of your story. They’re used as storytelling shorthand to attach identifiable qualities to your plot and characters— recurring themes that exist throughout history to guide stories.

Examples of tropes include the hero’s journey, the character’s fatal flaw, the comic relief character, the hero with a dark past, and the Mom Friend.

I’ll be the first to admit that there are similarities between the two— both are used to help readers understand parts of your story, and tropes can be specific phrases as shown in the cliché example above. The key is to separate the two in your mind and think about them only by the definitions above.

It’s important to do this, because part of the central misunderstanding is that “cliché” is often used in daily life to describe ideas as a whole that have been overused (think of the “I’m holding up the tower!” pic that literally everyone takes at the Leaning Tower of Pisa). I get the confusion and concern here, I really do. The most important thing to remember is that clichés have a specific meaning when it comes to writing. No matter how often you may see a particular theme or character arc, it is and always will be a trope.

With that out of the way, I’d like to discuss why this should be good advice. The truth of the matter is that clichés should be avoided where possible because they give the impression of lazy writing. Writers and readers alike take the imagery for granted and rely on these tried-and-true phrases to add physicality to their prose instead of finding unique descriptors; while it certainly gets the point across, it comes across as more of a 2D picture from a magazine than a scene from the movie adaptation we all know our books are destined to have.

To illustrate this, let’s take a look at the example above with all of the clichés removed:

The world had never experienced a beauty like hers— neither had I. I just watched as she stood there, arms to the sky as the rain pelted her relentlessly, soaking into her clothes and hair. She smiled as it ran down her face, laughing at each raindrop, finally turning to me and winking. She could have just been blinking the water out of her eye, I don’t know, but my face was hot and I suddenly found it hard to look at her. I stared at my shoes, willing them to take a step for once so I could go and join her.

Clichés fall flat because they aren’t specific to you as a writer— they aren’t at all indicative of your unique style. Your story loses so much when it’s not told in your own voice, so you shouldn’t rely on old phrases just because you know people will automatically understand them.

While the argument could be made that tropes fall into this same category, I would point out that tropes serve a deeper purpose than clichés. Where a cliché would act as filler, a trope would act as a foundation. Tropes are tools (most frequently, structural tools) that guide the story through plot/character development and tonal themes to give your reader a general idea of what they’re signing up for when they read your story.

Example Time!

Say that you wanted to write someone a love poem. You do your research, sifting through decades of poems to pick out the best phrases and metaphors, and you end up with the following:

Your eyes are as deep as an oceans Your eyes shine like stars They’re like windows to your soul I get lost in them every time I look

The poem is essentially a cut-and-paste of phrases from every cheesy romance novel out there, and will most likely leave the object of your affections wondering why you’re so obsessed with their eyeballs.

Alternatively, you hand them this:

Roses are red, Violets are blue...

and things get a little more interesting. Sure, the opening to the poem is a cliché in and of itself, but it sets the stage for whatever you want to fill it with. You could go with something traditional and make it cutesy, you could subvert the trope by dropping the rhyme scheme for dramatic or comedic effect, you could even revive the old 2015 “gun” meme. The world is your oyster!

The point is, the poem hasn’t been written for you. Sure, it follows a similar structure to poems that have been written before, but where you take it is entirely up to you— the opening lines are simply the prompt to make way for your own creative license.

Let’s be real, here.

I get that everyone wants to make something new and exciting that comes entirely from their own imagination. It’s the dream! The idea that anything we write could potentially be sourced back to an existing piece is super aggravating, and you don’t have to tell me how discouraging it is to have something that you’re genuinely proud of suddenly fall flat because someone says, “Hasn’t the teen dystopia thing been done to death?” or “Didn’t Star Trek do an episode like this?” or “Penney, this is just a Star Trek fanfiction with the names changed to Dirk and Spork, please stop.”

To be totally honest, there is not (nor will there ever be) a single piece of writing on this earth that’s 100% original. Everything is based off of a story that came before it, or had plots and characters that were cherry-picked from the millions of plots and characters that existed previously.

Even more honestly, people like it that way. Tropes help us to identify our favorite genres and characters, guide us to stories that we may like based on those preferences, and open our eyes to new stories and authors that follow those tropes in a slightly different way.

In short, embrace your tropes. Learn to recognize them and how they can be used and reimagined, and build your story out of the wonderful things that come of that knowledge. Be like me and waste a billion hours in the rabbit hole that is TV Tropes!

Most importantly, write the way you want to write and don’t let anyone else tell you how to do it. They’ll have their time when you’re ready for peer review. Right now is your time to do as you please, ignore all writing advice you see online, make a few mistakes, and do it all over again because that’s what writers do! Get out there and make some beautiful, cliché-ridden, trope-y masterpieces.

Love, Penney

#ask p #cliche #cliches #tropes #literary tropes #tropes in literature #writing cliche #writing cliches #writing tropes #writing advice #writing tips

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douxreviews · 5 years

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Star Trek: Short Treks - ‘The Brightest Star’ Review

Siranna: "Look down every now and then. There's beauty there as well."

By nature I love brevity: Meh. It was fine. The filmmakers made some decisions that are all too common and completely understandable, but that made this story less than, well, stellar. It's a shame; Saru deserved better.

Doug Jones' Saru is a fan favorite character from the ranks of Star Trek: Discovery, and one of the few characters that has managed to dodge the extreme backlash from people who hate on DIS so much you'd think its sole stated purpose is to end all life on Earth. (Disclaimer: I am fine with anyone disliking the show. Just don't act like both the show and the act of liking it are an affront to human decency.)

Anyway, Saru is one of the show's most popular characters, loved and enjoyed even by those who dislike the show itself. He's also from a species that's entirely new to Trek, and that we've heard precious little about thus far. This makes Saru the perfect subject for a Short Trek. One slight problem, though: how do you develop his backstory and motivation sufficiently, while also creating and displaying the culture of his species and maybe even giving us a compelling story as you go? Oh, and it all needs to fit into a short film less than twenty minutes long. The answer is that you can't do all that, of course. You can't give us all of that in such a short span of time, not if you want to do all those elements well.

The solution they used here is not the one that I would ideally have chosen, but I understand it and in practice may have made the same decision. Rather than cut out one of the elements in the film entirely, a little bit was drained from each of the elements present. The good thing about this is that now we get to see all of those elements, still largely intact. The downside is that each element feels just a little bit lacking, because of what's been taken from it

This is true of every single element in 'The Brightest Star.' Take Saru's relationships with his father and his sister. The dynamics could have been interesting, but as far as we saw these were just stock family relationships, borrowed from every story ever. Had there been more time to explore them, we would no doubt have seen the intricate details that make specific family relationships unique. But there wasn't enough time, and so we have to settle for the generic relationships that, while they serve their purpose adequately, are not terribly interesting.

Or what about the story? Saru acquires a piece of technology from the predator species to the Kelpiens, and instead of discarding it as he is supposed to, he hides it and uses it to send a message to the stars. We could have seen some tension as Saru's device is almost discovered. We could have seen Saru reveal to his father what he plans to do, and then watched their conflict come to a boil. Maybe could have even gotten a quiet acceptance from his father, though he would never have gotten approval. There was so much here, but there wasn't time to explore it.

Every part of 'The Brightest Star' had a whole lot of potential. But because so many elements were at play, none of them had the space for that potential to be realized. This comes back to the decision I mentioned earlier. Instead of keeping all these elements and making them less, the filmmakers could have cut some elements down to nothing or almost nothing, allowing the remaining ones room to breathe. If they had done that, what was still there could have been amazing. But one of the hardest things to do as a writer is to cut something you love. It hurts to take out a sentence, or a plot thread, or a theme that doesn't belong, because you become attached to what you're making. I get that, and it's really, really hard to do. That's why I don't blame the makers of 'The Brightest Star' for loving their story elements too much to let them go. I understand. But it would have been a better film if they had.

Strange New Worlds:

Saru's planet is called Kaminar. One of those rare Trek planets not named after their species.

New Life and New Civilizations:

The Kelpien culture got a little bit here, but nowhere near what we'd have hoped for. It's a shame.

Pensees:

-'The Brightest Star' dropped on All Access in December. Coincidence? I think so. It's cool, though.

-Could anyone other than Georgiou been the officer to come get Saru? Absolutely not.

-The pre-warp status of the Kelpiens makes it unlikely that the Disco would visit Kaminar without a really good reason. Since this is unlikely to be the last we see of the Kelpiens, that tells us a bit about whatever story might bring us back to them.

-Are the Kelpiens called Kelpiens because they farm kelp? Because that's kind of strange.

-Hannah Spear and Robert Verlaque did respectable jobs portraying characters that felt like unique individuals of the same species as Saru.

Quotes:

Saru: "I saw hope in the stars. It was stronger than fear. And I went towards it."

3.5 out of 6 bright stars

CoramDeo finds hope in more than the stars.

#Star Trek #Star Trek Discovery #Short Treks #Saru #Philippa Georgiou #Disco #DIS #ST:Disc #Star Trek Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews #something from the archive

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comicbookuniversity · 6 years

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Ten Thoughts on Avengers: Infinity War

I’m writing this the day after my second viewing, but by the time you’re seeing this, I’m hoping the majority of you have seen this.

So if you haven’t seen it yet, SPOILERS.

1. This was easily one of Marvel’s better films. The scale of it all could have easily collapsed this into a mess, but McFeely, Markus, and the Russo Brothers kept this film moving along at an exciting and steady pace that built into an intense climax- insert sex pun. I loved this film and loved it more the second time around. I don’t think it was as good as Black Panther or Civil War, but neither of those films operate in the same way as this one. This film was a rollercoaster experience, and a fantastic one. I think this film has to be judged in a different manner, because even Black Panther and Civil War still operate by relatively conventional film standars. Infinity War is a different beast; one must be fluent in the language and conventions of the MCU to really understand it. There has never been another film quite like this; the closest examples don’t operate on the same scale. Never has it been more true to think of the MCU as the world’s biggest and most expensive TV show than it is when you’re watching Infinity War. I will need more time to think upon where it lands on my list of Best Marvel films.

2. Between this film and Ragnarok, Marvel has made an excellent case for Thor traveling around the stars in a similar to the Guardians of the Galaxy. I would love to see Thor and Valkyrie gather up a crew and bring the fight to whatever cosmic asshole is trying to threaten the innocents of the universe. They should be called the Thor Corps. I am surprised at how Thor had somehow become the protagonist after Thanos, if you don’t want to consider the bad guy the protagonist, even though he functionally is whether you like it or not. Until Ragnarok, Thor had been more muscle than heart, and when you consider how much more focus and success has been built out of the characters of and the relationship between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, its surprising to think that Thor would be given so much screentime. It makes sense that he is the Avenger with the best chance of actually beating Thanos in single combat, but you don’t build stories around military tactics- you build them around emotional journeys. Thor has lost nearly everything, whereas Steve and Tony still have more to lose. When that is considered, it makes sense to focus on the building rage of a god while you build towards the ultimate loss of the great leaders of men. And Thor with his new hammer was freaking great.

3. I’ve seen a few critics argue that there were few characters arcs and that humor was used as a substitue. Plenty of great comedies have used humor as character work, and I think Infinity War also substantively used humor to efficently establish and advance character development in between the dramatic moments of the film from wherever the last time we saw them. This film had so many moving pieces to balance and it did so artfully.

4. Dr. Strange might have jumped significantly higher up my list of favorites thanks to Cumberbatch’s effective performance and the incredible fight sequences the movie utilized him in. Holy crap, you guys, Dr. Strange was fucking awesome in this film. Speaking of the weilder of the Time Stone, I decided to rewatch the Dr. Strange film the next night, and something occurred to me. I’m still debating whether this is just a common factor or a deciding influence, but I looked up the run times to all the Marvel films and had my hypothesis mostly confirmed. Generally speaking, the longer over 2 hours (including credits) the film goes, the better it has been recieved both financially and critically. This makes sense, because Marvel has even more time to develop all the relationships between characters; and the greater we are invested in these relationships, the greater the payoff. I think the Dr. Strange film would have been better if it had an extra 10-15 minutes to develop all the relationships at Kamar-Taj and a little extra for Rachel McAdams. I say only a little for McAdams, because I don’t think the film really needed that much more time in that arc since it was about him leaving her and the world she represents. My larger point is that Marvel should embrace two hours as the new minimum for their films.

5. Thanos is definitely one of Marvel’s better villains and that’s largely thanks to the brillaint performance of Josh Brolin, who commits to seeing and bringing the vulnerbility under all of Thanos’ power and evil plan. He’s still not Marvel’s greatest villain as that honor belongs to Killmonger, who will likely hold the honor until the next Black Panther film. Despite Thanos’ plan, Brolin, the writers, and directors of the film really give him certain amount of sympathy in seeing his commitment to his cause and the fear that ultimately drives him to act as he does. And it is fear that ultimately drives Thanos to act, because he sees the injustice in Life’s capacity for growth at the expense of the living. Thanos is someone who cannot and will not accept that Life is unjust and rages against this existintial condition with all his strength, and by the end of the film, the strength of the universe itself. But despite the great work of Brolin, what really helps Thanos is the sheer amount of screentime that the studio was willing to give him. With so many characters, many of of whom anchor their own franchises, it makes sense center the film on the least well-known character and force others to react to them, because it’s not about them in this moment. It’s all about their lives being interupted and forced to react to this almost natural disaster like situation, where winning doesn’t feel like an option and losing less feels like the only prudent mindset to have. Against the threat of Thanos, the superheroes are reminded of their own vulnerablity and mortality, and they feel more human than ever in this dark moment.

6. As introduced by Jonathan Hickman, my favorite members of the Black Order were Corvus Glaive and Proxima Midnight; look they all had wonderful names, Black Dwarf, Supergiant, Ebony Maw, and then they had the other name for their group- The Cull Obsidian. Damn those are wonderful freaking names, so I’m a little disappointed that the members of the Black Order didn’t even get named, outside of Thanos’ passing reference to Ebony Maw simply as “The Maw.” Also, this Ebony Maw has a different power set than his comic counterpart, but damn was he great; easily the creepiest and best member of the Black Order. Black Dwarf did have a weapon that kept changing into different modes that I thought was awesome. I wasn’t ever expecting them to be big and I was never certain if they would last beyond this film, but would it have added that much time for the Black Order to have gotten called by their names?

7. I thought Vision would have recieved a more significant arc in this than he did; Peter Quill did and all he did was lose his girlfriend, whereas Vision litterally has an Infinity Stone in his head and is willing to sacrafice his life to destory it. Vision spent most of his time being stabbed instead of being a hero. He would have made a good point of contrast to Doctor Strange; they’re each the weilders of Infinity Stones, but have radically different ideas of how deal with the stones when presented with the threat of Thanos. I guess it makes a certain amount of sense, due to the fact that he he is a Thor class fighter and that he hasn’t had much of a chance to develop as a character. To me, Vision is a low-key Superman figure of the MCU (or more accurately Martian Manhunter in direct compairson, but he’s just a more stoic version of Superman), and he suffers from the projections of Superman as tedious and boring figure being placed upon him. I think Vision suffers from the same problem that Star Trek does when compared to Star Wars; instead of treating the intellectual and philosophical pursuits with respect and excitement, the filmmakers assume that the audience is going to find it boring and treat it as boring instead of finding away to actually make it exciting. I think the best examples of the superhero genre are essentailly philosophical and ethical works that present the issues in a dynamic, colorful, and charming story, but because of what can be best called an attitude of anti-intellectualism based from ignorance, rather than something worse, the philosophy is often overlooked in favor of the simpler steps that would tie the character arcs and themes to larger philosophical concerns. I know it is not the most well liked of the MCU, but Vision’s scenes in Age of Ultron are some of the most earnestly poignant on the fragile beauty and duty of and to life itself. And these scenes also speak pretty directly to the core of Avengers philosophy, which has now been summed into a single line thanks to this film: “We don’t trade lives.” I just think Marvel missed an oppurtunity to really sell Vision as being more than a secondary figure and someone who is a product of the moral core of the MCU.

8. Considering how thoroughly representative of nearly every tone and narrative aspect of the MCU this film is, it only serves to highlight how underrepresented women and people of color are in the MCU. None of the Avengers or other characters who would typically hold franchises of their own are given nearly the same amount of screentime or material to work with in this film, because of it’s epic scope and the relatively simple nature of the conflict; but that being said, the women of the MCU are still given very little to do overall. They are supporting players while the men are off leading the charge or creating strategy that determines the fates of hundreds of trillions. The first person to die on screen is a black man, and there’s only one black man who is in a real position of power. Marvel still has trouble of thinking beyond America’s history of slavery and a segregated citizenery with African-Americans to see America’s other troubled relationships with national, ethnic, and religous groups and also give them some kind of positive representation. The only woman or person of color given a significant role similar to the signifcane of say Iron Man or Dr. Strange fighting Thanos on Titan is Scarlet Witch. This is a film where Scarlet Witch really gets to unleash her full power, and it’s seen in a tragic moment of where she is forced to kill her lover for the sake of the universe while holding back a nearly omnipotent being who defeated the Sorcerer Supreme just moments ago. Before I go on with this analysis, HOLY CRAP that’s kinda crazy to think how powerful she must really be, so I 1000% agree with Okoye when she asked why Scarlet Witch was not on the field of battle the whole time in Wakanda. Like, damn, she must be so powerful, so can we please get a film where Elizabeth Olsen is given more to do than play rookie and wear a sexy corest? And while there admittedly is a certain value to seeing her power arise from her love to Vision in this tragic moment, the fact that we have seen so very little of Wanda compared to her many male peers and her moment of great power is defined in part by her romantic relationship is not the most progressive choice. Had we had more time with Wanda in previous films, I don’t think I would find this choice as anything other than a sad moment in a star-crossed relationship, but because she has had so little time by comparison (and even without comparison) to her male counterparts this moment loses a little bit of the power it could have had as a symbol of female power equaling male power.

9. I’ve seen a few people complain about how the drama and value of the deaths of half the universe is undercut by the knowledge that these characters will be back in their own films within the next year or two. But I call bullshit on this complaint because it is based in cynicism and ignorance. There are three parts to this complaint: the first two problems are tied together in that the characters don’t know they’re going to come back, so if the film had botched its execution of setting up the emotional beats in this film to continue and progress our attachment to the characters, then it would have all fallen apart. But the film didn’t botch it, every line and edit is proposeful and effective in engaging and reminding us of why we love these characters in the first place, so since the film was executed well, we can sympathize and empathize with the characters in their sadness and shock at all these deaths. Second, even if we didn’t know from announcements made by Marvel or somehow guess from Marvel’s previous works that these characters would be coming back, the film establishes that its not over. Dr. Strange clearly knows what is going to happen (or at least something extremely close to the victory he searched for in all the possible futures). And even if Dr. Strange didn’t know, do we really believe these characters who we just watched try so valiently to fight Thanos from achieving his goal would allow him to go unpunished for his crime? Let’s assume for a split secon that there is not some way to fix what Thanos did, do we really believe that the film would spend so much time on all these different characters for it to just end on the one guy sitting on a hill when all their emotional threads are just left unfinished? The answer to all of these scenarios is no. There was never a version of this film that was a single part or the final film; this is clearly the first half of a story, so the audience value of all the deaths comes from thinking about and then later finding out how it all be fixed to as much as the heroes can fix it. People who compalin about the deaths as having no value or drama are just being babies about having to wait.

10. After having seen this twice and considering how well Marvel has been doing since the release of Civil War, I really think Marvel has found it’s groove and I am so excited for the future. While I would understand if they want time to do other projects, I would hope that the Russo Brothers, Stephen McFeely, and Christopher Markus always have one hand on driving the MCU. Feige has been there since the begining, but I feel like working with these four has really helped him focus overall and loosen his grip to trust the filmmakers he hires to execute their visions within the MCU. Gunn, Watts, Waititi, and Coogler all breathed new life into Marvel with their style and emotional honesty, and it’s this trend Marvel should continue to follow if they want to keep their success going. Infinity War is representative of many of the best elements of Marvel, and everyone involed in it should be proud of the work they’ve accomplished with it. That being said, Marvel still has progress that needs to be made, and it looks like it is going to be able to effectively do this by closing one chapter of the MCU and starting the next. I am so very excited for the journey we’ve all got ahead of us.

#avengers infinity war #avengers #marvel #mcu #captain america #iron man #thor #doctor strange #scarlet witch

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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Halloween Reviews — 2001: A Space Odyssey

Ségolène Sorokina

Assoc. Fiction Editor

A visual tapestry and musical opera, but devoid of interesting characters or a mature story structure.

Heather Downham (as Miss Simmons) in the Opening Scene of Act II in “2001: A Space Odyssey”

This is a film that fits into every director’s, film student’s, and every critic’s education of the film medium. It is a prerequisite on the syllabus of every curriculum for movie makers. 2001: A Space Odyssey was one of the most influential works of science-fiction and cinema to come out of the Cold War period, yet it would be entirely wrong to call it a movie. In fact, it is a terrible movie — but it is a remarkable film.

Because every film studies wonk and their mother has an opinion on the film, I will be brief and remain true to the purpose of reviewing it, not lavishing over it. That is to say, I don’t give a flying hoodah what the “deeper meaning” or “wider vision” of 2001: A Space Odyssey is interpreted to be by bandwagon film critics who are too afraid to feel like they’re missing out on the punchline to be honest and objective about the Clarke’s and Kubrick’s failings.

A movie is not meant to be something that has to be discussed afterwards. A movie is not something that requires the viewer to read the book, or take a class to understand. A movie is not something that forces people to sit through 85 minutes of dead air, offering no explanation, and is entirely devoid of any scintilla, any semblance, of a storyline, character arc, or plot.

Containing horror elements, “2001” fits closely enough into the Halloween line-up of reviews, as (#5), if not only because of its inspiration on other horror genre motion pictures.

Quite frankly, 2001: A Space Odyssey is boring as hell. And it is a horrible movie. To give an illustration of how empty the film “2001” is, the original script had about 17,000 words in it. Most of this is description of the sci-fi elements and screen directions. In the end, the film had about 5,000 words of dialogue in it, total. That comes down to about 20 minutes of speech. . . The movie is 139 minutes long.

The film’s defenders are quick to claim that its emptiness and barren quality are an allegory for the emptiness of space. They never seen to stop for a moment however, perhaps in one of the film’s 30-minute long stretches of drawn out ‘alternative’ content, to consider why the film needs such a defence. People do not like it. Quite plainly, it is a bad movie. Defining why it is bad, using words like “allegory,” “metaphor,” and “artistic vision” doesn’t change the fact that it is unwatchable, it just explains how a production crew could look at 5 minutes of black screen in a major motion picture and think to themselves, “The audience will understand why they spent 5 minutes of their life looking at a dead screen. Because it says something about what it means to watch, blah, blah, blah.”

This movie is a film critic’s movie. It gives people plenty to analyse. And it has exceptional cinematography. For a film maker, it’s easy to see why the writers and directors did what they did, and how good it turned out — especially for an audience in the heat of the Cold War-era Space Race, who had quite literally never seen anything like it before. The long, operatic sequences probably mean a great deal to people who were born in the 1950’s and for them 2001: A Space Odyssey was Kubrick putting the last half-century on the silver screen, in colour film, for the first time.

Cinematically, it is exceptional at what it is and what it wants to do. But as a movie — and just a movie — it is quite poor. The entire plot of the film is that all-powerful aliens have been observing life on Earth since before life humanity came into existence, and during the Space Age people discover one of their relics, which leads to the capture of one human being in Jupiter’s orbit, who is killed and reborn as an alien himself. . . That’s it.

What the hell that has to do with the elementary notions of a beginning, middle, and end — a rising conflict, a climax, and a resolution — is anyone’s guess. There is no plot to speak of. Kubrick himself said the picture was more of an exploration of different concepts than a straight forward story. When I watch a film, I’m kind of looking for a storyline; That’s the whole point. A movie is not an art gallery of stills and frames juxtaposed together through editing, it is a cohesive and contained world onto itself: A story.

A movie is a casual experience, not a class requirement or a way to coerce the viewer into writing some kind of thesis. A viewer needs a reason to watch a film, and not because other people watch it or because it’s a cultural phenomenon. In this way, 2001: A Space Odyssey is no different than a trashy boyband, since they both have merits to justify their fame, but only get continued fame and discussion as a previous result of existing acclaim. But that is not enough to idolise a failed film. Reading Stanley Kubrick’s name on the playbill is not enough. Staring at Heather Downham’s ass is not enough.

This film does not deserve to use the title “Odyssey” at all, not more than some cheap gladiator flic would, because the Odyssey had a clear progression of characters, and themes, and resolutions which Homer was capable of creating over a long oracle tradition, and which Clarke and Kubrick fumble to represent on-screen. They should have stuck to long, narrative fiction, because whatever “2001” is trying to be — and even it doesn’t know — this doesn’t work as a movie. The film is polished on the surface, but entirely experimental, and therefore superficial, but above all boring, dull, and dragging on too long.

And nothing in that plot is ground-breaking or new at all. The visuals might be first-of-their-kind on big-budget films, but the ideas of aliens, aliens linked with the Cold War, and computers being evil are old and hackneyed ones. Anyone deluded enough to unwavering call the directors ahead of their time need only to look at the abysmal depiction of women in the film: Pink-wearing, skin-tight, ass-in-the air stewardesses and receptionists, completely subservient to male control and design. Perhaps the film is making a statement that Russian women are liberated and American women are oppressed, yet even the female Soviet scientists do not speak for themselves, but elect the singular male doctor to ask the difficult questions of Floyd instead.

Consider Star Trek, which was released 10 years after 2001: A Space Odyssey, and draws heavily from it, yet Star Trek is also capable of making social commentary. Unfortunately, Star Trek as well, for all its preachings about ascending beyond economic struggles and societal biases, still echoes them. Star Trek shifts the focus from societal bias of the system to implicit bias of the individual, which is a human trait that follows the theme into the future, creating the conflict of the franchise, yet the franchise also has a serious problem with the depiction of women all the way from the Original Series, through the Picard saga, and into the later sequels and spin-offs like Voyager, and current reboots. There’s a major difference between being a liberated woman who still has needs, and being an intergalactic sex toy. Most of my friends are sex-crazed lunatics, but that doesn’t mean they don’t choose to be, and it doesn’t mean they view themselves as second to men or their actions to benefit men generally at all, just as a man chasing several women is hardly doing it for their benefit.

The social commentary is absent in “2001.” The purpose of this might be to make the point by ‘feeling’ rather than telling, but the problem of gently nudging people in a pompous way to feel something instead of sincerely telling them directly is that people will interpret things as they want, and are very resistant to change. If a viewer thinks that lying to Russians because their foreigners is okay to do, then watching Kubrick make a passive aggressive statement about how duplicity can backfire is not going to change their minds — it will only embolden those who disagree with him more, and for those who already agree with him he’s just preaching to the choir. And if someone did take away the wrong message, who’s to say it’s the wrong message anyway, if it’s all “open to interpretation,” ie. an evasion by the writers from making their true feelings known.

And as a small note, the Russian dialogue in the film is horrible. The actors have poor pronunciation, the words they are speaking are incorrect, and the grammatical structure was erroneous. Clarke, Kubrick, and MGM had $10 Million Dollars, and the time to film 30-minutes of people running around in ape suits fighting pig puppets, but they couldn’t do a simple grammar check? They couldn’t cast a single Russian actor?! The four Russians are played by: Leonard Rossiter, French-English, British; Margaret Tyzack, German-English, British; Maya Koumani, Greek-English, British; Krystyna Marr, Polish-German, American.

These tropes were used in different ways, such as not seeing an alien until the very end, and after being pioneered by Kubrick became easy fodder for space movies and the science fiction genre to copy, but don’t actually have any deeper substance. It is a well known fact that Stanley Kubrick did not like the Cold War, so people going into drawn out arguments for why the first 25 minutes of the film was literally thrown away just to make some esoteric statement about how backward and barbaric the Cold War was, are really just gluttons for punishing themselves and inflicting that bias on others.

A fourth (25%) of the runtime of a 2-hour long movie, the first 25 minutes, is completely unwatchable, AND, frustratingly so, it has absolutely nothing to do with the remaining 115 minutes of the film. How in the hell the editors did not cut this garbage out of the movie for its major release debut is incomprehensible. Pulling this kind of raw poor taste is exactly the kind of thing that gives a bad name to ‘artistic freedom.’

The only semblance of a plot is the part everyone thinks about when they think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the deep space voyage with the supercomputer HAL-9000, pronounced initially as “H.-A.-L.-Niner-Zero-Zero-Zero,” then later, obviously just as “Hal Nine Thousand.”

This minor sequence in the movie saves the film, as far as popular culture and the average person are concerned. HAL-9000 is a perfect and incorruptible machine, tasked with guiding the mission to Jupiter, along with a two-man crew, and payload of three cryo-sleep scientists.

Immediately to the audience, it seems like a stupid idea. Why would anyone go to a gas planet like Jupiter? Why would the AI be put in charge of everything? Why is half the crew in hibernation? All these questions added together make a catastrophe inevitable. HAL mentions as much to one of the crew members himself, asking him if he, too, thought the mission was “odd.” It is explained later that the reason for all these difficulties are the result of a specific miscalculation by the American command structure back on Earth.

HAL tells the crew that communications will fail in 72 hours, but he does not know why, and he never gives an explanation for why he knows this in the film. The crew check that nothing is wrong, and phone NASA (or its fictional equivalent), and NASA tells them HAL is malfunctioning. It is possible that NASA is lying to the crew, or it is possible that HAL got something wrong.

Because HAL was designed to be a perfect robot, this possible malfunction worries the crew, who conspire in secrecy to destroy HAL and take control of the ship. HAL, in true machine fashion, wastes no time in shooting one of the crew out into space, and as his crewmate goes to retrieve the body, HAL kills the rest of the crew and locks him out.

At this point, HAL appears to be acting irrationally and emotionally like a human would. After the last surviving crew member kills HAL, he finds out that the reason HAL killed the crew is because he was programmed by the Americans that under no circumstances whatsoever is he to be shut off.

So what appeared to be self-preservation was actually just the mechanical process of fulfilling his commands. What makes HAL a complex character is that his human caretakers take care of and are taken care of by him. HAL is in total control of the ship, but only because the humans told him to be, as the crew waste their days away drawing sketches, and playing chess, and watching videos. The audience is left to wonder if decommissioning HAL is any different from killing a servant who has gotten sick and is therefore no longer of any use.

When HAL discovers the crew’s plot to take over the ship, HAL is aware that the crew want to ensure they make it to Jupiter and fear HAL would get in the way of that. HAL, however, is also aware that the USAA or NASA or whatever wanted HAL to give the crew a secret message about the aliens after reaching Jupiter. HAL is put in a difficult position, because he believes it is important to get the crew to Jupiter to deliver the message to them, but it is also important to keep the message from them and stay in absolute control of the ship until they get there.

HAL at this point has a logic break and malfunctions, killing the crew, and thereby inadvertently destroying the mission he was acting to protect. When Bowman resets HAL’s memory banks, HAL admits to Bowman that he knows he malfunctioned in killing the crew, and tells him that he/it is afraid to die. This leaves the audience to interpret whether HAL is lying to stop himself getting shut off, so he can compete the mission himself with no crew, or if HAL genuinely broke down and malfunctioned when he murdered the hibernating crew members because he was afraid that the crew would destroy him after the found out what he had done.

There is also something to be said about the fact that Bowman risked his life to retrieve Poole’s dead body, but after it becomes an impediment that threatens his own life, he throws it back out into dead space. It is in this moment that Bowman becomes a dead man himself, since HAL has killed everyone else and damaged the ship for human habitation, making a return trip impossible even if HAL is defeated.

HAL is known to lie to the crew, but it could be influenced by self-preservation and dilemmas, causing something called confusion. But then again, HAL is programmed to lie, so to HAL lying would be a form of truth, because it was told that doing the wrong thing was the right thing, for a greater purpose. And yet, again, HAL cruelly murders the crew when he could have left them frozen, even if it was necessary for it to kill Poole and Bowman, which is as much malfunctional as it is emotional.

HAL-9000 is the strong point of the entire movie. But that being said, HAL does not have a character arch, since HAL never changes over the entire course of the film. The crew only learns about HAL’s motives after they kill him, and despite HAL acting irrationally and inexplicably several times, the movie gives a superficial explanation that HAL has human-interface protocols built-in to sound more palatable to users, nullifying the question of HAL’s possible growth.

HAL did everything it did because humans told it to. Not once did HAL contravene the human directive in it’s own interest. The tragedy of the HAL character is a misinterpretation and accident of logical data. Additionally, the single most important point of HAL’s character — that it doesn’t make mistakes — is severely undercut when HAL makes three mistakes: incorrectly predicting the communicator would break when it didn’t, killing the crew thus undermining the mission, and ultimately being unable to stop itself being erased by Bowman. Part of that discrepancy has to come down to poor writing.

The idea of HAL is great writing. HAL is not a human character, and it’s the robot’s distinct lack of humanity that makes it the most human character of the film.

Bowman, Poole, and Floyd are not characters. They believe nothing, they say nothing, they do nothing. The audience feels nothing for them. When HAL threw Poole out of the spaceship, careening into space, I burst out laughing because of how absurd the image of him getting comically, cosmically tossed out of the veritable window was. When Bowman sees this, he doesn’t even react, but robotically and emotionlessly asks HAL what went wrong, and HAL lies to him by telling him it doesn’t have enough information to know.

After the HAL storyline ends, Bowman receives a transmission that reveals to him that HAL was given a message to lock down the crew and control the ship because the U.S. Government wanted to keep the aliens a secret, even from their own crew who ultimately died because of the mistake. The original script has Bowman re-establish contact with America (I say “America” and not “Earth” because the film makes clear that the U.S. is not cooperating with other countries), and NASA sends him the message. That is cut in the final film, with Bowman just discovering the message, either because HAL gave it to Bowman as a final act of protecting the mission, or much more likely that HAL being deleted removed a barrier from accessing the message. This further makes the point of why HAL could not allow the crew to ‘unplug’ it, since guarding the message was HAL’s personal mission.

The HAL chapter is marred with long pauses, like waiting literal minutes for the stupid space popcorn balls to turn around and move back and forth, or watching Bowman stare silently into a screen. Many people like the music, but the music usage is paradoxical. Since space is silent, to use ballads of music is just as much a choice as to use dialogue — music is no more “pure” or “non-human” than speech is — and watching entire scores of music play out of a static backdrop would be interesting at the live orchestra, but this is a stereo recording underplaying a film, so it hardly has the same effect. This is a limit, and choice to pursue that limit, which was weak on the part of the writers. A soundtrack is not supposed to take centre stage; people can buy the CD later, but they want to see the movie now.

The movie makes the decision to skip over the rest of the journey to Jupiter, cut out all the dialogue and character exploration between Bowman and NASA, and jumps right to the end of the movie — a twenty-minute-long session of meaningless strobe lights.

All the storyline and extra HAL content that could have been included, and they made the decision to, again, burn the whole film continuity down as a middle finger to the audience and the producers — to balk conventional ‘expectation.’ It is a horrible choice. The writers said they wanted to create something alien and never imagined before about what a different world would be like. They said they had some difficulty translating the idea: And they decided on rainbow lights and lava lamps. Twenty. Straight. Uninterrupted. Minutes of it.

This is made even more BS that the directors put a title card right in the middle of the HAL sequence, in front of this, called “Intermission.” Is this what audiences were returning for? One unhappy movie-goers said, “People call this movie genius: There are 5 minutes of black screen in the film. No music. No picture. Just an empty frame of dead air. How genius can that be? Is my turned-off television screen also a genius of cinema? Is a blank piece of paper now some artistic statement? The last half hour of the movie is flashing light in people’s faces for 30 minutes, with no dialogue. A complete bore and an insult. One of the most overrated films in history.”

Skipping over about an hour of rubbish in the film, it starts to become compelling. There probably exists a fan edit out there somewhere that recut the film, trimming it down to 45 minutes. The monkey scene — “Dawn of Man” — could be 2 minutes. (As a side point, it shoud be pointed out that humans are not descended from chimpanzees, but that chimpanzees and humans share a common origin, much like whales and elephants do.) The space stewardesses fumbling to walk and carrying lunch trays can go. Floyd’s daughter plays no role whatsoever. Floyd can meet the Soviets, talk about the virus, then give the Moon presentation about the virus being a cover story, and then they go to the alien artifact, and then it cuts to HAL-9000. After HAL dies, there is a 60-second sequence of ‘light gates’ to convey the ship was abducted, and then the screen fades to black. The End. What happens? Who knows. Not much different from the original.

I’ve read some of the commentary on this film, such as by Roger Ebert (or Robert Egert, or whatever his name is) and the always come off as snobs and pricks, even suggesting audiences should requires some minimum score on an entrance exam to see the movie in theatres. That is exactly the problem with 2001: A Space Odyssey, snobbery. The snobbish idea that it means something more when it needs to, and that it doesn’t when it doesn’t need to. There is a reason people find it “annoying. . . confusing. . . infuriating. . . frustrating. . . crazy. . . unwatchable.” These are not people who hate movies or Kubrick, these are the same people who like the HAL story and the Moon voyage parts. But a movie, even about aliens, cannot be alien itself. The movie is supposed to be the viewer’s friend, and guide the viewer through the experience of the alien and the unknown. Alienating the audience is counterproductive in every measure.

Everyone — every single person you ask — calls 2001: A Space Odyssey a work of “art.” Art. Not movie, art. Not entertaining, art. Not good work, but good art. Well, just what the hell is art? I don’t want obstinate art, I want a good film. I’ve seen films that are artistic and compelling. I’ve seen films that are interesting but shallow. A Bruce Lee movie doesn’t have much in the way of plot, but you get to see Bruce Lee do some real-life kung fu and amazing stunts, and it’s still fun. But “2001” more subtle and ‘lava-lampy,’ so much so it is impossible to get lost into the experience without becoming aware of yourself at certain moments and wanting to either turn the show off, or just suffer through it because everyone else seemed to. Film critics might get paid to watch 10 minutes of dead air, but the directors don’t have the right to waste people’s time. At the end of the day, 2001: A Space Odyssey isn’t really intellectual at all; Anyone who’s actually interested in learning something or seeing something new would be better off going to the bookshop or a city gallery, this is still just a movie, and no one can claim they are smart for just sitting there and passively consuming a piece of popular media, not even haughty sci-fi fans. There is a difference between watching a science-fiction movie and being a real scientist!

Film snobs and fusty critics who rewatch the damn thing 10-times don’t get to just designate the whole package as good. Maybe the reason such contrarians like the film is just because so many people don’t, and they feel cultured or superior for pretending they’re ‘in on’ the experience. The movie has some high points and innovative structures, but fails as a cohesive unit. It’s a meticulously crafted bomb. Anyone studying the film has to focus on the camera angles, the underlying themes, and the audience reception more than the plot — because there is no plot.

This is a film which, if you like esoteric and avant-garde, you can watch this film and then spend the rest of your time reading the book and the script notes and the celebratory review articles and the academic theses and watching the director and cast interviews, to actually understand what the hell is going on. That is certainly its own kind of experience, but it is not a movie experience. That is to say, it’s not fun.

If you want to watch a good movie, skip over everything except the HAL arch, watch a 3-minute synopsis on what you missed over the other 90 minutes, and then move on with your life doing more important things, or watching better movies. Even Kubrick’s other movies are drawn-out and slow, but at least they have established characters and a point, as well as a clandestine “moral of the story” under the surface. If that seems like to much of a hassle, just give 2001: A Space Odyssey a hard pass; it’s not worth seeing. This is one of those trailblazing films where the innumerable imitators actually picked up the gauntlet, evolved the themes, and did it better.

Overall Score: 2 out of 5

#Review #2001: A Space Odyssey #Film Criticism #Science Fiction #Cinematography

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