#I also used this and a few other books to argue the progression of horror over the 21st century for my final english report

[rruhlauthor]

Book Review - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is about the answer to life, the universe, and everything—yet it’s also about nothing. The earth isn’t saved at the end; in fact, no one really makes an effort to save it. There is no immediately discernible plot structure. More or less, it’s around 190 pages of describing this unique setting and its inhabitants, which is something I’ve always heard contemporary speculative fiction writers warned against: “do you have a plot or do you just have a worldbuilding bible?” The goal of every character is summarized by the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide: DON’T PANIC. No character has particularly strong motivation to do anything but survive and explore. So why has The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy endured as a blockbuster? The book is quotable, clever, and at its core is satirical yet heartfelt, which makes it still relevant over forty-two years later.

Without Adams’ writing style, The Hitchhiker’s Guide would not have worked. It’s witty, romping, and never loses the reader despite using complicated conlang terms and having a somewhat meandering plot. Each word, even word repetitions and one-word questions, is chosen with purpose. Beautiful prose describing binary star sunrises is juxtaposed against alien poetry so bad it kills you. Omniscient point of view made it feel like my brain was being bounced through hyperspace at times, yet all the seemingly unrelated paragraphs and guide entries came together at the end. Deus ex Machina can be a sloppy literary device in other cases, but it is quite literally the entire plot of The Hitchhiker's Guide, with the characters being improbably saved again and again. Suspense was generated not through fear for the characters’ survival—at one point, the reader is even told that no one will be hurt except “a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale” (109). Suspense comes from having zero clue what’s going to be on the next page. It's delightful. This chaotic structure is proof that any high concept can be pulled off by a skilled author. The concept isn’t a man who isn’t seeking to save his world, find himself, defeat the President of the Galaxy, or even find love with the one other earthling left. It’s about a man who really just wants a good cup of tea—seeking normalcy in a topsy-turvy world of uncontrollable forces.  

Science fiction and social commentary have been inherently linked since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein questioned where the limits of science should be. I would argue science fiction is also closely intertwined with horror. Bradbury and Serling in the mid 20th century explored radiation fears, technology, and the Red Scare, amongst other things. 21st century sci-fi like Murderbot and Ready Player One criticize unfettered capitalism. Here, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide from 1979, we have a galaxy of civilizations who have achieved escape velocity but have not escaped bureaucracy. The undercurrent of the narrative is a fear that we and our stubbornness and politics will be our own undoing. The entire earth is destroyed within the first few pages of the book—but the reader feels safe in knowing this is more of a comedy than horror, because of the absurdity of the Vogon fleet using the exact same language as the council destroying Arthur’s house. The incompetent politician was chosen specifically for his incompetence. The scene towards the end with the “progressive cops” was hilarious in that painful way of knowing it’s just as relevant in 2024 as it was then. What if the earth was created as part of a computer program? The beings who created the program would still be scrambling to cobble together an embellished story that sounded good for the news and made them lots of money. “If there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.” (179) This observation is not a cold comfort. The theme is not the vast uncaringness of the void. Acknowledging this madness we all live in is what makes the story sincere and heartfelt. Despite the tone, never once does it stop taking itself seriously, or stop being hopeful. Who would bear the whips and scorns of time? Someone who knows where their towel is.

I saw the movie almost ten years ago, after which I purchased a copy of the book but never got around to reading it. I was delighted to pick it up and enter this interstellar world which is so different, yet not different at all from the problems and idiosyncrasies of Earthlings. As below, so above. None of the characters are larger than life or even have strong goals, but that's the idea of the book: no one is important in a vast and improbable galaxy, and so everyone is important. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is timeless. As long as there is civilization, it will be plagued by the absurdities that populate the book.

As this review comes to an end, I can think of no better closing line. “So long and thanks for all the fish.”

Version referenced:

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 1979. Del Rey, 2009.

#book review #the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy #science fiction

[magma-queen]

I really liked your movie night fics, do you think you could make a part 3? :3

Awww!! Really? That’s so sweet! Of course I will, I was kinda wanting to make a part 3 anyway! ❤️💙 enjoy!!

“Oh Maaaaaaxieeeee~”

He didn’t even look up from his book. “What is it, Archie?” He knew, that when Archie said his name like that, he wanted something.

“Can we cuddle and watch a movie together?”

Immediately following that was Maxie’s first question. “I’ll always say yes to the cuddling. But Is it a horror movie? Because if so, then no. I can’t handle any more scary movies right now.”

“No no, I’m not gonna make ye watch any more scary movies. I was thinking.. maybe we could watch a Disney movie?”

“Oh thank god..” The redhead sighed in relief. “That sounds much better.. yes.”

Archie smiles. “Good. Because I’ve got the perfect one for us to watch.”

After a few minutes, Archie found himself laughing hysterically at Maxie’s reaction to what they were watching.

It was Finding Nemo.

“Are you kidding me? Of course it has something to do with the ocean! I should’ve known!”

“Whahahahat?? It’s such a good movie, babe! Bwahahahahah! Yer face, I swehehear to god!” He cackled as he watched his husband pout, then put the movie in. “Oh c’mon! Ye’ll like it, I promise!”

“Mmmhmm..” Maxie rolls his eyes. “We’ll see.”

The movie started and played for a good few minutes. The redhead was cuddled up next to his husband on the couch.

“Now, what’s the one thing we remember about the ocean?“

“It’s not safe.”

“That’s my boy.”

“Well, there’s something the movie got correct.” Maxie chuckled.

Archie rolls his eyes. “Of course ye’d take notice to that.. *kiss* yer such a dork. Maybe this movie will make ye look at the sea a little different.”

*chuckle* “I highly doubt that, love. But points to you for trying.”

The movie progresses on, they make it to the scene where Dory is introduced.

“Oh look hun, I found the fish version of you~” The Magma leader teased, earning a pillow whacked at his shoulder. “Short term memory loss, hm?”

Archie smirks at him. “Oh yeah? If anybody in this movie, ye most resemble Marlin.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How?”

“Ye seem like the overprotective dad type.” Archie answered.

Maxie glared at him. “..I don’t know whether to feel relieved that you didn’t say anything worse or insulted.”

“Bwahahahah! And that’s not all! Like him, yer also super uptight.”

“I am not!” He argued, pausing the movie. “Name one instance in the entirety I’ve known you.. where I was uptight.”

Archie cackled in response. “Babe, I don’t have all day!”

“You little shit!” Maxie exclaimed, taking his pillow and start whacking the other with it playfully.

“H-Hey! Ye want me to lie?? Hehehey-!” The pillow landed at his face. “Okay okay! I’m sorry babe! Can we continue please?”

Maxie huffs, putting the pillow down.

“I suppose.”

*kiss*

The movie kept going on. Eventually, they almost made it to the finish. Archie caught his husband tearing up near the end, when he heard him sniffling next to him, cuddled in his chest.

“Babe, ye ok?”

He quickly wiped a tear away. “Wh-what-? Yes. I’m fine. Why?”

“I just saw ye cry a little, so I was wondering if ye were okay.”

“I-I- was not crying!“ Maxie retracted defensively. “Not at all!”

Archie chuckles at him, pecking a kiss on his cheek. “It’s okay, love. This movie gets a little emotional at times.. especially at this point, where Marlin thinks Nemo is dead.”

“I wasn’t crying..” He said again, cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

*smirk*

“Honey. It’s not good to lie.” Archie knew that he was going to start an argument.

The glare was really harsh this time. “I. Was. Not. Crying.” He reiterated.

“I. Don’t. Believe. Ye.”

“I am telling you I wasn’t!!”

“Then what was that sniffle I heard?”

“It’s allergy season.” Maxie argued back.

Archie started cackling, pausing the movie once more. “Maxie, babe.. just tell me the truth. It’s okay to get emotional.”

“For the last, and FINAL time.. I did NOT cry!”

Archie just kept staring at him, hopeful that it alone would get his husband to break.

“Are you just going to stare at me until I say I was? I wasn’t!”

“Nope. I’m gonna do something else.” Archie then got a devious look on his face, one that Maxie knew too well.

“No! Don’t you dare! I know that look!”

Archie scooted closer to him, the scary look on his face making him grin wider. His hands raised up, and fingers wiggling.

“D-Don’t!” He tried to run away, but Archie was way faster. He darts out and grabs Maxie by the waist, pulling him back to the couch.

“Aw, Max? Where ye going? The movie’s not over yet, and ye still haven’t admitted anything yet.”

“I haven’t admitted anything because I have nothing to admihihit!” He squeaked, feeling a finger on his side, tracing in circles. “St-Stop it, Archiehehehe! That tickles! L-let me go!”

Archie positioned his hands into claws. “Not until ye fess up, Max. Come on, don’t make this harder on yerself.. cause ye know what I’m bout’ to do next.”

“Please no!” He begged, starting to giggle already. “Archie please!”

He tsked at him softly, then gently pinned him to the couch. “Ye asked for this, sweetie pie.” With that, his fingers made contact with his ribcage, sending Maxie into a fit of giggling.

“Nohohohoho!! Ahahahahahah!!! AHAHAHAH! Ahahahaharchihihihihiiee!! Dohohohohon’t- ahahahah- tihihihihickle mehehehehe!!!”

He smirks again. “Tickle ye? Whatever ye say, Max!” He tickled him faster, poking and prodding at his ticklish sides. “Ahhh Coochie Coochie coo~”

“Nohohohohoho yohuhuhuhuhuhu ahahahass!! *snort* Nohohohohoho teheheheeasing!! Quhihihihit ihihihihit!!!”

“The tickle torture will stop, once ye swallow yer pride and admit that ye were crying.”

He snorts and tries to wriggle away. “Ihihihihihi wahahahahahasn’t cryihihihihihing!!!”

Archie hums contently, tickling his husband without mercy. Then he found a weak spot, Maxie’s stomach.

“PFFFFT- NO!! Dohohohohohohon’t yohuhuhu dahahahahare!!! *snort* Ihihihihihi’ll kihihihill yohuhuhuhu!” He threatens.

Archie positioned himself behind his lover, trapping him in his arms, and his hands came around his waist to his belly, poking and prodding at the very ticklish surface.

“Ahahahahahahahahah!! Ahahaharchiehehe! Plehehehehease nohohohoho!!” That’s when Archie began tickling. “AHAHAHAHAH NAHAHAHAHAHAHT THEHEHEHERE!! PLEHEHEHEHEASE!! NAHAHAHAHAHAT THEHEHEHEEHE BEHEHEHEHEHELLY!!”

“Hehe!” Archie’s head came around to kiss his cheek softly. “Yes, the belly! Coochie Coochie! I know all of yer most ticklish spots, me sweet Max~”

Archie coos at him and kissed his cheek again, which already had a few tears running down it.

“I got yer tummy! Yes I doooo~ Tickle tickle tickle! C’mon babe! Spill it!”

“NOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO!!”

Damn, he’s stubborn. Especially about his emotions. No matter, Archie has the clear advantage, knowing how ticklish Maxie is, and just how to drive him mad.

An idea popped in his head, and he lays his head on the giggling redhead’s shoulder, adding his beard to nuzzle his neck. “Hey, mister grumpy gills~ when life gets ye down, ye know what ye gotta do?” He grins, seeing his husband blush.

“HONEHEHEHEHEHEY IHIHIHIHIHI’M BEHEHEHEHEGGING YOHUHUHUHU!! AHAHAHEHEHEHEHE!! IHIHIHIHI CAHAHAN’T BREHEHEHEHEATHE!!”

Archie continued quoting the movie, but changed the lyrics a little. “Just keep laughing, just keep laughing, just keep laughing, laughing, laughing!”

That did it. Maxie was now a puddle of blush, weak at the knees and literally cackling at this point. The combination of his stomach being tickled and his neck being nuzzled was too much. Finally, he surrendered.

“OKAHAHAHAHAY!! OKAHAHAHAHAHAY!! IHIHIHIHIHI GIHIHIHIHIVE!!” Maxie squealed.

“And?”

*SNOOOORT* “IHIHIHIHIHI AHAHAHADMIT IHIHIHIHIT!! IHIHIHI WAHAHAHAS CRYIHIHIHIHIHIHING!!!”

As promised, Archie ceased the tickly torture. He backed off, letting Maxie breathe. It took him a good few moments to fully regain his composure, and wipe the mirthful tears away from his eyes.

“There. It’s about time yer stubborn butt gave in. Was that so hard, me giggly magma bear?”

“Ihihihihi.. hahahahate… yohuhuhuhu..” He wheezed, laying back in the couch in defeat. He clutched his stomach, trying to stop laughing. He still felt the tingling sensation on his belly.

He gives him a kiss. “No ye don’t. Ye would’ve divorced me by now, cupcake~” He wraps his arms around Maxie, and hugs him close to his chest. “Now.. Why didn’t ye want to admit it? If ye thought I was gonna make fun of ye, then yer wrong.”

“Nohoho.. it’s just- it’s a movie, for god sakes! I shouldn’t be weak and cry at a movie! It’s.. *sigh* it’s embarrassing.” He finally caught his breath.

Archie looked at him with sympathy. He saw his glasses on the floor from the scuffle and picked them up to give to him. “Honey.. yer not weak. Especially not for getting emotional during a sad part of a movie.. c’mere.”

He has him sit up, and they hug.

“Maxie.. my love. Don’t be afraid to express yer emotions in front of me.. ok? I’m yer husband. I’m never gonna make fun of ye. Can ye promise me that?”

He sighs, puts his hand on Archie’s shoulder. “Yes. I promise.”

“Good. *kiss* Now, let’s finish the movie, ok?”

“Ok. But on one condition.”

Archie looks down at him. “Yes?”

“You owe me kisses and cuddles.. for tickling me to death.” Maxie says, burying himself into the other’s chest.

“Awwww, that all?” Archie chuckles and puts his arms around him to cuddle. “Of course, sweetheart. *kiss* I’ll give ye all the kisses and cuddles ye want.”

“Mmm..”

Once the movie ended, Archie stood up, holding his husband in his arms.

“Wh-what’re you doing..?” Maxie sleepily asked, barely keeping his eyes open.

“Carrying ye to bed, love. What else? The movie is over, and it’s late.” He smirks, kissing him. “Are ye still mad at me? Does mister grumpy gills need to be perked up once more?”

His eyes immediately opened, and he glared at him. “NO. Don’t you dare. And no.. I’m not mad at you.. you.. were right..”

“Max?”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t open up to you… but.. this movie.. it really touched me.”

“Really?”

“Yes..” He starts to tear up once more. “My father and I never had a healthy father and son relationship… it got so bad that it lead to verbal abuse, and me getting kicked out of my own home when I was 17..”

“Whoa- sweetheart..” Archie lays him down on their bed. “Y-Ye never told me about this.. it must’ve been so hard for ye..”

*sigh* Yes… it was.”

“Oh, Maxie…. Darling.. *hug* I wish we told me about this sooner… I know ye didn’t like talking about yer family, besides yer sister.. so I never asked. But.. I had no idea that yer dad was an ass.. I’m so sorry.. c’mere..”

He hugs him closer, and presses a soft kiss on his forehead.

“It’s alright… I’m sorry I kept you in the dark with it… it’s such a sensitive topic for me to talk about.. now, the only family member I have a relationship with is my sister.”

“Shhh.. Let’s not think about anything negative any more.. ok?” He buries his face and beard into his neck. “Instead.. how about I just kiss ye some more? Mwah~”

“W-wait! Archiehehehehe!!” His red headed husband snorted, squirming and wiggling in his grip. “Y-you’re tihihihihickling mehehehe ahahahahagain!!”

Archie chuckles, continuing to kiss the ticklish neck. “Good. That was the plan. I love hearing yer cute laugh~ mwah~ mwah~ I love ye, me sweet little Numel~”

“Hehehehehehehe!! St-Stop ihihihihihit!! Ihihihihihi mehehehean ihihihihit! Ahahahahah- ihihihihihihi’m ticklihihihihish thehehere!!!”

“Never~ Ye deserve all the kisses in the world, babe! C’mere!”

He pulls his husband close, spooning him and covering his face and neck with kisses.

“Hahahahahahahahah-! *snort* Ahahaharchie!! St-Stohohohohop! Ahehehe- ihihihihihihit tihihihihiihihickles sohohoho muhuhuhuhuch!! Ahahahah- AAAH!! NOHOHOHOHOHOHO!!!!”

“Ah, I remember that one particular spot around yer ears~ Are ye still ticklish there?”

“Nohohohoho Nohohoho- Not there!! Stahahahap ihihihihihit!!”

He traces his fingers around both of his ears, getting him to jump and squirm even more.

“Babe, this is so cute. Ye have such sensitive ears~ Tickle tickle tickle~”

He shook his head to get his fingers away, but to no avail. “Stahahahahahahap-! Plehehease! Nahahahaht mihihihihihihy eheheeheears!”

His giggling turned into full blown laughter when his burly husband took a new initiative and blew a raspberry on his neck.

“NOHOHOHOHOHOT THEHEHEHEEHE RAHAHAHAHASPBEHEHEHERRIES!!! FAHAHAHAHAHACK- GAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!”

“Awwwww~ Does that tickle, me giggly Teddiursa? Huh? Yer so cute! Pfffffffffffffft-!”

“ST-STAHAHAH- STAHAHAHAP!! OHOHOHOHO GAHAHAHAHAD!! AHAHAHAH-! NOHOHOHOHO-! AHAHAHAHA! IHIHIHIHIHIHIT TIHIHIHIHIHICKLES!!”

Archie was so in love with the cute laughter and snorts he was hearing. “I know ye’ll love this!” He raised his shirt up and blew a raspberry on his belly.

Out came the cackles and squeals from the Team Magma leader. “NAHAHAHAHAHA- NAHAHAHAHAT THAHAHAHAHAT!!! EHEHEHEHEHENOUGH!! AHAHEHEEHEEE- IHIHIHI- IHIHIHI’M GOHOHOHNNA DIHIHIE!!”

Archie stopped. He pulls his shirt down and hugs him once more. “Hehe! I’m sorry, baby. I wanted to cheer ye up.” He felt a little guilty, seeing his crimson face. “Are ye okay?”

“Hehehehe.. hehe… heh… Y-youhuhuhu’re thehehehe wohohohorst…” He giggled, wrapping his arms around his waist. “But Ihihihi love you…”

“Hehe! I love ye too, Max.. *kiss* So much. Feeling better yet?” He asked.

Maxie wipes his mirthful tears away. “Yehehes.. you’ve tickled me so much, that I’ve got a permanent smile on my face..”

“Awwww, good!! But I’ll let up, babe.. don’t worry. I don’t want yer lungs to collapse.”

“Ha. Ha.” He rolled his eyes and curled up in the bed, snuggling very close with his lover.

Archie returned the snuggles. “Are ye sure ye still wanna cuddle with the tickle monster?”

“Mmm~ As long as he keeps his hands away from my tickle spots for a little while, then yes~”

“Ye’ve got it, babe.. I’m sorry I went a little overboard. You and yer laugh are just so fucking adorable.. and like I said, I wanted to cheer ye up. *kiss*

Maxie chuckled. “I forgive you, you big dork. *kiss* You always know how to make me feel better~”

#Pokemon #Anonymous #asks #ask #Hardenshipping #Maxie #Archie #Fics #my fics #Tickling

[stabbysideblog]

BBH’s Prison visit (scene-by-scene)

(To make things easier I’m going to put the timestamp for the END of each scene I talk about)

Link to the vod 

Very long post warning! This is going to center on Dream so if you aren’t into that don’t click the read more. 

28:46 - Bbh comes up to Dream and even walks past him a bit before Dream turns and starts moving again. This is our first sign of him being spacey. After he says hello he takes a deep breath. This sounds like the type of breath you take to calm down. 

29:14 - We can hear how Dream’s voice is different even from the last time we heard him. To make sure I checked Tommy’s vod and it is completely different. He speaks slower, with more spaces, less enunciation, sometimes there’s a slight slurr to his voice. Bbh asks how he’s doing and he replies and goes to spin his clock. I don’t know how intentional this is but BBH asks what he’s doing and Dream stops and looks at the floor instead of at BBH. 

29:33 - Bbh asks if spinning his clock is what Dream does in his free time and Dream says yes. He used to write but he burned a lot of his books. He doesn’t say why. We can assume based off what he said he doesn’t write anymore. That means all he has to do is spin his clock round and round. After BBH opens the chest 6 spaces are empty. One book is on the lectern. He assumedly burnt all the books Tommy made him write. Why? He never elabirates on this so we don’t know

29:52 - Bbh asks if Dream likes it in here and Dream takes almost 3 seconds to respond. He describes it as “really good”. Before while bbh is talking about the cell he doesn’t say anything. He looks at the lava but doesn’t move towards it.

30:11 - Dream talks about how he gets potatoes :] But they’re raw :[. He goes close to the lava but comes back to talk to bad. Also whenever he walks he runs. Dream is notoriously very active, he bounces around he can’t do that in the cell so instead he runs from place to place. “he said he- I tried to get out and so he made it so I couldn’t have visitors for a few days but” He completely drops the potatoes conversation to say that then drops this conversation. 

30:47 - Bbh tells Dream that he’s done bad things that got him in there. Dream doesn’t argue he simply repeats “that’s true”. He also says he gets to “think and think and think... and play with my clock”. In that sentence he looks at the damage pot dispenser then plays with his clock. 

31:36 -  When Bbh asks if Dream wants to hear what’s going on outside he perks up somewhat and asks how George and Sapnap are doing. He remarks after bbh says they probably miss that they haven’t visited him. He then makes a reason for it because there were a few days he couldn’t get visitors. Bbh accidentally rubs in that they haven’t come by at all and Dream goes and spins his clock for 31:24 - 31:33. He says nothing in this time, then he asks what’s happening outside. 

32:41 - While bbh talks about that’s going on outside Dream spins his clock, he stops to chuckle at what Tommy’s up to. Bad says he’s sure a lot of people miss Dream while Dream is turned around and Dream snaps to attention looking at bad. He laughs at Techno “still doing the whole anarchy thing” then asks for a 3rd time what is happening outside. He goes back to spinning his clock while Bbh talks. At this point it’s very obvious how much Dream uses the clock. It’s like he relies on it. 

33:28 - Bbh talks to Dream about  the egg. He simply says “I remember the egg” and “that’s intresting” before going back and spinning his clock. “I don’t really have anything else other than the clock”. That’s sadly true. As far as he knows everyone hates him, he’s lost everything. The only thing he has left is his clock. Bbh asks if he’s named it and he has but he doesn't want too say the name. Instead of that he just keeps spinning it.

34:29 - Dream takes out at book and starts writing in it. Bbh asks what he’s writing but Dream doesn't reply simply giving bad the completed book. It’s titled “thank you!” and the inside says “thank you for visiting me badboyhalo!” Dream tells bad he won’t be able to take it out. Bbh says that once Dream gets out he can take it with him. Dream doesn't reply and spins his clock. If you haven’t noticed how much he uses this clock you’re blind. He says that his sentence is forever when bad asks. “Forevers not that long” Way to rub it in bad. At least Dream chuckles a little.

35:40 - Bad tells him he likes what he’s done with the place before realizing how that sounds. Dream moves his clock to the other side of the room. “I like to watch it and then when it hits halfway *pause* then *pause* then I’m happy”. Note that in this chunk Dream is particularly bad at replying to bbh. They watch the clock move together. Dream says that it was “awesome” he seems to not have been the biggest fan of redecotaring because he moves his clock back to it’s original location. 

36:43 - Dream makes a sound like when you are sad and have to take a breath before you start crying. He says that he doesn’t know what else he’s supposed to do. Bad mentions that Dream has a heat source. From that we can assume that Dream’s tiny prison is pretty darn hot. He also asks how long he’e been in there suggesting that he has lost track of time. That’s pretty common in people who are in solitary confinement. Bad gives a timeline of a few weeks to 2 weeks. For reference the United Nations says solitary confinement for more than 15 days is torture. 

37:20 - Bad asks who’s come and visit Dream, Dream says only Tommy and bbh is surprised. Dream remarks that “he’s the only one actually, until you” and goes to stand close to the lava. He goes close to it a second time while he justifies no one visiting by saying there’s limited visiting hours and overtime more people will (come visit). 

38:18 - Dream tells bbh about the #epic prank he does on Sam where he burns his clock so he can see Sam and say hi. The clock that he’s spent most of his visit spinning. So he can see someone else. I wonder if Sam decided not to give Dream another clock what else he would do to get Sam to visit. Bbh asks if he gets in trouble for burning his clock and Dream says sometimes he gets less potatoes. 

"oh so he starves you"

 "no I'm not s- I dunno- I wouldn't say I'm starving but-" 

"you have 3 square meals a day?" 

"........... i have potatoes"

The concerning parts are how much he stumbles over his words and the I wouldn’t say I’m starving. What would you say you are then? 

39:38 - Dream chuckles and throws his clock into lava. It’s gone now. Let’s see if he acts any different. Dream moves around a bunch while talking about what will happen later, you can hear his chuckle and smile at his ‘prank’. Dream tells bad that Sam is going to make a system so that the potatoes are dropped in so he doesn't have to see him to give him potatoes. Bbh says that he should keep sam from doing it because doesn’t it brighten his day? Dream admits it does but everything here is automated so it’ll make it better. Bbh asks if awesamdude treats Dream well and Dream says he does while he keeps glancing at the lava.

40:28 - Dream sniffles and tells bbh that it’s fine in here. He has his clock and his book and,,, he’s happy in here...right? He finishes off that sentence by sniffling and clearing his throat. All signs point to him not being happy in here. Where before he would spin his clock now he,,,, tries not to cry. Bbh asks if he’s allowed to have anything else, Dream tells him he can ask. While bbh talks about how maybe he could get a potted plant he sniffles again. Dream is obviously upset but he does as Dream does and says he’s okay and things are fine. 

42:00 - Bbh asks who Dream wants to come visit him, he says that he wants george and sapnap to come visit him. Bbh accidentally makes it sound like they don’t want to visit Dream, he says that they probably just need to be reminded that Dream is available for visitors. Dream takes 4 seconds to reply and it’s just a sad “yea”. Bbh tells him to look on the bright side and Dream just looks at the floor. I think that he knows that George and Sapnap don’t like/hate him. He also takes awhile to reply to Bbh saying that he’s been on good behavior right? If that’s because he hasn’t or because Sam’s idea of good behavior is hard for Dream we don’t know. 

42:51 - Dream throws himself into lava and Bbh reacts with horror yelling at him what is he doing? He says that sometimes he swims in there. What exactly made him decide to swim in the lava? Maybe him remembering how he he lost his friends, maybe him realizing he’ll never be free, maybe he was bored? We don’t know. What we do know is in this cell healthy coping mechanisms do not exist. They aren’t allowed to exist by nature of it. He tells bab that going into the lava keeps him entertained and sometimes he likes to set himself on fire with it. He demonstrates this and while bad asks if it’s a prank he just chuckles. This demonstrates how in the cell he’s willing to put himself physically into harms way for any more stimulation. It’s sad honestly. 

44:12 - Dream says that bbh’s time is probably almost up and thanks him for visiting him. Bbh says he wants to get Dream a pet and improve his living conditions. Dream talks about how long it takes to break a block, he once sat there for over 20 minutes with basically no progress. He helped design the prison and knows that if he broke a block the guard would be teleported in (and kill him). He realizes if bbh becomes a guard it could be a way to get him to come visit him :D he’ll simply punch a block for hours until it breaks so the people tasked to kill him can be there. Dream is desperate for human contact. He realizes that would make awesam really mad and he doesn’t want to do that. 

44:35 - Bbh says maybe he can get his sentence commuted from forever to 10 or 20 years. Dream says he’d like that if he has good behavior. I can’t help but feel noones idea of good behavior is lining up. Sam wants to think and see Dream as little as possible. Dream, I don’t know what Dream considers good behavior. Bbh sees good behavior as not trying to escape or messing with anything. Bbh says he doesn't wanna get Dream’s hopes but but Dream should look in the bright side. Dream sniffles and clears his throat. As this goes on it gets harder for him to not cry it seems. Bad tells Dream to look on the bright side and Dream says alright in a way that obviously suggests he wont. 

45:43 - Bad says that he’ll come visit Dream again really soon. He says he’ll bring George and Sapnap, Dream reminds him only 1 person can visit at a time. Bad says then he’ll schedule for them to visit. Bbh alost saays that they need to visit their friend but instead says they need to visit you (Dream) instead. From Dream’s POV this celents that they don’t care for him anymore. Bbh ends his visit and Dream somehow sounds more dejected than ever. 

50:42 - Sam while HOLDING a clock says that he might not give Dream a new clock. It also doesn’t matter whether Dream knows if it’s daytime or not. Bbh seems to have picked up how important the clock is to Dream. Sam also asks if Dream “said anything(????)” while he was in there. He also says that Dream swims in a lot a lot and usually he just wants attention. Sam also says with the way Dream has been acting that he probably won’t get his sentence commuted.

 Overall very concerning! From the way Dream relied on an inanimate object and the moment it was he started sniffling, to how he talked and sounded different, to how he swims in lava and sets himself on fire for fun, to how he’s starved if he misbehaves, to how he was spaced out and slow to respond. This all paints a picture of someone not doing well but pretending he isn’t. If he were to not get a new clock, and sam installs the automated potatoes machine I feel like he would get worse much faster. Unless bbh gets on that prison reform fast it’s not looking good for him. Not even getting on how the warden of the prison hates his guts. 

#dreamwastaken #dsmp #dsmpblr #badboyhalo #awesamdude #dream smp #dsmp tumblr #pandora's vault #warden sam #dream #prison arc #issa me post

[sparkbeast20]

You’re my Treasure (Mammon X MC) Pt9

The Blue Lotus petals (series)

As a fan of Beauty X Beast pairing, Showing your “true self” to Lover or (Monster Love) Tropes. I figure to make a (More Demonic Forms AU/head canon) story for each brothers. Heads up each brother’s Story is long as fuck. So, I’ll be posting them as parts and finishing one brother before moving on to the rest of them.

(spoiler for lesson 1-60)

Pt1 Pt2 Pt3 Pt4 Pt5 Pt6 Pt7 Pt8

Warning: Swearing, Demonic nature, mention of Pain, Blood, Violence, Killing, Cannibalism, Using Someone as Baited

Previously

“I’ll activated the spell while you and Satan grab our troublesome brothers” the two nod and move in. leaving Lucifer to get ready.

“When it all fail, I still have the book. Mammon what ever happens I know you’re ready to take my place. It better me then you”

Levi, Asmo and Beel is face to face with Mammon who looks at them with a blink stare.

“M-Mammon! It’s you……. I-It’s really you” Levi tries to hold back the tears as he smiles to Mammon who turn to face them and start cooing. “W-where have y-you been! You know that you Made Beel worried sick about……how worried sick I am!?!” Levi starts cry as walks over to him. However, Mammon is getting annoyed of he with the noise. His feather slowly raises up as shrike comes out from him with start out low but louder and deeper shrike.

“Levi! I think you’re making him angry!” Beel grab Levi by the collar of jacket, and pull him back so hard he stumbles back and fall on his butt. Beel shifted to his demon form and stand Infront of Asmo in a defensive position, which makes Mammon think of they are a threat.

“Mammon!!” Belphie scream his name, as he standing behind him, Mammon quickly turns to face Belphie, all the while Satan sneak behind the three brothers, with one wave of his hand he undid the chain spell.

A sound of chains breaking echoes around them causing them to flinch, all expect Satan, Belphie and Mammon the latter which whip his head towards Basto.

Who immediately took his chances and start running out of there? Mammon sees it and chase after him.

Once Mammon is in the spell circle, Lucifer flew out of his hiding spot, and trigger the spell, a barrier starts to form from where Lucifer is to the opposite side where he standing.

Satan hold down both Levi and Asmo from following Mammon, unfortunately Beel saw Basto running and thinks he escape followed Mammon into the spell. Seeing his twin step in Belphie followed him too.

The spell is complete with Mammon, Beel, Belphie inside with Basto who crushes into the invisible barrier causing him to flew back and fall right Infront of Mammon.

At the brink of death and beaten up to exhaustion he tries to crawl away, But Mammon quickly stops him by stepping on him and dig his talons on the back of the demon. With one slowly pulls his head back and quickly drop it peaking Basto right through the head piercing his skull killing him once and for all.

Meanwhile Beel and Belphie punch and push on the barrier with Levi and Asmo doing the same thing from the other side of it.

“Beel is no uses this one of Lucifer’s spells, he’s the only can break it.” Belphie pants catching his breath as he said that. “We just have to stay calm and~” but seeing Levi’s expression cuts him, causing him to turn around. Mammon is staring right at them while licking his beak.

“SHIT!!! Beel get ready” Belphie shifted to his demon form, getting ready.

Lucifer seeing his younger brothers in danger, reach for the book and about to use it, when suddenly Mammon perks up with his head and feathers rising up. Then he squawks and try to fly but only crash in the barrier and fall.

“What’s happening?” Asmo asks but no knows to answer him, as they all watch Mammon fly, crash, fall and get up only to repeat the progress.

“He stops noticing us” Beel asks Belphie who nod, move near to the barrier where Satan is Standing. “Satan, uh? What should we do now?”

“Just stay out of his way, I think his too distracted to notices that he can break the spell by phase through it”

“Wait what? He can do that”

“That’s his thing, he’s not just fast in flying he can also go through thing like trees and mountains like a ghost”

“How ironic that he is scare of horror and other scary thing, and yet his basically a demon that can scare anyone by just poking his head through the wall” Satan chuckles while Belphie look at him with a blink expression.

“Really right now”

“That’s good right! we have Mammon back and his kinda acting like his old self” Asmo cheer statement causing the other a little optimism, all expect Beel.

“We need to let him go” The other whip their head at Beel with a shock expression.

“Eh…… Beel you were the one who told me that we not losing him again” Levi yells at Beel, who just keep watching Mammon hurting himself trying to escape.

“I-I ……... think his trying to get back to y/n” everyone eyes widen at Beel’s remake, then look back at Mammon who is panting and letting out squawks.

“What made you have that idea, Beel” Lucifer finally walks over to them and asks. As he watches Mammon keep trying to escape.

“Look at him! He distresses if Satan is right, then he should be able to break you spell but he doesn’t his more focus on getting back to y/n and not realize that he can get out of this minutes ago”

Lucifer look closer to Mammon who is now catching his breath, carefully examining him. And thinking to what is next plan.

“Lucifer if we let him go, there is a possibility that we might not see him again.” Satan is weighting their option tell his brothers the possibilities “But if we let him fly far enough that we can still see him, we might able to follow him to where he’s been hiding and where y/n might be”

“Satan! This Mammon we’re talking about, even Lucifer has trouble catching up to him!” Levi voices his concern on the option with Asmo and Beel shaking their head in agreement.

“Beel we can’t stay here, the moment he sees us in here with him, he’ll take his frustration out of us, and well…… I for one don’t want to be kill like the dead corpse over there” Belphie points to a half-eaten dead body, which is being step on by Mammon, who start flying again.

“And that dead corpse was the only thing draw out Mammon in the first place, if we let him go, we can never find him again” Asmo reply to Belphie, who is looking at him narrow bow and snarling.

“Fuck you Asmo! You’re not the one trap inside with him. Look I love Mammon, but I don’t want to be kill by him!?!”

While the two brothers argue, Lucifer and Satan are weighting their option.

“Lucifer, Belphie’s right eventually he’ll see them in there with him and~”

“We’ll let him go and follow him to where he and y/n have been hiding” Lucifer said it in stern tone. Then he looks at Asmo and Levi, to see if they objected.

“W-we’re not losing him…...r-right!”

“Rest assure Leviathan! We are not losing are brother not like this, now you and Belphie are with Beel, and Satan is with Asmo. If I don’t have someone to carry, I will able to catch up to him. But whatever happens DON’T STOP FOLLOWING. If one of us gets knock out by him while in the air, the rest of us KEEP GOING. Understood.”

Satan and Belphie are the only ones who nods in agreement, while Levi and Asmo are unsure of the plan. And Beel just look on to Mammon.

“Beel?” Belphie place a hand on his twin’s shoulder and calling to him. “Are you ready?” Beel turns and looks at Lucifer and nods.

All of them shifted to their demon form and prepare themselves what maybe a long flight ahead of them.

With one wave of a hand the spell broke, Causing Mammon to look up see the spell breaking from the top down. He immediately flaps his wings taking off and start heading north.

Levi and Belphie quickly grabs on to Beel’s arms and Satan did the same thing to Asmo. All the winged demons quickly took off with Lucifer in the lead following Mammon to where ever he’s been and where he taken you to.

After two hours of unstop flying through, they finally made it to the unknown woods, where there is miles of trees and a couple of lakes they flew by.

“I haven’t seen this place before but I kinda feel like I been here” Satan comments as he looks around taking in the scenery and feeling strange deep inside.

Then after a few minutes of flying overhead of the woods Mammon dive down, surprising his brothers of the sudden change of direction.

The other quickly follow suit.

Even with his bigger form Mammon, easily maneuver through the trees with Lucifer is hot on his trail. Unfortunately for Beel who is carrying Levi and Belphie changing direction is not an easy task to do. While Asmo is slowly losing speed, not only he’s carrying Satan but his wings are getting tired. Satan sees that Asmo is panting meaning they’ll be grounded soon. Quickly cast a spell and threw it at Lucifer’s ankle, causing him to look back for a moment. And seeing that Satan was the one who cast it return his focus on Mammon as he continues to follow him.

“Asmo take us back down, we can’t follow them like this”

“But Satan!”

“You’re going to pass out in any second now if you keep going. So landed down NOW!” Satan sternly said the last part, causing Asmo to flinch and slowly fly closer to the ground.

“Beel! You too” Satan glare at Beel with a serious look, giving him the scenes of his not taking no for an answer, so Beel did the same thing. The two-winged demons slowly decent down, making an emergency landed.

Once close to the ground, Levi, Satan, and Belphie jump off and get on the ground with Beel land smoothly but Asmo who is tired pass out causing him to landed on the ground by falling face down.

Levi and Beel rushes over to fifth’s side and help him by turning him on his back.

“Satan what spell did you cast?”

“A tether spell, so we can follow them by foot. At this rate only Lucifer has a better chance in following Mammon through the trees, and you two need to rest your wings.”

After hearing that Beel sat next to a sleeping Asmo, while Levi walks over to Satan and Belphie.

“You think Lucifer manage to keep up with him” Satan raise a bow to Levi’s thought. “Is Lucifer, even it kills him he’ll keep following Mammon where ever he goes. That how he is”

Then Satan claps to grab the attention.

“We’ll rest for an hour, then we’ll keep going on foot”

Mammon swoop down and landed Infront of the cave, rushes inside. Lucifer gave him a couple feet head start before following him in the cave.

He slowly looks around the cave as he decent farther into it. And notice a make shift campfire with a pot and roaster above it.

“Good y/n is be able to survive with Mammon like this~” A shrike cuts him off, causing to running in farther into the cave.

Mammon in a panic, franticly look around the cavern leaping all over the place looking for something. While squawking as if his calling for someone.

Lucifer made it to the mouth of the cavern, and see that Mammon is looking from something or someone.

He though to himself that this bad, Mammon is looking for you and now that your gone because he was held back by the trap. He will attack and kill anyone who made the trap in the first-place aka he and other brothers.

Since Lucifer knows now where you two are been hiding, he can meet back with the others and form a different plan.

When suddenly something crashes beside him, the impact shook the floor he was standing causing him to fall into the cavern and landing on his side on his arm causing a bone to break.

Mammon saw Lucifer and threw a statue at him, and ready himself to pounce at Lucifer, who is trying to get up. But Mammon pounces on top of him and dug his talons into Lucifer’s broken arm breaking the skin and drawing blood.

Lucifer look up to met Mammon’s demonic stare which is filled with anger, sadness, and resentment all blinding him to see that he’s hurting his brother.

With no other option he uses his wing to grab Mammon’s attention it works and use other talon to pinned down his wing freeing Lucifer’s arm. And quickly reach in grabbing the book out of his coat and start reading it then his eyes turning more demonic with each word and starting to feel his body shifting to his demonic form.

#obey me #obey me lucifer #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #obey me reader x mammon #obey me monster love #obey me shall we date #obey me mc #obey me blue lotus petals

[alostsock]

An exercise in futility.

Summary/Snippet: “Did you think it hadn’t been tried, Booker?” Booker blinks, slowly turning to face Nicky.

“What?”

“Did you really think it hadn’t been tried? That everything hadn’t been tried? Everything that woman did, every experiment she ran. None of it is new.”

TW: self-harm, medical experimentation (nothing graphic), body horror, self-hatred, suicidal ideation

This is based on a headcanon by @dearpatroclus which you can read here, so thank you to them! Thank you also to @socvrates for the amazing beta, and to @shaolinqueen for the brainstorming, and for the line “Maybe next time, habibi” because it crushed me and so I included it.

Everything below the cut.

Part 1: Booker

“Did you think it hadn’t been tried, Booker?” Booker blinks, slowly turning to face Nicky.

“What?”

“Did you really think it hadn’t been tried? That everything hadn’t been tried? Everything that woman did, every experiment she ran. None of it is new.”

“You’ve been… wait no, you haven’t been taken in the past 200 years, I would have known about it. Science has changed, Nicky. There’s so much that they can do now that they couldn’t do in the 1700s. You don’t know -”

Nicky says nothing. He turns to face Booker, his eyes dark.

“I would have known…” Booker tries again, losing steam when Nicky continues to look at him with a carefully blank face. His shoulders slump. “When were you taken? Where? Was it you? Was it Joe? Andy? Was it when I was in Shanghai in ‘89? Or  Rennes in ‘27? Why didn’t you tell -”

“We weren’t taken, Booker. Or at least, nothing you don’t know about.”

Booker straightens up again. “Well then how would you know - ?”

“I tried it.”

“What?”

“I tried it myself.”

Booker looks at him in confusion. “What do you mean you tried it yourself?”

“I did the research myself.”

Booker knows there’s something that Nicky isn’t saying (as there tends to be with Nicky, his words always hinting at depths he won’t say) but it’s just out of reach, his mind failing to put it together.

Nicky pushes himself up off of the porch step and heads back inside, the door swinging shut behind him.

-----

Part 2: Nile

They’re in an apartment by the Bay of Naples when Nile finds them. It’s an old property, definitely older than Nile (as most things are), and the things scattered around the house show it. The pots are old, the fireplace is well-used, and some of the clothes that Joe pulls out of the closet look like they’re from the wrong century (they just might be).

It looks innocent enough, at first. In an alcove off of the living room there’s a tall bookshelf, full to bursting. Nile hesitates. They’ve told her time and time again that what’s theirs is hers now, but these old books, clearly well-worn and often looked through, feel personal. She leans closer, hesitant to touch anything. Some of them have titles still legible on the spines. Others are too worn to read, while others still don’t appear to have anything written on the spines at all.

There are a few worn classics in Italian, English, and French that Nile recognizes.

Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Hugo, Rabelais.

There are others in languages Nile can’t read.

Curious and vaguely emboldened, Nile pulls out one of the unmarked books.

The only things she really understands are the dates on some of the pages. There are a few drawings that might have been done by Joe, but most of the book is filled with what Nile recognizes as Nicky’s hand.

She thinks it’s in Latin. It might be in Italian, but she suspects it’s too old of a form for her to read with her limited skills. Flipping through a few more pages and unable to really make out anything meaningful, she carefully closes it and puts it back on the shelf, picking up another.

The next one is much the same.

The pictures, scarce though they are, seem scientific, medical. She knows that Nicky has a medical degree - possibly more than one. Maybe he wrote something and Joe did the drawings for him.

It isn’t until the fifth book that the language starts to tend toward a recent enough form that Nile can make some things out between her recently acquired Italian skills and the Spanish she learned in high school. Between that and the obvious progress over the tomes in methodicity and organization, Nile realizes what she’s looking at.

They’re records of experiments.

She feels dread building in her stomach as she sits heavily on the couch, unable to tear her eyes away. There are a few times she needs to pull out her phone to check a translation but it becomes very clear what the experiments were about: they were experiments on immortality.

Nicky experimented on someone - and given what she knows about the immortal… community, or lack thereof? It must have been Joe or Andy or Booker.

She sits in silence, trying to understand.

Kind Nicky, gentle Nicky, very-much-the-mom-friend Nicky, had it in him to cut out pieces of his friends. It doesn’t feel right. Didn’t doctors take an oath to “do no harm”? She supposes it didn’t stop Kozak, and she knows that anything that was done would heal instantly, but the idea of Nicky taking a blade to Joe or Andy or Booker willingly unsettles Nile deeply.

And based on the number of books here (and Nile is sure that, with the number of properties they have around the globe, this isn’t the only stash of them), Nicky did a lot.

The notes are meticulous, and even with the language barrier Nile gets a pretty good idea of the extent to which Nicky went. Even though they heal, it feels wrong.

She hears the padding of footsteps on the stairs and she can’t help but hope that it isn’t Nicky. She isn’t sure if she can face him just yet - if she can handle how much her perception of him has changed.

She lets out a breath of relief when she sees that it’s Joe. When he sees her sitting on the couch he immediately beams at her, and she feels guilt rush through her when his face drops as he notices the book on her lap.

She shouldn’t have looked.

For a moment, he doesn’t move. Then he huffs out a breath before calling out “Tea?” and heading to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.

Nile doesn’t know if she can stomach tea.

---

When he comes back he places both teacups on the coffee table before carefully taking the book out of her hands, closing it, and putting it back on the shelf. She notices that he does it all without even looking down at the page. He keeps his gaze averted as if he can’t bear to look at it.

She’s speaking before she can stop herself. “Was it you?”

Joe freezes midway from the shelf to the couch.

“What?”

Nile gestures vaguely. “The… the book. Was it you?”

Joe frowns. “What? No… I mean… Nicky wrote it. He’s the one with the medical training, you know that.”

Nile blinks. “I mean… who did he… who did he experiment on. Was it you? I just… I can’t imagine he would, on you… and so much, too. Even on Andy, or Booker, I...”

Joe’s expression shutters. He doesn’t say anything for a long moment before hesitantly walking the rest of the way back to the couch and sitting down beside her.

He stares down at his own hands, fiddling with one of his rings. “Nicky never touched us.”

That does not make Nile feel better. She squeezes her hands together to stop them from shaking. If he wasn’t experimenting on immortals, then that only left… “He - he must have killed them.”

Joe whips his head around to face her. “What?”

“I… I know I didn’t understand everything, but some of the things he did, there’s no way they made it. He was just… just killing them. For the sake of what, science? Nicky? I never - ”

Joe cuts her off with a quick shake of his head, taking her hand in his.

“No.”

“Joe, have you read those? Even with my shitty Italian and no medical degree I can tell that -”

“No.”

Nile softens. She knows denial. Nicky’s been the love of his life for 900 years. “Joe…”

Joe clears his throat uncomfortably, giving her hand a squeeze. “I’ve read them, Nile. I did the art… when I could handle it.” She waits, sensing he has more to say. “But… Nile… he didn’t hurt anybody else.” She opens her mouth, about to argue that it’s impossible when he continues, “The point was to test immortality, test how it can be… what it can do. If it can be harnessed. Testing mortals would have been pointless.”

“But you said he didn’t touch you. He clearly experimented on someone, Joe, he -”

“He refused to hurt anyone else.”

Nile blinks, confused, but Joe doesn’t say anything else. He lets go of her hand and goes back to playing with his rings, but Nile can see the anguish written all over his face. She reaches out a tentative hand to rest on his back, unsure how to comfort him, or even, really, what she’s comforting him for. 

“Joe…” But then, what he said seems to settle in her mind. “He didn’t hurt anyone else.” Joe nods, doesn’t look at her. “He didn’t hurt anyone else,” Nile continues. She thinks she’s going to be sick. “All of that… all of that, he did to himself?”

Joe doesn’t respond. He doesn’t need to.

-----

Part 3: Joe

Joe loves and hates medical breakthroughs. He loves them because, having lived for so long, it’s such an amazing thing to see things that used to cause so much suffering no longer need to. He loves how many unfathomable things have become possible.

He hates them because every time something groundbreaking is published, Nicky gets a distant look in his eyes. Then come the days of scouring the literature, the planning, the hypothesizing. Nicky sinks into a dark hole that will only get darker, and Joe has to try to press food into his hands and drag his love to bed because if he didn’t, he knows Nicky wouldn’t stop to breathe.

What Joe hates most is that working himself to the bone is hardly the worst thing that Nicky will do to himself when he gets into it.

He hates that he knows that nothing he says will dissuade Nicky from desperately destroying himself.

He hates that all he can do is wait until he sees in Nicky’s eyes that it won’t work - until he sees that Nicky knows (however much he doesn’t want to admit it) that he’s tried everything, and that continuing is pointless.

He hates that even though, in the back of his mind, Nicky knows he’s done, he will continue regardless, doing the same thing over and over, still hoping for a different outcome. He hates that all he can do is pull the notebook out of Nicky’s trembling hands, press a kiss to his forehead, and brush back his sweaty hair before putting a hand under his elbow and helping him to his feet.

“Maybe next time, habibi. For now, sleep.”

-----

Part 4: Andy

Healing is exhausting. The human body (even the immortal one) needs fuel. It needs rest.

It isn’t meant to be taken apart over and over, no matter how seamlessly the skin grows back.

After she walks in to find Nicky focused over a piece of his own liver, a frenzied, desperate look in his eyes for the umpteenth time, his cheeks gaunt and his face pale, she realizes the best and worst part of the progression of humanity is science.

It’s not the first time he’s gotten like this, and she’s sure that it won’t be the last.

She knows that Nicky carries guilt. She knows that horrors from his first life still haunt him in his dreams, and that he still sees himself as responsible for the atrocities committed centuries ago at Jerusalem.

She suspects that, in everything that he does, a part of Nicky is still trying to atone - a part of him still sees himself as owing penance.

She suspects that, in the deepest part of his heart, Nicky hates himself a little

She suspects that this will never really change..

She knows that no amount of pleading, of Joe’s tears, of reminders that nothing has ever worked, will stop Nicky from desperately hoping that this time, this time he can pull something out of himself that will save the world.

She has offered, Joe has offered, every time Nicky is convinced that something is different, now - that humankind has what it needs, to make it work this time - to be the sample, to be the source.

Nicky took a scalpel to Andy’s skin once with a quivering hand before leaving to throw up.

“You’ve cut me in training before. You don’t need to keep hurting yourself.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“It’s different.”

“How?”

“What if… what if it’s the last time and I did it on purpose?”

“What if it’s your last time?”

Nicky turns away without a word, but Andy hears the “it wouldn’t matter” all the same.

#the old guard #fanfic #fic #angst #catholic guilt #tw: suicidal ideation #tw: self loathing #tw: self harm #tw: body horror #tw: horror #tw: vomit

[mythicandco]

I have 1% Battery Left And I’m Wasting it on This

A.K.A. Philip B. Wittebane (in which the “B” stands for “Belos”)

Warning: More than 90% of this is pure headcanoning and theorizing, based on the evidence that’s arisen and the ideas of many other members of the fandom. This theory has been circling the Owl House fandom for months, I DID NOT ORIGINALLY CREATE IT. Brooke and North are from this and so is some of the story, but the majority of the details are the work of my own convoluted brain. This was kinda disproved by Yesterday’s Lie but I want to post it before my computer dies. Anyways, I hope you enjoy this summarized monstrosity… 

Everything is once again below the cut

Philip stumbles into the Boiling Isles by complete accident while on a hike through the woods, tripping into a rift in the fabric of space-time created by Titan’s blood interacting with other various magical substances. He doesn’t realize he’s in another realm until he actually stops to look around, and is startled to come face-to-face with a trio of witches. 

The first witch, Brooke, is taller than their companions, with a big ol’ witchy hat and a pair of grey, tasseled earrings. North, only slightly shorter than Brooke, has a similar hat along with a matching cloak and blonde, curled hair. Her face is covered in scars. The last witch is Kirani, who ends up being a minor character but eh.

The trio is here to collect Titan’s blood for Brooke’s experiments with magic. They believe that by using their knowledge of potions, they can create an elixir of some form to allow witches to perform magic without the use of glyphs. The exact recipe is a work in progress, but they know that Titan’s blood will be a key ingredient. 

When the group first encounters Philip, they are startled by his small, round ears. The bemused human assures them he means no harm and eventually they decide that even if he does want to hurt them, he doesn’t have access to the magical knowledge to do so. This is further proven when a dragon nearly eats Philip (more on that later). They take him to their village to help him find a way home and survive until then. 

Over the next five or so years the group spends a lot of time together, Philip begins writing a journal, and North, Brooke and Philip form a friendship, often going on adventures together with the help of their palismans. North even trusts Philip enough to let him use her staff for transportation until he eventually gets the chance to carve his own. During this time Philip also learns a lot about glyph magic and the creatures of the Boiling Isles, and is surprised at how naturally it comes for him to draw the glyphs from memory and get them right. 

At one point Philip and the others travel to the Knee to retrieve some Titan’s blood from Eclipse Lake. Brooke stays behind to start collecting the other, more local ingredients to their spell, and North is forced to stay behind due to injuries sustained after fighting off a swarm of small, dragon-like creatures.

The expedition is a disaster, and after mistaking fool’s blood for Titan’s blood, Philip is the only one who makes it out alive following the cave-in. Philip is horrified at this turn of events but simultaneously relieved that Brooke and North didn’t accompany him on this particular mission. He comes back with the Titan’s blood, but not the rest of the group, and has to explain what happened. 

The village begins spreading rumors that he killed them to take the blood for himself, or that he is too incompetent to continue leading these expeditions. Brooke and North also get a share of the blame, being the ones who brought the human to their village in the first place. Brooke retreats to their study for a few weeks, taking the Titan’s blood with them. 

Things get even worse after the Titan’s blood excursion and the neighboring witch tribes hear about the dangerous human who supposedly kills witches and other creatures in cold blood for his own gain. (Rumors are nasty things, slightly more terrifying the longer they’re out there.) Philip finds it almost ironic that in this world of freaks and monsters, he’s the target of the torches and pitchforks. 

While out trading at a small market shared by a couple of the tribes, North is confronted by the leader of another clan and accused of betraying her kind. Things escalate quickly and she barely gets out without things coming to blows. 

Philip starts worrying that he is becoming a burden and a danger to the others, not because he actually wants to hurt them, but because they will get in trouble for sheltering him. He offers to help out Brooke with the portal, which is nearly finished. While they are distracted, he pockets some of the Titan’s blood and some other magical supplies from when Brooke was experimenting with improving a witch’s ability to perform magic. 

Philip uses the potion on himself, but because he is human, not a witch or demon, and isn’t connected to the Titan, he can only use magic by taking it from another source. He starts off using various plants and the horns and tusks of the creatures the village usually uses for jewelry or tosses aside after, I dunno, making a pie with it or something, and practices using spell circles in secret, making sure he can defend himself and the others should the need arise. 

Soon he discovers that he needs more and more magic to stay powerful - to stay stable - and slips up in front of Brooke, losing control for less than a moment before using a spare flower he’d been keeping in his back pocket as a gift for North.

Brooke, understandably, is freaked out by what the fuck just happened and Philip begs for them to keep it a secret. He admits that he stole some of Brooke’s concoctions so that he could protect himself from the witches of the other tribes, and that he needs a reliable source of energy to continue using magic. Brooke argues that what he’s doing is dangerous and unnatural, and that a human shouldn’t be able to use magic the way he does. 

Philip is furious, yelling at Brooke for hogging all of the magic for themselves. He says that where he comes from, witches were supposed to be burned at the stake or drowned. Brooke, horrified, backs away. Philip realizes he’s gone too far and flees back to the home he and the witches constructed when he first arrived in the Boiling Isles. 

His state continues to worsen, and eventually he is driven to snap his own palisman in order to consume its essence. With horrified awe, Philip discovers palismen hold far more magical energy than the little table scraps he’d been collecting before. He is able to briefly rejoin the rest of the tribe, but Brooke doesn’t speak to him and he keeps thinking about his broken palisman.

A few days later Brooke finally finishes the portal and gives Philip the key. The human doesn’t get the chance to test out the door before one of the rival tribes attacks the village out of nowhere and Philip joins in defending the people he’s spent years with. North is stunned that he can weave magic without the use of glyphs, but she doesn’t have the time to consult Brooke on where the human gained this new ability. 

At some point Philip corners the leader of the rival clan and nearly kills her, running out of magic just before the final blow is dealt. He reaches for the nearest source of power - North’s palisman - and snaps it in half. 

For a few moments, North and Brooke process what just happened amidst the chaos. Then the fighting stops and everyone watches as Philip finishes consuming the palisman’s essence. 

Philip looks up with glowing eyes and pauses, confused at everyone’s expressions. The fighting picks back up, this time directed at him, and someone throws a spear straight through his chest. It goes in one side and comes out the other, but the human(?) remains unharmed. The witches and demons start freaking the fuck out, because wouldn’t you in this situation? 

Finally registering what he’s done, a horrified Philip backs away and makes a break for the trees. He never sees Brooke or North again. 

In a clearing in the woods, Philip summons the door to the Human Realm but doesn’t have the courage to step through. He realizes that he is no better than the other monsters of the Demon Realm. He’d probably be shunned if he went home. Would anyone even recognize what he’d become? He once again briefly loses control of himself before giving up and throwing the key to the portal into the trees as hard as he can, before disappearing into the foliage himself.

North burns everything Philip touched, his books, home, everything in her fit of anger over the loss of her palisman and one of her best friends (or maybe something more). She is furious with Brooke for not telling her about him sooner and the two witches engage in an argument. Afterwards, Brooke discovers the journal Philip was going to donate to the market library, the one with all of his recorded notes and diagrams about the fantastical horror of the Demon Realm, and instead of burning it, donates it in their lost friend’s name.

A few centuries go by and Philip Wittebane’s name is practically lost to time, save for the journal that still resides in the almost-constantly growing library in what is now Bonesborough. 

A powerful, controlling figure arises, claiming he alone can communicate with the Titan, and that the wild magic used by witches is wrong. Emperor Belos unites the witches of the Boiling Isles under the Coven system, ascending the throne and becoming the most powerful being (both physically and politically) on the Boiling Isles. 

The rest, as they say, is history.

#the owl house spoilers #made before yesterday's lie #help my computer is dying

[luidilovins]

You should turn your post on the Uncanny Valley into a book or something. I am not even kidding, it's brilliant and sorely needed information. Thank you for it.

Tbh its just speculative that the uncanny valley is an inherent biological trait and not cultural or a learned behavior at the moment. A good example would be the cultural phenomenon of colorophobia where in the US we have a longer history of using clowns in our horror pop culture genres than countries like Japan.

Clown entertainment has been around since the Egytian times and maybe some people have always been freaked out by them it honestly just takes one director or author to have an disproportionately irrational fear and good cinematography skills to convince people that they SHOULD hate clowns just as much, (I could say the same about the movie Jaws but thats a bit of a tangent,) or a memorable event that damages the public's trust in something that SHOULD be innocent or harmless. (A good examples being the John Wayne Gacy trials.)

Clowns are also thought to be in the uncanney valley so ita a fairly good argument on cultural phenomenon versus genetic traits. Up until aroud the 60s-70s clowns were actually fairly well liked by the US general public and a lot of older generation still find a fondness in it that would scare the living shit out of their grandchildren.

As far as evidence that I may be right about the "uncanney valley might be because of rabies" theory, there has been a small case study suggesting that the movements of a non-human robot that trigger the effect in us, is also present in people with parkinsons but the sample size is too small for me to be thoroughly convinced.

And don't be mistaken I also dislike this concept because saying that ableism is an inherent human trait is just as bad as saying racism is an inherent human trait. There is little to gain from distrust in the disabled and little historical evidence to suggest it was common or beneficial to discard disabled people. Disabled people's remains have been found time and time again to live to incredibly long livea and be cared for, and participate in their communities. I'm highly critical of this particular case study and I take it with a grain of salt because its on cosmo, but evidence of human disabilities and compassion can be sourced by actual bones and it's been placed on VERY credible sources. NPR, NBC, Discovery, Nat Geo, NY Times, literally the clostest you can get to creme of the crop news articles on DOZENS of accounts and if you have a goddam problem then pay for a tour to the Smithsonian, find an archeologist and coherse them into showing you the bones and then explain phorensics to you because you probably wouldn't understand unless you too were a phorensic archeologist yourself.

What I DO BELIEVE tho is that if the uncanny valley is a legitimate inherent trait, that like most evolutionary traits, it made it this far for this long because it somehow served us benificially. And the biggest benifit I can think of is identifying neuro-infectious diseases because they can spread agressivley, many of them lead to death or lasting effects and are fucking MISERABLE to catch. We're talking brain swelling, fevers, uncontrollable vomiting, tremors, hallucinations, motor and vocal tics, difficulty swallowing, seizures. This could all happen because they eat infected deer meat or because of one bad fox bite. It's miserable if you survive and horrifying if you dont. Rabies can survive in your muscle tissue for years before infecting your brain and once it does usually you only live for about 5-10 days in and out of concious knowledge that you're going to die painfully, and disease aggrivated psychosis. It would be hard to pinpoint the causation because the amout of time before full blown infection would vary too much to assosiate for a long time. So your only option is to hone in on telltale signs.

The disabled people who would suffer from herdeditary or developmental neurological disorders run the risk of prejudice from mistaken identity, but if a human is part of a community, and doesn't die within a week from having a wobbly head, it would sooner or later become apparent that they're not dangerous. I think nowadays culturally people don't press to learn more about disabled people due to social and political prejudice and never fucking grow up past that. Mistaken identity or not. You learn about people from the patterns of their behaviors so even ones that seem abnormal to you become a normal recognizable pattern for them. Fancy that.

We don't get grossed out by chimps or gorillas, who are even more distant cousins, and the proof that we don't have a search and destroy button for anything immediatly related to us is a bunch of bullshit can be found in almost every human's blood on earth. And not just neanderthals, but denisovans as well. And that's not even accounting for genetic backtracking the crossbreeding of other sapiens species before we were whittled down to just the three. What makes the tweet even stupider is that when neandertals still roamed the earth humans were shorter, hardier, and overall more rough looking so we looked even indistinguished then. We Also Chewed On Bones and neandertals handled cold climates better than us based on a study on chest cavity density and, skull nasal intake and heat circulation, providing genetic diversity and the upper hand in survival in the tundras or mountainous regions spanning over Eurasia. If it wasn't for humans fucking neandertals we might not have been able to spread over the contient or diversify the way we did.

So my full hypothesis is that if the uncanny valley is a genetic inherent human trait it was used to benifit people from catching agressive diseases in a time where the benifit of fearing a group member with rabies outweighed the cost of fearing a group member with a disability like parkinsons.

WHAT PISSED ME OFF was the idea that we are DESIGNED to be unwary of our evolutionary cousins could easily be used for white supremacist spaces to justify racism BECAUSE IT ALREADY HAS

So that one tweet that might seem like a quirky thinkpiece in my eyes is just fuel for eugenics trend round whatever number we're on. It's like we don't fucking learn. It would be REALLY easy to retool the concept that it's natural for people to be fearful of whatever the bullshit definition of sub-humans are. Claiming that black people were sub-human thus deserving of mistrust and submission to white ownership worked like a fucking charm.

Maybe if I go to college and major in psyche/socio/civics it'll be my college thesis. Right now I'm more of a hobbyist than anything, but what I DO know is that anyone can make an untested hypothesis to combat another untested hypothesis and it should hold just as much goddamn value. I combatted the idea that the idea that human othering was funneled into an unconfirmed effect that causes disgust and terror based on non-human sapiens is in fact racist and gave what is in my opinion a more evoluntionary practical approach to the uncanney valley.

The generalized links that I used APARENTLY weren't good enough for some people but aparently a single tweet that says "hur dur heedle dee uncanney valley exists because of human cousins" was taken at face value even tho it was probably tapped out in five seconds without regards to the reproccussions. I find a huge discomfort that less than studious links about the evolution of monkey social behaviors that I used as a guideline to explaining my concerns became the focal point for people to nitpick without even having the gall to "well actually" on the subject. That absolute ravaging NEED to rip apart at it and devolve into name calling because I MENTIONED racism is fucking suspicious and I don't trust it. I had to stop looking at the responses because some people were only reblogging and arguing with barely half of my argument and i was getting nowhere fast.

There were a few people that made actual points with cited sources that made their own rebuttle arguments. That I respect. It's just as valid an argument as mine and I'm ALWAYS willing to take on more credible sources to strengthen my stance or gain perspective.

But it's the utter dismissal of a concerning concept that just seeped into the subtext that gnawed at my gut. Some people on top of hating the linked sources I provided, admitted they didn't read it, refused to read between the lines to purposfully misinterpret or derail my main points, and detract that my claim that the tweet was a result of systemic white supremacy saturated into modern science was a bunch of bullshit because I claimed that 1500s anglos invented racism.

The thing is we did invent the racism that we fucking currently subscribe to.

We practice the science that we formulated based on our own social prejudice. Real people die from this.

We remain uncritical of our own theorums that we postulate then pat ourselves on the back like we're philosophical geniuses even though racism is a family heirloom with a new paint job.

We preach the eugenics ideals that we pulled out of our asses to benifit from fearmongering, promises of national security and unpaied labor.

White supremacists create subtext with the intention of it being consumed by accident or in ways that seem palatable.

Fuck.

That.

I don't hate the person who wrote the tweet. Chances are that they gave the tweet as much thought as they took the time to write it and went on their day as a fun little thinkpiece. Everyone on the internet does it. But its that kind of thinking error that needs to be adressed as a progression of historic and scientific prejudice that gets rehashed, recycled and untouched and continually damages and is weaponized against marginalized people. I am not wrong for taking it seriously especially when a bunch of people were sitting around nodding their heads just as effortlessly.

I don't owe the internet any more sources than the tweet. I don't owe anyone on the internet a full scientific ananysis. And the people's reaction to what I had to say was actually what further convinced me I might have hit the nail on the head.

#answered asks #uncanny valley effect #eugenics #fuck white supremacy #systemic racism #racism #negative #slavery #luidilovins

[ohscorbus]

I had a thought while watching one cc show that when Scorpius first got back he accidentally slipped and called Draco “sir” instead of “Dad” and then he has to tell Draco everything about who he was in the dark timeline - do you think that could happen?

Oh I think this is exactly how it happens. I’ve actually had this headcanon for a while. Scorpius stands in McGonagall’s office and tells them what happened because he has to, but he skillfully skims over the details about Draco. He does it to protect his dad. To spare him the judgment from others, save him from his own, and partly because saying it out loud makes it real in this world too. No, Scorpius is going to bury it because that’s what is best. Except Draco can tell when he’s holding something back. He always has. But Draco decides not to call him out on it in front of an audience. He’ll ask him about it later on. Except there is no later on. Scorpius goes missing again and Draco fears his own failings have finally caused him to lose his boy. 

Between their return, recovery, and classes, this specific issue doesn’t rear its ugly head again until the summer. Despite the reveal of Delphi’s true identity and intentions, McGonagall still enforces their cancelled Christmas and Easter is spent catching up on missed classes, so Scorpius doesn’t get back home until June. It’s been months since the events of October and so he’s been lulled into a false sense of security. But that first night home brings back the nightmares tenfold. He thinks it’s just because this is the first time he’s been separated from Albus since… since that place. And so he writes a letter the very next day and makes sure to place a photo of the two of them together on his bedside table. He goes to bed that night hopeful but wakes up in a cold sweat and a silent scream on his lips. This goes on for a week until that scream finally escapes his throat and Draco rushes in, wand raised ready with a lumos. But in the murkiness of sleep and the confusion between dreams and reality, Scorpius is blinded by wand light and then struck by fear of the loose blond hair behind it. He doesn’t register his dad’s mirrored horror, just of what could possibly be following it. He violently flinches back and gets out a ‘sorry sir’ before he’s even realised what he’s done. Draco is silent. All that can be heard is Scorpius trying to catch his breath between barely suppressed sobs. Then suddenly the lights are on and Draco slowly approaches, wand out of sight and hands where Scorpius can see them. Draco has no idea what’s happening but as he looks from his son’s trembling body to the letters and photos scattered on the bed beside him, it all falls into place. 

“Scorpius… it’s me. Do you need me to get Albus? I don’t care what time it is, I’ll make sure Potter sends him through.” 

That makes Scorpius choke out a laugh. He can just see his dad arguing with Harry through the Floo as Ginny ignores them both and tries to wake Albus up because she knows like mums always know. And as nice as it would be, to have the confirmation he’s okay, Scorpius doesn’t need that right now. Albus is safe at home with his dad. So why did he just now feel like he wasn’t safe at home with his? That’s when the guilt sets in and those words start to playback in his head. He must look like he’s going to be sick because Draco moves as quick as he can, clearly trying not to startle Scorpius again, but needing to reach the small bin by his desk for Scorpius to throw up into. He makes it just in time, but the gentle hand rubbing the back of his neck only sets off his tears again. He’s not afraid anymore, just ashamed of ever thinking his dad could hurt him. So he confesses it all. Sat there in his sweat soaked pajamas and smelling of sick. Scorpius can’t look at his dad as he spills their worst fear. But as he feels Draco start to retreat into himself, Scorpius looks up and fiercely tells him he’s not that person. He speaks with as much passion as Astoria would whenever she told him he was a good man and the kind of dad Scorpius deserved. The best. They know they need to talk about this again someday but for now, it’s enough. Draco vanishes the sick and freshens Scorpius’s pajamas and asks again about fetching Albus. Scorpius properly laughs this time. He says no and waits a beat before nervously asking if he’ll stay instead. Just until he’s fallen asleep. Draco gets on the bed beside him and lowers the lights. He pulls out a photo of Albus and Scorpius from underneath his back and asks Scorpius when it was taken. It’s exactly the right thing to do. Scorpius is smiling before he’s even launched into the tale of Albus chasing his last chocolate frog around the empty common room on Christmas day. He falls asleep with a smile still on his face and Draco stays long after it’s faded. He turns his head and looks across at the photo of Astoria also on the bedside table. He feels all the love and loss and failure and progress he’s experienced in the last hour alone and can’t stop the few tears that escape.

The next morning he’s awoken by a kick to his shins and Draco is taken back to Scorpius’s toddler years. He sits up and looks down at Scorpius still fast asleep and makes a decision. He quietly gets up and heads straight to the Floo. He manages to catch Harry as he’s eating breakfast, already dressed in his robes ready for work. He gets straight to the point. Scorpius had a bad night and while he’s better now, he knows he’d really appreciate a visit from Albus today. He knows Harry doesn’t want him at the Manor but he asks, father to father, if he’d put aside their history again for the sake of their sons. Harry must see the desperation in his eyes and as much as he hates that, it’s worth it when Harry finally promises to send Albus through as soon as he’s awake, if he wants to go. That makes Draco laugh. “I’ll see him shortly then. And thank you.”

When Scorpius comes down later on, it’s to find his dad and Albus sat at the table together. He doesn’t know who to run at and hug first. Luckily Albus is up and moving towards him before he has to make a decision, but once he’s over the initial shock of Albus finally visiting his home, he turns to his dad and gives him an equally bone crushing hug. 

“Thank you. For Albus and you know, for last night.” 

Draco lovingly pats down his son’s messy bed hair because there’s nothing to say. Scorpius should never need to thank him for that. He’s still learning, but he knows that’s what dads do and Draco, ever the Malfoy, is going for gold. So he pushes him back towards Albus who’s clearly itching for a tour. He’d just been telling him how Scorpius would use the ladders in their library to play hide and seek fearlessly up on the shelves. The image of a seven year old Scorpius hiding amongst the books had him laughing. He knows he can’t wait to tease him about it. So Draco ushers them out of the kitchen with the promise he’ll let them know once breakfast is ready. As the door shuts behind them, Draco stands there for a second and just listens to them talking and laughing as they catch up. The sound erases any reminding doubt that they can’t get through this. Toddler or teenager, Scorpius will always bounce back. Just like Astoria said. And if she’s right about that, then maybe they’re both right about him being a good man too.

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

(I often wonder if Draco would ever cut his hair or at least offer to after Scorpius’s strong reaction to it loose. But the more I think about it, the less likely I think he would. I’m sure he’d do it in a heartbeat if Scorpius asked or if it was a persistent issue. But it’s not. It was just that once. Plus, I personally think his long hair is a link to Astoria. He may have initially grown it out because he’s a Malfoy, but I think he keeps it like that because Astoria liked it. I imagine her reaction the first time he got it trimmed when they started dating told him so. Ever since then he’s always kept it long for her. I think Scorpius knows this too. I’m sure she often told him she loved his hair as much as she loved his dad's. So even if Draco does offer, he’d tell him no. His mum loved his long hair and he refuses to let that world tarnish that memory. Draco would agree, but he’d also keep it strictly tied back afterwards. It stays like that until the following summer when Scorpius cheekily uses a quick charm to undo the ribbon and laughs as his hair falls in front of his face, covering the pages of the book he’s reading. He doesn’t do it to prove he can cope, that doesn’t even cross his mind, he does it because his dad promised him a trip to Flourish and Blotts and he’s given up waiting patiently for him to finish his chapter. Draco threatens to cut his book allowance but they both know he doesn’t mean it, especially not when Draco realises Scorpius didn’t react just now. From that day forward, Draco doesn’t always bother to tie it back in the mornings or at all on days when it’s just the two of them. But it takes another couple of weeks for Scorpius to realise his dad is wearing it down again. He immediately gives him a hug in silent thank you.)

#1600+ words of draco and scorpius hurt/comfort anyone??? #scorpius malfoy #draco malfoy #albus severus potter #scorbus #malfoy family #text post #mypost #long post #Anonymous

[mediaevalmusereads]

My Friend Dahmer. By Derf Backderf. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2012.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Genre: memoir, graphic novel

Part of a Series? No

Summary: In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer — the most notorious serial killer since Jack the Ripper — seared himself into the American consciousness. To the public, Dahmer was a monster who committed unthinkable atrocities. To Derf Backderf, “Jeff” was a much more complex figure: a high school friend with whom he had shared classrooms, hallways, and car rides. In My Friend Dahmer, a haunting and original graphic novel, writer-artist Backderf creates a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a disturbed young man struggling against the morbid urges emanating from the deep recesses of his psyche — a shy kid, a teenage alcoholic, and a goofball who never quite fit in with his classmates. With profound insight, what emerges is a Jeffrey Dahmer that few ever really knew, and one readers will never forget.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: ableism, allusions to animal harm/death, implication of murder

Overview: This graphic novel/memoir has been on my radar for a while, but I only recently picked it up for reasons I can’t quite articulate. I’m not sure what I was expecting - thrilling tale of teen psychosis, the makings of a depraved murderer, I don’t know. Perhaps my lack of concrete expectations served me well, since what I found in Backderf’s book was a sympathetic look at Jeffrey Dahmer as a teenager and all the warning signs that were ignored by the adults around him. In a way, it was a heartbreaking read. I don’t think Backderf was trying to excuse Dahmer’s crimes by showing that he only did it because he had a rough life. Rather, I think Backderf was trying to reconcile the “serial killer” Dahmer with the kid he actually knew in real life. For that, I’m giving this book 4 stars.

Writing/Art: Backderf’s art style is fairly “cartoony” in that it doesn’t try to have accurate proportions or imitate reality. Certain facial (or any anatomical) features are exaggerated and there’s a lot of heavy linework, which doesn’t quite communicate “horror” as one might expect about a tale about Jeffrey Dahmer. In a way, I think this works for the story Backderf is trying to tell: it almost seems absurd and grotesque that nothing was done to help Dahmer as a kid, and the art style embeds these feelings in the shapes and linework. One might also argue that the style almost seems juvenile (though it isn’t) and that quality enhances the fact that this story is being told through the eyes of a teenager.

Personally, though, Backderf’s style has never really been my aesthetic of choice, but that’s my personal preference and not a knock against the author/artist. If it works for you, that’s great.

In terms of narration, I liked that Backderf was honest about his impressions of Dahmer. At no point did he claim that he “always knew something was wrong about him,” nor did he seem to play up the proto-serial killer vibes. Instead, Backderf uses subtler, unsettling feelings that show something was “off” but not so “off” that they could have been expected to report Dahmer to the police or something. In a way, it’s fairly truthful and shows how sometimes, you can get a vibe off someone, but not really know what’s going on with them. It also reassured me that Backderf was writing not to somehow leech fame off of Dahmer (for whatever reason) but to work out his own emotions.

Plot: This graphic novel is divided into five parts, plus a prologue and epilogue, that each focus on certain aspects of Dahmer’s life. Part One establishes the setting and Dahmer’s home life; Part Two portrays Dahmer’s alcoholism and the rise of his darker urges, which he desperately tried to control; Part Three is about Dahmer’s relationship with Backderf and their antics at school; Part Four is about how the end of high school was a breaking point for Dahmer; and Part Five is a reflection on how Backderf and his friends left Dahmer behind and how that isolation allowed him to start killing.

I think the organization of these memories into separate sections worked well. Though they followed a loose chronology, I felt like each section had a theme or goal so that Dahmer’s story felt like it was progressing rather than just existing all at once. I appreciated the sympathetic lens that Backderf uses to tell his story; multiple times throughout the novel, he questions where the adults were and how it was easier to not make a fuss. I think, in doing this, Backderf communicates the difference in culture in the 1970s and avoids portraying himself and the literal kids around him as responsible for not stopping Dahmer.

The only thing that I think could have made this story a bit more “real” and grounded for me would be if Backderf had used more of Dahmer’s own words from interviews. To his credit, Backderf quotes Dahmer in a few places, such as the epilogue and at the beginning of Part One, but I think I would have liked to see Dahmer’s voice more often, or at least Backderf’s reactions to Dahmer’s voice more often. Backderf says in his author’s notes that his portrayal of Dahmer is constructed from his own memories and the memories of others who knew him, as well as from transcripts and recordings of interviews with Dahmer, but I wonder if more of Dahmer’s own voice could have been woven into the panels. To be fair, though, this book isn’t trying to illustrate Dahmer’s life from Dahmer’s point of view; it’s specifically a memoir about Backderf’s perception and relationship with him. But it would have been interesting, I think, to see if there was a disjoint between what Dahmer said about himself and what Backderf saw as a kid.

Characters: I hesitate to analyze the figures in this book as “characters” because they’re all real people. I don’t have the knowledge to determine if Backderf is “accurate” in his portrayal or not, but that wouldn’t be productive anyway, since the point of this book is to offer a perspective rather than an objective account.

Instead, I’ll use this space to communicate how certain figures come across to me as a reader. Dahmer is incredibly sympathetic, to an extent. Backderf does a good job of making him feel like an outcast and a loner at some moments and something of a lolcow at others, which seems consistent with accounts that state that Dahmer seemed to have friends but was actually very isolated. From these moments, I got the sense that Dahmer was suffering; rather than taking joy in his “perverse” urges, it felt like he did everything he could to suppress them until the only thing that kept him in check (high school social life) disappeared. As a whole, then, it seems like Dahmer was a kid in desperate need of help, but he didn’t live in a culture that could really do so. If that was Backderf’s goal, then he achieved it.

However, I do think Backderf toes a little too close to the line of portraying Dahmer as wholly sympathetic. To be fair, it’s a hard balance to strike - you want to condemn Dahmer’s later actions, but you also want to sympathize with the kid he was at the time before he started his killing spree. To address this, it might have been interesting to flash back and forth between Backderf’s high school memories and his impressions or emotions when learning about Dahmer’s crimes or arrest/trial, but I’m not sure if that would have been in line with what Backderf was trying to do. So, it’s just an idea.

Backderf and his friends come across as a little insensitive, but not in a malicious way. They never really clicked with Dahmer or considered him a friend, merely someone they occasionally hung out with and used for pranks (as in, they got Dahmer to pull pranks and laughed at his antics, they didn’t pull pranks on him). I don’t think I can fault Backderf for that - people aren’t obligated to connect with everyone, nor do I think its fair to ask why Backderf and his friends didn’t do anything. I did get the sense that there was some regret in Backderf’s account, perhaps some shame at the more tasteless things that passed as fun in the 1970s (making fun of people with cerebral palsy, doing a Hitler skit for the school variety show, etc. - some of this behavior is addressed in author’s notes). But I do think he communicated the divide between the world of teenagers and the world of adults, and how that kind of environment affected him and Dahmer differently.

TL;DR: My Friend Dahmer is a sympathetic account of Jeffrey Dahmer’s early life, told through the eyes of someone who knew him. Rather than thrilling readers with a proto-serial killer narrative, Backderf communicates how the environment of the 1970s prevented Dahmer from getting help, thereby showing how easy it was to miss the “warning signs.”

[arcticdementor]

In Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.”

The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their patrons’ victory to undo the rights of citizens, and settle scores with their domestic rivals, exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth.

The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America today.

For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.

A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.

Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and send millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?

…

A decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The NBA’s $1.5 billion contract with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their ignorant countrymen. After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.”

Because of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.

…

But if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad, he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.

And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.

For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s. China’s lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes. Lockdowns are not public health measures to reduce the spread of a virus. They are political instruments, which is why Democratic Party officials who put their constituents under repeated lengthy lockdowns, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen immediately now that Trump is safely gone.

That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is irrelevant to America’s version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded. As with Athens’ anti-democratic faction, America’s best and brightest long ago lost its way. At the head of the Thirty Tyrants was Critias, one of Socrates’ best students, a poet and dramatist. He may have helped save Socrates from the regime’s wrath, and yet the philosopher appears to have regretted that his method, to question everything, fed Critias’ sweeping disdain for tradition. Once in power, Critias turned his nihilism on Athens and destroyed the city.

…

The chief publicist of the post-Cold War order was Francis Fukuyama, who in his 1992 book The End of History argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall Western liberal democracy represented the final form of government. What Fukuyama got wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t his assessment of the strength of political forms; rather it was the depth of his philosophical model. He believed that with the end of the nearly half-century-long superpower standoff, the historical dialectic pitting conflicting political models against each other had been resolved. In fact, the dialectic just took another turn.

Just after defeating communism in the Soviet Union, America breathed new life into the communist party that survived. And instead of Western democratic principles transforming the CCP, the American establishment acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy. Tech became the anchor of the U.S.-China relationship, with CCP funding driving Silicon Valley startups, thanks largely to the efforts of Dianne Feinstein, who, after Kissinger, became the second-most influential official driving the U.S.-CCP relationship for the next 20 years.

…

Nearly every major American industry has a stake in China. From Wall Street—Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley— to hospitality. A Marriott Hotel employee was fired when Chinese officials objected to his liking a tweet about Tibet. They all learned to play by CCP rules.

“It’s so pervasive, it’s better to ask who’s not tied into China,” says former Trump administration official Gen. (Ret.) Robert Spalding.

Unsurprisingly, the once-reliably Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce was in the forefront of opposition to Trump’s China policies—against not only proposed tariffs but also his call for American companies to start moving critical supply chains elsewhere, even in the wake of a pandemic. The National Defense Industrial Association recently complained of a law forbidding defense contractors from using certain Chinese technologies. “Just about all contractors doing work with the federal government,” said a spokesman for the trade group, “would have to stop.”

…

Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.

The idea that countries that scorn basic human and democratic rights should not be directly funded by American industry and given privileged access to the fruits of U.S. government-funded research and technology that properly belongs to the American people is hardly a partisan idea—and has, or should have, little to do with Donald Trump. But the historical record will show that the melding of the American and Chinese elites reached its apogee during Trump’s administration, as the president made himself a focal point for the China Class, which had adopted the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle. That’s not to say establishment Republicans are cut out of the pro-China oligarchy—Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s shipbuilder billionaire father-in-law James Chao has benefited greatly from his relationship with the CCP, including college classmate Jiang Zemin. Gifts from the Chao family have catapulted McConnell to only a few slots below Feinstein in the list of wealthiest senators.

Riding the media tsunami of Trump hatred, the China Class cemented its power within state institutions and security bureaucracies that have long been Democratic preserves—and whose salary-class inhabitants were eager not to be labeled as “collaborators” with the president they ostensibly served. Accommodation with even the worst and most threatening aspects of the Chinese communist regime, ongoing since the late 1990s, was put on fast-forward. Talk about how Nike made its sneakers in Chinese slave labor camps was no longer fashionable. News that China was stealing American scientific and military secrets, running large spy rings in Silicon Valley and compromising congressmen like Eric Swalwell, paying large retainers to top Ivy League professors in a well-organized program of intellectual theft, or in any way posed a danger to its own people or to its neighbors, let alone to the American way of life, were muted and dismissed as pro-Trump propaganda.

…

There is a good reason why lockdowns—quarantining those who are not sick—had never been previously employed as a public health measure. The leading members of a city, state, or nation do not imprison its own unless they mean to signal that they are imposing collective punishment on the population at large. It had never been used before as a public health measure because it is a widely recognized instrument of political repression.

…

China had cultivated many friends in the American press, which is why the media relays Chinese government statistics with a straight face—for instance that China, four times the size of the United States, has suffered 1/100th the number of COVID-19 fatalities. But the key fact is this: In legitimizing CCP narratives, the media covers not primarily for China but for the American class that draws its power, wealth, and prestige from China. No, Beijing isn’t the bad guy here—it’s a responsible international stakeholder. In fact, we should follow China’s lead. And by March, with Trump’s initial acquiescence, American officials imposed the same repressive measures on Americans used by dictatorial powers throughout history to silence their own people.

Eventually, the pro-China oligarchy would come to see the full range of benefits the lockdowns afforded. Lockdowns made leading oligarchs richer—$85 billion richer in the case of Bezos alone—while impoverishing Trump’s small-business base. In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy. And not least, lockdowns gave the American establishment a plausible reason to give its chosen candidate the nomination after barely one-third of the delegates had chosen, and then keep him stashed away in his basement for the duration of the Presidential campaign. And yet in a sense, Joe Biden really did represent a return to normalcy in the decadeslong course of U.S.-China relations.

…

What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same rights they do. Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen.

What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.

#china #athens #tablet magazine #lee smith #the thirty tyrants #read the whole thing

[frangelic999]

Resident Evil Time

As we all know, Spooky Season began on August 1st, as it does every year. Skeletons began to emerge from the earth, and we all joined together to help along the slightly unripe ones with just a knuckle bone sticking up out of the lawn. Pumpkins rolled down into town from the foothills, snuggling into piles of radiant leaves as they awaited their new, temporary keepers. Here on the west coast of America, ash began to fall from the sky, as it does every season of ash, and we all went out to frolic in the ash as we gasped for air in our newly toxic Zone. It never rains in California, except when it’s raining ash. As such, around August 1st I began my quest of playing every mainline Resident Evil game, and a couple of spin-offs. What follows is the book report that I wrote on this experience.

Resident Evil is a series that’s been on my radar in one way or another as far back as 1996, when I was a kid, but I never really took a very close look at it, or wanted to, until I played RE7 in 2019. My oldest memory involving this game is wandering Blockbuster with my older brother looking for a game to rent. Another kid was there, also with their older brother, and the little kid suggested Resident Evil, but the bigger kid sagely declared “Nah, the controls are bad,” and they left it at that. I don’t know why I remember this, but I do, and my general feeling about Resident Evil was negative, I think because I had played the demo and didn’t like it, due to the fact that it’s not really designed in such a way that a kid would like it much. My first actual experience with the series, outside of that, was playing Resident Evil 3 in 1999. At the time, I loved it, but I was 12, and wouldn’t have been able to articulate anything about why I liked it other than “cool videogame, Jill pretty. Jill me.” I also played RE4 and RE5 around the time they came out, and I enjoyed them as fun action games, but still didn’t think much of the series or really care about survival horror. My other experience with the genre pretty much only extends to Alan Wake, Dino Crisis, and Dead Space, all of which I played so long ago that I remember almost nothing about them. What kind of monsters does Alan Wake fight? Couldn’t say. Could be anything, really. I remember the main character of Dino Crisis, Regina. She had red hair. Regina pretty. Regina me? Strangely enough, wanting to play the role of formidable, independent, resourceful, attractive women in games was a running theme in my formative years. What could this possibly mean? We may never know. But anyway, I was very excited to go on this journey into the survival horror franchise, and one of the most iconic franchises of all time. It had its highs and lows, but it was well worth it, and I emerged with a newfound appreciation for the design and appeal of survival horror games. The intention here isn’t to give a full, thorough analysis of these games or a breakdown of every aspect of them, but to compile my various thoughts on them, so it’s more of an opinionated overview than a deep dive. 

Resident Evil (1996)

It’s actually really hard to place this game when making a tier list, due to the simple fact that none of these other games would exist without the conventions Resident Evil set. It was groundbreaking, and literally invented a genre. At the same time, it's impossible for me to not compare it to other, better games, because I have knowledge of the rest of the series. It was an experiment for Capcom, and it shows in the game's rough edges. It feels like it had good ideas that didn’t always live up to their full potential, due to some combination of inexperience, available hardware/software, and questionable implementation.

RE1 is... not very good at being scary. It does its best, but it's a fairly early PS1 game. I think a lot of this has to do with the atmosphere and graphics. Visually, it’s just kind of ugly in that early PS1 way, and the color choices are dull and lack cohesion. For a horror game taking place in a spooky dilapidated mansion, it feels a little too bright, and I’m guessing it has to do with the fact that no one really knew how to make darkness convincing on PS1 at the time. But it’s not entirely the PS1’s fault this game is ugly, as you can see from RE2 and RE3 being not ugly. The color choices and backgrounds just aren’t especially lush or interesting.

I don't really need to go into the voice acting and writing of this game, due to their status of legendary badness. The live action cutscenes are unbelievably cheesy and almost impossible to watch with a straight face. The live action ending where Jill and Chris hold hands as they fly away in a helicopter is incredibly dumb. If you correctly chose Jill as your main character, it just seems incongruous that after fighting her way out of a deathtrap of horrifying creatures, she's now laying her head on the big strong man's shoulder. It’s bad, but fortunately the game isn’t entirely bad narratively. It was surprising, in a game from 1996, to see the in-world documents scattered around that add to the narrative, telling you what's really going on and adding detail to the broader strokes of the story. This is a thing that's ubiquitous in games now, AAA or otherwise, and I'm wondering if this game helped to establish that facet of games. RE1 has a simple story of evil corporate experiments gone wrong, with the driving force behind everything the player/character does being escape from the mansion, and this simplicity really works in its favor. As we shall see in later RE games, convoluted stories don’t really lend themselves all that well to horror. 

If you look at other games released in 1996, there are a lot of fast paced action games, like 3D platformers and first person shooters, as well as RPGs, and it's clear this game was something different. It has that slow, methodical play that makes survival horror feel unique. The feeling of not knowing what's waiting for you behind the next door, but knowing you have to go anyway, and that balance between surviving and solving puzzles to progress. The backtracking and item hunts, the interlocking paths and puzzles, the environmental storytelling and documents, the sense of isolation, it's all here in the first game. Some players may not find inventory management thrilling, but it’s a key part of these games, and it’s mostly done well in the good ones. Inventory management and item scarcity are a big part of what actually captures that feeling of “survival horror.” Since items are needed to progress, your inventory is directly tied to your progress, and at its best this forces you to make tough decisions about what you really need to carry and by extension makes you play more conservatively and prioritize avoidance. At its worst, it forces you to go back to previous areas for no reason and wastes your time while hurting the pace of the game, which RE1 is only guilty of at one point toward the end. The more weapons and ammo you have, the less room you have to do the work of actually progressing in the game through item-based puzzles, so you often have to sacrifice some of your lethality to progress smoothly. There’s a fine line between giving the player too many resources and too few, and almost all good survival horror games walk that line very well. It's also just thematically appropriate that your character isn't able to lug around a hundred pounds of gear. The open-ended nature of exploration, or the illusion thereof, is also an important aspect of survival horror. In good Resident Evil games, you usually have multiple doors you can choose to open, multiple potential paths, and feeling out which one is right, and which places are safe to travel, is a big part of the game. That exploratory feeling of gradually extending your reach and knowledge of the place you're in, knowing how vulnerable you are but also knowing you have to keep going deeper, gives the player a much greater sense of agency than more linear horror experiences.

All of these good design elements are firmly established by RE1, but they're just not executed as well as in future Resident Evil and survival horror titles, and by today's standards, playing it can feel like a chore. I think it certainly deserves a huge amount of credit for establishing almost everything that's good and defining about survival horror. There were earlier horror themed games, and I'm sure there are online people who'd be strangely invested in arguing that it's not the first survival horror game, but Resident Evil was clearly something new, different, and more sophisticated. It feels like a beginning, a rough draft, but it established something special. In some ways, I feel like RE1 has actually aged better than a lot of its 1996 contemporaries. Not in terms of controls, visuals or voice acting, heavens no. But, in terms of things like a focus on atmosphere, good pacing, and elegant, focused design, much of it still holds up today.

-Monster Review Corner-

These are the monsters that started it all. Zombies, undead dogs, hunters, Tyrant, and the absolute classic, a big plant that hates you. And who can forget the most forgettable monsters, giant spiders? The enemies themselves aren't especially exciting, but honestly, they work very well for the style and slow pace of this game. The deadly mansion full of the living dead is a classic horror setting. Things like Hunters and Tyrant seem pedestrian by series standards now, but they would have been a surprise in a zombie game in 1996, and Hunters are terrifying when they first appear. Overall monster score: 7/10

Time to complete: 5:46

Games were shorter overall in 1996, but the short game length is another survival horror trait the game established, and that brevity is a trait I really appreciate about this series and the genre as a whole. 

Resident Evil 2 (1998)

I feel like I’m going to be using the word “better” a lot. RE2 is immediately more cinematic than its predecessor, which is a good thing. It’s an important element of establishing tension and atmosphere. All the best horror movies, in my opinion, have smart and artful cinematography behind them. I’m not going to say Resident Evil 2 has masterful cinematic direction, but it’s a vast improvement over the previous game. Gone are the super cheesy FMV cutscenes and the atrocious voice acting. The voice acting here isn't great by today's standards, but people do talk mostly like humans! This must be due to the fact that it was the first time Capcom ever outsourced voice acting to a studio outside of Japan. The writing is also much, much better. The soundtrack is much more atmospheric, and even the save room music is better. Visually, the game looks so much better. Character models are more detailed and lifelike, and backgrounds are much more detailed, colorful and cohesive. I vastly prefer the character designs to those of RE1. They’re very 90s, in a fun anime way. Even the portraits in the inventory screen look way better. Even the story and the documents you find are more well written and interesting, and Umbrella is established as a more sinister and far-reaching presence. 

RE2 gives you separate campaigns for Claire and Leon that are similar, but different in some major ways. Rather than being a super long game, it has a short campaign that can be replayed multiple times with different characters for improved ranks, unlockables, and short bonus levels. I actually really like this kind of replayability, as opposed to the much more common type of replayability of modern games, which is just making the game 100 hours long and filled with boring sidequests, trinkets and skill points. This is  partially because I inevitably burn out on that kind of game, even if I like it (Horizon Zero Dawn, Breath of the Wild) and never finish the game. Super Bunnyhop has a whole video (“Let’s Talk About Game Length”) about the advantages of this game’s style of replay value which is worth a watch. I’m much more likely to rank a game among my favorites if I’m actually compelled to finish it. I’m always annoyed by how persistently gamers thoughtlessly complain about these games (or any game for that matter) being too short. Gee, maybe that has something to do with why 4, 5, and 6 all feel so bloated and outstay their welcome. Funny how the three most recent games in the series that brought it back from the brink of total irrelevance are all under ten hours in length.

The level design feels less haphazard and boring than RE1, but retains the satisfying sense of interconnectedness that the original mansion had. The balance of the game is good, and it feels dangerous without ever feeling unfair, like all the best RE games. Distribution of healing items and ammo feels right - I rarely felt like I was in serious danger of running out, but I always felt the pressure to conserve ammo and remember where healing items were to pick up later. This game is also a sterling example of the kinds of boss fights that work in survival horror. Rather than being reflex tests, boss fights are more a test of how smartly and conservatively you’ve been playing. If you’ve saved enough powerful ammo by playing well, you’ll have no problem with boss monsters, and there’s also the alligator fight, which, if you were paying attention to the area you just traversed, can be ended with one bullet. 

Overall, it’s a huge improvement over RE1 in every way imaginable, and a genuinely good game even by today’s standards, if you discount the cheesy voice acting and dated cutscenes. I finished RE1 in two sittings because I wanted to get it over with, but I finished RE2 nearly as fast because it was hard to stop playing. This is where the series came into its own, and RE2 feels like the beginning of the series as we know it today, while RE1 feels more like an experimental rough draft.

-Monster Review Corner-

This game, overall, has some great monsters. Fantastic monsters, and this is where you’ll find ‘em. First, we’ve got your classic zombies. Classic. We’ve got your zombie dogs, two for one deal. We’ve got some evil birds who inexplicably burst through a window one time. Okay, decent. Giant spiders, boooring. But then, here comes a new challenger! It’s lickers, one of perhaps the most iconic Resident Evil monsters. These nasty wall crawlin’ flesh puppies have got exposed brains, big ol’ claws, razor sharp tongues and a complete lack of sight. Due to this last fact, you can avoid them by being very quiet, which is extremely survival horror. Lickers are great. RE2 also has a giant alligator, which even the RE2 remake team thought was too silly to include in the remake (but to the great relief of everyone around the world, he made it anyway). Personally, I love the fact that they brought the classic urban cryptid, the mutant sewer gator, into the RE family. RE2 also has a Tyrant who chases you around in the second scenario. He’s just Nemesis before Nemesis. There are also big plant monsters who look like walking venus fly traps, totally rad. And finally, all of the G-Mutation designs pretty much set the stage for the monster design of all future RE mutants, including Nemesis. They have this alien, body horror feel to them that’s become a hallmark of the series. Overall monster score: 10/10

Time to complete: 5:06

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999)

RE3 has a darker tone than RE2, a lot of quality of life changes, and the terrifying presence of an unstoppable Nemesis. It’s a more combat oriented game, not in that combat is more complex, but in that there are more weapons, more ammo, faster zombies, and in comparison to the two previous games there are more times where it’s safer to kill enemies than avoid them. Jill can also dodge and quick turn. Dodging is fine, and quick turn, was an excellent addition that’s been in every RE since then, minus RE7. It’s a very good game, but the fact that there are fewer moments of quiet exploration and puzzling detracts from the variety of the game and makes it feel more one note. It definitely feels more like an action movie, not just in its increased amount of fighting but also in its story beats and cutscenes. I think it’s important to make a distinction between the style of this game and RE4/5/6, in that those are action games with light or nonexistent survival horror elements, while this is a survival horror game with action elements. I played the game on hard mode, because this game only has hard and easy mode. Hard is essentially normal, it's what you'd come to expect from the series, and easy mode is easy and gives you an assault rifle at the start. 

The titular Nemesis is such a great way to change up the Resident Evil formula. The first time you encounter him, he kills Brad in a cutscene, and you run into the police station. You think he’ll just appear at certain times during cutscenes and maybe a boss fight, but then a little while later he bursts through a window and chases you, and he’s faster than anything encountered previously in the series. That’s when it becomes clear that you’re going to be hunted, and from that point on Nemesis is in the back of your mind at all times, injecting an undercurrent of paranoia into every moment of methodical exploration. Although, I do have complaints about Nemesis, too. If you’re familiar with the series up to this point, his appearances are undermined by that very knowledge. What I mean is that if you played the first two games, you start to get a sense of when events or attacks are going to be triggered in Resident Evil, and that makes Nemesis much more predictable. You start to think “whelp, it’s about time for another Nemesis attack,” and then he shows up. Also, the first time you’re actually supposed to stand and fight him is an awful boss fight, and the first really bad boss fight in the series. The game’s dodge mechanic is finicky and hard to time, and it’s an important part of winning the fight, at least on hard mode. He’s basically a bullet sponge, which is not interesting. 

Something that I like about three is it really expands on the setting by giving you lots of details about Umbrella and their relation to Raccoon City. You learn that not only have they infiltrated the city government and police, but a lot of the city's infrastructure was funded by Umbrella donations. You also learn that they maintain their own paramilitary force and are a far reaching, international corporation. Umbrella is really fleshed out as a more robust and powerful organization here. 

Another unique aspect of this game, that’s never been in another RE game, is the “choose your own adventure” system. Nemesis will be after you, and you can choose between two different options, such as running into the sewers or hiding in the kitchen. You have a limited time to make these choices, and they have positive or negative outcomes, but never outright kill you, as far as I could tell. It’s kind of neat, and an interesting way to change things up occasionally, but not especially important. 

Overall, this is an excellent Resident Evil game, though a good deal less original and groundbreaking than RE2.

-Monster Review Corner-

Honestly, most of the monsters are fine, but nothing to write home about. Nemesis is the star of the show, which you can already tell by the fact that the game is named after him and he’s on the front cover. He’s like the cooler, better, more deadly version of a Tyrant. Nemesis score: 10/10

Time to complete: 5:32

An Aside About Puzzles

I’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate what I like about the puzzles in this series, and this seems as good a place to put these thoughts as any. I get that not everyone likes the puzzles in this series, and that many of them can only be called puzzles in a very loose sense, but I think they add a crucial ingredient to the games.

The thing is, if they were more complicated or difficult puzzles, they would take up too much screen time, they would overpower the rest of the game, like too much salt in a dish. There are a lot of them where you have to follow riddle-like clues to figure out what to do, but they're all pretty easy. There are a lot of item hunts that boil down to finding item A and bringing it to point B, or combining item A with item B and using the result at point C, and I remember plenty of jokes over the years playfully lampooning this facet of Resident Evil. But, while playing through these games, I found myself dissatisfied with the view that these item hunts and simple puzzles are stupid, or bad game design. Because really, what makes these games good is not shooting or puzzles or atmosphere or good monsters, but all of these elements working together in harmony. It seems like the more harmonious that balance, the better the Resident Evil game. All these little parts make up the whole. The puzzles aren't hard, sure, but they aren't meant to be. They add an element of sleuthing and a sense of accomplishment and progression that would otherwise be lacking, and which could easily slip into frustration if they were any more difficult, and detract from the overall experience. If you just went around and shot at monsters and opened doors, it would be missing something big, and it would be a much poorer series. If you need evidence of that, may I direct you to Resident Evils 4 to 6. Without that exploratory feeling, without that aha feeling of figuring it out, it would feel bland. "If I use this item to open this, then I get this thing and I combine it with this, it frees up space in my inventory, and now I can take them back to the spot I remember from earlier because I was paying attention and taking mental notes, and I can open this path..." I'd argue that this feeling of things clicking together neatly, of attentive and methodical play paying off, is integral to the series and to the entire genre it spawned. The whole game is a puzzle that you’re figuring out, and things like item juggling, map knowledge, and carefully leaving enough space in your inventory are a part of that puzzle. 

The puzzles in the series are more representational than what might usually be called a puzzle. The item lugging, inventory swapping parts that I remember being maligned at one time are more akin to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, but those pieces are scattered across a monster infested, carefully designed, difficult to traverse map. What made RE7 feel so much like a revival of Resident Evil, despite it being a first person game that looks and feels very little like its predecessors, was returning to this approach to game design. It was a polished and well made return to the principles that made survival horror popular. The fact that Capcom brought back all those often complained about puzzles and item hunts, and slashed the current idea of game length to ribbons, returning to the roots of the series, and then those games being so highly praised, feels so right in part because it feels like the developers are saying "look, a lot of you were totally wrong about what made these games good."

Resident Evil - Code: Veronica (2000)

To me the most immediately noticeable thing about this game is Claire’s embarrassingly early-2000s outfit: high rise boot cut jeans, cowgirl boots, a short-sleeved crop top jacket, all topped off with a pink choker and fingerless gloves. I don’t think I’ve ever seen character design that so perfectly encapsulates the time period of a game’s release. It’s bad, and the game only gets worse from there. 

I really tried to like Code Veronica, at first. But after playing RE1-3, saying it's underwhelming is putting it lightly. I honestly don't think I have a single good thing to say about this game, and it's possibly the worst mainline Resident Evil game ever made (RE6 being the only thing that might take that crown of trash in its stead). It's pretty much not possible to take Code Veronica seriously in any way, especially not as a horror game. The visuals have no sense of darkness or atmosphere and manage to look much worse than the old pre-rendered graphics, the puzzles are uninspired rehash, the enemies and bosses are irritating, the character designs are a particular type of early-2000s bad, the voice acting is insufferable, the story is asinine, and the game is full of the bad kind of backtracking. It's not entirely the game's fault it's ugly, it's a product of its time, but it's weird to see in retrospect because it looks worse than RE3 from one year prior. Previous RE games had bad voice acting, but this is the first one where the voice acting makes you want to turn the game off. 

Up until this point, the storylines of Resident Evil games were very simple. Evil corporation caused chaos with a virus, get out alive. There are details scattered throughout about how the city and government were being paid off, but that’s the gist of it. Code Veronica is where the lore of RE starts to get convoluted and sometimes very dumb. I won’t go into all the ways the story is bad, but suffice it to say this is definitely when Resident Evil jumped the shark, and it paves the way for the stupidity of RE4. It also uses the “mentally ill people are scary” horror trope, which is perhaps my least favorite horror trope. The villain for most of the game, Alfred, has *gasp* a split personality and thinks he’s also his sister. Of course, at one point Claire calls him a “crossdressing freak.” I’ll just leave it at that. Of course nobody who writes this kind of thing bothers to do any kind of research into the mental illnesses they use as story crutches. I feel like I need to mention the voice acting, for Steve and Alfred particularly. Steve sounds like he walked off of a middle school campus, and Alfred sounds like your local community theater’s production of Sweeney Todd. They’re both absolutely atrocious and make the game that much more annoying to play. Claire’s acting is about what you’d expect from a Saturday morning cartoon of the era.

As though the fact that it's a bad game visually and narratively wasn't enough, it's also badly designed, not much fun to play, and way longer than the previous three. The game’s map, at least for Claire’s portion (most of the game), is divided into multiple small areas, each with one path leading to them, so you have to go over these paths repeatedly once you’ve retrieved an item from a completely different area, and it makes for a lot of very tiresome backtracking. The series always had backtracking, of course, but never over such long, samey stretches of space. On top of this, there are tons of blatantly bad design choices. To name a few:

-The hallway you have to traverse multiple times containing moths which poison you and respawn every time you leave and are really hard to hit on top of being a waste of ammo. It’s hard to see how they were unaware that this is bad since they also leave an infinite supply of poison antidotes in the same room

-The fact that there’s no indication whatsoever that you should leave items behind for the next character you have to play, which left me struggling to even be able to kill enemies as Chris

-Multiple times where in order to trigger progress you have to look at or pick up a certain thing, not for any logical in-game reason but just because it triggers a cutscene. One of these makes you look at the same thing twice, and I wandered around not knowing what to do for a while before checking a walkthrough

-More than one save room that contains no item box, when this game asks you to constantly juggle items and repeatedly travel long distances with specific items

There’s more, but I don’t want to write or think about this bad game anymore. This game is a slag heap that deserves to be forgotten, and I hope it’s never remade. Something I find really disappointing about Code Veronica is that the setting is ripe for a good Resident Evil game, but they botch it. It takes place in two locations, a secret island prison run by Umbrella, and an antarctic research station, both of which I can imagine a great RE game taking place in. I guess, really, the best thing that can be said about Code Veronica is that it’s a survival horror game. They didn’t totally stray from the principles that made the series good, they just implemented those things very badly, in a very stupid game.

Time to complete: who knows, I quit near the final stretch of the game. The internet says it takes about 12:30, which is far too long.

REmake (2002)

I played the remake first, and it’s the only game I played out of order, because when I started I had no plans to play the entire series. It’s a remake that fixes everything wrong or dated about the original while keeping the things that made it good, and I would say it’s the definitive version of the game and the one that should be played. 

Visually, a lot of it looks very good, and uses darkness much better than the original. I like this game’s high def pre-rendered backgrounds, because it’s like looking into an alternate reality where pre-rendered graphics never went away, and just increased in fidelity. I actually really like a lot of the backgrounds in this game. Pre-rendered backgrounds have their shortcomings, but I think they can play a role in horror games. They give the developers total control of how things are framed, and framing/direction are a big part of what can make things ominous or scary in horror movies. You can do this to some extent in games with free cameras, but without nearly as much control. I think over time the popular consensus became that pre-rendered backgrounds are inherently bad, but I think like any style of graphics they have their pros and cons. The late 90s Final Fantasies are great examples of how pre-rendered graphics can be used to frame characters and events in certain ways.

The strongest suit of this game is that it really feels like a horror game, and avoidance is encouraged over combat due to scarce ammo and healing. The pace is slow and thoughtful, the mansion is sprawling and claustrophobic, and even one or two zombies feels like a threat, especially before you find the shotgun. Even after that, shotgun shells are fairly scarce. Like the original, combat mechanics are intentionally very simple and limited, though this one sees the introduction of the defensive items that return in the RE2 and 3 remakes. One thing I really like is that if you kill a zombie and leave their body, without decapitating or burning it, it will eventually mutate into a fast and powerful zombie, and these are genuinely threatening to encounter. You constantly have to make decisions in this game about what’s more important, immediate safety or conserving ammo. The fuel that’s used to burn corpses is limited, and can be used strategically to eliminate threats from frequently traveled areas. It’s a great idea for a game mechanic, but in practice, I rarely did this, because inventory is so limited that it didn’t feel worthwhile to use two of my eight slots on a lighter and fuel. Another nice added horror element is the fact that doors aren’t always safe. You’ll hear monsters pounding on doors, see them shaking, and at multiple points they’ll be smashed open when you thought you were safe.

A lot of the ideas that made this game good and the original good are ideas that were returned to in RE7, the RE3 remake, and especially the RE2 remake, and a big part of what made those games so successful. 

Time to complete: 10:15

In my opinion it ran a little too long. It takes almost twice as long as the original, and I feel like the added areas pad out that length rather than improving the game. Even though I think it’s a very good game, it started feeling like a slog in the last few hours.

Resident Evil Zero (2002)

After Code Veronica, it was initially refreshing to feel like I was actually playing Resident Evil again and not some subpar knockoff. This one feels a lot more like classic RE, and in its slower pace it’s most similar to REmake or the original trilogy. I played the HD remaster of RE0(which changes nothing but the graphics) since it's the one I own on steam, so I can't speak to the original GameCube graphics, but the art direction itself is vastly better, and it creates an atmosphere that's perfectly Resident Evil. Highly detailed backgrounds, with rich dark colors, old paintings, dusty bookshelves, soft clean lighting, marble and dark wood, wind-rustled ivy, shadows and rain, creep dilapidated industrial spaces. The HD remaster is gorgeous, and one of the best looking games in the series.

This game adds two major new mechanics: playing as a team of two and swapping between characters, and the ability to drop items anywhere. Character swapping is an interesting gimmick, made more of a curiosity by the fact that it will probably never be used again in a RE game. Often it's pretty neat, but just as often, it's an annoying chore. I like the idea of controlling two characters, but I don't think what they attempted to do with it was entirely successful, and could have been better with a couple of simple changes. Ultimately all the inventory management required feels like more trouble than it's worth, especially since you have to carry weapons and ammo for both characters. Between inventory management and swapping off-character actions, I found myself in the inventory screen a lot more than in previous games. It seems like they could have alleviated these problems with more inventory space and buttons for switching off-character actions. Most of the time it ends up feeling like a chore to manage two characters and two separate inventories. In theory, the ability to drop items anywhere adds an element of player choice and planning, but in practice, I just found myself missing the item box that allows you to access the same items from different places.

This game is fine for the first hour or two, but ends up getting more and more frustrating the farther you get into it. After playing about half the game, I started feeling like I'd be having a less terrible time on easy mode. I died in it a lot more times than in any previous game. The combination of really irritating new enemy types and all weapons (even the grenade launcher) feeling underpowered means there are multiple enemy encounters where you're just forced to lose health. This wouldn't be so bad if there were enough healing items around, but there aren't. Every enemy in the game, even a basic zombie, feels too bullet sponge-y. I repeatedly found myself with very little ammo and no healing items, so in a lot of situations I would just die, and reloading with the foreknowledge of what rooms would contain felt like the only way to progress. Managing the health of two characters, one who has very low health, makes it that much harder. I played through all of the previous games on normal difficulty (RE3 on hard) so I know I'm not imagining the spike in difficulty. It's possible they wanted to make this game challenging for series veterans, but if that's the case they missed the mark, because part of what makes a good RE game is excellent balance of difficulty. In a good RE, you always feel like you're facing adversity but still progressing, and you really don't die all that often if you're being careful and using the right weapons for situations. In RE0, you just die a lot to frustrating video game garbage and feel irritated that you have to reload and repeat content. To make matters even worse, aiming feels weirdly sticky in this game and movement feels clunkier than previous games for some reason.

Just like Code Veronica, this game has a premise that seems like it should excel as a Resident Evil game, but it misses the mark. With the new mechanics, it feels like they were struggling to think of ways to further refine and reinvent a series that was getting a little tired. I love the formula of the first three games, but I can understand why after six games following that same formula, with a lot of very similar in-game occurrences and puzzles, they wanted to move in a different direction with RE4. This game feels like it's floundering, attempting to reinvent the series while being chained to the same rules, and though I have mixed or negative feelings about the next three games, it feels like the series was in dire need of a total overhaul.

-Monster Review Corner-

Whoever designed the monsters in this game thought that giant animals are absolutely horrifying. Giant bat, giant scorpion, giant centipede, giant roaches. There are also guys made of leeches, and they're pretty boring and annoying to fight, and it's hard not to find the way they move comedic. There are also hunters and your typical zombies. All in all, a lackluster offering of critters. Overall monster score: 3/10

Resident Evil 4 (2005)

Let's get the obvious out of the way: this game feels almost nothing like Resident Evil, and feels less and less like it the further into it you get. The devs made sure to do a lot of things that make RE4’s identity as an action game very obvious. It’s a game of series firsts: first in the series with an over the shoulder camera, first with weapon stats, first with such an abundance of enemies and weapons, first with QTEs, first where the primary enemies aren’t shambling zombies, first with currency and a merchant, the first where Umbrella isn’t the big bad, the first where you can karate kick and suplex enemies. It’s incredibly not survival horror. It might succeed as a 2005 action game, but it fails miserably at being Resident Evil.

I’m feeling generous, so I’ll start with the things I like about RE4. I really do appreciate that it’s a slower and more methodical action game than its contemporaries, and precise, thoughtful shooting is rewarded. I also like that the over the shoulder camera gives you a pretty narrow field of view, which makes it always feel like enemies could be lurking just off screen. This makes things more tense and is often used to surprise the player, especially in the early game. The almost identical perspective used in the exceptional RE2 and RE3 remakes shows that they weren’t off the mark with this element of the game’s design. However, in RE4 even this good thing is undercut by the fact that jarring, anxious combat music plays whenever enemies are anywhere nearby. The first 2-4 hours of this game, just about up to the Mendez boss, are actually a pretty good game, and provide most of the really tense and scary moments. Unfortunately, these opening hours aren’t really indicative of all the stupid shit to come. Something I grew to hate about this game is that it feels like it just goes on and on and on. It took me around 12 hours, which is short by video game standards, but long by RE standards. By the time I reached the end, it had long outstayed its welcome. Even in these early, decent moments, there was still stuff I hated, like the button mashing quick time events to run from Indiana Jones boulders, the garishly glowing item drops, the dumb kicks, the dynamite zombies.

The crux of a survival horror experience is the feeling of vulnerability, and this feeling is only scarcely captured in the opening few hours of RE4, when it’s still sort of pretending to be Resident Evil. But then, you keep getting more and more powerful, as you do in action games, you keep getting more and more weapons and upgrades and grenades and facing more and more enemies and bosses until it all feels trivial. It’s thoroughly an action game, and by the time you’re near the end, storming a military fort guarded by heavily armed commando zombies manning gatling turrets while you’re aided by helicopter support, it’s clear the game has entirely stopped masquerading as Resident Evil. On top of being a big stupid action game, it’s also extremely a video game. The glowing items that are dropped whenever enemies die, the tiny adorable treasure chests full of doubloons, the big garish video game markers for QTEs(and the most heinous kinds of QTEs: button mashing QTEs and mid-cutscene QTEs), the action movie window jumps and kicks, the cultists driving a death drill, Leon’s backflips, the dumb one-liners that scarcely make sense at times, a giant fish boss, a mine cart level. The absurd stupidity of this game never lets up, so much so that playing it in 2020, it feels almost like an intentional parody, which I know it’s not. 

The story is kind of silly from the start, and delves increasingly into the realm of asinine bullshit as it goes on, as though Capcom and Shinji Mikami sought out the dumbest ideas they could find. In RE2, Leon was a cop for one day during a zombie apocalypse, and now somehow he's working for the White House on a solo mission finding the president's daughter. It's quite the barely explained leap. One of my least favorite things in the narrative department is that Leon's voice acting and dialogue make him insufferable. The humble rookie from RE2 is gone, replaced by a heavily masculinized, aggressive, arrogant, misogynistic, backflipping action movie hero. We went from six consecutive games with women either as one of two playable main characters or the only playable character, with Jill Valentine in RE3 single-handedly destroying the most powerful BOW ever created, to a game where a gruff manly man is tasked with rescuing a literal damsel in distress, and has actual lines like “Feh, women” and “Sorry, but following a lady’s lead just isn’t my style.” It’s atrociously bad, and I hate the character they decided he should be for this game. It also doesn’t even make sense, because why would he even have that attitude towards women after seeing what Claire can do in RE2? It’s a huge step backwards for the series. On top of this awfulness, the actual plot points are just increasingly unbelievable and imbecilic, in a way that totally undercuts any way in which the game could theoretically be frightening. At the end of the game, it’s not Leon and Ashley sitting in silence as they contemplate their harrowing and traumatic experience, it’s “Mission accomplished, right Leon?! Please have sex with me!” and then they literally ride off into the sunset on a jet ski.

At first I thought they were aiming to turn a beloved survival horror series into a big dumb action movie, which is partly true, but then I realized what they had really made: an amusement park. It’s divided into themed zones, like an amusement park: there’s a spooky village, a deathtrap castle, a haunted manor, slimy sewers, an underground tomb, a Mad Max island. There are little coaster cars with purple velvet seats that carry you through the castle, there’s a mine cart ride, living suits of armor, there’s literally a giant animatronic statue of Salazar you can climb around on, there are trinkets and treasures everywhere and a merchant always magically appearing to sell you new toys to make sure you don’t ever get bored or think too hard, there’s a lava-filled carousel room with fire-breathing dragon statues, a haunted house section, a shooting gallery, a cave full of monster bugs, a hedge maze, a tower of terror where flaming barrels are rolled down the stairs(and then you get to pull the lever to roll them!), there’s a crane game, an evil villain lair with a deadly laser corridor, there is for some reason a subterranean battle maze in a cage suspended over a chasm, and your whole visit to this horror themed wonder park culminates in a jet ski ride through a collapsing cavern.

I find it baffling, but "a masterpiece", "the best Resident Evil game", and “one of the best video games ever made” are actual ways I have seen this game described. Multiple reviewers called it the best of the series, and people continue to call it that. Gone is the tense, atmospheric, resource management based survival horror gameplay, the harmonious balance of puzzles, survival and action that made this series so beloved. It’s replaced with a theme park of homogenous action gameplay and an incredibly stupid story. In my mind, it’s not Resident Evil at all, and may as well have belonged to an entirely new series that’s continued in RE5 and RE6. Another oft repeated bit of unquestioned conventional wisdom about RE4 is that it “saved the series from itself,” which is strange given that it marked the beginning of a slump that lasted over a decade. But, who knows? Maybe Resident Evil had to undergo this kind of transformation and decline to ultimately produce the four most recent Resident Evil games, all among the best of the survival horror genre. If these bad mid series games had to come first in order for the latest four exceptional games to come later, then I’ll gladly suffer their existence.

-Monster Review Corner-

Another thing I actually like about this game is a lot of the creature design work. The Mendez boss fight feels like a Resident Evil fight, and his insect-like true form looks like a classic Resident Evil BOW. Verdugo and U-3, likewise, feel like classically inhuman RE creatures, and they’d be right at home in a survival horror series entry. Regenerators and Iron Maidens are genuinely terrifying creatures – or they would be in a survival horror game. Here, they’re just another enemy to mop up. The Plagas that burst out of enemies are a shock when they first appear, and look like horrifying hybrids of The Thing and facehuggers. The chainsaw men are initially one of the best and most horror-centric additions to the game, that is, until you get powerful enough to trivialize them and they stop appearing. At least in the first two hours, they’re legitimately scary due to your narrow field of view and the fact that they one shot you. But it seems like with each thing this game may have done right, there comes something that it did very wrong. Toward the end of the game, you start fighting stuff like the zombies with huge gatling guns, and it’s very dumb. I hate these military zombies, I really do.

Overall monster score: 6/10

Overall monster score minus the merc zombies and dumb robed cultists: 9/10

Time to complete: 11:28

By around the 8 or 9 hour mark, I was practically begging for this game to end.

Resident Evil 5 (2009)

When I started this, I thought I'd like RE4 more than RE5, but it turns out 5 is a much better game. It's a big dumb action movie, but it's a much better big dumb action movie than RE4, or RE6. The action is better, the graphics and art direction are better, the controls are better, the story, characters and dialogue are all better. It's too bad they just couldn't let go of the QTEs. It's a very good Capcom action game, but again, not a great Resident Evil game. It's much more confident as an action game than RE4, and almost entirely stops pretending its gameplay is about anything other than action, to its benefit. The combat is faster and more responsive, but still feels slower and more methodical than most action games. It’s just overall a significantly improved action game.

RE5 Chris is so much better than RE4 Leon. Chris and Sheva are a likable duo who feel like a typical RE pair and play off of each other well. The dialogue likewise has much more natural localization than most if not all previous games in the series. I don't really like how they gave Jill and Wesker Kojima character designs, and this bad aesthetic continues in RE Rev.

The files unlocked in the menu are actually kinda good, and this game expands and fills out the setting in some interesting ways, setting the stage for the Revelations games and RE6.

If you read the files, you learn what happened to Umbrella and how they shut down. What's nice is that the files and in-game story actually go into the ramifications of a world where BOWs exist and can be sold to people with various agendas. It's a world of corporations, NGOs, political subterfuge, and black market dealers making profit off of human suffering, where a whole international organization was created to handle bioweapon incidents. It's disappointing that with this backdrop, the game's actual story is ultimately reduced to a battle in a volcano to save the world from a supervillain. It's a very comic book conclusion.

I know they're infected with a monster virus, but the visual of black people as writhing, animalistic subhumans is, uh... problematic, to say the least. Also, the image of Africa The Continent as a land of dead goats, megaphone-shouting lunatics and rabid, violent crowds. Also the scene early on where some brown savages are carrying off a scantily clad white woman. At least she turns into a tentacle monster shortly after instead of being rescued. It's hard to deny that they probably chose part of Africa as RE5's setting due to the misconception of the entire continent being a war-torn land of petty dictators.

Some parts of the game are much better than others. Generally, the early game is good. The ancient city level is... pretty bad. And it culminates in a laser mirror puzzle that some version of would feel at home in an older RE, but here feels out of place and rhythm-disrupting. I wouldn't necessarily say the game gets really bad toward the end, except for the two consecutive Wesker boss fights. The boss fights against Wesker are both bad and pretty dull. You don't really want your climactic final battle against a longtime series villain to be so boring. I imagine it's a bit less long and dull with another player, like everything in the game. I've played this game in co-op and alone, and you're really missing something by not playing co-op. Sheva's AI can be very frustrating and many parts are clearly designed for two human brains. Overall, RE5 ends pretty fast, and wears out its welcome less than RE4. The biggest problem with RE4, 5 and 6 is that they totally lose the spirit of survival horror. Because of that, I don’t have much to say about the gameplay of RE5 other than it’s a pretty decent action game. If you’ve played an action game, you’ve seen this kind of game design before, and it’s just not all that interesting. 

Neither of the D LCs missions are especially good or interesting, but I want to mention them because they do show the beginnings of Capcom experimenting with the episodic formula that they'd continue with Revelations, Revelations 2 and RE6.

Lost in Nightmares sees Jill and Chris exploring Ozwell Spencer's sprawling mansion, and is meant to be a throwback to the old style of RE. Unfortunately it doesn't have the spark that made those old games good, probably because it was designed by the RE5 team. It mostly ends up just being an extended and unnecessary reference to the classic games.

Desperate Escape is essentially just another level of RE5, but you play as Jill. Since RE5 already exists and is a fine length, this doesn't really need to exist.

Time to complete: 9:17

Resident Evil: Revelations (2012)

It's very rough around the edges, far from the production value you'd expect from the series, and definitely not something I'd call exceptional, but there are some good things going on. It definitely does feel more like RE than 4 or 5, but still only kinda feels like survival horror. It would be no great loss if this game didn't exist, but it's an interesting experiment.

This game was originally made for 3DS, and it feels very inconsistent, in a way you'd kind of expect a spinoff game made for a handheld console to be. It’s split up into episodes that usually take around half an hour, and have you switching between characters, and the short length was meant to be tailored to a handheld experience. Usually each chapter starts with a sort of interlude related to the main story where you play as other characters in another location, then it switches back to Jill exploring the main ship the game takes place on. The bite sized nature of the episodes makes it feel easy to keep playing. Some parts of the game are very fun and flow well, and other parts are just dull or frustrating. The game feels like a confused mix of survival horror and RE5 style action, and between that and the constant character swapping and hit-or-miss dialogue, it feels like a game that’s not very sure of what it wants to be. The bulk of the game where you’re playing as Jill aboard the Queen Zenobia, a BOW infested ship adrift at sea, tends to be the strongest part of the game, and it’s a great setting that’s perhaps underwhelming due to the graphical capabilities of the 3DS. You end up in a similar setting near the end of RE7, also directed by Koushi Nakanishi, and it looks a lot better there, and does justice to the concept better. Like so many things in Revelations, it was a good idea, but a bit underwhelming in its execution. This period of Resident Evil was definitely a time of trying out new directions for the series. Revelations, RE6, and another spin off I didn’t play called Operation Raccoon City were all released in 2012. RE6 is bad, Revelations is okay, and by all accounts Operation Raccoon City is not all that good. After a year like this, it makes sense Capcom went back to the drawing board. 

The writing in Revelations is not great, and is sometimes suddenly better or worse, but I appreciate what they were going for with the rapport between characters. I also feel like this game messes up that classic survival horror feel of exploring an intimidating place alone. You're always with a partner and always switching perspectives, so it never feels like you're alone, and because of that switching you never even really feel like you're isolated from the outside world on the Zenobia. It feels more like a TV show storytelling technique than something that works well for survival horror. Part of what makes survival horror work is that atmosphere created by feeling isolated and vulnerable, and it doesn't really work when the game is always cutting away between chapters to show what so-and-so is doing elsewhere.

Most of the characters get Kojima style designs, which I'm really not a fan of. Previous RE character designs were always very grounded without being too boring, and included classics like Jill's beret look, Jill's blue tube top look, Claire's magenta shorts look, and Ada's red dress look. I’m really not a fan of the skintight suit covered in tubes, straps and gadgets style of character design. It feels very “anime Rob Liefield.” 

I appreciate what they wanted to do by telling a story in multiple perspectives, and how they did it to suit a handheld game, but at the same time I feel like it disrupts the flow of exploration and the atmosphere of survival horror. Revelations 2 does a significantly better job of telling a story in different perspectives. Revelations was pretty fun to play, and had some decent ideas, but it’s nothing I’ll ever return to. It would be remiss of me not to mention my favorite bad dialogue of the game, so here are all of the best lines:

"Sorry, I don't date cannibal monsters."

"Me and my sweet ass are on the way!"

“Jill, where are you?”

"I dunno. A room, I think."

"These terrorists must be brought to justice... blast it!" 

-Monster Review Corner-

They went for an “under the sea” aesthetic for the monsters in this game, so almost every monster is a variation of a bloated pale humanoid. It does have guys that are like walking mutant sharks with arms that are swords and shields, which I’m not going to pretend isn’t sick, but they really, really don’t fit in a Resident Evil game. Oops, wrong game, these guys were supposed to go to Etrian Odyssey. The only kinda cool RE monster is the one that’s like a nightmare mermaid with spiny abdomen teeth. Overall monster score: 4/10

Time to complete: 5:12

Random fact: this was the first RE game where you could move while shooting.

Resident Evil 6 (2012)

I’m not going to have much to say about this one. RE6 is bad in many of the same ways the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy is. Abandoning almost everything that gives the series its unique identity in favor of trying to make a game that will sell a lot of copies. Obsessed with QTEs and explosive, loud set pieces, and resentful of player agency. "No no, silly player, look over here. Move at this speed. Go this way. We know best. Now that's entertainment!" It's a game that desperately wants to entertain and impress, dragging you by the wrist through loud, brash, guns-blazing action campaigns that totally miss the point of both horror and Resident Evil. Most of the time it just feels like an arcade shooter, and you're expected to stick to the script so closely that it may as well be a rail shooter. It really does take away everything that makes survival horror special: it doesn’t have a slow pace, it’s not about exploration, you don’t feel vulnerable or isolated, there’s no sense of map knowledge or pathfinding, it has overwrought combat mechanics, there’s pretty much no quiet time, the atmosphere is more goofy than scary, and it takes forever to finish. Sometimes it feels like this game really wanted to be Left 4 Dead 2: the way campaigns are set up like movies, the special zombie types, the co-op play, the sprawling levels. Except the devs seemed to have no clue as to what actually makes Left 4 Dead fun. The producer said the idea behind RE6 was to create the “ultimate horror entertainment,” which perfectly explains why it feels so much like a bad movie you’re being forced to sit through. It’s bombastic and stupid like a Fast and Furious movie, but doesn’t even have the idiot charm of one of those movies. Resident Evil 6 is a long, forgettable and stupid third-person action game that doesn't even have the common decency to be fun. 

Time to complete: Who knows. I'd finish this game if someone was paying me to, but they're not. People say it takes over 20 hours, which sounds unbearable. 

Resident Evil: Revelations 2

Finally some good fucking Resident Evil. I was actually kind of surprised by how good this game was, something the mediocre Revelations didn't prepare me for. It's a very welcome return to a more survival horror style of gameplay. From the start, it's dark, lonely and atmospheric. You do always have a companion, but it's still mostly very good at capturing that survival horror isolation feeling. 

It does have a few holdovers from RE6, most notably sprinting, skills and dodging, but it's the same style of dodge as RE3R, which doesn't feel totally out of place in a survival horror game, rather than the over the top rolls and dives of RE6. It doesn't have any of the dumb combat moves or the pointless stamina gauge or the action movie bombast. Skills are mostly passive and have only a very slight effect on gameplay. To me, this is a good thing, but it also means there may as well be no skills at all. It feels like something that’s needlessly tacked on, as though they wanted to convince a certain subset of their potential audience that it’s not just a classic survival horror experience, or perhaps they were trying to make it feel more modern, or extend replay value, or all of the above. In any case, it doesn’t need to be there and I’m glad it has little effect. 

The game has a good deal of combat, but combat is simple enough to fit into a survival horror game. It would have been fine with less, but it's still fine, because it actually has things outside of combat, unlike 4-6, and lets you play, explore, and figure things out without a lot of overbearing guidance. A lot of the puzzles and navigation feel like classic RE, and it’s a great return to form in that regard. Sometimes it has a bit too much combat for my taste, but this is made up for by long stretches with few or no enemies, and it has those survival horror moments of exploration and puzzle solving to balance things out. 

This game does AI companions right, for the first time in the series. Moira and Natalia are both really useful, and I found myself wanting to switch to them almost as often as I wanted to play Claire and Barry. You also don't really need to babysit them because it's pretty hard for them to die and they’re good at following behind. There are multiple good segments of the game where your characters separate, and Claire or Barry need to cover their partner while they traverse a room to gain access to the next area. Unlike in RE5, though, you’re not required to have a second player to have fun during these parts, and I don’t think it’s even possible to play the game co-op. At first glance this seems like a missed opportunity, but honestly, if someone had to play either of the secondary characters full time, it would get boring very quickly. I think it was a necessary sacrifice to make the two character system work well in a single player experience. I really don’t mind, since I think of survival horror as a single player genre. As a result, it lacks both the painfully slow character switching of RE0 and the painfully stupid AI of RE5. 

It’s funny that just as in RE5, Rev 2 ends in two consecutive Wesker boss fights, but this time against Alex Wesker rather than Albert. Also, these Wesker boss fights are much better. The final boss makes use of the character swapping, and actually does it really well. Barry is running from mutant Alex through cliffside caves, and you switch between him and Claire, who’s in a helicopter with a sniper rifle. It’s very much a Resident Evil fight, in that it’s more about positioning and survival than it is about fast shooting or burning the boss down with damage. 

I also actually think this game has a good story for the series, but mostly what makes it stand out is the characters themselves. I also really appreciate the callbacks to previous games. It refers back to things from RE1, Code Veronica, Revelations, and RE5. Alex Wesker, who I think previously only existed in lore notes, is the villain, and the Uroboros virus of RE5 plays a small role. It makes nods to the larger mythos without being so convoluted that someone who doesn’t know everything about every game would have trouble following. The central story is easy to follow: you’re trapped on an unknown mastermind’s monster infested deathtrap island, infected with a virus that causes you to turn into a disgusting, mindless monster if your level of fear gets too high. I love their choices of Claire and Barry as the main characters. Claire being a beloved series staple, and Barry being an unexpected but surprisingly great choice. I also love how you play in two different timelines, Claire and Moira on the island six months before, and Barry and Natalia searching for them in the present. You travel through a lot of the same areas, but fight different enemies, take different paths and solve different puzzles. Rev 2 also has the most naturalistic character dialogue and acting the series has seen thus far. It feels like the rapport they were going for in Rev 1, but done better, and both pairs of player characters play off of each other well. I like that Claire takes a matter-of-fact, seen it all before approach to the situation, because she’s been through two different self-contained zombie apocalypses, while Moira the teenager is always cursing and yelling and basically saying “what the fuck,” and she really acts like I think a teenager might in such a situation. Barry, the dumpy old dude with dad jokes who came prepared with his dorky backpack and cargo pants, and the fearless 10-year-old girl Natalia, also go together well. By the end, I found myself actually caring about what happened to these characters.

Between Rev 2's gameplay, dialogue, and visual style, it's easy to see how it paved the way for the third-person RE2 and RE3 remakes. It was a very good move for the series, and I'm surprised it's not mentioned more often. Despite being a sequel to a spin-off, it was at the time better at being Resident Evil than anything since REmake, which came out thirteen years prior. It has its highs and lows, but it’s a big step in the right direction, and a good survival horror game. It’s not quite the same quality of RE7, RE2R or RE3R, but I really liked Revelations 2. 

-Monster Review Corner-

Honestly, the monster designs are one of the weakest parts of Rev 2. The principal zombie-likes are just these kind of blobby, gross dudes who run at you, sometimes while holding wrenches or other makeshift weapons. Most of the enemies follow the same pattern, kinda blobby humanoids that look like bloated corpses or conglomerations of body parts, and I find it pretty dull. There are also some generic RE dogs that for some reason have pig heads. I never hold zombie dogs against a Resident Evil game, because you can’t have a Resident Evil without evil dogs. I don’t make the rules. As you progress you just get bigger, meaner blobby corpse guys with different abilities. There are only really two exceptions that I find less boring than the rest: Glasps, and Alex Wesker’s monstrous forms. Glasps are invisible, bloated flying insectoids that instantly kill you if they catch you. In order to kill them, you need to switch to Natalia, who can sense them and point them out, then switch back to Barry to take your shot. They cause this weird vision effect when they’re near, implying that their invisibility is something they’re doing to your mind, which to me feels less out of place than physical invisibility. If you had asked me before if I thought an invisible enemy was suited to RE, I would’ve said no, but Glasps feel like a creature out of a STALKER game, and I like it. Alex's final form is classic RE, like the Tyrant or G-Mutation designs, but with more of a disfigured crone vibe. Her unnaturally long spiky spine and humanoid limbs give her a creepy marionette feel. The heavily mutated humanoids, like Nemesis, tend to be among the best RE monster designs. Before she injects herself with Uroboros and transforms, she looks like an ancient haglike being with the air of a hunched vulture, with tubes and staples and half her face peeled off, a victim of her own T-Phobos virus.

Time to complete: 7:45

A practically perfect length. It feels like a long and satisfying experience that's paced well and wastes very little of your time. 

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017)

I actually played this game in early 2019, before I ever conceived of this journey through the series, and I was as surprised as anyone at Resident Evil 7 being a good game. An oft repeated sentiment among RE fans who dislike RE7 is "it's not Resident Evil." In my mind, that's a very strange thing to say, since it borrows almost all of its design principles from the classic trilogy. I think the negativity some people feel towards this game is a knee-jerk reaction to the first person perspective. I've learned that like any fandom, Resident Evil's is full of idiots who just kind of say things, and barely make any attempt to understand the thing they like so much. (Not to say everyone who's an RE fan is an idiot. People like Suzi the Sphere Hunter and Critique Quest on YouTube have plenty of insightful things to say. Your average video game comment leaver or redditor is just a "whoa, cool videogame" meme). RE7 brings back so many things from classic RE: a slow methodical pace, save rooms, a classic style map, limited inventory space, item boxes, emblem keys, limited ammo and healing, a small array of weapons, a relatively small number of enemies, a creepy isolated mansion, a lone protagonist, survival horror puzzles, a focus on exploring in order to escape, item-base progression, simple mechanics, a feeling of vulnerability, environmental storytelling, a relatively simple story, a harmonious balance of all these elements, and a short game length. Even the character switch at one point near the end of the game is classic RE. The design philosophy applied to RE7 is classic survival horror, through and through. This is so much the case that I noticed myself playing in a similar way to the classic era games. Checking my map to carefully plan the safest, most optimal route. Managing inventory for the least amount of backtracking. Making sure I checked every room as thoroughly as possible for useful items. Slowly making my way through a small but interconnected and well designed map. Feeling that sense of tension every time I opened an unfamiliar door. Getting absorbed in the atmosphere and taking my time. It's weird to say playing a horror game feels comforting, or cozy, but RE7 does, in a way. All of this isn't to say it feels just like playing the old games. It's a reinvention, rather than a re-creation, and I think that was the right route to take. 

RE7 is the first game to use Capcom's RE Engine, and it looks extremely good, especially its lighting. The one thing that doesn't look exceptional is the models for people and their movements and expressions. People move and make facial expressions in that weird video game way that never looks natural, and it's kind of impressive how far Capcom has come since 2017 in that department. This is greatly improved in the 2 & 3 remakes, which also both use the RE Engine. The first thing I noticed while replaying this game is how incredibly detailed everything is, including the sound design. You hear your character's slightly hesitant breath, his footsteps, the creaks and groans of an old house, and other muffled sounds that can't possibly be attributed to a house's age. All of the visual details let you imagine how every part of the Baker farm slowly fell into disrepair, the toll that multiple floods took on the place, and the gradual disintegration of a family's sanity and normalcy reflected in the physical dilapidation of the house. Like the Spencer mansion in 1996, the Baker property is as much a character as it is a setting. The return to a seemingly abandoned, sprawling house as a setting really helps establish that this is a return to form, a return to slow, creeping horror. The house is a shadowy urbex nightmare of abandoned spaces and black mold. The washed up tanker and the mines you explore in the game's final stretch aren't nearly as memorable or characterful as the house. RE7 succeeds in actually being scary more than most Resident Evil games. It's very good at being a horror game, but has all of the survival horror gameplay that makes the genre so satisfying.

The RE7 team wisely created a new narrative that’s almost entirely disconnected from the convoluted mythos the series has been building on since Code Veronica, but used the ending to leave the narrative open to that connection to the larger story. This, combined with the first person perspective, makes the game feel more intimate and more focused, which really works for it. It's really more a story about the house and its inhabitants, about Eveline, Mia, Zoe and the Baker family than it is about its protagonist, Ethan Winters. In my opinion, he's one of the weaker parts of the game. This series isn’t exactly renowned for its brilliant character writing, but he’s just kinda there, like American cheese. At least characters like Jill, Carlos, Ada, Claire, Chris, Sheva, Barry and Wesker are likeable and/or memorable in a video game character kinda way. Ethan feels intentionally designed to be the most unremarkable mid-30s white dude you could think of, almost like he's meant for a target audience, and he drags an excellent game down a little bit. Even Nemesis, the monster whose only line is "STAAAARRSs," is more memorable. They can really do better. So while I’m very excited to see what they do with RE8 after the quality of the last three games, I was disappointed to learn I’d still be playing as Ethan. I'm hoping they'll figure out a way to make him less lame. The other thing is, almost every RE protagonist is a member of S.T.A.R.S. or the BSAA, or someone who knows how to shoot a gun, so they at least have some explanation for how good they are at handling these situations. Ethan is literally just some guy who goes into a swamp to find his wife.

RE7 is at heart an amalgamation of a bunch of horror tropes and references, even references to the series itself, and yet it feels more like a loving homage to horror than a hackneyed rehash. Meet the family from Texas Chainsaw Massacre as you explore the mansion from Resident Evil/The People Under the Stairs and evade your wife who’s now a deadite from Evil Dead, meet the gross body horror man from From Beyond, shambling swamp monsters, an evil witch grandma, and the little girl from F.E.A.R. You also solve a puzzle from Saw in a serial killer’s murder maze. It's all bundled together and interwoven so well that it feels like something fresh and unique rather than horror's greatest hits.

Time to complete: 7:40

Like all of the best survival horror games, it ends right before it starts wearing out its welcome. The short length keeps any of its ideas from getting stale.

-Monster Review Corner-

There really aren't that many different kinds of monsters in this game, which I'm fine with. The principle zombie-likes of this game are slimy black sinewy humanoids called molded. Eveline, the bioweapon in the form of a little girl, is the cause behind everything bad that happened to the house and family, and she creates a black mold which infects those she wants to control, and which molded are made of. A lot of people think they're boring enemies, but personally I think they're perfectly suited to the setting of a dilapidated, water-damaged house that's being slowly reclaimed by the surrounding wilderness. The first enemy you actually encounter in this game is your wife Mia, who switches between normal Mia and evil deadite Mia. She also chops your hand off with a chainsaw, which is pretty fun. Jack is the Nemesis of RE7's early game. He's an unnaturally pallid middle-aged man who stalks you and has regenerative abilities which are later revealed to be... extensive. As you explore the house in the early game, you're always on edge because you know he could be lurking anywhere. In his later boss form, he's a bulging body horror monstrosity. Marguerite is another enemy who stalks you through the boat house with a creepy lantern. She creates bugs that attack you, so she's like a nasty bug crone. As a boss she employs hit and run tactics, lurking in the dark waiting for you, so slow and careful is the best way to fight her. Eveline is just the little girl from FEAR. No two ways about it. I'm honestly not a big fan of her, just because I kind of hate the creepy little kid horror trope.

Side note: I think this is the first game in the whole series without evil dogs.

Overall monster score: 7/10

Resident Evil 2 (2019)

To my taste, Resident Evil 2 remake might be the most ideal incarnation of Resident Evil that exists. It has everything that makes survival horror great, and it’s all implemented extremely well. Combine this with the gorgeous graphics and chilling atmosphere and you have a practically perfect survival horror game. It feels like the culmination of everything that worked in the series over the years, with the visual fidelity to do it justice. It’s a good remake because it does more than just faithfully recreate the original – it takes the best ideas from across the series. It has the methodical pace of classic survival horror, the backtracking and slow unlocking of new areas, the shadowy, eerie atmosphere of REmake, the highly detailed graphics and sound design of RE7, the item combining of RE3, Revelations 2 and RE7, the close over-the-shoulder view of RE4 and beyond, which notably feels like Rev 2. I’ve talked about how survival horror is a balance of things, and in that sense, RE2R is superbly balanced. Visually, it’s so detailed and nails the atmosphere so perfectly that it makes you want to move slowly just because it feels like you should. Moving forward feels foreboding. The way zombies look and move is scary, and lickers are terrifying. Narratively, it’s the same story but told better, and characters are much more human and believable than the original. Leon is just a regular dude, not the regular shithead he became in RE4 and RE6, and Claire is a great character. The Raccoon City police station is the strongest setting of the game, it’s all shadowed corridors, bloodstained walls and shattered windows. You really get the sense of it being a building that was formerly used as a museum, and the barricaded doors and aftermath of carnage everywhere help you imagine what happened as people fought for their lives, and lost, before you arrived. The sound design is extremely well done and detailed, which I never noticed until I played with headphones. (I wish I had paid more attention to sound design on this series playthrough. It can be an important part of survival horror). Gameplay is no slouch, either. Patient, precise shooting and tactical retreats pay off, and inventory management remains an integral part of progressing through the game. You eventually have much more inventory space than in the classic games, but it still never really feels like too much until right near the end of the game. Puzzles and item usage feel just how they should in survival horror. The Sherry and Ada portions, in Claire and Leon’s campaigns respectively, are both a nice change of pace and they’re short enough that they don’t wear out their welcome. 

Strangely, I don’t feel like I have much to say about this game, just because it so well embodies everything I’ve already cited as being good about survival horror. The police station especially is exceptional, in terms of atmosphere, map design, the layout of enemy encounters, methodical play, and balance. It’s very light on anything resembling fast paced action, and I love that. All in all, I think this is the most well-rounded and well-made Resident Evil game to date. It would be a great place to start the series, and a great way to show someone everything good about the genre. 

Time to complete: 

First run, Leon A: 7:49

Second run, Claire A: 6:39

Resident Evil 3 (2020)

Here are the common criticisms people have of this game, and why they’re wrong:

“It’s bad because they cut content from the original.”

First of all, these two are both excellent games, but they’re different enough to be completely separate games. Even the maps and the paths you travel through the game are totally different. Sure, it would be fun to see a clock tower area in the style of the remakes, but I’m not going to hold nonexistent content against a game, especially one that’s this good. If you want to relive RE3, it still exists. No one seemed to complain about how different RE2R is.

“It’s too short.”

It’s pretty much the same length as RE3, and it’s a fine length for a survival horror game. I like that the game is fast paced and concise, and this captures the spirit of classic survival horror. In this day and age I find short games refreshing, and brevity is a mark in a game’s favor rather than a mark against it. Also, when a game is short, I’m a million times more likely to want to replay it in the future. Case in point, this was the second time I played this game. If it took 20 hours, if it even took 10 hours, it would run too long. 

“It’s an action game, not survival horror.”

It’s more of an action game than RE2R, but even that is up for debate. I feel like throughout a lot of the game, you’re really not doing more shooting than you do in RE2R, and Jill isn’t really any more heavily armed than Leon or Claire end up being in that game. There are more boss fights, and more explosions, though, and by the end of the game you have a ton of ammo and resources, but they generally give you tons of stuff at the end of these games. I mentioned that original RE3 felt more like an action movie than the previous two games, and the remake is a lot better at being an action movie. It has a breakneck start where you’re almost immediately in a fight for your life against Nemesis as he bursts through the wall of Jill’s apartment and chases you through the streets, which culminates in the player ramming him off of a parking garage with a car. I’m normally not a big fan of explosive set pieces in games, but this one is really good and is great at setting the tone for the rest of the game. Just like the original, it’s more action oriented, but it’s just much better at action than the original RE3. I really wouldn’t classify it as an action game, like a lot of people seem to. Its pedigree and presentation are thoroughly survival horror, in my mind. Inventory management is an integral part of the game and most of the game has that slow survival horror gameplay. One thing I like less about this game than RE2R is that it has fewer puzzles. It’s not like it doesn’t have any, but they take a backseat, which is why I’d call it more action-oriented survival horror. 

“Nemesis doesn’t show up often enough.”

I really don’t know where this comes from, because I feel like if he showed up any more often than he already does it would get irritating and redundant. There are literally four separate boss fights against him, and multiple parts where he chases Jill around. How much more do you need in a five and a half hour game?

Now that that’s cleared up, on to other things.

The Resident Evil 2 Remake has a lot of noticeable similarities to the original version, but Resident Evil 3 Remake is basically a completely different game, and I honestly think that’s a good thing. Somehow, when you play the original RE3 in 2020, it feels more dated than RE2, and I thought RE2 was a better game. 

Back on the topic of action: this game does a thing video games do I don’t usually like, which is when the main character is often seen falling off of exploding things and staggering through corridors and burning buildings and thrown against cars and so on and so forth. Here, I don’t really mind it though, maybe because it’s not a long game and these parts take up little of its play time. It also makes the fight against Nemesis feel more immediate and tangible. It does often feel like playing an action movie, but it’s Terminator 2, not Michael Bay. Also, the bad Nemesis boss fights of the original are replaced with actually good boss fights. 

One thing I really like about RE3R is the way characters are presented. Jill and Carlos both feel like more relatable, human characters, with actual personalities, and this makes you much more invested in their fight to escape the city. They end up being two of my favorite versions of RE characters, and I hope we see them in future games, though I find that kind of unlikely. Resident Evil is really not great when it comes to consistency in characters. It’s a shame because I’d love to see a direct sequel with this version of Jill and Carlos. Apart from these two, even the rest of the cast are given a lot more character and feel human. 

The Carlos segment of the game in the hospital is much more atmospheric and interesting than the original’s Carlos section, and this one ends with a siege style fight much like the cabin fight of RE4. On the topic of RE4, this game has a document explaining that Nemesis was created by implanting some kind of parasite into a Tyrant, and the author of the document berates Umbrella for going the route of parasites due to their unpredictability. You also fight a few zombies in the game who were infected by Nemesis and grow alien-looking parasites on their heads. It can be assumed that this is tying the lore of these games in with the Las Plagas parasites of RE4 and RE5 and paving the way for the RE4 Remake. I think this is neat, even though I wish they wouldn’t remake RE4 on account of it being garbage. 

All in all, I really like this game, and it’s one of my favorites of 2020. It’s a very good survival horror game with tons of detail and character that can be finished in two or three sittings. I have pretty much no complaints about it other than the aforementioned lack of puzzles. It’s more fast paced survival horror, but it’s very good in it’s own right.    

Time to complete: 4:36 (2nd playthrough)

I don’t know the exact time of my first playthrough, but my old save file that’s right before the final boss was at 5:52. 

Final Thoughts

I feel like after playing all of these games, it should be asked: is the story of Resident Evil any good? The answer to that is… kinda, sometimes? But also no, not really? It’s often entertaining, scary, gory, tense and atmospheric in the way that a good horror movie is. It’s also a little silly, often in a charming way, like how you can always tell at any given moment that this setting is a Japanese interpretation of America. The story itself goes well off the rails by the time you reach RE4. I mean, you’re rescuing the president’s daughter from evil zombie villagers and space alien tentacle monsters and cultists and ogres and then the zombies get body armor and guns. (Let's just not ever talk about the story of Code Veronica.) But the story isn’t really the point, is it? I think the series is vastly improved because there is a narrative, and it just wouldn't be the same without it, but you won’t find anything too deep or meaningful in that narrative. The one saving grace is that a defining feature of the story is ultimately the fact that corporations and governments are evil and only care about profit, to the extent of sacrificing hundreds of people in multiple biological weaponry incidents. That aspect at least feels true to life, especially in the midst of a pandemic that neither our government, nor the extremely powerful corporations that exercise control over that government, are doing anything about. Umbrella is an international corporation that no one dares or bothers to oppose who maintains their own paramilitary force, has their own private prisons and research sites, and has their hands in every part of the government and infrastructure of Raccoon City and who knows how many other cities. The villain is always ultimately the unchecked corporation - even in RE7, the nightmare family that seems disconnected from the outside world is ultimately revealed by in-game documents to be directly linked to corporate experimentation.

In Revelations 2, as well as the new 2 & 3 remakes, the characters are at least likable and there’s nothing incredibly dumb like you’ll find in RE 4, 5 or 6. Some would cite the part at the end of RE3R where Jill uses a humongous railgun called the FINGeR (Ferromagnetic Infantry-use Next Generation Railgun) to kill the final form of Nemesis as something dumb, but they are wrong. The characters of RE2R, RE3R and Revelations 2 are likeable and human, so they seem to at least be going in the right direction in that regard. The storytelling of RE7, RE2R and RE3R returns to the more grounded approach of the original trilogy, which is a good thing, and I think a good sign for the future of the series and its setting. 

There’s something I’ve noticed about RE games, which might just boil down to my own personal preferences. In pretty much every game, you end up in an entirely new location in the final act of the game, and that last part is never as good as the rest. In RE2R, you spend most of the game in the police station, then go to the sewers (and the orphanage if you’re playing as Claire). For the last stretch of the game you end up at NEST, Umbrella’s secret underground lab, and this part is weaker than the rest. Likewise, the ship and mines areas in RE7 are weaker than the majority of the game, the lab in RE3 and its remake, the lab in REmake, even the last section of RE5. This isn’t to say these parts are necessarily bad, just that they tend to be worse than the rest. At the same time, I think they’re necessary changes of pace and locale. I think there are two reasons for this: one, the first locations of RE games tend to be very strong settings with lots of character, and two, it’s an an example of a problem all horror fiction faces, which is that the more you ramp up tension, the harder it gets to do it in believable and interesting ways. If horror goes on too long, situations become predictable and it loses its bite, and survival horror games are no exception. Ramping up tension and action necessarily compromises the things that initially make horror enjoyable, like slow and eerie pacing, the danger of an unknown threat, the vulnerability of character or player, and the slow unraveling of mysterious and fatal circumstances. At the same time, horror needs a final act, needs some kind of closure, otherwise the building of tension feels like it was for nothing and the story is unsatisfying. I have no idea what the solution to this is, except brevity, which good RE games are very good at. 

I liked a few RE games already, but playing through them all really made me realize I like this series more than I previously thought, and I like survival horror a lot more than I thought. The really bad and long mid-series slump that lasted about thirteen years can’t be ignored, but I really like more than half of the games in the series. It created an entire genre with a devoted following, and I feel like RE2R brought the genre back into the limelight somewhat. You can see the influence of the genre even on games that aren’t really in the genre, like Prey, Gone Home, Bloodborne, and Left 4 Dead. I’m really looking forward to playing through my list of other survival horror games. 

Things Resident Evil showed me that I love about survival horror:

-Slow paced, thoughtful gameplay. You’re rarely rushed, and action isn’t the focus. Generally there’s nothing dragging you along in a certain direction, forcing you to look at or interact with certain things. It’s up to you to figure out the way forward.

-An emphasis on exploration. This is tied in with the previous point. A lot of the fear and tension comes from not knowing what's through the next door or what will happen next, but knowing you have to explore to progress. These games have a lot of backtracking, a healthy sense of map knowledge and memory as a useful skill, and lots of item-based progression. As I mentioned in my note about puzzles before, the whole map feels like a puzzle to be solved.

-A feeling of vulnerability, reinforced by things like limited defense options, slow movement, scarcity of items, limited inventory space, and simple combat. This goes hand in hand with the sense of isolation usually found in survival horror games.

-Environmental storytelling. Setting details being revealed through documents, destruction, corpses, bloodstains, locales, and even puzzles. 

-They aren’t defenseless walking sims. It's on you to survive. Having a way to respond to threats, but not feeling like you ever have quite enough, is much scarier than being defenseless. It's because it's a game - mechanically, you know a game isn't just going to give you no defenses, then throw you to the wolves. Survival horror acknowledges its framework of video game, its limitations and advantages. It gives more of a feeling of success or failure hinging on your decisions rather than on scripted events. The player feels like they have more agency, even if it's not always strictly the case.

-Making use of silence, something games aren't generally good at. This ties in with quiet time, something I wish more games were aware of. That is, times when the player is just quietly left to their own devices, exploring alone, solving puzzles, reading notes. You're not in danger 100% of the time, which gives the danger teeth.

-Simplicity of play, or accessibility. These games generally don’t contain any difficult mechanics or concepts that need to be explained, have little need for tutorials, and are easy to understand and play. Things like difficulty settings, auto aim, and the assist modes seen in RE2R and RE3R expand accessibility too. I think difficulty goes in this category too. Honestly, most survival horror games aren’t all that hard, because if you died all the time, you’d get bored and frustrated. Survival horror games seem to actually want you to have a good time. Imagine that. 

-Mostly short playtime. A genre that's often good at not wasting your time. It’s very good for people without much time or people who like to actually be able to finish games and move on to other games, or replay games. It might sound weird, but also, sometimes I feel like really long games have something to hide under all that repetitive content.

-New weapons or abilities feel earned, because you generally go through a lot to get to them and they’re not handed out very often.

-A harmonious balance of elements. When a survival horror game is good, it elegantly combines all of the aforementioned traits.

RE Score Sheet

Endings where I flew away in a helicopter: 8 Crank or valve handles collected and turned: 16 Zombies or dogs or birds that burst through windows: 19 Object pushing puzzles: 14 Shaped indentations filled (including cogs): 71 Jump scares: 13 Puzzles where you configure shapes or valves or gears or numbers or lights a certain way: 18 Oversized animal types: 12 (Spider, Bee, Moth, Snake, Shark, Worm, Scorpion, Cockroach, Centipede, Bat, Salamander, A Different Bat) Rooms with monsters in tubes: 8 Gigantic mutant plants: 4 Times when it looked like a character died but they didn't really: 10 Secret subterranean labs: 10 Switches that change the water level: 5 Batteries/cables attached to things: 9 Clock towers: 4 Vaccines synthesized: 4 Self destruct sequences: 7 Helicopters shot down or otherwise destroyed right before they were used to escape: 6 Unique viruses: 9 (Progenitor Virus, T-Virus, G-Virus, T-Veronica Virus, Uroburos Virus, T-Abyss Virus, C-Virus, T-Phobos Virus, Mold Virus)

Resident Evil Tier List

Obligatory tier list disclaimer: tier lists are stupid and bad and fail to acknowledge the many nuances of things.

#resident evil #survival horror #game reviews #shinji mikami #koushi nakanishi #capcom #re #spooky season

[pictureswithboxes]

Chapter 6 of Understanding The Heathers is up.

AO3 Link [x]

There was a phenomenon where if a domestic cat was left on its own long enough, it would revert back to its feral state. Her father had told her that this was referred to as going ‘house feral.’ After seeing and hearing about how often The Heathers’ parents were out of the house, Veronica was sure that The Heathers had gone house feral. That was the only way to explain the horror show that was the game of Monopoly Veronica found herself part of. 

Though, she was less of a player and more like a referee. 

“Heather, get off of Heather!” Veronica exclaimed when Chandler had tackled Mac onto the floor after she had bought ‘Pennsylvania Railroad.’ 

“You know that it’s my strategy to buy all the Railroads!” Chandler growled. 

They paid her no mind as Mac wrapped her legs around Chandler’s waist and reversed their positions handily. “It’s everyone’s strategy to buy the Railroads! You’ve already got two, I couldn’t let you get them all! It’s just good sense!” She pinned Chandler’s hands above her head with one swift motion.

 Veronica averted her eyes, feeling rise to her cheeks. Her mouth went a little dry, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was intruding on a private moment. Especially with how close Mac and Chandler’s faces were, their noses were practically touching and their lips were mere inches apart. 

“She’s right, Heather and you know it. We’re all in it to win.” Duke said, she looked more interested in reorganizing her money than with whatever the hell was going on right next to her. “If you guys fuck up the board, you’re going to have to fix it.”

“Oh my god, fine, Heather!” Chandler rolled her eyes. “Just let me up!”

Mac sat up, not taking her eyes off Chandler. “Just remember, I can do this any time I want.” 

Veronica cleared her throat. “Heather, it’s your turn.” She said, nodding her head toward Duke. 

If Veronica had known that playing a game with The Heathers meant that there would be acts of violence, she would have thought twice about betting against them. So far Chandler had already torn the three property cards in half, Mac was balling up her bills and throwing them at the people she owed money to, and Veronica already had to wrestle a hammer from Duke. She didn’t even want to know what Duke was going to do with the hammer. 

Duke rolled the dice and let out a loud cheer when she saw the result. She’d landed on the Free Parking space. 

“Fuck you entirely!” Chandler shouted, slamming her hands against the coffee table. 

Duke laughed as she collected the bills from the center of the board. “You’re just mad because half of this came from you.”

“That’s exactly why I’m mad!” Chandler snapped. “Just you wait, you’ll land on my hotels and I’ll get all your fucking cash.” 

Veronica looked at the board and had to admit, Chandler was right. Each Heather had their own different strategies, Chandler had elected to buy and develop around one of the corners of the board so it was almost impossible to avoid landing on a property owned by her. Duke aggressively bought up properties as quickly as she could, she didn’t even bother with the Utilities. Mac’s strategy looked like she only wanted to sabotage the other two more than she wanted to win. 

Meanwhile, Veronica was simply trying to survive.

“I’m so scared.” Duke rolled her eyes. 

“It’s my turn.” Veronica announced, rolling the dice. She was at the point where she almost wanted to go bankrupt. It was exhausting to be the banker, babysitter, and to actually play the game. 

She rolled a five and landed on ‘Luxury Tax.’ 

“Tough break.” Mac said as Veronica doled out seventy-five dollars. 

Veronica shrugged and passed the dice to Chandler. “Your turn.”

Chandler didn’t roll immediately, instead choosing to take a few moments to assess her properties.”I want to put a house on Kentucky Avenue.” She said, passing Veronica the appropriate amount of money. 

“Sure thing.” Veronica took the money and handed Chandler one of the tiny, plastic houses that came with the game. 

Chandler rolled a seven and landed on a Chance square. “Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw.” She muttered under her breath after reading her card. 

Veronica was about to ask what the hell that meant when Chandler cut her off. 

“Enjoy the charity.” She rolled her eyes and tossed a fifty dollar bill at Veronica, Mac, and Duke. 

“Gee wiz,” Duke rolled her eyes. “This is life changing.” 

“Shut up, Heather.” Chandler snapped, handing the dice over to Mac. “It’s your turn, Heather.” 

The game continued and this level of hostility never wavered as time wore on. The closest thing to a fight that happened was when Mac took Duke’s plate of pizza and frisbee tossed it across the room when Duke started a housing crisis. Veronica was less horrified by the sound of the plate shattering, and more so by the way The Heathers had disregarded the sound. Going bankrupt was a blessing, if Veronica was being honest. 

Two hours in and they were still going strong. This had to be a world record. 

“Please.” Veronica groaned, she was now laying on the floor and blindly doling out the cash as requested. “Please tell me it’s almost over. I’m so tired, you guys.”

“Fuck off, Veronica.” Duke snapped. There wasn’t a trace of exhaustion in her tone. “I’ve got Heather on the ropes.”

“No you don’t!” Chandler growled back. 

“Please, Heather.” Mac scoffed. “The only reason you made it to this round was because you were in jail for so long. “If you roll a one through five, you’re paying me. And you barely have any liquid assets left as it stands. You’re going to have to start auctioning off your properties.” She let out a little laugh. “Well, more of your properties.”

Veronica didn’t bother to look at the board to see what Mac meant. 

Chandler eventually went bankrupt and the other three had to physically stop her from flipping the board. It was another half hour after that before Duke ran out of money and Mac took home the victory. Veronica wasn’t sure how the hell that had happened, seeing as Mac’s main goal from the beginning was to simply hinder the others’ progress. 

“I can’t believe it’s over.” Veronica murmured as she, Duke, and Chandler cleaned up the game board. “I don’t think I’ll ever recover from this.” She turned to the two of them. “You’ve scarred me for life, I never want to play Monopoly again!”

Mac yawned from her spot on the sofa. The winner never had to clean up the mess, apparently. “Now that I think of it, Monopoly is kind of a trash game.”

“We should play Ticket to Ride, next.” Chandler said as she carefully counted the houses to make sure there weren’t any missing. 

“No way, we should play The Game of Life.” Duke argued. 

Chandler scoffed. “Please, Heather, you always try to sell your kids when you get in a pinch.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.” Veronica found herself saying. She glanced at the clock and was horrified to see that it was nearing one in the morning. “How the hell did you three manage to stretch a monopoly game for almost four hours?”

“We all really wanted the bragging rights.” Mac replied easily. “Which reminds me, Heather, Heather, is there something you wanted to say to me?”

The other two sighed before chorusing “You are a titan of industry” to Mac in an annoyed tone. 

“Am I a pretty titan of industry?” Mac asked, batting her eyelashes. 

“You’re beautiful.” Duke and Chandler sighed together.

. .

Veronica sat at the lunch table, looking over her study guide for her AP Lit class. She wasn’t worried about the test that day, but it was still important to have a bit of a refresher. The Heathers, who had that class during second period, assured her that it would be a piece of cake, but Veronica would rather be safe than sorry. 

“Honestly, if you even read the back of the book you should be fine.” Chandler said, looking bored out of her mind. “All you have to know is that Edna is trapped in her little gilded cage and wants to bone Robert.”

“The hardest part is trying to spell the names right.” Mac added offhandedly, she was working on her math homework and therefore not paying much attention. “Ms. Fleming said she’d mark us down if we spelled the names wrong.”

“I think that was directed at us, specifically.” Duke said. “She was still a little miffed that Heather called Mademoiselle Reisz an old crone.”

Chandler laughed a little. “In my defense, I thought it was funny at the time. How was I supposed to know that the sewer witch that is Ms. Fleming would go off the handle?”

“She’s more of a gutter hag.” Duke said after a moment of thought. “Her being a witch implies that she has powers.”

“But I’d rather be in a gutter than in a sewer.” Chandler frowned before taking a sip of her Diet Coke. “Let’s go with sewer hag. That way she’s in a sewer with all the rats and shit and piss, but also she can’t cast spells.”

“It’s decided, Ms. Fleming is a sewer hag.” Duke said as she and Chandler high-fived with a smile.

“Of course you guys would have a committee to create insults.” Veronica found herself laughing. 

Chandler and Duke grinned at each other. 

“So, Veronica,” Chandler said, leaning forward and resting her weight on her elbows. “As much as I hate to change the subject, Halloween is fast approaching...”

“And?” Veronica furrowed her brow.

“And,” Duke rolled her eyes.  “We, as in Heather, Heather, and myself,  always do a group costume. Now that you’re part of the group, we figured we’d see if you wanted to... you know, be part of the group.”

Veronica thought for a moment, usually she and Martha gathered up the worst, most D list, scary movies they could find and make a night of it. This year, however, Martha’s grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary was on the second of November and she was to go out of town with her whole family for the long weekend, starting right after school on Halloween. Veronica was planning to just stay home and pass out candy with her parents. 

“Sure thing.” Veronica shrugged. 

“Cool.” Chandler looked at Mac. “It’s Heather’s turn to pick a group costume, by the way.”

“You guys don’t go trick or treating, do you?” Veronica asked. She couldn’t picture the three of them going door to door begging for candy. 

The Heathers looked at each other. 

“Not quite.” Mac replied. “We’re doing that volunteer thing through the school where you take a few kids trick or treating around the neighborhood and then their parents come get them.”

“You should sign up if you want.” Chandler added. “We always need more people and it’s an easy way to get volunteer hours. The kids do whatever you say, it’s basically just going for a walk around the neighborhood. You don’t even really have to look at them.”

“We’re gonna watch our favorite scary movies after, you should come.” Duke said, looking over to Mac. “Do you know what we want to be, Heather?”

“I’m gonna need some time to ponder.” Mac said, closing her math book. “I don’t know any iconic groups of four off the top of my head.”

The first group that came to Veronica’s mind was The Teletubbies. There was no way in hell that she was going to tell The Heathers that, she didn’t want to risk it. 

“We need an answer by Wednesday.” Chandler said, pointing at Mac sternly. “Halloween is fast approaching and we need to look good.”

Mac mock saluted Chandler. “I’ll start brainstorming tonight.” 

“Speaking of making plans.” Veronica figured this would be the best time for a subject change. “My parents want me to have you guys over for dinner.”

The Heathers looked at Veronica like she’d grown a second head. 

“Why?” Mac asked. 

Veronica’s brow furrowed. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with you guys, is it so weird that my parents would want to get to know the people who are taking up some real estate in my life?”

“I guess not.” Chandler frowned. “Do they think you’ve... you know... gotten in with a bad crowd? Or something?”

“No.” Veronica shook her head. “Well, my mom thinks you’re all weird as hell, but they don’t think you guys are bad seeds.”

“So... They just want to meet us?” Duke asked. 

“Is it seriously so weird that my parents are taking an interest in my life?” Veronica exclaimed. 

“... Yeah, kinda.”

. . 

Veronica was nervous as she helped her mother set the table. The Heathers would be over any minute and while Veronica was sure that her friends knew better than to be inappropriate or rude to her parents, she was terrified that they might start bickering at the dining table. Her parents already thought that The Heathers were weird as hell and they had barely interacted, Veronica was sure that if The Heathers were themselves in front of her parents, she would be banned from seeing those girls ever again. 

“I’m so excited to get to know your friends a little better.” Veronica’s mother said as she put out the napkins. “I already know Martha so well, I feel like getting to know them will help us get to know you more.”

Veronica laughed. “You might want to run and hide if you get to know me too much.” 

Her mother sent her a fond smile. “I certainly hope you’re joking.” 

Just as Veronica was about to speak, there were three sharp knocks on the door. Veronica froze, half expecting to hear her name being screamed from outside. It was jarring to say the least. 

“I’ll get it.” Veronica’s father said as he walked to the door. 

“Is that them?” Veronica’s mother asked. “No one’s screaming.”

“Yeah,” Veronica nodded. “It’s kind of an inside joke between us.” She shrugged. “Heather Chandler does that to all of us.”

“What a card.” Her mother said with a confused look on her face. 

“To say the least.” Veronica nodded, turning toward the door as her father led The Heathers into the dining room. “Hi guys.” 

The Heathers had all elected to wear something more conservative than their usual outfits. It was like they were trying to look business casual. 

“Hi Veronica.” They chorused together. 

“Thank you so much for having us over, Mr. and Mrs. Sawyer.” Chandler said as they entered the room fully. “Is there anything we can do to help out before dinner?”

Mac and Duke both smiled and nodded, looking at Veronica’s mother expectantly. 

“You’re just in time, actually.” Veronica’s mother smiled. “Dinner is ready and Veronica and I have got the table all set. Why doesn’t everyone sit down and Mr. Sawyer and I will bring dinner out.”

Veronica moved to the dining room table while her parents entered the kitchen. “Take a seat guys.” Veronica said, gesturing to the table. 

Mac and Chandler sat on one side of the table while Duke sat beside Veronica on the other side. They sat ramrod straight, like they were awaiting a job interview or something. Veronica had to admit that it kind of felt good to know that they were taking this as seriously as she was. 

“I know we just told you to tell your mom to make your favorite,” Mac whispered, she looked a little concerned. “But what did she make?”

“Spaghetti with extra oregano.” Veronica replied. 

Mac let out a sigh of relief. “Okay cool.”

Her parents returned and they began to break bread and eat. They made some small talk for a little while, Chandler and Duke led the conversation a little more than Mac did. Veronica was surprised that Chandler hadn’t ordered Duke to shut up at least once since dinner had started. She was expecting it. 

“So, Heather.” Veronica’s father paused. “Uh... Heathers. What do you do outside of school? Are you part of any groups? Any hobbies?”

“Well, I’m the senior class representative to the PTA.” Chandler said, sitting up straighter. “I'm also a member of the NHS. I used to be on the debate team, but it conflicted with student leadership. So I had to drop it in my sophomore year.”

“We’ll it sounds like you keep busy.” Veronica’s mother said with a smile. “And what do the rest of you do?”

“I’m head of the yearbook committee.” Duke said. “It’s a lot of work, I assign most of the stories and me and the advisor are going to edit and put the yearbook together. I’m also in the NHS with Heather. And I do a lot of reading.”

“What kind of books do you like?” Veronica’s father perked up. “I, myself, like spy novels.”

Duke smiled and nodded. “I’m more of a fan of the classics, myself. Moby Dick is an old favorite, but right now I’m reading Of Human Bondage.”

Veronica frowned at that. “I’m sorry, what are you reading?” 

“Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham.” Duke said, turning to Veronica. “It was written in like nineteen-ten or something, and it’s all about this orphan with a clubfoot living in London.” 

“Oh, I think I’ve read that with my bookclub.” Veronica’s mother smiled. “It’s a little wordy, don’t you think?”

“So far, it’s pretty good.” Duke shrugged. “It’s no Moby Dick, though.” She turned to Chandler. “Heather has some opinions about Herman Melville.” 

Veronica watched Chandler fight an eyeroll. 

“And Heather, what about you?” Veronica’s father prompted.

Veronica fought the urge to laugh at her father’s poor attempt at a subject change. He only ever read trash books and beach reads, the classics didn’t hold his interest in the least. 

“Oh,” Mac looked a little like she had been taken by surprise. “I’m head of the cheer team. It’s my job to help the coach put together stunt formations and choreograph routines, I also run the pre-practice drills. I’m also part of NHS.” 

Veronica had almost forgotten just how perfect these girls were on paper. They were every parents’ wet dream, people sent their children to school in the hopes that they would fall into The Heathers’ crowd. And here Veronica was, in their crowd, completely on accident. 

“Wow, you girls certainly keep very busy, don’t you?” Veronica’s mother sounded very impressed, and also a little concerned. “You are making sure to take time for yourselves, right?”

The Heathers looked at Veronica’s mother with confused faces. 

Chandler recovered first. “Of course we do.” She smiled sweetly. “It’s just important to be well rounded, you know?”

“It looks good on a college app.” Duke added. 

“I’m just full of school spirit.” Mac grinned. 

Veronica laughed at that. 

The rest of the dinner went off without a hitch. The Heathers were perfectly perfect in every single way. Veronica wasn’t sure what had her so anxious in the first place, if The Heathers knew anything, it was how to put on a show. They’d even offered to clean up after dinner. By the time they’d left, Veronica was sure her parents would be under the same spell as the students of Westerburg High. 

“You liked them, right?” Veronica asked after she’d watched them leave in Duke’s Jeep. 

“Oh, they’re lovely girls.” Veronica’s mother said. “A little stiff, though. Were they nervous?”

“I don’t think they are physically capable of feeling nervous, Mom.”

. .

“I’ve decided what we’re going to be.” Mac said, sitting down on Veronica’s desk once their Econ teacher gave them independent work time. 

“Oh really?” Veronica asked as Duke sat beside her and Chandler perched herself on Duke’s desk. “Was today’s lesson about resources and scarcity inspiring?”

Mac laughed at that. “No, I wasn’t listening to that at all.” She set her text book on her lap and began to fill out her worksheet. “I was too busy thinking about Rose McGowan in Jawbreaker.”

“I don’t understand the logic.” Veronica said. 

“She watched Jawbreaker last night and loves Rose McGowan.” Duke said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. 

“We had a whole conversation about it last night.” Chandler added. “I swear, Heather went on for hours about how she’s in love with Rose McGowan. I was getting kind of jealous, if I’m being honest.”

“Why would you be jealous?” Veronica asked, earning an annoyed glare from Chandler. 

“As I was saying,” Mac cut in. “I’ve decided that we’re going to be the Flawless Four from Jawbreaker.” 

“The original Flawless Four or the one with Fern?” Duke asked. 

“The original, duh.” Mac replied with a grin. 

Veronica frowned and tried to remember the last time she’d watched the movie, Jawbreaker. She’d watched it with Martha, who had a habit of talking through movies, and was never really able to get into it. She remembered being entertained, nonetheless. 

“And who’s gonna be who?” Chandler asked. 

“Well, I want to be Rose McGowan, obviously.” Mac said. 

“Heather, you don’t have brown hair.” Duke pointed out. 

“Wig technology exists.” Mac turned to Chandler with a pout. “Please let me be Rose McGowan. I never get to be the mean one.”

“They’re all mean, Heather.” Chandler was averting her eyes from Mac’s. She was desperately trying to avoid eye contact. 

“Come on, Heather.” Mac leaned into Chandler. “Please!” 

“Just let her be the bitch.” Veronica sighed. 

“Veronica is right, Heather.” Duke said, earning a glare from Chandler. She met the glare, not backing down. “Please.” She scoffed, smirking a little. “Heather already had you in her back pocket, it was just a matter of time.”

“It’s true.” Mac nodded. She whispered something into Chandler’s ear that made Chandler’s cheeks turn slightly pink. “I had you on the ropes.” She said at full volume. 

“So who are the rest of us gonna be?” Duke asked. “I don’t want to be the dead one.” 

“No one wants to be the dead one!” Veronica had to struggle to keep her voice down. 

“Veronica has to be Rebecca Gayheart.” Mac said quickly. “She’s the tallest, and so is Julie.” She looked between Duke and Chandler. “One of you has to be the dead one.”

Chandler and Duke stared each other down for what felt like almost a full minute before Chandler spoke. 

“I sure as hell am not going to be Foxy.” She said confidently. “So I guess I’ll be the murder victim.”

“You’d rather be dead than Foxy?” Veronica asked, unable to keep the laughter out of her voice. 

“I just figure that at some point during the night, you guys are going to have to carry my limp body around during the party.” Chandler shrugged. “And I, for one, think that sounds very fun.” 

“Oh yeah, we’re definitely gonna haul you around!” Mac nodded excitedly. “We have to make you a jawbreaker lump and everything!”

“Well, now that we have that settled,” Chandler snatched Duke’s worksheet from her and began to look it over. “Let’s get this assignment done.”

“How many times have you guys even watched Jawbreaker?”

. .

Signing up to chaperone kids while they go trick or treating turned out to be a better idea than Veronica had originally thought. The rules were simple, each chaperone was to be assigned four kids, sent out with their group for two hours, then had to return their four kids to the adult in charge. She didn’t even have to deal with parents, and it was even encouraged for groups to go together. 

“I can’t believe that this was basically a two hour walk through the neighborhood with my friends.” Veronica asked Chandler for clarification as she and her group joined The Heathers’. “It can’t possibly be this easy.”

“It is.” Chandler nodded, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jacket. “All we have to do is not die of frostbite.”

“I told you to bring mittens.” Mac said, turning around. She had been walking a little ways in front of the group and had to walk backward to show off the thick, yellow mittens she was wearing. They each had a little, red triceratops on them. 

“Yes, I know, but I didn’t listen, so here we are.” Chandler rolled her eyes. 

“I wore mine.” Duke said from Chandler’s other side. She showed off her own pair of mittens, they were green with bears on them. “You should have worn yours.” She looked at Chandler with a smirk. “Your Nana worked so hard on them.”

“Your Nana made you all mittens?” Veronica couldn’t help but laugh a little at the thought. She couldn’t picture what Heather Chandler’s grandmother was like. “That’s adorable.”

“Yeah, her Nana’s pretty cool.” Duke shrugged. “She’s way better than my grandma.”

“What’s wrong with your grandma?” Veronica asked. If Duke’s grandmother was anything like her mother, she could understand why Duke didn’t care for her.

“She’s really sweet, but also really religious.” Duke replied as they stopped outside of a group of houses. “When she came to America, she got really into Jesus. And she’s really hateful about the weirdest stuff. Like she’ll go off about women with short hair and we always have to be like ‘What would Jesus say about you having so much hate in your heart?’ And then she gets all teary eyed.”

Veronica frowned. “I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that.” 

“Her grandma doesn’t even look at me whenever I’m around her.” Mac added. 

“That’s because she hates the Irish.” Duke shrugged. “I told you not to use your last name when you first met her.”

“I was nine. She threw a potato at me before asking me if I liked being a part of the IRA.” Mac grimaced. 

“This is really putting a lot of pieces of the puzzle together.” Veronica laughed. “It just explains so much.” She turned to Chandler. “Please tell us more about your Nana that knits you and your friends adorable mittens.”

“Hers have stars on them.” Duke smiled. 

Chandler sighed. “She’s a ridiculously old and rickety lady who’s horrible to everyone except for me because I’m the baby of the family and I have the most pinchable cheeks of all her grandchildren. And my complexion is perfectly peaches and cream that she could just eat up.” She smiled a little. “I’m her favorite.” 

“Every answer brings more questions.” Veronica couldn’t help but laugh. 

Veronica watched as their groups of kids returned to the four of them with grins on their painted up faces. The smallest one, a girl who was dressed as a witch, ran up to Veronica. 

“They gave me two pieces!” She said with a smile that showed off her lost tooth. “Do you want the other one?”

Veronica felt her heart break a little at how cute this kid was. “That’s so sweet of you!” She took a fun sized candy bar from the little girl’s hand and gestured to another group of houses. “We should try and hit as many houses as possible before we have to get you to your parents. Don’t you want a huge haul?”

The little girl and the rest of the group all nodded. 

“Then we’d better motor!” Mac announced, bouncing a little on the balls of her feet. 

The kids cheered as Veronica and The Heathers led them toward the next group of houses. 

“We need to think about heading back soon. We don’t want the kids to be late.” Chandler said. 

“Good, every minute I spend not watching the first or second Scream is a minute wasted.” Mac said, earning a nod from Duke. 

“And I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Duke added. 

“Do you guys just really like movies that have Sarah Michelle Gellar in them?” Veronica asked. 

“We love SMG.” Chandler said. “Heather changed her house’s voicemail to ‘Omega Beta Zeta, you’ve reached The McNamaras.’”

“My dad still hasn’t noticed.” Mac grinned, turning around as their groups ran up to them. “Whatcha guys get? Anything good?” 

Veronica watched in horror as the children slowly pulled toothbrushes out of their candy sacks. “Now that’s just awful.” She said. 

“People like that need to be stopped.” Chandler said, crossing her arms. “What do you guys say we head back to the school? Maybe hit some houses we might have missed on the way back?”

The kids let out a little cheer before heading off in the school’s direction. Veronica and The Heathers trailed behind them, they were chattering about how excited to get back to Mac’s place. Veronica listened as they walked, she’d normally love to join them, but when she’d asked her parents if she could go over, they’d told her that just because it was a holiday didn’t mean it wasn’t a school night. Her curfew was still in effect unfortunately. 

They made it back to the school a few minutes before eight and filled out their child return paperwork. It almost felt like they were returning books at the library. Except instead of a fine for a late return, she would be suspended and probably charged with child endangerment. 

“Your parents said it was okay for you to come to Kurt’s party, right?” Chandler asked while Duke and Mac turned their children in. “Because we’ll look really fucking stupid without you.”

“Don’t worry.” Veronica said, leaning against the lockers. “My mom was actually kind of worried that I’d be depressed and lonely because Martha’s gonna be out of town this weekend. And my dad just kept reminding me to call him if anything happens and that I wouldn’t get in trouble if I did.”

“You know that’s a lie, right?” Chandler crossed her arms. “That’s what they always say, then you call them and next thing you know, you’re grounded into next month after being screamed at for an hour straight.” She let out a humorless laugh. “Not the kind of family bonding I was hoping for.”

Veronica almost told Chandler that her parents, unlike Chandler’s, were good and normal parents. Almost. Instead she just hummed an acknowledgement. “I’ll keep that in mind.” 

Chandler nodded. “I look ridiculous in my costume, by the way.” She said after glancing toward Mac and Duke. “Heather’s lucky she’s cute, otherwise I would not have agreed to be a murder victim wearing skimpy pajamas for Halloween.” 

Veronica smiled a little at that. “What did you want to be?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Chandler shrugged. “It was Heather’s turn to pick.”

“You guys are kinda cute, you know.” Veronica gently shoved Chandler’s shoulder.

“Of course we are.” Chandler scoffed. “Don’t let it get around though, we’ve got a reputation.”

“Cross my heart.”

. .

Stepping into Kurt Kelly’s Halloween party was awkward to say the least, and not just because their terrible date was still in the back of Veronica’s mind. It was mostly due to Heather Chandler’s insistence that she, the dead body of the group, should be carried into the house like it happened in the movie. So there Veronica was holding Chandler’s legs, while Mac supported her middle and Duke had her under the arms, hobbling up to Kurt Kelly’s front door just so Chandler could get the entrance she wanted. 

It was so dramatic and stupid that Veronica didn’t even really mind it. 

People turned to watch them as they carried Chandler over the threshold and into the house. A few guys wolf whistled at them as they hobbled by, Veronica was sure it was more due to Chandler’s outfit, or lack thereof. The girl she was dressed as only wore a pair of panties and a tank top in the scene Veronica and The Heathers were recreating, and Chandler was definitely going for accuracy with her outfit. It had taken the combined efforts of Veronica and the other Heathers to convince Chandler to wear a pair of flesh colored tights,

“Aren’t you glad you wore those tights?” Duke grunted as she readjusted her gip. “It’s cold as fuck outside and you’re basically in a tanktop and panties.”

“Shut up, I’m supposed to be dead.” Chandler replied, not opening her eyes.

“Then stop wiggling.” Veronica demanded, trying to maintain her grip on Chandler’s legs. “When can we put you down? I swear, you are the worst murder victim ever.”

“I don’t mind carrying her.” Mac said, she was smirking a little. 

“That’s because your hand hasn’t left my ass since you guys picked me up.” Chandler snapped. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

“I swear to god I’m going to drop you if you don’t shut up.” Duke groaned. 

“So, uh, what’re you supposed to be?” Kurt asked, approaching with a tray of jello shots. Veronica had no idea what his costume was supposed to be, but it involved being shirtless. “No wait, let me guess... You’re...” He paused and took a closer look at Chandler’s neck. “What the fuck is on your neck?”

“It’s a jawbreaker.” Chandler replied, kicking her legs a little. “Veronica, put me down.” 

Veronica obliged and dropped Chandler’s legs so she could stand up fully. The giant lump on her throat was unsettling due to the amount of time Chandler had spent making it look as real as possible. She looked like a real choking victim. 

“Well, you ladies look great.” Kurt said, not taking his eyes off Chandler. “Maybe I’ll be able to unmask you later? See the woman beneath the costume...?”

It had to have taken all of Chandler’s self control not to vomit all over Kurt at that line. He must have been thinking of that since before the party. 

“Anyway,” Kurt continued, shoving the jello shots forward. “You all need a jello shot! I made them myself!”

Veronica almost scowled at the memory of her first jello shot, but took one anyway. Maybe this time she wouldn’t end up spilling half of it down her face. “Thanks, Kurt.” She said as he wandered away, offering his shots to anyone with an open hand. “How the hell do I eat this thing without spilling all over myself?”

Mac laughed and took Veronica’s shot out of her hand. “First you have to loosen the mold.” She said, squeezing the shot container before passing it back to Veronica. “Then you either use your finger or your tongue to guide it into your mouth and slurp it into your mouth.”

“You could use a spoon too, but then you’d have to make the walk of shame to the kitchen.” Chandler supplied before downing her shot. “I use my tongue because I don’t want to have to deal with having a mess on my hands.”

Duke followed suit. “Same here, but you might want to try using your finger for your first real try.” She looked like she was trying not to laugh. 

Mac rolled her eyes. “Just finger the shot a little, it’ll loosen it up.” She started poking at her own shot to demonstrate. “Once you have it nice and loose from the fingering, you tilt your head back and just let it slide down your throat.” She downed the shot quickly before smiling. “See? One day, you’ll be able to just do it with your tongue, but you need to get used to it.”

Veronica did as Mac instructed and poked her shot probably a little too roughly before tipping her head back and letting it slide into her mouth. It tasted a lot better than the first one she’d taken, that was for sure. And she didn’t lose half of the shot either. It still tasted like crap though.

“Kurt cannot make a jello shot to save his life.” Duke said with a shake of her head. 

“It’s because he doesn’t let them cool long enough.” Chandler said, linking arms with Veronica and pulling her toward the backyard while the others followed. “They don’t set properly and they start to separate.” 

“And it’s gross.” Duke scowled. 

“Where are we going?” Veronica asked. 

“We’re going to the keg!” Mac grinned, throwing an arm around Duke. “Gotta get this party started!”

Kurt’s Halloween party was very similar to the party at Ram’s house earlier in the year, except everyone was in some kind of costume. There had to be at least fourteen Batmans running around and twice as many girls dressed as cats, what surprised Veronica the most was how many bumble bees there were wandering around. She didn’t know that was a popular costume at all, and yet there they were. 

“There are a lot of bees.” Mac said, passing Veronica a red solo cup. 

“And Batmans.” Veronica nodded, taking a big swig of her beer and scowling. It was god awful. “Will beer ever taste better?”

“No.” Duke shook her head. “It’ll always taste like death. Sorry. Don’t worry, though, we’re not staying here all night.”

“What’re we doing after this?” Veronica asked. “A seance in a graveyard? Break into an abandoned house?”

“First off,” Chandler said with a scoff. “Did you learn all of your pastimes from teen movies?” Veronica’s cheeks heated up a little. “Second of all, it’s not even actually Halloween, so spooky shit isn’t even really on the table at this point. We’re going to take advantage of my parents being away and after-party at mine.” 

“Oh cool.” Veronica nodded. “How come we’re here then?”

“Because I look fucking good.” Chandler gestured to her outfit. “And it would be a waste not to show off a little.” She took a sip of her beer. 

“Why didn’t you throw a party then?” Veronica asked. “You’d be able to take advantage of your parents being out, and show off.”

“I don’t want all these people at my house.” Chandler replied, gesturing around her. Everything was a huge mess already, there was trash everywhere and someone was vomiting in a decorative vase. “Look what they’re doing here. I don’t want that at my house. I’d be the one who has to clean it up!” She looked disgusted at the thought. 

“And I don’t want to have to help you.” Duke added, grimacing when a junior boy ran into the room shouting. 

“Heather!” He pointed at the group. “Down in one!” 

The phrase inspired everyone around them to start chanting. “Down in one! Down in one!”

Mac shrugged and tipped her head back, finishing her drink in one gulp. She gave Duke a little shove. 

Duke rolled her eyes and followed suit, looking to Chandler when she was done. “Down in one, Heather.” 

Chandler wrinkled her nose and finished her drink. This earned a large cheer from everyone before they went back to their own business. 

“I hate that.” Chandler scowled, filling her cup again. 

“What’d Kurt even get, PBR?” Mac passed her cup to Chandler for it to be filled again. 

“I don’t know how you can even tell, all beer tastes like asparagus piss.” Duke grumbled as she held her own cup out for a refill. 

Veronica’s nose wrinkled at that. “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, Heather.” She said. “Congrats.”

Duke raised her cup in a mock salute with a dry smile. “Glad to be of service.”

The party was pumping and it looked like Kurt and Ram were being kept entertained by a pair of cheerleaders. Or a pair of girls who were dressed as cheerleaders. Those two seemed to be the only two guys at the school who felt confident enough to approach The Heathers, so they were mostly left alone during the party. This allowed them to do shots without someone making a blow job joke, Veronica had even been able to watch Duke do a body shot off of Chandler without having to hear a threesome joke being made. By a guy at least.

“I would love to get in the middle of that.” Mac muttered, Veronica assumed it was to herself. 

“I don’t think there’s anything stopping you.” 

. .

Veronica stumbled into Chandler’s house, her legs sort of felt like jelly and she had to use Mac and Duke for support. She was definitely drunk, she’d done a lot of tequila shots at Kurt’s party, it took her a few tries to remember what order she was supposed to do them in. Just the thought made her break down in a fit of giggles. 

“What’s so funny?” Mac asked with a little smile as she and Duke started to drag Veronica up the stairs. 

“I don’t know how to drink tequila.” Veronica giggled, putting all of her weight on Mac. “How c-come I’m just... so thrashed and you’re not?”

“Because you insisted on taking shots until you got it right.” Chandler said as she locked the front door. “Do you want to borrow some pajamas?”

Veronica laughed again. “I-I never got the shots right... d-did I?” She paused. “Salt, lime, shot. Right?”

“Wrong.” Duke grunted. “Why is it that I’m stuck carrying people around all night? First Heather and now Veronica? Next year, I’m the one who’s getting carried around.”

“What am I, a pack mule?” Mac muttered. 

Veronica was led into a spare bedroom before Mac and Duke all but threw her onto the bed. “Aren’t you supposed to buy me dinner before you take me to bed?” She giggled. 

“Do you want some pajamas or not?” Chandler demanded. “I’m not asking three times.”

“Why do I need pajamas?” Veronica asked, trying to sit up before falling back down again. “Whoops.” She giggled at that. “We’re supposed to be after-partying!” She sat back up and threw her hands in the air.

“I’m going to push you back down and if you can sit up again, we’ll after-party.” Mac said before shoving Veronica’s forehead back. 

The rest of her body followed head and she fell back onto the bed. She tried to get back up, but every part of her, not just her legs, felt like jelly. Besides the bed was so comfortable, there was no point in getting back up. 

“I live here now.” Veronica mumbled, closing her eyes. “This is my life.”

“Heather, go get a big t-shirt from my dresser.” Chandler sighed. “We’re gonna have to get her into some pajamas or she’ll bitch about it in the morning.” 

The last thing Veronica heard before she fell asleep was Duke and Mac agreeing before a door slammed shut. 

#heather chandler #heather duke #heather mcnamara #veronica sawyer #chandlamara #mcduke #chanduke #the heathers #my writes #7000 words for this chapter #almost double my last one #can you tell that I had a lot more fun doing writing this chapter than I had with the other one?

[intruality-overlord]

Why Are We (Best) Friends?

Warnings: Excessive swearing, alcoholism, mentions of drugs, drug use, suggestive humour, implied sexual content (no smut), some gore descriptions. Generally, Remus stuff.

Taglist: @blogging-time @veraisnotfine @littlestr @jessibbb @ibroken-butterflyi @hi-its-tutty @idkanameatall

Let me know do you want to be added or removed from the taglist! Updates every Wednesday/Thursday. Don’t worry I’m posting the second half of this chapter later today cause it’s too long all in one part and Tumblr doesn’t seem to like it when I post stuff too close together. So have the fun with the fluffy part!

Chapter Three 1/2: Duck

Loosen Up

May 26th, 2017.

Tiny little sips did Patton take, swishing the liquid around before swallowing each drop. Cautious. Procrastinating. Remus rolled his eyes.

“Why are you so embarrassed? I’ve seen you so drunk that if you weren’t a figment of imagination, the police could have been outlining your dead body in chalk the next morning. You don’t have anything to be shy about,” he said. Patton glared at him. “That’s exactly what’s so embarrassing!” He shrieked. “It’s bad enough knowing that happened! I don’t want a repeat!”

“That’s the whole point of this, Pat. I’m here so you don’t get completely pissed like that again. And if you do, I’ll stop you from being stupid.”

…

“I’m always stupid,” Patton mumbled into his next sip. Albeit, it was a slightly bigger sip. Remus would have argued with Patton, but he hadn’t planned a heart to heart and felt rather unprepared. At least he knew Patton had already drunk enough to not think too hard about what he was saying. Baby steps.

Turned out the snowball effect settled in soon after that. The more Patton drank the less he thought to regulate himself so he drank more. Remus discovered that night that Patton became efficiently, drunkenly relaxed at five cans of… whatever collection of concoctions Patton had mixed up.

“Wait Wait Wait Wait Wait! If I’m a figment of Thomas’s imagination, but you’re Thomas’s imagination, does that mean you could, like, make me,” Patton made a charade of what would have resembled an explosion if he still had his fine motor skills intact, “poof? If you wanted?”

Patton had had six cans and was on his seventh.

Remus blinked at him. There was some semblance of sense in that thinking, and Remus did love a good “what if?” question. “I don’t know...” he said. “Why don’t you try?!” Patton exclaimed, bouncing in his seat. Remus for a split second thought of how adorable Patton’s excitement was—

“Hell no!” He snapped. Patton whined. Sulking, he flopped back down in his chair like a voodoo doll that had just been angrily launched into a wall. “You’re s’posed to be fun!” Patton chugged the rest of his can and didn’t bother to put it down. Instead, it just toppled and rolled out of his lax grasp.

“If it worked then you wouldn’t exist anymore!”

“So?”

Remus also discovered that Patton’s attitude was just as bad as Virgil’s. At least Remus knew his limits now for future reference.

“Well if you stopped existing you wouldn’t know if it worked or not because you wouldn’t exist,” Remus reasoned, and he wanted to scrub his tongue with soapy sandpaper.

“...What if we tried it on Roman?”

“Damn you, that’s tempting.”

Multimedia

August 30th, 2017.

“Heya Remus—” Out of all the anarchy encapsulated in the room, Patton instantly fixated on the razor. The blade devilishly glinted. Patton glared at the offending mustache slayer.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Patton! I was just—“

“Leave the moustache alone!” Patton pounced, lunging for the shaver, and Remus shrieked a very manly shriek. Plumes of white flew free from Remus’s fringe in the kerfuffle. “Your mustache is special and perfect just the way it is!” Patton said. Wrestling the razor from Remus’s grip, which on further inspection was definitely for shaving your legs and not facial hair, and confiscated it.

“I know!”

What?

“That’s why I need it for my self portrait!”

What?

What looked like very grainy flour caught in Remus’s fringe made it appear silver, enhancing the pearly whites that split his lips into a beaming grin. Patton swore his teeth looked slightly pointier than usual. Each syllable rolled around Remus’s tongue exaggeratedly long before he spat it out. And the crazed look in his eyes looked especially crazed, circled in red like a big mistake.

Oh, he’s high.

Wait, what?

Hooking an arm around Patton’s, a stark gentlemanly contrast to Remus’s distinctly wild hair, bloodshot eyes and suddenly apparent absence of a three piece suit, and yanked Patton to stand before his work in progress.

“I’d ask what you think, but it’s not quite finished,” he said, giddy.

Paint was splattered all across the canvas.

And across the floor, and the walls, and the ceiling, and after spending five minutes in the room Patton somehow had some too. (Remus was always more of a catcher than a thrower. Terrible aim.) Focusing on an individual area, it looked like a nonsensical mess. There were handprints, globs of textured brush strokes, and scratch marks. Acrylic and watercolour paints with salt adding texture. Swatches of silk, sprinkles of glitter. The only orderly aspect of the piece was the fact it stuck strictly to a dominantly green colour pallet with accents of blue. Even so, there were hints of pinks, yellows, and purple. Tasteful hints, mind you. Oh, there’s some red, too—

“Is that blood?”

“A happy little accident involving a blunt pallet knife. That’s all.”

As a whole, though, when you stepped back it clearly was Remus’s self portrait. Amongst all the chaos, his outline was clear and confident. Insane smile and all. (Except for his moustache, which seemed to be the final missing piece.)

Patton looked closer. Woven in were more intricate details. Passages from Alice In Wonderland and Little Shop Of Horrors (“You love her madly, don’t you, shmuck” was one he picked out)— other books, musicals, and movies Patton couldn’t name— fit seamlessly into the collage. Everything was written in different, swirly fonts or magazine clippings.

Then he looked even closer. Patton squinted.

“Is that fucking dick glitter?”

“Green and blue duochrome dick glitter!”

It was the most accurate self portrait Patton had ever seen (or ever would). A massacre of common sense. It was his internal tumultuous frenzy in a visual medium. A celebration of self love in a uniquely Remus way.

“I’d frame that and put it on the fridge,” Patton said genuinely. Remus preened. “It’s… exceptional, really.”

But did Remus really have to sacrifice his adorable face caterpillar for it?

“I can’t wait to add the finishing touches!”

“Are you really going to put your own moustache on it?”

Remus burst into rambling only a select few could comprehend. Sentences clumsily overlapped each other as Remus spilled the direct translation of his thought process. And within that mess, the words were crushed like a Pepsi can (Yes, Remus could taste the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Yes, he purposefully drinks only Pepsi), squishing the vowels out of existence. In Patton’s case, though, he was able to translate the garbled soup of consonants roughly to, “One does not simply soil the sacred authenticity of multimedia!”

“Can’t you just...” Patton shrugged. “I don’t know— use some fake fur or something instead?” He argued.

“Ugh,” Remus grunted, “That sounds like something Roman would do. His art is so flat and boring! Always so play it safe, never experiments,” He ranted passionately, throwing his arms in all directions. “And there’s never enough glitter!” He scoffed. Pent up energy drove him in stomping circles. “Too much glitter makes it look childish,” he said, tone swinging into a mock impression. “There’s no such thing as too much glitter! I don’t care if it gets everywhere. I’d happily leave glitter stuck in my teeth rather than some stupid, diet of the week salad! And Roman wants to claim he’s the gayer one?! Huh, bullshit.”

Patton checked if his ears hadn’t conked out. They screeched like microphone feedback. (His ears and Remus.)

“Roman’s such a bitch— I fucking hate him so goddamn fucking much, the cunt.” Remus thrust his hand into the nearest paint can, and readied the colourful grenade.

Patton grabbed his wrist, hastily. Globs of acrylic paint slipped from his fist, reuniting with a green puddle soaked into the carpet.

“Uh-um,” Patton cut in, improvising a distraction, “Why don’t we have a drink and watch, uh... ah, um— Ratatouille?” Fizzing with nerves, Patton cracked a hopeful smile. One Remus couldn’t help mimicking. “A drink of water!” Patton quickly corrected, “and Ratatouille.”

(“Giggle water?”

“Emu, no.”)

“I love that movie!” Remus said, clapping his hands. More green sprayed them in Remus’s brazen excitement.

It worked. Patton breathed a quick sigh of relief.

Beaming, he cupped Patton’s face in his cold, sticky, stained hands. “You always have such good ideas!” Remus gushed. That was a rare, rare compliment. Patton's face blazed. For a second he was sure the paint would evaporate from his skin.

No, his wine red complexion was hidden.

Green handprints drying on his cheeks, Patton watched the movie with Remus just like that. After, Remus finished the painting properly. Instant grief followed shaving his moustache. But when he grew it back, he was ultimately happy with the results.

Next Chapter:

#WAW(B)F? #sander sides #thomas sanders #ts sander sides #sanders sides #patton sanders #ts patton #remus sanders #ts remus #intruality #moduke

[ladyreapermc]

Fic: This isn’t a rom-com 14/17

Author’s notes: we’re getting closer to the end. I’m thinking I’m just gonna post the last three chapters daily so it can end on Monday. Also I wrote two possible finales for this and I still have no clue each one to go for. Make your bets on what’s gonna happen!

Summary: Keanu and Lilah meet at the set of John Wick. Rom-com shenanigans ensues

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6  Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13

Wordcount: 2385

Warnings: a lot of yearning, a tiny bit of angst, but nothing too serious.

As Keanu stepped into the airplane that would take him to Tokyo, his chest felt tight and heavy and his head was a jumble of confused thoughts. He knew he wouldn’t get a wink of sleep the entire flight. Not that he ever managed to sleep in red eyes anyway, but in any other situation he would at least be able to distract himself with the book he brought along or with inflight movies. Tonight, Keanu knew the only thing he would manage to do was think about Lilah and the fight they had.  

This was the one thing he did not miss about relationships, about letting people that close to him. The ability they gained to hurt him. Not that Keanu didn’t do his fair share of hurting. He was quite aware he had been very petty bringing Pierce into the entire mess, but Keanu just couldn’t help himself. He lashed out when he was scared and when she mentioned Oxford, terror and dread overtook him.

They had known each other for about two months. Had been dating, really dating, for not even a month properly, but the thought of losing Lilah was terrifying. Right now, just knowing that he would be away from her for a few days, especially with all the uncertainty that hung over them, made Keanu feel like he left a piece of himself behind in New York. No matter what he did, he couldn’t shake that feeling.

He let out a heavy sigh, making the person sitting next to him look over. He just flashed a quick smile of apology and went back to stare out of the window of the plane. Keanu still couldn’t believe he was this hopeless in love with her after such a short time.

Sure, he realized his feelings had been running deeper than just infatuation that first night they argued about her father, but he didn’t really realize he was in it this deep. Not until tonight.

Keanu should have been more careful. He should have been smarter than this. He had been here before. He had given his whole heart and it had been wrenched out of his chest, smashed and torn, leaving him reeling and barely able to function.

When he picked himself up from that mess, Keanu promised he wouldn’t allow himself to fall like that again. He had been mostly successful at it; keeping his shields up and people would eventually turn away. There was always affection and care for whoever Keanu decided to date, but he never let it progress into something else. He had that pattern fine-tuned down to an art in the last decade. Sometimes it felt as natural as breathing.  

He still couldn’t quite understand how Lilah managed to break through that. It took Keanu by surprise, but not really. He saw the warning signs and had every opportunity to turn away, but he didn’t. Because Lilah had been such a breath of fresh air with her honesty and openness and earnestness. With the way that she never asked of him more than he was willing or ready to give. How she accepted him and liked him for what he was, not what she wanted him to be or something she made up in her head. Not many people did that, and Keanu found himself letting his walls down just enough for Lilah to sneak under the wire and lodged herself so deep it suddenly felt like she had always been there and he was just discovering it like a buried treasure.

And now Keanu was scared shitless because he didn’t want to lose her, but he didn’t know what to do either. Because part of him wanted to be with her no matter the cost. That hopeless dreamer that he thought he had lost so long ago didn’t care about the damn age gap or what the rest of the world would think of it. Keanu would move to New York or England or wherever the hell she wanted, if that’s what it took. Because he needed Lilah in his life.

The saner part of him, the one who had loved and lost knew it wasn’t healthy, not for himself and not for Lilah. This part of him knew that he couldn’t interfere with this choice in any way, at least not any more than he already did by offering to pay tuition and helping her through it. Keanu shouldn’t even have done that. He had hadn’t been aware of the weight her father’s wishes had on Lilah’s decision. The second he pushed her Keanu wasn’t being any better than her father was. And that was the last thing he wanted.

At the same time, the thought of Lilah giving up something that was obviously her dream broke his heart and every fiber of his being was screaming him to fix it; to make it better. Because he loved her, and it killed him to see her hurting like this. But Keanu knew that wasn’t what Lilah needed. She didn’t need a hero. Someone to fix things for her. She needed someone to be there for her, no matter what. So that was what Keanu was going to be. The supporting partner she needed, even if the uncertainty of her choice was almost driving him crazy.

With a new sigh, Keanu picked up his book from his jacket pocket, snorting at the cover. He had left home in such a hurry that he forgot the book he had separated to take with him so he stopped by at the airport bookstore to pick something else. The second he laid his eyes on this, he knew he needed to take it. It was Keanu's way to stay close to Lilah even miles apart.

He settled a little more comfortably on his seat and started reading The Shining. Keanu went through almost half before his eyes demanded a break and he put it aside again, smiling because he could almost hear her at every page; her thoughts on this or that scene. She had gone into a lengthy discussion on this book and Stephen King’s work in general, as well as her love for horror books and movies. He had never really thought about it as she did, as an exploration of the human psyche. It was an interesting take.

When he finally landed in Tokyo, Keanu fought the urge to call Lilah, check how she was doing. This was the moment to give her space, let her come up with her answer on her own. Instead, he decided for a text to let her know he arrived safely. He did the same for the rest of his family as he headed to his hotel.

Keanu was exhausted, physically and emotionally and as soon as he got to his room he pretty much passed out. He couldn’t remember the last time he slept for eight hours straight in the past few months, but he woke up to the sound of his phone, his publicist name flashing on the screen. It was time to get ready for the first round of photocall and interviews.

The thing Keanu hated the most about doing press for a movie premiere was that there were always so many things happening at once. He would come out of something and head straight into another with barely enough time to eat or have a smoke or check his phone. And that was how most of his days in Tokyo went in the time he had there. He only managed one afternoon free and he used it to buy some gifts for his friends and family.

Despite all, Keanu really enjoyed the trip. He had always been much fonder of Eastern culture and philosophy than Western. It was also quite nice to meet his fellow cast members for 47 Ronin again. As well as the director. Debuting the film in Japan, considering it was a tale of Japanese culture just felt fitting. The right kind of homage.

But as he headed to the airport at the end of his fourth day, Keanu was anxious to get back since he couldn’t get his head out of New York. Part of it was his worry about how much he was hindering John Wick’s production by being away. Even if it was just for a week. Chad and Dave assured him that they had come up with a plan, so they wouldn’t get too behind schedule and both of them understood that this was the sort of commitment that Keanu couldn’t say no, but he was still worried.

Keanu also couldn’t wait to get back to Lilah, see how she was and if she made up her mind about anything yet. Since they were in such different time zones and his schedule had been so full, they hadn’t managed to speak directly to each other. Only a few text messages throughout the day and he hated it. Apparently, he had grown used to their daily phone calls.  

He settled in one of the seats in the airport lounge, leaning his head back and closing his eyes as he heaved a long sigh as he waited for his flight to start boarding. Keanu was exhausted. All he wanted was to sleep. Fortunately, his publicist managed to book him a better flight this time, but he was probably gonna get to New York in the middle of the night. He was almost drifting off when he got a call from Karina. Doing a quick calculation on his head, Keanu winced at how early she must be up to be calling him.

“How come I had to hear from Kim that you’re dating someone?” she asked as soon as he picked up and Keanu rolled her eyes fondly at his baby sister.

“Well, hello to you too dear sister. How are you doing? I’m good, thanks for asking.”

“Oh, screw that!” she said with a huff. “Just give me the details because all Kim told me was that you met her at the set, was head over heels and being an idiot about telling how you felt.”

Keanu chuckled, pushing his hair away from his face. He really needed to call home more often. They were both a little out of the loop.

“I can’t talk much,” he said with a quick glance around. Everyone seemed to be minding their own businesses, but Keanu knew that didn’t mean anything. “So yes or no questions.”

“Fine,” Karina huffed. “She’s an aspiring actress?”

“No.”

“Good. She’s probably not dating you to advance her own career,” she said, and Keanu let out a long sigh, his argument with Lilah coming to mind.

“Definitely not that.”

They went back and forth with a few questions, Keanu chuckling slightly at Karina’s growing frustration, but he wasn’t crazy to talk about his personal business in a crowded airport. Even if he was in a private area.

“I wanna see her,” Karina said, and he winced. Keanu should’ve known that was coming. “Come on. Pictures. I know you have them”.

With a sigh, he pulled his phone away from his ear to browse his gallery, trying to pick one picture of Lilah to send Karina. Keanu smiled to himself because he noticed he had quite a few. She was fond of sending random selfies, which he really appreciated.

He picked the one they took on the mirror, maybe his favorite picture of them so far and sent it to Karina.

“She’s beautiful,” Karina said after a moment’s pause. Keanu smiled and just hummed in agreement. “Way out of your league.”

“If you’re gonna be an ass I’m gonna hang up,” he threatened with a snort.

“No, no!” she said chuckling. “I liked her Matrix shirt.”

“Me too,” he admitted with a smile. Keanu had really loved to see her with that shirt. Almost as much as he liked seeing her in one of his.

“Oh, man! You’re so in love!” she teased, and Keanu could feel himself blushing. He lowered his head, letting his hair block his face from view. “I can hear it in your voice. I can see in your face in that picture.”

“Yes,” Keanu breathed out. There was no point in pretending otherwise. His family knew him too well anyway.

“She makes you happy?”

“Very,” he said with a smile and he could hear his sister smiling on the other side too, as well as his phone beeping to signal low battery.

“Good. That’s all we all care about. You know that, right?”

“I know,” Keanu said, noticing his flight was about to board. “I gotta go. Talk to you when I get home.”

The flight back went a little better. Keanu actually managed to nap a little, but every inch of him felt stiff and ached when he finally landed in New York. His phone had died mid-flight and since he didn’t really want to give the entire airport a view of his dirty laundry by digging through his carry-on for his charger, Keanu hailed a cab instead of calling the car service he usually used.

The driver was a nice guy who recognized him immediately and asked for an autograph, which he didn’t have the heart to refuse. When the man asked for his destination, Keanu hesitated, checking the time before letting his impulsive side win over. He gave the driver Lilah’s address. It was late and he should be heading home, but he spent five days without seeing her. Keanu needed this.

Jean looked really surprised when she opened the door to see Keanu standing there and he gave her a sheepish smile.

“I’m sorry about the hour. Is Lilah…”

“You didn’t get her voicemail, did you?” she asked, her expression shifting into a grimace and Keanu’s heart stopped in panic.

“My phone died. What happened? Where’s Lilah?”

“Her brother was in a car accident,” Jean explained. “She left for Miami earlier tonight.”

A lot of feelings went through Keanu at once: relief that nothing happened to Lilah herself, worry for how she must be. From what all her stories, she was really close to her brother, but the thing that was stronger was the need to get to her. Make sure she was ok.

“Can I borrow your phone?”

x(tbc)x

Go to part 15

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[youre-in-the-jungle-baby]

@arnold-layne you posted that little idea about vince being dyslexic and i started writing (and it ended up off topic and a little out of hand, but i tried) <3

At some point Vince had stopped giving a fuck about school, it was just too frustrating trying to manage it all, and he hated reading because he was dyslexic, studying never really got him anywhere.

He meets Tommy for real the first time after school when he goes for a smoke behind the bleachers and the sports field, before that he had only seen him in a few of his classes- always the loud one cracking jokes.

They start hanging out after school, and they end up having a lot to talk about since they both like similar music.

Tommy introduces him to Nikki, who Vince had never paid much attention to, the moody looking kid who sat in the back of their literature class and scribbled on his desk and every free inch of his notebook with doodles and words that he can never quite read from a distance (not that he would ever want to sit down and read through the chicken scratch that seems to pour out of his pen).

It’s their own weird little group that seems to develop, they blast music and drive around in Nikki’s beat up car that Vince was hesitant to get into the first time, he’s pretty sure the doors are gonna fall off at any given moment.

It turns out they all know Mick, the guy who owns little record store they frequent. He’s a few years older than them, but he seems to like to watch out for them too, talking to them whenever they float in and out of the store.

Nikki had, of course, met him when he had tried to steal records, and neither Vince nor Tommy can get him to spill what happened, but he has an odd respect for Mick, and needless to say, he’s never tried to lift anything out of the store since. Instead, he prefers to go there to escape any shit that happens at home, Mick letting him camp out in the little back room before shoeing him out when he closes up.

Another thing they love about Mick is that he has a few guitars that he plays, and if they’ve all had a good week he’ll even spend some time showing them how to play, although Tommy seems more inclined to the drums with his constant tapping and fidgeting, and Vince quickly decides that guitar will not be his career path- his fingers just don’t seem to bend the right way.

They also get to listen to the records Mick lets them into, playing the used ones in the often empty store and he even leaves new ones from their favorite artists out sometimes, the boys are all broke.

In school, Vince has more and more trouble keeping up with his work, too frustrated most nights trying to go over his notes.

Of course, Mick somehow finds out and threatens to withhold their little music sessions (he’s only hoping they’ll focus more in school if they have a reward). This is easy enough for Tommy, a little effort in his classes goes a long way in his grades, but it's not so simple for Vince.

He gets caught up in the reading, and he’s never been very good at math, his notebooks have been thrown against the wall until they’re looking like shit and he stops trying to take notes in class.

By the next Friday, Vince is pissed, moody, and drawing back from his ragtag group without the promise of a record shop visit (Mick’s deal had specified that they *all* needed to work on their grades, and Nikki and Tommy are getting tired of him making them miss the fun so he can’t really hang out with them tonight either). He’s flunked another test and his parents don’t care, they don’t expect much of him, so he’s home alone feeling miserable.

Tommy knocks on his door, standing there looking like a lost puppy with his torn up backpack over one shoulder. Under normal circumstances, Vince would slam the door in his face on principle, but Tommy slips right in and goes to snoop through the kitchen.

Vince growls, but Tommy blows him off and drags him upstairs to his room. They sit down and Tommy digs out his Chemistry notebook, flips it open and starts reading his notes. Vince never really likes to talk about the fact reading his difficult for him, but obviously, Tommy is catching on as he spouts off his notes.

Vince is silently thankful, and listening to Tommy read this is all so much easier than having to read it himself, and Tommy is reasonably patient compared to Nikki, going back over sections and slowing down.

They eat a snack and take a break, arguing over what music to play, before Tommy quizzes him with note cards (made from torn up notebook paper, and Vince can appreciate the effort).

Tommy ends up staying pretty late, and for someone who fucks around in class, he’s got a surprisingly good record of what they’re doing in the classes they share.

When he leaves, Vince jumps up and gives him a rather awkward hug, because no ones did that for him, usually they just judge him for not being able to keep up in school. Tommy, of course, returns with a rib-crushing hug that has him on his toes (not that he would admit it, but he loves it).

Nikki shows up on Sunday, waving his English notebook around and muttering something about Tommy. It’s a bit more awkward, Nikki seems more on edge, but that could just be Nikki being Nikki.

Monday rolls around and they have a quiz in chemistry, and the next day Vince stares in awe at the 92% scrawled on his paper.

They all go to see Mick after school, Vince happily slapping down his quiz on the counter and grinning.

Mick looks pleased, and since its a slow night he lets them all mess around, singing along to records and lounging around behind the counter.

That's the night when Vince sings in front of them- for real this time, not in in the playful way they do when they’re in the car or fucking around in his room. Tommy stares at him and Nikki starts laughing, ‘Shit man, you might have something there, fuck playing guitar if you’ve got that voice.’

Even Mick looks up, eyebrow shooting up with a little smile.

Thursday night, Vince falls asleep with his head on Tommy’s shoulder as he reads from the book he’s supposed to read in literature. He wakes up the next morning alone, with the book on his nightstand and the blankets thrown over his legs. He passes the test the next day.

They spend Friday driving around town, Nikki driving and Tommy with his head out the backseat window, the pounding of the music oddly soothing to Vince with the smell of cigarettes hazy like the setting sun.

The weekend hits and they decide to go spend the first evening with Mick. When they get there, the door is locked and the lights are off. Which is strange because Mick seems to live in his little shop.

Nikki seems to least surprised, if not looking a little worried. Vince just thinks Mick might want a day off.

There’s not much to do, so they float back to their respective houses, Nikki dropping them off. He doesn’t talk the whole ride, ignoring Vince and Tommy snapping at each other.

Instead of going back home, Nikki drives to Mick’s house (Mick had given him his address the first time he had come to him with a black eye, one of his mom’s boyfriends not particularly fond of him, but more than happy to get drunk and show him how he really felt).

Mick doesn’t open the door when he rings the doorbell, and Nikki paces around his little porch. He knows that Mick hurts a lot and that they all forget that he’s not that much older than the rest of them, but he can see the way it all weighs on him. He doesn’t talk about it, just like Vince doesn’t talk about why he can never quite take his notes right in class.

He knocks again, and Mick opens a few minutes later, looking tired and hunched over. He lets Nikki come in, but he doesn’t say much other than to wave him over to the couch with a, ‘I’m fine kid, don’t worry about me.’

Nikki stays the night on the couch, because Mick doesn’t seem to mind, and he waits for him the next morning. He waits while his stomach growls because he hasn’t eaten since lunch yesterday until Mick cracks open the bedroom door and groans when he sees Nikki still on his couch.

He asks for the bottle of pills sitting on the counter, which Nikki scrambles to get. They end up sitting on the bed together, and Mick reluctantly tries to explain why he wasn’t there yesterday- and Nikki doesn’t really understand exactly what it is that Mick has, but whatever it is it sounds like hell, and Mick tells him he switched meds a few days and they weren't working as well, he hadn’t felt like coming in to open the record store.

Tommy and Vince end up spending the day together, and Tommy finishes another chapter of Vince’s book, and Tommy doesn’t want to go home (Vince’s parents are out of town again for the weekend). So they sit together and watch shity TV.

They watch a really bad horror movie that Vince manages to enjoy, and Tommy seems to get progressively more and more twitchy. At first, he thinks it's just the movie, or maybe he’s getting bored.

What he doesn’t expect him for Tommy to do is sit up, stare at him, then promptly lean in to kiss him. It’s short, no one had any time to really react and Vince jerks back in shock when Tommy leaps to his feet.

He looks like he might cry, squeaking something out about needing to leave and grabbing his jacket thrown over the back of the couch and he’s out the door before Vince can stop him.

#izzy writes #not guns n' roses #idk i just kept going #and this is way longer than i thought it would be lol #Motley Crue

[kee-writestrashh]

Soot & Healing Salve (part 2)

Charlie Weasley x Reader

warnings: none

words: 1352

summary: Charlie managed to finally get reader out for a lunch date, after weeks of trying to gain her attention by purposefully getting hurt while working with the dragons. After that, well, as people like to say ‘the rest was history’. *part 2 of 3*

part 1

“I can’t believe I have to miss it.” You pouted, handing Adam ingredients for the potion he was brewing.

“That’s the life of a mediwizard. I can’t tell you the last time I was off for the fun stuff. Tickets are damn near impossible to get a hold of anymore anyways.” Adam shrugged, flicking his wand slightly to turn down the radio a bit, after the World Cup commercial.

“Charlie is going and I’m stuck here.” You sighed, pulling out a clipboard, parchment, and your quill to check inventory for the order at the end of the week.

“I’ll bring you back something.” Charlie said, stepping into the medical tent. “You’ll be supporting Ireland then?”

“I’m from Boston, you bet your arse I’ll be supporting Ireland!” You said, leaning in slightly to let Charlie place a kiss to your cheek.

“While this dummy has hearts in her eyes, I should let you know, Commander approved us for the Triwizard emergency team.” Adam said, only slightly rolling his eyes at your flushed face and goofy grin.

“Oh yeah! That’s right! We turned in our paper work this morning!” You gasped, almost jumping up and down in excitement. “Hogwarts! Can you believe it?” You added, excitement evident.

“Wow! That’s great you guys!” Charlie exclaimed, grabbing your shoulders and giving you a small shake.

“I know!” You cried dramatically, mock fainting into Charlie.

“Alright love birds, take it somewhere else. This is a professional tent.” Adam chuckled, prodding the flame under his cauldron with his wand to turn up the heat slightly.

You ducked out of the tent with Charlie and walked with him to the apperation point, shoulders falling slightly as he turned to give you a hug. Still extremely bummed that you had to miss the World Cup. It hadn’t been hosted in the United States since you were a young child. You returned the hug, letting go slowly and taking a step back.

“have fun and be safe!” You smiled, placing a kiss to Charlie’s cheek.

“Me unsafe? You must have me for the wrong person. I would never dream of being unsafe!” Charlie said in mock horror.

You snorted, “Yeah, okay, Dragon Soot.”

You both shared a laugh before he took a few steps back and gave you a small wave and wink before turning on the spot and vanishing.

You had to admit, life was pretty quiet around without Charlie. Or maybe it was just that things were seeming to calm down now that dragon mating season was coming to a close. Regardless, you were glad to be able to catch your breath and relax.

Adam entered station and handed you a butterbeer. You popped the top, placed your feet up on the table and flicked your wand at the wireless, already tuned to the Wizarding Sports Station.

“Butterbeer in America is different. Almost like it’s sweeter or something. This is much more subtle.” You said through a yawn, seeing the new shift partners come in. You gave them cheery waves leaned back into the squashy armchair, closing your eyes lightly.

Those few catnap moments were the only moments that were quiet over the next few days as everyone around was preparing for the World Cup. The wireless blasting nonstop from every medical and supply tent. 

Tonight was the night. Ireland versus Bulgaria. The wireless DJs talking nonstop about both teams. But no one seemed to get more attention than the Bulgarian seeker, Victor Krum. You had the articles about him in every tabloid magazine and Quiditch Today did a special five page article on him three days ago. If only you could have been able to watch him in action with your own eyes.

The anticipation had everyone on edge as the hours drew nearer to game time. Once the World Cup had started however, you lost track of almost everything. The next morning Chris told you that at one point you were standing on the table with an Ireland flag caped around your shoulders, slinging fire whiskey and singing at the top of your lungs.

You groaned at the pounding headache as you slid your uniform robe on the next morning. “I feel like Ireland this morning.”

Adam laughed, clapping you on the shoulder. “You don’t look like it though. The phrase ‘when Irish eyes are smiling’ is not sitting well with you. I’ll get you something for the hangover.”

The potion was much needed. A bit unorthodox to use a pepper up potion for a hangover, but that coupled with a big breakfast helped get you back on your feet within the hour. Which was a good thing too, because it was back to the usual grind. Charlie would be back soon, and you couldn’t wait for a play by play analysis from him.

But, there was hardly time to hear from him when he came back. The dragons were as moody as ever. At least the females were as time came for them to become broody and get ready to have their eggs.

You couldn’t help but giggle at Charlie crooning over the lovely ‘mommy’s to be’ as he so delicately put it. But his need to the dragons took away his time from you. Even free time was spent with the dragons. It would be time soon to transport them, and you had never met less willing cargo.

It had taken weeks to finally round up all the dragons and their nests. Constant stunning spells and burn salve to all of those involved in the Triwizard transport team.

“Well, we’re all packed and ready to leave first thing in the morning.” Charlie said, taking a heavy seat beside you and giving an even heavier sigh.

“You look plain exhausted.” You said gently, looking up from the paper work you had been filling out. The accident reports had swamped you in the last 48 hours as the last of the dragons were safely stunned and put in their crates. A few last minute preparations had to happen as eggs were counted, tagged, and put away safely.

“I could use a long nap. Maybe they can stun me next.” Charlie chuckled on a sigh, removing his thick dragon hide gloves and dropping them on your table.

“We leave first thing in the morning. A couple rooms booked for us in Hogsmeade. I’m excited to see it.” You said, dipping your quill back into the ink well.

“Oh you’ll love it. The Three Broomsticks has amazing food and handcrafted mead. The shops are always fun, especially Honeydukes. Can’t find a better sweets shop anywhere. And if we get the time, maybe I’ll take you to see the Shrieking Shack. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t show you the most haunted building in Britain.”

“Your sense of a date can never simply be dinner and a play can it?” You giggled scratching out your signature on the last report.

“If you didn’t like adventure, you wouldn’t be here.” Charlie countered.

“You caught me.” You laughed, standing from your seat and giving a small groan and stretching. You hadn’t stood in hours. You placed you hands on either side of Charlie’s chair and leaned in, placing a gentle kiss to his lips. “I also wouldn’t date men who spend more time with dragons than their significant other either.”

“Date men, huh? In the plural sense? How many other dragonologists are you seeing?” He chuckled, eyeing you suspiciously.

 “How many dragons are you seeing?” You quipped back with a wide grin. Your grin only growing wider when he opened his mouth to argue, but no words left him. A small laugh, nudging his shoulder and shaking your head. “Dragonoligist. Like anyone says that. Feeling insecure are you?”

“You have to admit. It has a nice ring.” He said with an innocent shrug.

“Alright then, Mr. Dragon.” You huffed in amusement, leaning closer toward him and catching his lips in a kiss. “You should get some sleep then. Think of all the lovely dragon ladies who would be disappointed in you if you were not on form tomorrow for them.”

tagging: @eldritchscreech

**I have decided to break this up into 3 parts. the next part will be Charlie and Reader visiting all of his old haunts when he was at school, and possibly a more in depth progression of the relationship....???? maybe??? ;) we shall just have to wait and see!**

as always; requests are open. For all your HP needs and wants. *kisses*

-kee

#kee_writestrashh #soot & healing salve #part 2 #soot and healing salve #charlie weasley x reader #charlie weasley imagine #HP FIC #harry potter fanfiction #pre triwizard tournament #wizarding world #charlie weasley #AO3 fanfic #part 2 of 3