#I mean I have 4-6 mental illnesses so that tracks is but goddamn

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

the wolf should’ve been afraid of me.

Titans 3.04

just under the wire! ... i hope.

like with the previous review, i’m typing this up as i see the episode. here we go!

spoilers ahead.

1. ... well. that was an interesting cold open.

1.25. i don’t know whether to admire this show’s restraint when it comes to gotham and its excesses, particularly arkham asylum. it’d be easy to go hammer and tongs, like suicide squad (2016) did, or any number of bat media did, at a tropey, colourful~~insanity~~ that can be quite damaging, casting mental illness in strangeness and criminality. it definitely shows gotham as... separate from the rest of the country, its own ecosystem of heroes and villains, a sort of rogue state. 

but that ecosystem is still human, with its heroes needing to clip parts of themselves away just to survive, growing old and needing to be recycled, its villains languishing in the same kinds of systems that fail everybody else who needs to be helped. it’s a quieter, tenser sort of wrongness: not strange enough that you can dissociate, but not close enough that you can completely empathise. gotham is its own creature.

1.5. i know that the reasoning behind this is more doylist than anything, but i’m so glad that joker was killed off with little fanfare right at the start of the season. he is the one man in the batverse that’s transcended its confines as this sort of ethereal boogeyman/eternal edgelord and to justify his presence in the series would mean giving him this tired, overblown importance and too much of a stab at colourful, tropey “madness” in this otherwise-subdued series. i wish all batmedia would follow suit and get rid of this fucker.

1.75. so jason is bucking scarecrow’s control! or reminding him of who exactly holds all the cards right now. circling back to what i talked about in the last review, it’s remarkable just how little time it’s been since jason’s “death” and he’s already got ‘minions’ and elaborately set up plans to track, break and kill the titans. just how long has he been planning this? when did he first look at WE weapons prototypes and think that’s something i can use to blow somebody up? and the most unsettling question: did he plan his own death at the hands of the joker just so that he could break batman?

at this point it’s obvious that the scarecrow at least started jason down this path, but it’s frightening just how far he’s travelled already.

1.8. aaagh, less than one minute in! i’ll shut up. 

2. conner washing his hands at the sink reminds me that he was directly in the line of explosion when hank got blown up and he’s probably got atomised hank-bits all over his skin that he’s desperately trying to wash off.

... you’re welcome.

2.25. conner, don’t you speak to gar fucking logan like that, sir, no!

2.3. if anything it’s the lex part of him that gave him the knowhow to recognise the weapon and build a de-activator for it. 

anyway, for that ‘half-breed’ and ‘talking tiger’ comment?

(i wish, tho, that we actually see conner more interested in the superman part of his legacy, like maybe listening to stories from gar, or even better, dick, so we get a better idea of the pressure he’s feeling to live up to that part of him and not the part that’s lex.)

((i talked about conner’s stages of moral development in his introductory episode last season, but i wonder if the next stage of his self-actualisation would be to further integrate the parts of himself and realise that they are only parts and he, conner, is an entirely different person unto himself that can make decisions on how to use what he has and what he knows. his superman abilities can be used to destroy. his lex knowledge can be used to save.))

3. oh dawn :((

3.25. is this the last we see of dawn and hank? i mean, we know donna is coming back; would it be a stretch to think they’ll try to have a go at resurrecting hank as well?

3.5. “deathstroke didn’t make us into killers.” good, because deathstroke didn’t make jason a killer either. there’s a missing step there you need to be looking for, dick. 

3.75. dick did try to break the cycle, step away from gotham, run from the possibility that he could turn into batman. it didn’t help; he couldn’t fully withdraw from his vigilante persona the same time he loathed it, and batman literally haunted him both asleep and awake. but maybe gotham doesn’t have to turn anybody into anything. maybe gotham has nothing to do with it at all. it’s about taking responsibility, realising some sacrifices are pure bullshit, and building an actual family instead of merely a team.

anyway: hugs!

(oh, also? mr “i hate flying”? i mean, there’s perfectly valid reasons to hate flying that’s not related to childhood trauma, but then again, this guy was literally a ‘flying grayson’ once. also also, remember that he also gets sea-sick. must’ve a lot of fun stories to tell.)

4. ooh that gar/kory confrontation was brief but cool!

listen, i have never seen a psychiatrist with that extravagant an office and SIR I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW--

4.5. kory’s so unused to reaching out for help and it’s breaking my heart that HPG likely is some kind of impostor that’s maybe causing her symptoms in the first place. 

kory and dick have mostly been apart this season but it’s remarkable how their journeys have paralleled each other; kory processes her grief, isolation and existential dread into a determination to take care of this new family she has, no matter what it takes; dick does much the same, forging ahead with plans and solutions until he has no fuel left in him and spirals into a massive breakdown.

4.25. listen titans this really is a TERRIBLE continuity error. we aren’t goldfish; we can clearly remember that two minutes ago it was gar’s upper arm that was burned, not his forearm. COME ON.

“sensory deprivation tank” *SNORT*

anyway, gar is the BEST

4.5. i wonder where these visions of experimentation took place. was it on tamaran, or on earth, after she came to hunt down rachel/trigon and before she lost all her memories? is HPG a part of the scientist group that experimented on her? ... god, i hope not. i mean, i think he is, but it would be cool to have some positive therapist representation in media. 

5. you’d think the van transporting a dangerous supervillain that only batman could catch would be more secure but... i’m also not entirely surprised. 

5.15. i love dick gives ZERO shits about hiding himself or even ensuring scarecrow is adequately contained. just turns away after kidnapping him in BROAD DAYLIGHT and says ‘let’s go’. I LOVE THIS DUMBASS

6. lmao gar is having a really really shitty day SOMEONE GIVE THIS MAN A BREAK or just a goddamn story arc of his own

6.5. i’m really confused about the timeline here. so... sometime ago, kory came down to earth to hunt down trigon, yeah? at some further point down the line she and her sister were kidnapped and experimented on. THEN she somehow escapes but... loses her memory? a few months pass and then we see blackfire alive and well and free; she kills faddei, can impersonate other people, and is clearly seeking out kory. but now she’s still in the experiment facility...? what’s going on?

i’m not entirely surprised about the facility being mostly deserted. either the biggest investors in this project gave up on it and it was left to the most fanatic to carry on, or they were deliberately trying to lure kory and get her to free blackfire--expand the environs of the experiment, so to speak.

7. hopefully barbara is going to get something to do other than listen to various men give her Attitude

8. how do you terrorise a terrorist? well:

i love when dick is a scary-competent motherfucker.

8.25. ooooh, the attack on crane at arkham a ploy to get crane to blackgate? nice one dick, i didn’t even think of that. but why though? to protect crane from the titans? to intercept the van to blackgate and “rescue” him? seems likely--red hood was there, except dick got to crane quicker.

9. still reeeallly unclear about the komand’r situation. was komand’r captured after s2? is this all A TRAP?? if so, why are you stepping into the only thing that can contain you, kory????

9.25. so... definite parallels between dick/jason and kory/kom here. i’m just. i’m still. really confused. i’ll shut up now.

10. this may be my favourite dick look yet:

woodsman!dick in a beanie.

10.5. i unironically love how titans has made this bizarrely-devoted-to-his-moniker, toxin-spewing supervillain into a tamer version of hannibal, psychoanalysing his victims into submission. it’s of a piece with how inward looking titans is, the way all of its villains are obsessed with how our protagonists’ minds work, to the point where they would actually spend time inside of them. 

there are no big plots to end the world. no apocalypses or endgames here. these villains collect the titans’ insecurities like infinity stones. the way the titans defeat them is by achieving character growth--literally winning by the power of love. literally “the real superpower is the friends we made along the way”!

10.7. anyway, i’m betting dick is used to this bullshit from crane and is humouring him in the service of getting more information. the story about the wolf? an implicit threat, not to mention dick getting to control what crane knows about him and what methods he would use to manipulate him.

am i giving dick too much credit here? i don’t think so. he’s really impressed me so far this season.

10.75. like. there’s a real unreliable narrator vibe coming off with every person that talks about bruce (much like how the various members of the titans talked about jason’s motivations) and to buy into crane’s talk about bruce being a psychopath is to fall for the same manipulation that jason fell for. dick is the only person who hasn’t really psychoanalysed bruce this season, and i think some part of his detective brain is piecing things together into a bigger picture.

11. i’m glad kory rescued kom but did she have to kill the scientist?

(i mean, yeah, probably - the less people know that kom escaped the less likely they’re going to have the fucking govt on their doorstep, but still.)

11.5. dick’s gonna come back to wayne manor, stare straight at komand’r and go, well which room would you like? because the team might as well adopt ANOTHER person, yeah?

12. oh MAN that red hood/nightwing fight was AMAZING! and he did the thing! the boomerang escrima thing! i’m so delighted!

12.5. the anger and disbelief in dick’s voice when he says you told crane EVERYTHING?! tells me that he knew exactly what he was telling crane himself.

12.75. “everything you are is because of him” - oh that reminds me of halluci!bruce from last season. i hope we see halluci!bruce again--he is so vicious but so entertaining... so much more effective at tearing dick down than crane or jason combined. goes to show that dick’s biggest enemy is own fucking head.

12.8. oh no! dick’s shot! crane is in the wind with red hood! blackfire is now with the titans! i love it!

honestly this season’s pacing is such a big step up from the last couple. gold star, show.

#titans #titans spoilers #meta #dick grayson #koriand'r #garfield logan #komand'r #conner kent #dawn granger #jason todd #jonathan crane #a byronic cupcake #badass strawberry truffle #manic pixie pop tart #a tragic jalebi

[turtle-paced]

GoT Re-Watch: Fine-Toothed Comb Edition

This post is also available on my wordpress.

All right. We know what this episode is. We know what we’re digging into here. Only one more recap to go after this one…

8.05 – The Bells

(1:59) We open the episode with a bit of mild treason. Someone (Varys) is spilling the beans about Jon’s parentage.

(2:35) This isn’t spelled out in so many words, but the strong implication here is that Varys sent this little kid to go poison Dany. This didn’t come out of nowhere, but boy did it ever escalate quickly. Make one decision Varys disagrees with, even when he’s got no good alternatives, and bam you’re up for assassination.

Note how Varys’ actions here aren’t given much scrutiny. This is because it would reveal the hypocrisy in a second flat. When Varys says the ends justify the means, the narrative is silent. When Dany says the ends justify the means, the narrative goes out of its way to demonise her. I don’t believe the ends justify the means, but there is a fundamental lack of consistency here.

(3:52) Not to mention the goddamned fucking nerve of portraying Dany’s refusal to accept food as evidence that her mental state is deteriorating, when the show not one minute ago established that her food was poisoned. It’s the famous question – is it paranoia when they really are out to get you?

This is not a case of Dany harbouring the irrational and unfounded belief that her breakfast will coagulate into the Dread Brunchmonster and devour her. Given that Dany’s soldiers are watching the poisoner, this appears to be a case of Dany forming the belief that someone is trying to poison her and being justified in her belief. I gotta say, looking at the evidence and coming up with an accurate conclusion based on that evidence does not support narrative contentions of irrationality.

Unfortunately for Dany, the narrative’s out to get her as well. She cannot win. Eat the poisoned food and die, refuse the poisoned food and have Varys imply damaging things about her mental state.

(4:37) Varys is committing all the treason in his last scenes. This is the worst of the lot, in the sense that he’s soliciting Dany’s #1 fan for a coup on an open beach in plain view of her Hand, who knows that Varys can now be counted a political enemy. Square character pegs, round plot holes. Was Varys ever established to be this incompetent? But we’re getting close to the end here and he needs to die, so bye!

Notice also the competence flip. Varys is trying to do “the right thing,” so he sucks at it. Much like Jon’s ineffectual when he tries to do the right thing. Hell, pick a Stark, any Stark, and they were probably ineffectual when they tried to do the right thing. Compare Euron, who’s only out to kick shit down, and succeeds when he’s got no right to because he’s doing a shitty, plot-convenient thing. Now Dany’s in that Euron zone. She’s effortlessly detecting Varys’ treason because the narrative has decided she’s a bad guy now. We’ll get back to this when the fighting starts.

(5:19) If I was tempted to count one thing this season, one thing, it would be how many times Jon says “she’s my queen” or variation.

(6:03) We track Tyrion into this scene. It becomes quite noticeable at this point that we aren’t seeing much from Dany’s PoV, but approach her actions from the viewpoint of the men around her. We don’t get insight into why Dany thinks someone’s betrayed her or her emotional reaction to coming to this conclusion, we only get the scenes of Varys (absolutely positively 100% justifiably, for certain) betraying her, and Tyrion approaching her with the news. Keep that in mind for later.

It’s also worth mentioning the weather flip. Last season Dragonstone was perpetually sunny. Now it’s gone back to Stannis-in-charge weather.

(6:11) Oh my god! She’s not perfectly groomed! Flee for your lives, people, if she can leave her hair unbrushed she’s capable of anything!

Now, not taking care of your appearance and hygiene can be an indicator that someone’s got some mental issues going on. Depression, pretty commonly. But to understate the issue just a bit, depression does not automatically translate into mass murder. Not all mental disorders are the same. And sure as shit not all people with mental disorders are violent. Most aren’t. Nor is this a careful depiction of a character struggling with mental illness that does result in violent tendencies. This is just flat out crazy = violent, “madness” striking out of a clear blue sky because the writers said so.

(6:57) So, basically, this game of telephone worked exactly like Dany thought it would, for the exactly reasons she thought it would. Dany’s relationship with reality is still going strong.

Dany’s “madness,” right now, is basically the fact that she’s upset over being betrayed, and grieving and angry after recently witnessing the violent deaths of two close friends. The emotional reaction to this doesn’t even look disproportionate. The narrative is Very Concerned that Dany is crazy…but all they’ve shown us is a woman going through a real rough time.

Equating a woman experiencing turbulent emotions with insanity is sexist as fuck and does no favours for people experiencing mental illness, either. Hysterical women! They cannot be trusted to lead.

Mind you, it’s not an improvement when the writers apparently drop the insanity angle just as abruptly as they introduced it. Problems for later!

(7:44) “She trusted you to spread secrets that could destroy your own queen.” Now this, this isn’t so well-supported. Sansa hasn’t spent much time with Tyrion in season eight, and as far as we can tell, never observed his relationship with Varys. She’s been in the same scenes with them, but I think she’s only heard them exchange one line of dialogue, in a group setting. Why would Sansa think that Tyrion would immediately tell Varys without clearing it with Dany? Why would Dany think that Sansa would do this? (Undermine her in a general sense, yes, Dany’s got good reasons for suspecting that. Undermining her in this specific way…not so much.)

This, I think, is a case of the writers not keeping track of which characters have seen which interactions. Resulting in all characters knowing all the same things about their relationships.

If you’re going to hinge plot developments on this sort of thing, you have to set it up. If Sansa’s machinations are the starting point of the rumours about Jon’s parentage, leading to actual betrayals of Dany, you have to show how that plan worked. (See also: Littlefinger’s downfall.)

(9:25) It may have come about for stupid reasons, but Varys’ arrest is, I think, nicely understated. No dialogue, just Gray Worm entering Varys’ room with shackles.

(10:31) Varys nods his acceptance that Tyrion told on him to Dany. Seriously, though, what even was Varys’ plotting this episode? Show!Ned could have given him a few pointers.

Then he gets a few lines about how he hopes that he’s wrong about Dany, because Varys enlisting a small child into his assassination plot was only for the best. His desire for a better world was right and noble, despite the fact he was willing to use violence and treachery to achieve his ends. (Don’t think about it too much, okay?) Jon and Tyrion are clearly in denial over Dany’s mental decline.

(12:12) And that’s the end of Varys. Didn’t take long. Varys had to lose a lot of competence very quickly to enable that loose end to be wrapped up so quickly.

(12:58) This is a scene from Dany’s PoV, inviting the viewer to share her grief over Missandei’s death. I think this might actually be the last scene we get from Dany’s PoV.

(14:24) “This was a victory for [Sansa].” What’s also apparent at the end of the series is that we’re now at a point where we’ve got reasonable men trying to work together, and women pit against each other at every side. The surviving male protagonists have cordial relationships with each other, by and large – and the surviving female progatonists hate each other, by and large. The surviving female protagonists identify the other female protagonists as threats. The exception here is Sansa and Arya, but remember season seven? Oh boy, I sure do.

Forget the question of who’s more at fault for the Dany-Sansa conflict, because the answer is “the writers.” They’re the ones who can’t imagine that Dany and Sansa might be able to talk out their problems honestly, even if they don’t like each other, distinguishing each from Cersei’s inability to collaborate.

Again, for clarity – the problem isn’t that female characters are in conflict, the problem is that the majority of the female characters are in conflict, almost exclusively with other female characters, where the men are talking about their problems reasonably.

(15:56) Doubling down on completely awful ideas (yes, the bad ideas are increasing exponentially), we’re back to the idea that Dany is sad/insane over the fact that nobody loves her, and Jon’s romantic rejection furthers her mental decline and determination to kill her way to the top.

This is just…completely awful.

First, there’s the fact that Dany’s inability to win love in Westeros is a massive plot contrivance. Why hasn’t this character been able to gain affection? Because the writers haven’t been allowing the consequences of Cersei’s actions to play out (you know, the ones from the time she blew up the Sept of Baelor and murdered a lot of very popular political figures), making Dany look worse in comparison. Also because xenophobia, which for some reason the narrative is now actively supporting.

Second, after all the traumatic bullshit this character’s been through, it’s romantic rejection that sends her over the edge? Seriously? Rejection sucks, but come the fuck on. Is Dany going literally insane over rejection remotely in character, from what we’ve seen of her over the course of the seven previous seasons?

Thus far the dragon queen has needed a man like a fish needs a bicycle. This is flippin’ insulting.

Oh and it’s bad writing for Jon because we still don’t have the info that he’s squicked out by Dany being his aunt. No insight into his identity crisis whatsoever.

(16:07) We’re having the same argument yet again. We’ve been having this argument off and on for two seasons. Yes, Dany assaulting the city will cause a lot of casualties. This is bad. In-universe, however, the people who’ve been advocating for not assaulting the city directly have had their chance, and they failed. Dany gave their ideas a shot and they didn’t work. So what’s the greater evil here? Assaulting the city directly, or leaving Cersei in charge?

Note that the showrunners have ceased to talk about or show what makes Cersei in charge such a colossally bad idea in general. We’ve seen her actions against Dany, and they were bad, but we haven’t seen her going out and oppressing the population for a few seasons now. We get a line about the consequences of resisting Cersei, but when we’re told and not shown, this doesn’t have the same impact. We cannot even establish that this happened. Could’ve used a scene of that, instead of that garbage with Euron. Plus, over the course of the series, Tyrion has been quite consistently wrong about how willing his sister is to use violence and when she’s willing to use it.

Furthermore, we’ve got some double standards here! I know, I’m as surprised as you are. Dany is proposing a plan that will cause a lot of casualties, and this is used as justification for the men around her thinking she’s unfit to rule. When the series’ male leaders proposed and enacted plans that would kill a lot of people – including Tyrion, defending King’s Landing against Stannis! – that was not used to determine their fitness. Fitness for leadership was judged on other qualities.

(16:17) “You can’t expect them to be heroes, they’re hostages,” says Tyrion, apparently forgetting that his earlier advice to Dany relied on the people of King’s Landing rising up against Cersei.

(16:47) Now we’re turning a long-term argument, i.e. leaving Cersei in charge will cause more deaths over the long run than assaulting King’s Landing will in the short term (keeping in mind just who blew up the Sept of Baelor), into further evidence of Dany’s insanity and/or evil. You can think what you like about this argument, but it’s not an unreasonable argument to explore.

The showrunners have posed us a nasty ethical and moral problem in this plot. As wars tend to throw up. The only thing they seem to have to say about solutions, though, is “not this way.” Worse, they’re not actually addressing the counter-arguments, and basically going for the ad hom “but Dany is crazy and/or evil” instead.

(16:58) “If the city surrenders, they will ring the bells and raise the gates.” Continuity alert: back in S2, it was said outright that bells =/= surrender.

(18:04) Just establishing Jaime’s offscreen teleportation.

(18:14) Another undeniably crazy and/or evil moment from Dany: she puts Tyrion on a performance improvement plan. The madwoman. It’s not like he’s failed her before!

Oh, wait. He’s barely done anything but fail her.

(18:31) Scenes of overwhelmingly white civilians (over the course of the episode, I did spot a few people of colour amongst the King’s Landing extras), complete with vulnerable young children, continue pouring through the gates of King’s Landing. And yes, I do have to mention that they’re overwhelmingly white, given the subsequent depiction of Dany’s loyalist armies, who are overwhelmingly people of colour. We’ll talk about that then, when we’re fully dealing with Dany as a villain.

(19:54) Exhibit…what are we up to? I lost count…in “the writers kinda forgot Tyrion’s orders directly led to the death of Davos’ son, and they both know this.” Davos is fucking committing treason for Tyrion now.

(20:11) Oh, god, it’s Arya and Sandor encountering a nameless guard. This is going to be “witty,” isn’t it? Much like the writers have no way for Tyrion to elicit character-sensitive information but drinking games, they’ve got no way for Arya and Sandor to prove their likeability except random encounters with guards.

(21:15) Show!Tyrion’s shithouse Valyrian is basically Bella Swan’s clumsiness. It’s an endearing flaw that’s meant to show they aren’t perfect – but in its shallowness only shows that as conceived, this character was not given enough real flaws.

(22:24) Just confirming that Jaime’s here for Cersei, even believing her cause to be utterly futile. I really hope nobody was invested in Jaime/Brienne, because that’s just fucking brutal.

(22:36) Convince Cersei to change her course of action? To recap, Cersei’s lied about sending people north to help fight the zombie army, hired someone to kill the pair of these dunces, and rejected Dany’s most recent offer of peaceful surrender by murdering her BFF in front of her. Given the slightest opportunity to screw Team Let’s Not Get Turned Into Zombies over, she has screwed them over. What grounds do any of these characters have to think they’ve got even half a chance to convince her that this time, this time, she should really not screw them over? Fourthtime lucky?

At least Jaime’s got the excuse of a self-destructive co-dependent relationship. Tyrion’s just throwing Jaime’s life away here.

(22:49) “To be honest, I never really cared much for [the civilians of King’s Landing].” If it weren’t for, you know, the other thing, this might have been the worst characterisation thing this season and this series. This blatantly does not accord with the Jaime we saw develop over the course of season three. The reveal that Jaime gave up whatever good name he had in order to protect five hundred thousand people from burning to death calls for a substantial reevaluation of his character. It puts a lot of his actions and reactions into a very different context.

And now, in his last episode, the penultimate episode of the series, we get “lol no never mattered to me! All incest, all the time, baby!”

Flippin’ insulting. To any viewer who was remotely invested in Jaime’s storyline or character.

(23:02) Continuing to use Cersei’s pregnancy to humanise her. This just – I’m not sure if I can fully articulate how much this bugs me, and on how many levels. I’ll come back to the issue as the episode progresses, especially in her death scene, but for now…

Cersei’s pregnancy is not going to automatically radically change who she is as a person. I mean, it hypothetically could, it’s not outside the realms of possibility, but it’s by no means a given. She’s a grown-ass woman who’s already given birth to three children (possibly four, depending on retcons). She’s got a bunch of other strong life experiences and strongly-held beliefs. This pregnancy does not define her life. If she’s been saying “no, fuck off, I think I can win this and that will be best for my unborn child,” perhaps that’s worth paying attention to? Perhaps it’s her argument that needs to be addressed, rather than simply saying “but the baby”?

Note to characters: the issue you’re having with Cersei is that she mistakenly believes she can win the war, not that she’s hanging on to her position out of self-destructive spite. She might be deluding herself, but if anyone’s trying to convince her, they have to deal with that delusion. Not rely on appeals to emotion alone.

(23:50) Now it’s Tyrion committing some mild treason. To save Cersei. Who hired someone to kill him and Jaime both, in the last couple of episodes. Remember when Tyrion had actually complicated feelings about Cersei, back in the day? When he hated her for the shit she pulled and the way she treated him, but couldn’t totally give up on caring about her because she was his sister?

Yeah, I can’t help but notice that the more the show wants to demonise Daenerys for her actions in removing Cersei’s regime, the less complex Tyrion’s feelings about Cersei become.

(24:12) “Sail right past the Iron Fleet and into a new life?” Jaime asks, and Tyrion responds, “There isn’t going to be an Iron Fleet much longer.” And, what, Tyrion thinks that Jaime can sail right past Dany’s own forces, dragon included? Like finding Cersei won’t be real high up on Dany’s to-do list following gaining control of King’s Landing? Granted, if last episode is anything to go by, Dany’s field of vision while riding on Drogon is severely limited, but even so.

(25:39) So the brothers Lannister share their final farewell. Speaking of relationships that became less complex. This hits basically the same notes as their parting at the end of season four did. How has this relationship changed? How have the people involved changed? Where’s the progress? Where’s the journey? What is the story?

(25:54) The omissions from Tyrion’s book arc are rubbed in as he thanks Jaime for not treating him like a monster.

(26:37) Now here we have a shot of a bell tower, and I think I might be done with most of my substantive commentary for this episode. I’ll do a bit of narration so people can keep track of who’s going where and the like. We’ll try to keep the teleportation to the show and not the recap. There’ll be a few things of substance, and we’ll get to them, but most of the rest of this 77-minute episode is noisy destruction.

At least it’ll be well-lit noisy destruction. Ugh, and to think I asked for a daytime fight scene in my pre-S8 wishlist.

(27:03) Establishing the Iron Fleet with their ballistae, and Euron’s presence aboard.

(27:15) Establishing more Lannister forces on the walls, also with ballistae. The amount of hustling and bustling and locking and loading going on, this is shaping up to be a real fair fight.

(28:16) Arya and Sandor have made it inside the city.

(28:44) Jaime is also trying to make it inside the city. He took his glove off especially for this purpose. Meanwhile, the Golden Company march out.

(29:15) Here’s a nice detail – the Golden Company’s shields all have golden skulls painted on them.

(30:31) Cersei heads out onto the balcony, because that’s what she does these days, watch things from her balcony. She’s wearing a nice shade of red today, and it couldn’t possibly be coincidental that Cersei swaps back to the red outfits as Dany moves into all black outfits, could it? Huh, so weird. And extraordinarily subtle.

(31:30) We’ve got a bit of a subplot with this mother and daughter trying to enter the city. I sense heartstring-tugging…

(33:03) And now, establishing Daenerys’ location. On a dragon. In the sky. The music kicks in with her arrival.

(33:31) Daenerys starts doing what she should have done well over a season ago, and starts torching the Iron Fleet. Note that all aimbot tendencies have been turned off, today. Diabolus ex machina is no longer affecting Dany because she is the diabolus ex machina now, and nobody will be able to stop her. The forces of evil (as defined by the show, not me) will now be delivering an almighty curbstomping to the forces of also evil, and the innocent bystanders. It’s gritty. It’s real.

(33:58) It’s not too late for Euron to make his final miraculous escape from a ship just torched by Drogon, though. See you in half an hour, Euron! I’m sure you’ll make things worse when you show up.

(34:07) So that’s the Iron Fleet dealt with! Man, why didn’t Dany just do this back in 7.02 or 7.03? This is super easy! Could have saved a lot of lives amongst Dany’s Ironborn allies, Dornish allies, and Reach allies, too. Were their lives not worth preserving? Shortened the war, saved a lot of lives there. Increased resources available to deal with the ice zombies, possibly spread out the impact of those losses…

(34:47) So that’s the Lannister forces on the walls dealt with! Man, why didn’t Dany just do this back in 7.03 or 7.04? This is super easy!

I note that Dany’s attack on the Red Keep, while causing a lot of fatalities amongst the men on the walls, hasn’t caused any destruction in the city as yet. You wouldn’t want to rely on a fire not spreading, and anyone worried about the risks would be fucking right to do so, but it would seem to indicate that a bit of targeting can go on here. It’s not a case of “use fire in city = fwoosh!” Almost like risks can be managed, chances taken…

(36:20) So that’s the Golden Company dealt with! I’m glad they were in the story! They sure had an impact!

You know I’m looking at all this fire and destruction and thinking, wow, a character sure was set up to fail in multiple ways these past two seasons…and not very well, either.

(38:22) Dialogue! What a novelty! Anyhow, Qyburn tells us that all Cersei’s anti-dragon weapons have been destroyed.

(41:15) The Lannister soldiers defending the streets start to throw down their swords. Here is where the episode gets…nasty. Also the situation with Daenerys and her cause becomes narratively irretrievable. The fight is over.

We’ve got a lot of close up shots of Dany, but she hasn’t had any dialogue since…lemme check…about the seventeen-minute mark of the episode. We have not been tracking what she thinks of the city’s fall. The story decided she was a bad guy now at the end of the last episode, and we’re just cementing it now.

(43:07) The bells start ringing here, officially signifying surrender.

(43:31) But wait! Dany is listening to the bells and breathing heavily! She sobs, takes off towards the Red Keep –

(44:33) And starts randomly spraying fire on civilians. That’s right! No dialogue! No nothing! Dany hears bells and fucking snaps. Goes from liberator to mass murderer in a second. Starts killing thousands of people without a word. Because after everything, it’s the surrender she can’t handle.

This just doesn’t track. I’m sorry. It doesn’t. We spent all that time debating how much force Dany should use against legitimate military targets, even when the possibility of severe collateral damage was involved, and in this moment Dany starts going after civilians directly. Clearly a different sort of thing. Where is the connection? The logic? “Dany is willing to accept the risks of high collateral damage, therefore she’s just a bell ring away from murdering civilians deliberately and personally.” “Dany is willing to use extreme force against active military targets, therefore she’s willing to use extreme force against surrendered enemies and civilians.” What?

There are ways you can bridge those gaps. There’s the way I think the books may well go down in TWoW – Dany misjudges the risks out of aggression (and ignorance of the magical explosives in town), and her actions end up causing far more destruction than she was okay with. There’s the way where Dany believes that the civilians are a threat to her, out of paranoia or delusion (note: this requires more set-up than Dany not enjoying herself at a party and failing to brush her hair after her spymaster tried to poison her). The show’s done neither, leaving us no explanation for why Dany has crossed what’s a pretty clear moral and ethical line, above and beyond any moral ambiguity in using her dragon against a military target.

If we’re going for “her logic is twisted because she’s ~crazy~”, the viewer still needs that explanation. Why did she think this made sense? This is a huge, radical action in the story, whether Dany’s insane or whether she drank evil juice with her non-poisoned breakfast, so where’s the scaffolding around this decision? She couldn’t even shout down to Jon that it wasn’t over until Cersei is dead?

Also note that the close-ups on Dany’s face and the heavy breathing would indicate that this is an emotional decision for Dany. These close-ups have been used thus far this season to indicate her growing insanity/“insanity”. Another issue to discuss next episode.

Mostly, I think the showrunners have subbed Dany in for JonCon – who, unlike Dany, does have bell-related surrender trauma. Here’s the thing though, and I know this is a minor point easily missed in these thousand-page apiece books: JonCon isn’t Dany. Find/replace is not a good way to adapt cool storylines from the books.

In addition to this, it’s real fucking irksome that after all the song and dance a few seasons back about the strong female characters taking charge, we get this. Female characters in charge, yes, but female characters who are both crazy and/or evil, which we can see because they keep blowing up the same damn city. I hate that this is the final conflict of the series. What’s more dangerous than the humanity-obliterating ice zombies? Women being in charge of Westeros, because they keep blowing up the same damn city. I hate that this is how they decided to treat arguably the series’ most prominent female character, let’s make her Cersei at her evilest, but even eviller and more fiery. Isn’t it cool that we went back on what was thus far a pretty straightforwardly heroic narrative, blowing all her moments of moral ambiguity and ruthlessness far out of proportion to her arc as a whole to that point? I bet this will subvert everyone’s expectations!

I just – I just want to know why. Really I do. Why was this decision made? What did the writers think the connotations of their decisions were? How did the writers think this would play? Honestly, now.

This also marks the point where the episode starts to just fucking suck to watch, because it’s another half hour of previously sympathetic characters mass murdering civilians. Half a fucking hour. Mass slaughter of extras. It’s destruction porn, nothing more. It’s not designed to make the audience think about the moral hazards of war and power, it’s meant to hurt the audience.

Asshole storytelling – the story gave the audience something to want, in Daenerys, won over several seasons of seeing her overcome internal and external obstacles. It gave the audience Daenerys’ success. And then the story abruptly yanked it away by having Dany mass murder thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians, and told the audience they were stupid for not seeing it coming earlier.

*sigh* Let’s get the rest of this over with.

(45:05) Jon is mildly bemused by Grey Worm murdering a Lannister soldier unprovoked. Can we buy a reaction? Nor does he do anything you might expect a leader to do, such as exert authority over the situation on the ground.

I mean, I know that they’re going for Jon being shocked into numbness, and as a member of the audience I can relate to the emotion. But when everyone’s reaction to things is Dull Surprise, nobody’s reaction stands out.

(45:23) Okay. Crucial seconds after the fact, Jon starts reacting. What this scene also does is establish that the Northern armies are getting well into the sacking and slaughtering (as does the extended sequence of wanton slaughter afterwards). That’s yet another thing I’m going to be keeping in mind for next episode.

(46:42) Speaking of Dull Surprise. The problem’s not Peter Dinklage (nor Kit Harrington, actually), the problem’s the lack of variety in response.

(47:03) Davos here starts ushering civilians out of the line of fire and proves himself far more effective a leader in the moment than…well. Just about anyone else present, actually.

(47:43) Oh no! The Dull Surprise has taken over the extras, too!

(48:10) Jon Snow, still wandering around scenes of carnage as they just sort of occur around him.

(49:03) Lena Headey’s doing her best with this “keep the emoting minimal” instruction, but yeah, nobody thus far has been allowed to have a reaction to Dany burning a city down for funsies beyond maybe a slightly dropped jaw.

(49:29) Meanwhile, Jaime has made it all the way around the Red Keep.

(49:35) …where, quite coincidentally, Euron is hanging out. So I was wrong, it was twenty minutes until he showed up for his last diabolus ex machina.

(50:17) So this isn’t so much a climactic duel against an epic backdrop as a misplaced ego fight. Euron’s revolting and basically a plot device for bad things to happen to other people, Jaime’s burned all sympathy anyone may have ever had for him, they’re fighting over Cersei of all people, Euron’s only doing this to be fucking obnoxious one last time…what’s the audience supposed to hope for here, beyond “I hope you both die”?

(50:33) While Jaime and Euron fight, the Red Keep’s getting absolutely torched.

(51:51) Two minutes of Jaime and Euron flailing at each other, concluding with Jaime getting stabbed, nobody cares…

(52:08) Qyburn continues to give Cersei notifications on how fucked her situation is, and he convinces her to leave. Strange, he never once mentioned the fact that she’s pregnant to do so.

(52:48) Green fire is visible in the city, another thing which makes me think that the showrunners were lifting from the books. Badly, with key things out of context (like the order of events), but grabbing from planned book events nevertheless.

(53:33) Back at the Euron-Jaime dick-fighting contest, Jaime stabs Euron. Still don’t care.

(54:09) Euron dies insisting how awesome he is for stabbing Jaime. How nice for him.

(54:35) Arya and Sandor make it into the map room. They’re not even dusty.

(54:43) We get a close-up of Sandor, Arya fuzzy in the background, as Sandor tells Arya to go home. This, much like the scene they shared last episode, puts Sandor in the protagonist role. Not Arya.

For a while now, Arya has felt like an afterthought. Her skills built up to killing the Night’s King through the magic of hasty retcons, but as far as an internal character journey goes, she’s been a side character in other people’s development. First Sansa, now Sandor. Again, this is something I anticipate talking about in a bit more detail in the next episode’s recap, but I think the showrunners lost sight of Arya Stark as a character in the last few season, and started bouncing her between plot points they wanted her involved in.

(55:04) Sandor stops here to tell Arya the point of their respective stories. Somewhat belatedly, I might add, given that she’s already slaughtered most of House Frey. Just in case it wasn’t coming across, or was somehow undermined by the events that are about to transpire.

(55:32) After being informed of the futility of her quest, Arya remembers, “Oh hey! I have a few things to live for! Thanks for pointing that out!” She doesn’t come to this on her own, she has to be told this.

(56:53) Sandor appears on the stairs, ready for Cleganebowl.

(57:36) Gregor rather abruptly kills Qyburn (bye!) and Cersei excuses herself from a scene she clearly has no business in. Seriously, it’s like she alked onto the wrong set.

(57:59) So here we are for a far more hyped up duel, another fight to the death against an epic backdrop. And again: why should I, the viewer, care? Sandor just said that this was absolutely pointless, that they’re both going to die anyway. The stakes of this fight…aren’t real high. The emotional torque relies on people wanting Sandor to get revenge at the direct expense of finding some way to move on with his life – the very path he just told Arya was a better one.

(59:20) Ah, the true love of the series: Cersei and Jaime. Reunited at last. What even are the choices here. Never mind, let’s just enjoy Lena Headey’s Cersei.

(1:00:46) More Cleganebowl. It’s a fight. With a zombie.

(1:02:00) Arya heads out into a rapidly crumbling and burning King’s Landing.

(1:03:31) Swapping between Cleganebowl (still a fight with a zombie) and Arya (still in a city in the process of being destroyed).

(1:04:12) The woman who was trying to get through the gates earlier with her daughter helps Arya to her feet. Oh yeah, there’s definitely going to be some heartstring-yanking here. Back to Cleganebowl.

(1:06:05) Which ends when Sandor tackles Gregor out the collapsing walkway into the flames below. Again, I got nothing. This fight meant nothing. It did nothing. Except help contribute to the undermining of Arya’s story, such as it became (do as I say, not as I do!) and kill off some useless characters, uh, provide fanservice, uh, wrap up loose ends.

(1:06:20) Back to Jon, still just kinda existing in the devastation, now with greener fire. Clearly he needs a dragon to scream at.

(1:06:44) Fucking finally! Jon does something useful and effective, in starting to arrange for his own forces to leave the burning city. About twenty minutes after he should have, but he got there in the end.

(1:07:10) Back to Arya, who’s most definitely dusty now. Writers seem to be trying to fake out her death an awful lot this episode. How many buildings can fall on the poor woman?

(1:10:17) Sure enough, the woman who tried to help Arya, and her daughter, are tragically incinerated in front of Arya’s very eyes. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

(1:10:25) Back to Jaime and Cersei in the collapsing tunnels of the Red Keep.

(1:10:49) Only their escape route is blocked.

(1:11:15) Ramin Djawadi doing his best as per usual brings in an echo from “Light of the Seven,” aka the music that played when Cersei blasted the Sept of Baelor. She did that! Just in case people and/or characters can’t recall as far back as season six.

(1:11:28) Unfortunately, we get this bullshit for Cersei and Jaime’s respective deaths, which is all about how she wants to live because she’s got a wanted pregnancy. I’m not averse to showing that Cersei is human with human frailties, but the viewer is fundamentally being asked to feel bad for this woman because she is pregnant. Ignore the woman (and the entirety of her life), focus on the pregnancy. We also have some goddamned icky creator comments contextualising this scene as Cersei being just a girl seeking comfort from a man, or some such bullshit that infantilises Cersei and reduces Jaime’s range of appropriate emotions in this situation.

It also continues to be extremely gross that the writers are treating Cersei’s romantic relationship, and her motherhood and potential motherhood as her foremost humanising, sympathetic characteristic – while out there unloved, infertile, human-childless Dany has snapped and started murdering thousands of people because nobody loves her.

I’ll have more to say about gendered character death next episode. Yes, I’m keeping a list. It’s getting pretty long.

(1:12:42) The music switches back to “The Rains of Castamere” for the actual Lannister deaths. Rocks fall. Jaime and Cersei die in each other’s arms.

(1:13:15) Ash falls in King’s Landing, and Arya wakes up yet again. This is like the third time in the past twenty minutes. Would you believe she’s still in a burning city?

(1:14:59) A random blood-spattered white horse appears on the set for Arya to ride. The symbolism here would be anvilicious, if not for a) the next episode and b) the fact that this goes nowhere. In case you didn’t get the point, though, there’s been a lot of death this episode!

#anti got #fine toothed comb edition #cw: violence #season eight #now to crack open a bottle of red wine

[thethoughtsfromthreeam]

California

Pairing: Agent Whiskey/Jack Daniels x OC

Warnings: Bodily harm, diabeetus-inducing fluff

A/N:  This is the point in the story where it dramatically changed for me as I wrote it compared to how I originally envisioned it.  In fact, so much so that I spent a good two days just rewriting several of the prior chapters just to leading to parts 9 and 10 and thus making these two chapters all the more satisfying for me.  And of course, changed how everything in these two chapters play out.

So I am hoping that all y’all going Obi-Jack-Kenobi y’all our only hope last chapter will be happy with the turn of events in this one.

Reminder: I haven’t seen Kingsman: The Golden Circle, so I’m just using the Wikia, IMDB.com, some gifs, and my own weird ass brain to make up this whole ass story.

Tag List:  @zeldasayer , @romanticgumchewer, @tarrevizslas , @coolmaybelateruniverse , @the-feckless-wonder, @lavenderl3mons , @pascalisthepunkest , @mandoandyodito​ , @randomness501 [please message me to be added or subtracted]

[PART 1]  [PART 2]  [PART 3]  [PART 4]  [PART 5] [PART 6]  [PART 7]  [PART 8]

Part 9 

Sunshine Blooms

The cold air curled around the couple strolling along the sidewalk. Shirley was bundled up, but the chill in the air still seeped in and she couldn’t help but shiver.  Even her favorite navy sweater failed to keep the cold at bay.  Eventually her chattering teeth alerted the man next her that his companion probably needed a little warmth.

“Moonshine, why didn’t you tell me you were cold?” His tone was soft with her.  It was always soft with her.  She looked at him and the right side of her mouth curled up.

“Jack, it’s barely twenty degrees outside, I could be in eighty-four thousand layers and I’d still be freezing my ass off.  The only reason I haven’t gone back to the house is because of you.”  He grinned, trying not to preen like a peacock.

“You’re a loyal little thing, moonshine, I’ll give you that. But, we’re almost there, I promise.” He grabbed her gloved hand and put it inside his own jacket pocket.  She leaned into him and could feel the heat radiating off his body.  She sighed with a smile and they continued comfortably down the way to a large gate.

He opened it and they walked through.  The large building was brightly lit up and as they hurried up the stairs, Jack kept stealing glances at her.  In the two years since California, she returned to her sunny disposition and she blossomed alongside her library project.  Some days were harder than others, but she openly turned to him and their friends to get through it.  His heart swelled at the thought and he couldn’t wait to show her what he had found.

Off to the side of the wide portico was a greenhouse and they walked through the doorway.  Shirley stopped dead in her tracks as she looked around at the hundreds of marigolds blooming brightly in the evening.  She dropped his hand and moved forward.  She sat down on her knees and took her gloves off.  Reaching out to touch the plants, it was almost as if she drew comfort from the brightly colored blooms under her hands.  She looked back at Jack, her eyes shiny with happiness and tears.

He bent down next to her and kissed her temple before bringing his forehead against hers.  They closed their eyes and stayed like that for several minutes before she pulled back and looked at him.  “Why?” was all she asked him.

“Because I want you to know this is how I see you and what I love best about you.  You’re my Marigold, moonshine.  And I don’t ever want a day to go by without you know how much your brightness means to me.” His voice faltered.  “This place does a marigold show every year at this time. This is what I want you to think of. Me and you and marigolds. Always.”

She didn’t sob, but the tears in her eyes choked her up a bit. She cupped his face and smiled softly. This man was her whole heart and she was his.  She softly kissed him and pulled back.  Looking into his eyes, she said, “Me and you and marigolds.  Always.”  Not the words one would expect between two lovers, but nonetheless, important words that bound two souls together.

---***---

The smile on Agent Port’s face grew bigger as he watched her attempt to scream.  He loved the screams the best, but sometimes, it was the screams that didn’t come that quickened his blood.  He holstered his gun and reached out towards Shirley.

Everything in her hollered at her to run, even though she was trapped and had no where to go.  She eyed his hand as it reached out to touch her.  He dragged the pads of his fingers along her brow, down her cheek and to her chin. He could feel how still she was and the sharp intake of breath at his touch.  He lowered his hand down to her neck and to her surprised, he closed his fist around it.  Not hard enough to strangle her, but hard enough to make breathing a little more difficult.

Keeping his hand on her neck, he stood up and she was forced to do the same, her toes barely touching the floor.  Her own hands came up to grip his wrist.  She tried to pull, but she lacked the strength that he possessed.  Even if she was much stronger, it wouldn’t have mattered. When he was hunting, his strength was almost superhuman.  Her pulling on his wrist was like a fly buzzing around your ear.

They stood like that for a moment and she knew from experience he wasn’t going to kill her right away.  No, he needed the thrill of the torture, the game as he called it.  She heard his words in her head about how it was supposed to be fun.  At the thought, she began to grow angry, crowding out whatever fear she had felt just moments ago.

The more she looked at him, the more she realized the source of the evil that Malbec and Sherry and then Tequila and Ginger had been tracking was nothing more than a man.  A flesh and blood man who was standing right in front of her.  All that pain, all those deaths, the absolute destruction caused came from a single man who would bleed out if shot  right now.  This wasn’t the devil; this was a goddamn man.  Fear? What fear?  The sunshine of anger bloomed brighter in her gut.

“Sirah, it’s so good to see you after so long.  How you holding up?”  So casual of him, she thought.

“Agent Port.”  She spat the name out.  “Kill any good agents lately?”

“Of course, they’re my favorite type.  I just had some fun last week with a little number out of Jackson Hole. She reminded me of you, actually. Some ill-equipped sitting duck that almost made it too easy.  But she had spirit and oh, how I loved watching the light in her eyes just fade out.” His tone got heavier and heavier as the memory played back in his mind.

His free hand unbuttoned his suit jacket and he pulled it back to reveal a sheathed knife attached to his belt.  She glanced down at it and mentally cursed.  Statesmen were the only ones who could enter the building without their weapons being confiscated.  It was all the confirmation she needed.  She looked back up at him when he spoke again.  

“I swear honey, I’ve been having quite a fun five years since you and I last met.  And yet nothing from the greatest spies in the country?  Do you know how many people I’ve killed since then?  So many lives they didn’t save.  And you?  If I were you, I’d question the loyalty of your friends, because if they cared about yours truly, I’d already be dead.”  He pulled the knife from its sheath and she immediately recognized the thin blade he used last time.

“My friends are doing just fine, thank you.  I don’t need them to bring me your head to prove their love. But it would be a nice gift to hang above my fireplace.”  Like earlier, she forced herself to present a more casual tone than she was feeling. But instead of fear, the rage bloomed larger inside of her.  Her grip tightened on his wrist.

She bared her teeth at him as he dragged the blade along her left cheek, drawing a line of blood to the surface.  She hissed at the pain and before she could react, he drew the blade along her other cheek in a matching swipe.  He leaned back a bit to admire his handy work.  So beautiful.  And with her angry eyes, he could hardly contain himself and in a moment of weakness, he shoved her sweater sleeve up and swiped the blade along her left arm, but harder than before, leaving an open wound.

This fucking idiot, she thought.  He looked at her somewhat surprised when she didn’t even flinch at such a cut.  He cut her a second time and still no reaction.  He could cut her arm all day, but she couldn’t feel a thing.  The surface nerves in her left arm were deadened – all thanks to his handy work.  He swiped the blade a third time and this time she reacted by laughing.

He hadn’t expected that reaction from her and the surprise was enough to make him fumble with the blade and loosen his grip in her throat.  She tightened her own grip and wretched herself free from his hand.  Blood poured down her arm at the movement, but she didn’t notice as she tumbled backwards as she dropped to the ground.  And still she laughed, a harsh and loud sound that caused him to step backwards in confusion. This wasn’t how the game was supposed to go and it was clear she was changing the rules.

She was a goddamn Statesman and she was going to fucking kill him.

#agent whiskey #jack daniels #pedro pascal #kingsman: the golden circle #fanfic #agent whiskey x oc #agent whiskey x reader #pedro pascal x reader

[purplesurveys]

944

Things won’t get better unless you make them better Survey by emptyspaces

Do you agree with the quote in the survey title? For the most part, yes. A lot of the good things that have happened or come to me did so because I did something about them to some extent. I wouldn’t have begun dating my girlfriend if I didn’t ask her out, I wouldn’t have gotten this internship offer if I didn’t send a letter of interest, etc.

How many windows are on the front of your house? There’s one tiny window on the left side, then on the right is one big window but with three panes.

What common problem have you never experienced? Commuting at rush hour or getting the chickenpox.

Alternatively, what's an uncommon problem you have experienced? Being chased by a giant bird that I was trying to take a quick snapshot of from a distance.

Do you know anyone who opposes marriage equality? You mean the entire Filipino population who isn’t a millennial or from Gen Z? Sure. I can give you a novel with a list of names.

Are you an early riser or a night owl? I’m...both. I barely sleep. I have a 9-6 day shift but I also accompany Gab for a few hours on her 9-6 night shift, but honestly I don’t get tired from it at all. I seem to do well with only 3-4 hours of sleep.

What was the last thing you got really emotional about? Her and I.

What's the longest amount of time you've been ill for? That week-long fever I had a few months ago. Prior to that I only ever had quick overnight fevers, so you could just imagine my horror when my fever turned into 2 days, then 3, until a whole week passed and I was still playing around 38-39ºC.

What's your cure for hiccups? I hold my breath but it doesn’t always work. I don’t have other cures for it and I just let it naturally go away.

Who is your closest male friend? My eldest cousin on my mom’s side. Or Hans, but we only ever talk when Angela’s present or involved.

Do you track your spending? Yes. I only get an allowance so it’s not much, and I especially had to track it when I was still in school because back then I had to allot for gas, food, and course readings. 

Are you addicted to anything? I love love love my dogs, but I don’t know if that counts as an ‘addiction.’

What was your life like 5 years ago? Where were you living, working, etc? I was in my senior year in high school. It was two months after I went through a bad breakup, less than a month since I went through a grandparent’s death for the first time, and it was around the time I had taken the ACET. Not the best of times, and I can’t believe my life is as turbulent five years later. It just doesn’t feel fair, lol.

Have you ever let a mental health issue go untreated? It’s been untreated for around a decade now. Idk man, it will take a lot for me to be convinced to share my life story and most inner thoughts to a therapist who is also a stranger.

Do you know anyone who hunts for meat? No.

Have you ever lived with a boyfriend/girlfriend? I haven’t. I wouldn’t want that at 22, I think it’s way too early to be doing it. I don’t even have my own place yet.

What do you wash dishes with? Sponge, scrub brush, rag, something else? A sponge and the wire ball thing that makes it easier to scrape off dried rice.

Is there anything you prefer to do the old-fashioned way? Weddings. I will always fall head over heels in love over weddings where the color scheme is super simple and there aren’t a lot of over-the-top gimmicks that will kill the vibe of it being a serene ceremony.

How old were you when your parents first let you have a TV in your room? Well I shared a room with my parents and siblings up until I was 10 and we had a TV. When I was 11 and we moved in to a new house, my new room already came with my own TV. They eventually removed it when I was around 17 because I never used it anyway.

Are you more practical or creative? Practical. Not a creative bone in my body.

Have you ever seen Requiem For A Dream? I have seen it twice, unfortunately. I really should’ve seen it just the one time. I felt for the women the most, especially Marion. That girl had a goddamn dream, man.

Do you put your glasses and mugs right side up or upside down on the cabinet shelf? Upside down.

Are you planning to make any big purchases soon? Like what? For how much? Nothing big. I’m just trying to save my internship allowance so that I get to buy my parents nice things. The only purchase I’m planning for myself, admittedly, is a vape lmao and that’s like ₱199 or a little under $4. Otherwise everything is going to either savings or treating my loved ones.

Are you a recent university grad? I am indeed.

What changes to the environment/climate have you noticed in your lifetime? The highway I live on used to be peppered with trees, now there are buildings everywhere. It’s also impossible to see the stars at night, especially in Metro Manila; thankfully it’s not as bad where I live.

Do you own any power tools? We have some at home but none of them are mine.

How old were you when you first flew on a plane? 11.

Does everyone in your family get along with each other? My brother and I don’t.

What did you have for dinner last night? My dad prepared sisig and munggo, but I only ate the sisig.

What was the worst part of your childhood? The alcoholism and domestic violence I was exposed to the second I was born.

What grocery items do you buy the most frequently? I don’t buy my own groceries yet but I would say my parents go for eggs, bread, onions, garlic, frozen meat, and some veggies the most.

Have you ever seen a high school relationship last long-term? (like 10+yrs) Not from my own high school, but someone I used to work with from my first internship has been with her guy for like 15 years now or something.

Do you know any cancer survivors? Yes.

What color is your bed frame? It issssss black.

How old were you when you first started dating? I’ve never really...dated around. Doesn’t happen as a demi. I started liking someone for the first time when I was 16.

What's the highest-level science course you've taken? I’m from a humanities/arts course so I never needed to push myself when it came to science courses haha. I took only the most basic biology and physics electives because that was all that was required for journalism students in my school.

Have you ever had something stolen from you? Yes.

Leftover pizza for breakfast... yay or nay? YAY. Cold, fast food pizza is my guilty pleasure.

Do you personally know anyone who's a psychopath or sociopath? No. Again, what’s up with surveys asking the exact same questions? Y’alls telepathy games are strong, lol.

What is your most used kitchen appliance? I don’t use any of them other than the refrigerator.

#survey #surveys #took me a hot minute to get started and im highkey ready to admit im a jerk for not knowing survey etiquette slash common sense sooner #but yay survey credits! #shoutout to beth and guia for being the inspirations

[koiandjelly]

So Fila’s actual past isn’t very detailed, because she’s not a main OC, and I haven’t spent a ton of time actually thinking about her as a character lol. 98% of my Creativity goes to my original content characters, cuz someday when I finish actually crafting my worlds, I’m gonna write a book. I’m aiming for the lofty goals of making a full, fleshed out, intricate— just fuckin’... a whole ass Multiverse system comparable to the Lore content of Tolkien’s works, or The Elder Scrolls— gah fuck y’know what, I’m changing this post from being about my Fantasy Life OC to being about my creation baby, the effort of about 6 years (I am 20 years old, and although I didn’t know it at the time I started, I was 14 when I made the shitty Fire Emblem Manakete rip-off race that I’m gonna actually now talk about, because holy fuck this ain’t gonna fit in a parenthesis “btw have some info” bubble)

A’ight so I have a hard time keeping track of time, especially in a large scale across years. Apparently it’s related to being severely depressed without medication (communication error on my part, my parents are very lovely and helped me ASAP when I spilled the beans) while also having moderate to severe ADD. So, ya know, keep in mind that I was yet another terribly depressed 8th grader when I talk about my creation’s early days. I wouldn’t experience that time of my life for any sort of payment ever. It was goddamn miserable, because when I was midway through the age of 14, not only did the aforementioned depression spring up, but I also realized I was bisexual (And I live in the infamous state of Alabama, for reference. Don’t fear for me though, I was too unnoticeable to be bullied if anyone did know, and my wonderful mother, whom I love and cherish with all of my heart, is one of the few Christians that actually... like... do what their own God tells em to. That is, Jesus. I’m an atheist and have a general discomfort about the idea of super powerful entities actually existing irl, but I do agree with the stuff I’ve heard and remember from a decade ago in Church about Jesus. Good guy. But yeah my mom not only accepted me and reassured me when I came out, but she’s gone even further and is of the opinion/fact that lgbt folks are, really, good and normal and that God created them, so she really genuinely just... loves and accepts me. There’s no “I love you despite of this” in the equation and I am so grateful. But again. I digress)

Pause after that sidetrack, to recap, all of my medical issues began to emerge about 6 months before I turned 15. Including what I hate most, the emergence of my Fibromyalgia and Sjogren’s Syndrome, and for an added kick to the flesh, an undifferentiated connective tissue disorder. Meaning, as what I understand it to be, a nameless chimaera of many symptoms in a way that the disorder either is it’s own thing, or just can’t easily be recognized as any one disorder. And I had anxiety. If I recall correctly on *that*, forgive me cuz it’s been a while since it’s been diagnosed/brought up in a significant way, I have or had either general anxiety *and* social anxiety, or just lightweight versions of both, or something, but at the time I was horribly shy and I couldn’t even talk to the teacher after class about schoolwork, even though I tried rationalizing it to hell and back that I shouldn’t be scared— as you’ll guess, shit didn’t work out til I got medicine for it, because no amount of logic and rational thought will change the fact that I was struggling because of a literal disorder, an error of the brain, and as with that walking with two shattered femurs ain’t gonna work, trying to talk when the talk machine broke... ain’t going to goddamn work.

God. I am rambling a lot. But anyway, shit fucking sucked as a teen for me, because I got that wombo combo, prepare for trouble, make it double, precision strike at my existence as a person during fucking already difficult puberty— I am rambling. It’s 4:55am as of this sentence lmao. I had a nasty cocktail of both mental illness and physical disorders pop up once puberty hit me, so I, through many events starting from loving to draw as a toddler, to play pretend stories of heartbreak, betrayal, and death as best an 8 year old could understand via playing with Polly Pockets, and all the creative power I inherited from my Dad, plus the motivation borne through a need to escape, I started making my own characters.

So, to return to the present state of my creations, which will now be referred to as Bounding Beyond the Stars, or BBtS, I’m gonna get some things out of the way. Just to clarify, yeah? I have created my worlds in a way that is specifically meant to stand apart from the irl universe as we know it. I’m certainly not a knowledgeable researcher with any level of comprehension on Spacial law and quantum physics and shit like that. So hey, if something ever seems... like, off, or wrong? Unless it’s pretty obviously wrong in the “hey you just googled how a thing works, and misunderstood it, and made a detail based on a failure to understand stuff and that’s dumb in a catastrophic way that even a high school level viewer would notice...” kind of mistake, then hey, shoot me a message. But if some sort of universal rule seems fucky in the way that it doesn’t make sense, but isn’t a catastrophic structural error... well, Imma use that sentence to start a better one. For an example of a catastrophic error, perhaps... this: “This planet has no seasons cuz of its shape and axis! And it is also like twice as big as Earth!” That would be catastrophic alone because anyone with a grasp on planetary gravity or something, may go and think “if it’s that big, gravity’s gonna be way more intense”. And you’d be right! Which is why I usually account for those things with... *Magic*.

Before I split this post for Length reasons, and I’m sorry the majority of this was me rambling about how my general experience with life sucked from ages 14-17, I’mma state something very important about all my creations.

Magic, which will be explained in depth at a later point, is a fundamental, essential, and omnipresent force of not just any one universe in my Multiversal Trio. It is a key piece of Reality itself, as magic is the flow of many multiples of millions of unique and mysterious energies, concepts, and laws existing anywhere that Is.

To end this post, I’m going to put a quick summary and explanation why I’m rambling about any of this: The rant about my age and circumstances at the start are relevant because it’s necessary context for the tone and type of writing my creations are built upon. The foundations of BBtS are borne from a sometimes angsty, sometimes genuinely upset 14 year old who found escape in the art of Creation. There have been many, many, many heavy edits, rewrites, scrapped info and ideas, and even more info built upon it. It used to be pretty pointlessly edgy in a lot of ways, and redundant in grimdark, morphing into *grimderp* plot devices and character traits. The way it’s written today, I like to think the lore of my many high fantasy-alien societies, and all its denizens and creators and whatever else, are still written to be dark, be dangerous, even angsty... but more skillfully so, with the sort of nuance a 14 year old wouldn’t really even begin to understand. Cuz I still like high stakes stories with real consequences and character deaths when appropriate. And I enjoy characters who have tragic pasts, but now that I’m older and I’ve seen and read about and done so much more— I can write that stuff *better*. And more over, what I’m most satisfied with, is that I’m more in touch with myself as a person, and I’ve evolved many of my personal beliefs and ideals and all the things of the world I can have opinions on. But most of all, I’ve reached a point where I have consumed enough content from others to where I have figured out how to write something that should be interesting, and maybe a bit new, because I put a looot of Damn focus on identifying, and understanding, writing structure, cliches, plot holes to avoid, character traits to handle differently, and just generally making something that’ll appeal to both me, and my audience, should I get that far.

#original content #ramble #long ramble #worldbuilding #personal history #long post #fantasy #sci-fi #science fiction #it’s currently 5:24am as i think of appropriate tags lol #sleep deprived #late night/early morning thoughts

[riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice]

so 2020 is officially here and i’ve left my party early to do some INTROSPECTION and SELF ASSESSMENT can i get a hell yeah ??

i’ve started this blog here mainly for myself; i want to see how i progress with certain elements of my life and i think i need somewhere to write down my gotdamn feelings. obviously tumblr is free

i’m setting some goals for the decade right now. a decade is a long time so these are some big goals (plus some little goals)

1. get through university

im 21 and ive only just started university. when i left sixth form the thought of all that debt made me weep so i thought fuck that noise and got an apprenticeship. luckily for me my apprenticeship was incredible and i love my job to bits and now theyre paying for me to do my bachelors in chemistry. ITS SO HARD THOUGH!!!!!! i am very out of practice as a student so the existence of studyblrs is a godsend.. this blog may turn into a bit of a studyblr

2. keep playing piano

earlier this year i bought a piano on a whim (potentially not my most sound financial investment. it was 600 quid) thankfully ive actually practised a lot and im quite proud of what ive achieved (being able to play moonlight sonata and the piano from amelie is a highlight) and i definitely want to keep it up but i have a habit of just giving up for no damn reason. my focus drifts and i never go back. piano brings me a sense of peace and pride and i really do not want to give that up though, so come 2030 i gotta be a pro okay? right

3. write my novel

this might seem like a stupid and unrealistic goal to just pluck out of nowhere but i’ve had this story and these characters running around in my head for sometime now. i havent come up with a sufficient plot summary because its all so abstract in my brain and i need to get these bastard characters out on a page so they can stop disturbing my thoughts

4. learn a language

i say learn a language - i’ve already gotten pretty deep into two languages, russian and swedish and i was quite good at them like conversational at least, but then of course i didnt practice and i got out of the habit and now im like barely remembering any of it. i can barely speak english on a bad day and i am english. so im gonna put my goddamn memrise pro subscription to good fucking use or im gonna have to go back to that demonic stalker hell bird from duolingo

5. lose weight/get fit

over the last couple of years i have put on a lot of weight. i think it might be a combination of getting used to full adult working hours, stress of moving out and becoming dependent purely on my own damn self and not knowing how to cook and kind of just enjoying life a bit too much (not that you shouldnt enjoy life, i mean that i go out and eat and drink far far too often) i dont necessarily want to ‘get skinny’, i just want to be proud of my body and happy with the things it can do. for this ive got a couple of ‘sub goals’:

learn to cook like a normal human being

start going to the gym (that is IN MY BUILDING and also FREE)

try barre balance classes

finally for the love of god, go back and relearn ice skating

6. work on my mental health

so after seven years (!!!) of having some pretty bad issues and low points etc etc. i finally had something of a mental breakdown in june this year. turns out pretending that everything is fine is not a long term solution. so with a bit of help from my mum, i am now in therapy. and boy there is a lot going on. things i hadn’t even thought about since i was a child are actually still affecting me in a big way??? what bullshit. childhood trauma seemed like something that happened to other people and not in my real life. but im working through it. its going to be a long haul journey and theres so much i havent even begun to try to deal with, but if i can stay on the right track and work through it all i’ll be happy. i know its not something that can be like fixed and done with, so if i can just find the will to carry on with everything i’ll be pleased

OKAY, so these are my long term goals. im trying not to put too much pressure on myself to do all of this all the time. maybe ill have a week where i learn 6000 songs on the piano and nothing else. thats cool. although i think uni work may be a bit of a priority that i need to push myself on.... 

but anyway, to anyone who reads this inane ramble, i hope you have a gorgeous 2020 and a roaring 20′s decade and remember -  

stay sexy

#2020 #resolutions #new blog #personal #motivation #inspiration #studyblr #writeblr #piano #get fit #mental health #lets do this #no pressure #journal #peace #happy new year #happy new decade #lifestyle #studying #chemistry student #learning #therapy #getting better #getting stronger #langblr #russian #swedish #language

[jennathearcher]

2,6,19, 25, and 60 for the movie ask ! ! !

Hoo boy this got LOOOOONG as predictable as that is so if you want to read my babbling about movies but don’t want your dash spammed CLICK THE READ MORE LINK MY DEARS

2. Your most rewatched movie

OOOOOOH THIS IS SO TOUGH. If I really love any movie, I will often just watch it over and over again, so that means there’s kind of a lot of overlap with just my favorite movies in general; ie The Princess Bride, Corpse Bride, and more recently Suicide Squad and Hereditary

Plus, when I was younger, before I had my own computer and when DVDs were new and shiny, I would get a movie on DVD and just watch it and its special features over and over again until I got a new one; so that happened with movies like Mulan 2, Shark Tale, The Road to El Dorado (that one was an EVENT because I searched for that movie on VHS for YEARS and never found it so my sister was like a hero when she got it for me on DVD), and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas

Basically it’s really hard to pick just one in that regard XD I’m gonna go with both Corpse Bride and Suicide Squad in equal measure on this one cause when I was a kid, Corpse Bride was like my comfort movie, where I would come home from school pretty much every day and just put on that movie to feel good, and then later in life I do the exact same thing with Suicide Squad after work or just when I need a pick-me-up :3 

The rest are under the cut:

6. Top 5 performances of your favorite actor and actress

OH LORDY LOO ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME. First off, how the hell am I supposed to pick just one favorite actor and actress it’s impossible XD Besides, once upon a time not long ago (ho ho ho ho) my go-to favorite actor would have been a certain someone whose name rhymes with Scrawny Rep but for obvious reasons I can’t go with him :P And admittedly there’s a lot of my favorite actors and actresses where I adore them but I…haven’t seen 5 of their movies unfortunately I’M WORKIN ON IT. 

BUT we’re in luck because BACK IN THE DAY before the current age of Netflix and streaming and whatever, when I got obsessed with a specific actor I would do my damned best to track down PHYSICAL COPIES of as many of their movies as I possibly could and then I had no choice but to actually watch them this happened the most in the golden age of one man, the myth, the legend, CILLIAN MURPHY.

oh god this is gonna be so difficult what have i done

5. 28 Days Later

OH MY GOD HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MOVIE??? HOLY FUCK YOU GUYS. If you haven’t seen it GO AND WATCH IT IT’S FUCKING AMAZING and Cillian plays THE LEAD ROLE THAT ALMOST NEVER HAPPENS ANYMORE. 

4. Red Eye

Holy shit you think Scarecrow is scary YOU HAVEN’T SEEN JACKSON RIPPNER. I mean I’m one of those fucked up individuals who watches this movie and goes ‘hey so this guy held this woman hostage on a plane and generally threatened and terrorized her the entire movie WHAT IF THEY FUCKED’ because you know I’m Like That and it’s Cillian come on but like…watch this movie just WATCH IT IT’S SO UNDERRATED

3. Breakfast On Pluto / Peacock

Okay this one is a tie that I like to call the ‘Cillian in drag’ tie and yes I realize that cis men playing trans women is a Problem but BOP came out in 2005 and HE’S ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE IN IT SO I THINK IT SHOULD GET A PASS. And with Peacock his character is not in fact a trans woman but a man with DID whose alter is a female and oh my god this movie is so disturbing but so good YES I KNOW THE WHOLE ‘OOH PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESSES ARE SCARY’ THING IS ALSO BAD but to be fair his character is deliberately portrayed as sympathetic if that helps at all

2. Red Lights

LISTEN. IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THIS MOVIE YET. JUST GO, GO AND WATCH IT. I know I sound like a broken record at this point but basically your homework assignment is to watch every movie on this list because Cillian is a GODDAMN POWERHOUSE ACTOR HOW HAS HE NOT WON AN OSCAR YET. I literally will not say anything else about this movie just watch it trust me

1. Dunkirk

Yeah okay predictable choice is predictable and say what you like about this movie but Cillian CAME TO FUCKING PLAY on this one. His character doesn’t even have a name and he’s serving the most RAW EMOTION on the fucking screen how he didn’t get a Best Supporting nod for this one is beyond me but as we have learned the Academy sucks

AND NOW FOR FAVORITE ACTRESS I really feel like there is no other choice here for me but Helena Bonham Carter, that woman practically raised me

Okay in researching for this list I realize there are A LOT of 90s movies with Helena in them I need to watch so THAT’S GONNA HAPPEN AT SOME POINT but just going off the movies I’ve seen:

5. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

This movie gets a bad rap but I personally really prefer it over the Wilder version and Helena is SO GOOD in it?? She’s known for being very good at playing spooky/weird/kinda bitchy and she nails that shit every time but this is one of the few times in my memory she’s just Soft and such a pure wholesome mama and it warms my heart

4. Alice in Wonderland & Alice Through the Looking Glass

Listen to me whether you’re a Burton fan or not we all like to have a laugh about Tim casting his wives in all his movies but I firmly believe that no other actress out there could have NAILED the Red Queen the way Helena did she’s just SO PERFECT. She’s hilarious and terrifying all at the same time in the best way

3. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Full disclosure: I hate this movie. A lot. BUT. THE ONE SHINING LIGHT OF THE ENTIRE MOVIE IS BELLATRIX FUCKING LESTRANGE and let’s be real she’s the only reason I’m even considering watching the last three Harry Potter movies because she’s JUST! THAT! GOOD!!!

2. Corpse Bride

It’s impossible for me not to include this movie on this list because yeah it’s a voice role but like???? Helena breathes so much life (ironically) into Emily as a character and makes her so easy to adore and relate to and really turns in a fantastic performance, the entire movie basically hinges on her performance as the title character and she knocked it out of the fucking park

1. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

YES SOMEHOW CB DIDN’T TAKE THE TOP SPOT XD That’s a testament to not only how good this movie is but how AMAZING Helena is as Mrs. Lovett, not only can she really sing but her performance is top fucking notch and she breaks my heart every goddamn time I watch it

That was like a mini ask game inside an ask game wow :P MOVING ON

19. An underrated actress

Listen y’all have been sleeping on my queen Cara Delevingne for WAY TOO LONG yeah I know Paper Towns was not great but she was still good in it, she just had shitty material to work with XD Compare that to the performances she turns out in Suicide Squad and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets; I personally cannot wait to see what she does next

25. A movie you’ve seen that you think no one else here will have heard of?

OOH THIS IS A GOOD ONE. I mean I mentioned a bunch of them in the Cillian countdown above but still XD For a change of pace I want to mention a movie that I watched for a completely different actor (namely Harry Lloyd) and that is a lovely little ditty called Closer to the Moon; it’s a Romanian movie (in English) based on a true story about a gang who rob a bank with the cover story that they’re shooting a movie. It also stars Mark Strong and Vera Farmiga and if you can get ahold of it I highly recommend it!! I mean I had to stream it illegally in order to watch it but I do fully endorse supporting it :3

60. Biggest movie pet peeve

Oh this could mean anything XD But I’m gonna assume it means, ‘what is something that happens a lot in movies that annoys you’ and I think the obvious answer there is whenever a female character is pretty one-dimensional and only exists to provide a male character with motivation, or worse, is abused and/or killed in order to further a male character’s development. ALSO, the trope wherein a man seems like a nice guy until his wife dies in childbirth and then of course he blames the kid for his wife’s death and just becomes a complete asshole who doesn’t even try to be a good father and care for the child she left behind like UGH.

Thank you so much for the ask, dearie, and bless you for slogging through all of my ramblings to get to the end :P

#edelweissroses #ooc #long post #I LIKE TALKING ABOUT MOVIES OKAY

[itsybitsylemonsqueezy]

11 Questions

**RULES ** · Always post the rules · Answer the questions given by the person who tagged you · Write 11 questions of your own · Tag 11 people (or however many you want)

Stole this from @slashyrogue​ because I thought it looked fun X3

1. Favourite fantasy book? Or favourite book if fantasy is not your kind of thing? Oh mannnn... the books of my childhood ^^; I mean... yes? All of them? As a standalone, Beauty by Robin McKinley is one of my favorites and my favorite retelling of Beauty and the Beast.

2. Where do you most want to travel to? In general? A lot of places. There’s a lot of beauty in the world, it would be a precious treasure to see it. Specifically? House on the Rock, Wisconsin. Looks FABULOUS. MUST SEE.

3. A fic or story that impressed you deeply and why? Uhhhhh... fuck me. 

Reaching DEEP into my past Odalisque by Bailey was probably one of the most influential fics of my coming of age. Not the first slash fic I ever read, but one of the best. I learned new words from it! Hell, this fic single-handedly created Faramir/Eomer as my favorite LOTR crackship. And it STUNNINGLY, ABSURDLY WORKS. (Yeah, this is SO OLD, I originally read it on a geocities website. YEAH. Yeah. Let that just... sink in.)

My Fine Feathered Friend by Lixxle is still one of my all time favorite comfort fics in the whole goddamn world. I don’t think I can go more than a year without rereading it. It’s just so pure and good and gives me the warm feels. And, you know, it’s impressive on its own to have a fic who can do that for you perpetually, no matter what happens to you. That’s impressive. (Also presented to you in its original deviantART format. I have stared into the abyss, friends. And the abyss stared back.)

Speaking of fics I will never get over and always return to, The Crane Wife by x! Not only did this fic introduce me to the beauty that is Five/Ainley, it introduced me to The Decemberists, which was life changing, and it has forever embedded in my mind how EXCELLENT a slave trope can be. I mean... this fic changed me. And in my opinion, it is x’s best work, which is no small feat as one of the greatest Best Enemies writers I’ve ever read. (Also also presented in its original livejournal format. I’ve been doing this a LONG fucking time friends. A long. long. fucking time.)

Honorable Mentions: A BloodRed Rose for Legolas (long... long embarrassing story from the bad old days of FF.net when I was about 13. It has since been taken down, I’m sure, for similar embarrassment on the part of the author. Although I distantly remember the title being changed... but no, I am not spending my evening tracking it down, sorry ^^;)

Alis Grave Nil by ombredelarue (even unfinished, it stands as a tremendous work. Before I had Hannibal, I had Doctor Who. And I had Doctor/Master. And I had TenSimms. And, let me tell you, Hannibal is not the first fandom nor will it be the last to ship the actor’s characters from other fandoms. Before I had Spacedogs, I had this. And it’s beautiful.)

The Pull of One Magnet to Another by ellie_hell (I’m no longer in the Sherlock fandom for Every Possible Reason. But, this is a very sweet, very well-written fic that if you ever cared for the character of John and Sherlock, I’d recommend reading. It can’t be any worse than the show at any rate)

4. Favourite show character? I mean... j-just one? You’re... you’re kidding right. You’re kidding.

There’s... Hannibal and Mad Sweeney and Frank Castle and Count Olaf. There’s Garnet and Annie Edison and Jane Eyre and Martha Jones. To name a few.

5. If you could only save one book in the apocalypse, what would it be? I’m gonna play by Fahrenheit 451 rules and assume that EVERYONE gets to pick one book to memorize. And I would take Moby Dick and the reason I would take Moby Dick is because 1) now no one else has to suffer trying to memorize it, 2) if you forget the past, you’re doomed to repeat it and I AIN’T DOING THIS WHITE WHALE BULLSHIT TWICE, and 3) it’s a genuinely good book about the impetuous folly and tragic pride of humanity. And given this is the apocalypse, I feel like humility is a lesson humanity could stand to remember : |

6. If you could change one thing about yourself or the world what would it be? Clean energy. Instantly. If there was one thing I could fix today, overnight, that’s what I would do.

About myself, uhhh... motivation to exercise ^^; Also A Job.

7. What do you do for inspiration if you’re feeling blocked or low? I get some musics. Musics is good for my mental state, especially new stuff. I find radio stations imperative for this because I don’t know what I’ll get. And even if I hate it, that will give me inspiration, something to think about, a new stimulus.

8. What would be your patronus / dæmon / spirit animal? I always like to think of something perfectly harmless that just wants to make its way in the world. Like a whale or a butterfly or a pangolin. I’m extremely protective of creatures who are uniquely ill-equipped to defend themselves against humans. And the whale is fantastically intelligent and develops strong familial bonds, they are long-lived and sing to each other, they’re just majestic ocean giants who do their best to regulate their home. Or butterflies, who are beautiful at no cost to anyone and are vital to the continued existence of pretty much everything on the planet. Or pangolins, who just want to be left alone to eat bugs at night and otherwise hide in trees. All precious sweethearts who are just doing their best. I’d like to be one of them.

9. What trait to you value in a friend more than any other? Understanding is a pretty good answer, really, I’m gonna steal it.

10. A quote you always loved and want to share? I know a lot of good ones... hard to choose. But there’s nothing wrong with a classic:

“We cannot choose where we will love.” -- Susan Kay

11. What is your favourite thing about yourself (don’t be shy!) Uh, well, today I took a quiz that told me my Homeric epithet is a “great teller of stories” and I’m always touched when people like my stories and tell me I”m a good story-teller. I value the ability to tell a story quite highly and if I managed to meet that qualification some of the time... that’s pretty great c:

Tagging: anyone who wants to do it, seriously, it’s a good time, you should do it and tag me if you do c:

#long post #fic history #THAT was a lot of fandoms #Come with me on a literary journey friends #about me #about Lemon

[mysweetband]

The Root of it All (Lyrics)

Track 1 - The Root of it All

Our minds had slowly wandered So we took off all our clothes My bated breath failed to remind My confidence to stay composed And so now I've been losing sleep And etching days into my door Obsessing over nonsense To forget that I want more She felt the sorrow In my discontent I wrote the message, but never hit send Forming an ocean was not my intent I'm getting better But it never really mattered in the first place I'm no longer caught up in a world Where I lose my mind When I hear your first name It only made me sick Wide awake and wondering again Disenfranchising your sins Hung up on the thought That this might be As good as it gets The hole that I dug Seemed to quickly fill up Constant weight I felt stuck Always disembodied I saw in her face She felt home She felt safe Seeking peace in a past I was compromising I felt my smile slowly fade to a blister I tried to scream but it came out as a whisper The root of it all Depressed and inside our heads Sleeping in separate beds Just like our parents did Because we're our parents kids The half of blood state of mind Growing up left behind Half a man, undefined Lie awake every night The kind of person I don't strive to be I tried to shake it, but it married me It's a constant reminder Nothing in life comes free Breaking is masochistic mending Self inflicted healing Seeking the root of it all As we looked up at the sky I told her every star she saw Was a plane with its engine burning out I'm just a plane with its engine burning out

Track 2 - Restitution

I fell back with a sense of urgency The same lows, on a different frequency I lost touch, and felt the room scatter Subside, and opt for the latter I tried to get by balancing on fences But even indecision bears consequences I'm sorry for the way that things ended The lines get blurry when youre medicated I'm sleepless, and jaded It's my fault, I hate it Always longing for something more (It's all coming back to me now) I was tangled in her hair She was my cross to bear Pharmaceutical absolution But you can't pass the burden Blaming another person Hyper-delusional restitution I hit the gas It pulled me back The beasts of my burdens were fading fast I'll be the cul-de-sac Insomniac I'll die as a martyr, and maniac The conversation started bearing its teeth Lock, stock, and stuck to her guns She had them pointed at me She said You're not a poet, or a prophecy Just a kid in your head With those hypothesis It's easier to be hopeless Pessimistic, and broken When you've gone too far But if you stand by the path you have chosen Confident and devoted You could learn to live with the scars I'm learning to live with the scars Forever longing for something more

Track 3 - Lucid

The pain was implanted by your parents On the day that you were born You found it hard just to admit that By yourself your bones felt worn Tried to elope with peoples passion Just to soothe your heavy head But consistently lost comfort So you hid away instead You gain a little bit of something From each moment that you live But it's hard to keep a motive/emotive When your brain is double edged She said: "You're so neurotic How did it come to this? You waste your whole goddamn life Wishing that you didn't exist." We were screaming our lungs out Nervous that our past would come back And try to ruin what we have Maybe this year I'll find myself Without pushing my brain to the point Where I tear my hair out She said: "Deep down, I think you're bitter. Past that smile, you've configured A world you won't let anyone see" Take off your mask kid Who are you kidding You'll never meet the right people When you're pretending Struggle through the days That make you grind your teeth And cherish every moment That falls in between I had to draw the line I get so sick of wasting time And going through the motions With the weight that's on my mind No sweat, Its fine Sure, my wires intertwined But since my brain hasn't Short circuited just yet I'll be alright I was trying to sleep When you made me speak You never let me think You never let me sink In my head Where my brain keeps me fed On the thoughts of depression I'm feeling instead of... You I never spoke, because I knew You wouldn't listen I filled your void But all I wanted was some distance Oh! You had to know How could you miss it From head to toe I drowned in my own self affliction Oh! It's getting ludicrous I only speak when I'm lucid And falling asleep

Track 4 - Half of Blood

I hardly noticed the moments That you weren't around I'm learning the meaning of breathing When I'd rather drown Were you grinding your teeth Often thinking of me In your lows As the weakening pace of your heart rate Continued to slow? What kind of father Tells his son and daughter He doesn't care What kind of man Leaves a wife and his family So unprepared Drunk, and fallacious Said you didn't love us And closed the call You traded a life with your children For prison and alcohol Half of blood Dragged through the mud I hardly noticed the hole That they put in the ground My mother has raised me to Be who I am and I'm proud That you weren't around

Track 5 - Midwest Blues

I never felt at home inside my head The sinking feeling in my stomach Took its place instead She was wrapped up in a blanket Voicing muffled sleepless doubts While I was face down on the floorboards Trying to make sense Of myself My confidence Is wearing thin It's not enough to save me, when Every problem that I'm facing Comes from somewhere deep within It was causing the bend in my back To burden my heart The edges that frayed Were ripping apart We pieced it back together But it never felt the same She says: "It's 4pm, you're always sleeping in Why the fuck are you so selfish!?" You made this bed You've got to fix your self You'll have to beg for your pity In someone else I can't keep Indulging you It was causing the bend in my back To burden my heart The edges that frayed Were ripping apart We pieced it back together But it never felt the same So we reminisce the salad days With malice and a sense of praise Admiring the sour taste We found in broken homes I wanted what's best for you So I did what what I had to Sympathetically I terminated timelines I learned to live with demons When I put them in the limelight Cater to the countless wounds With land locked loathing Midwest blues Use your words not just your voice You have always had a choice RIP out your heart You waste of youth Hide from the sun Howl at the moon But I can't keep Indulging you

Track 6 - The Brightest Stars

Cold, dark lighting You made your smile seem so inviting But it was all bark, no biting Strictly bearing teeth when you felt slighted You never felt at home Because you were sick But you mustered up the strength from deep within I could never understand it as a kid But I wish that I had something to say back then I feel selfish to think I could save you So unbelievably naive to the depth of the grief That destroyed your brains perspective Depression darkened your perception And now I'm burdened with November again You are heavy in my head All the things I would have said If I could comprehend what you were going through I started Sneaking glances through windows Hoping I could find you hiding out somewhere I was so young and unprepared To lose someone I loved so much It's still hard to accept it I feel selfish to think I could save you So unbelievably naive to the depth of the grief That destroyed your brains perspective Depression darkened your perception If I knew you couldn't handle the weight I would've carried your torch I still remember you laughing on your front porch Listening to crickets chatter We knew you could've flattered the world The brightest stars burn out the quickest I feel selfish to think I could save you So unbelievably naive to the depth of the grief That destroyed your brains perspective Depression darkened your perception If I knew you couldn't handle the weight I would've carried your torch I still remember you laughing on your front porch Listening to crickets chatter I wish you would've flattered the world You found it Easier to pretend Cut away at your skin Put on a smile Throw away your prescription You got sick of keeping it in You saw a means to an end Your mental illness made it hard to decline it I never held that against you I still wish I could've saved you But I never held that against you I'll never hold it against you The brightest stars burn out the quickest

#My sweet Fall #Lyrics #The Roof of it All #New Album #2017 #Pop Punk #Indianapolis

[taeminuet]

Heartbeat (9/?)

Title: Heartbeat Fandom: SHINee Pairings: (eventual) Jongtae; Minkey; OnKai Chapter Wordcount: ~4k Overall Rating: R (Some chapters will be NC-17; these will be marked.) Chapter Warnings: discussion of mental illness, mildly dubious consent, Summary: In which not every problem needs to be fixed and not every person needs to be saved; sometimes you just need support.

–

1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 7.5 , 8

–

Chapter 9: Jonghyun

Jonghyun isn't used to waking up next to people. It's been a long time since the days where that was commonplace, the days when he had the possibility of waking up with a body next to him, a stranger willing to share a shitty motel bed for a night. Even longer since he could wake up in comfort, safety, a place where he knew he belonged.

He's pretty sure that he's not supposed to think too deeply about either of those things, but fuck it. It's not like he's going to magically recover by pretending he doesn't remember, pretending that he's not who he is.

But the point is that, since coming here, he's not exactly used to waking up with anyone next to him anymore. Even Jinki never stays, and Jonghyun can't really be upset about that; he'll never be Jinki's first priority, and Jonghyun knows as well as Jinki how much it would upset Onew to wake up in Jonghyun's bed.

But that means that it's not Jinki, and it's not Key or Minho or one of the other assholes around here who won't actually sleep with him, and Jonghyun is actually legitimately confused for a minute. But the morning sun is bright – too bright for him not to have fucked up and missed breakfast – and it seeps under his eyelids, staining them painfully red and yanking him towards wakefulness with all the subtlety of a freight train.

And then actually being awake catches up with him and last night filters in. Taemin, in his room, lips on his, asking to stay. Taemin in his bed, bundled under blankets while Jonghyun forced down urges. Taemin, drifting off to what Jonghyun has to assume was sleep, clearly feeling at least moderately more safe in his arms.

Well, fuck.

And yeah, he confirms as he cracks an eye open painfully, it's definitely Taemin in his arms, sleeping still. He doesn't exactly look well-rested, but Jonghyun supposes that passing the fuck out for a few hours after injuring yourself doesn't exactly make up for however-the-hell long of actual full-blown insomnia.

His breaths are heavy and even against Jonghyun's skin, and Jonghyun actually momentarily feels like shit for the prospect of waking him up, but Jonghyun isn't about to get the hell in trouble for all of this when someone inevitably comes around to find them for missing breakfast or being late or group or something else. He doesn't need side-eyes for “corrupting the other patients” and he definitely doesn't need any blame for the massacre of Taemin's neck, long red welts still clear on his skin.

Those still look kind of messy too, Jonghyun thinks, thumbing lazily at Taemin's neck to check a welt. Taemin shivers slightly under the touch, mouth falling open a little in his sleep as he lets out a quiet gasp against Jonghyun's skin.

He's pretty. It's almost a passing thought, but it's a passing thought that Jonghyun has had so many times over the past few days. And Taemin is here, in his bed, and Jonghyun remembers the feeling of Taemin's mouth against his, the desperation, the need.

Jonghyun lets out a long slow breath, and shifts until his mouth is over Taemin's, barely a centimeter away. “Taemin,” he murmurs, so close. “Come on, Taemin. Time to wake up now.”

Taemin shivers again, curling closer, a tiny groan escaping from his lips, and Jonghyun can't help but whine low in his throat, leaning closer to press soft kisses onto Taemin's lips.

“Taemin,” he breaths into his mouth, and then lets out another little noise when Taemin responds, mouth working lazily against his own. And god, nevermind. Nevermind, because if Taemin will give him this, Jonghyun will get in all the trouble he needs to to keep Taemin in his bed, to get this from him, to--

“What the hell?” Taemin asks, jerking away. His eyes are open now, and he's blinking at Jonghyun, looking confused and a little terrified, and Jonghyun feels something knot up hard in his stomach. Fuck. Fuck. He fucked up. But Taemin only groans, a low, distressed noise. “Why the hell did you wake me up?”

“What?” Jonghyun asks, cocking his head a little. Not exactly what he expected. But sure, yeah. A fair question. “Look, you came to me. I didn't ask you to pass out in my fucking bed or anything.”

Taemin's face goes warily blank, and he stares at Jonghyun for a long moment, blinking rapidly a few times before he shakes himself out. “Yeah,” he repeats, “but why the fuck are you waking me up? Especially like-- fuck's sake.”

Jonghyun scowls, a little bit put off by Taemin's attitude. He's literally done nothing for the past day or so but try to help the little shit. After breakfast yesterday, and after last night. Taemin doesn't need to be quite so fucking pissy about it just because they got off on the wrong foot.

“You came to me,” he repeats pointedly. “You're in my fuckin' bed and I gotta get up at some point. Figured it was nicer to wake you up like that than just shove your clingy ass off onto the floor. Not exactly like we haven't kissed before.”

It's a little biting, but Jonghyun's not sure what else to do here. Maybe Taemin doesn't get it, but it's not exactly difficult to see how fucked up Jonghyun gets, and he still let Taemin stay to make Taemin feel better after whatever the hell was going on there. Jonghyun doesn't even know the full story.

(“Are you going to be able to deal with Taemin?” Jinki had asked him yesterday. “If he starts talking about why he’s here? If it’s at all similar?”

Jonghyun isn't entirely sure that he even wants the full story.)

“You're welcome, by the way,” he says, pulling back, trying to put some sort of space between them, “You know, for letting you stay. And for not letting you miss group on your third day. You'll get a reputation that way, and believe me when I say you do not want the reputation for being the trouble maker in here.”

“I'm welcome,” Taemin echoes, staring at him incredulously. “You can't just fucking wake people up by-- what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“What's wrong with me?” Jonghyun asks, eyebrows shooting up. Not great phrasing for anyone in here, honestly, but like... what the fuck? “You're the one who ran in here acting like some sort of monster is on your ass, looking like you used your fucking neck as a knife sharpener for those fucking claws you've got for fingernails. You're the one who all but begged me to fuck you and then shoved me the fuck away. I'm doing my goddamn best here! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Taemin's face flickers, eyes going hard, and then he's twisting closer, catching at Jonghyun's wrists in the way that Jinki might, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make Jonghyun's resolve crumble. It's so goddamn stupid, but Jonghyun has never been able to push people away like this, and a small part of him says that Taemin is taking advantage of that, can see that in him. It's not hard to see.

But it's hard to keep track of that thought as Taemin's mouth hits his, hard enough to hurt, Taemin's teeth digging into his bottom lip hard enough to ache. Taemin's fingers around his wrists are tight, and Jonghyun can only futilely tug at them, not even to get away, but just to be able to maneuver, to reach out. But Taemin shoves his hands back and away, and slides over him, reaching for Jonghyun instead, his fingers teasing over the front of Jonghyun's pants and dragging over the outline of his cock, already beginning to harden, because Jonghyun is weak.

But, fuck, this is so much better, so much more to Jonghyun's speed, he can't help himself but to give in. He catches frantically at Taemin, hand curving around the back of his neck, trying to pull him closer, to kiss him harder, filthier. The skin under his palm is uneven, hot along the remnants of the welts, but Jonghyun can't even find space to care, not when Taemin's hand is brushing over his cock, raising goosebumps along the skin of his thighs, while his teeth sink into Jonghyun's lip harshly, such a sharp juxtaposition that Jonghyun trembles, going pliant in Taemin's hands.

He rolls his hips up, needy, desperate. He's aching, his entire body one long live wire, and he needs, he needs, he needs--

Taemin pulls away, so abruptly that Jonghyun sags. “No,” he whimpers, reaching out helplessly, lost between one moment and the next. But Taemin is moving away, clambering out of the bed, and the look on his face is all annoyance.

“Is that what you wanted, huh?” Taemin asks, voice biting. “Don't start shit, Jonghyun. Where the fuck do you think you get off?”

Jonghyun stares, breath coming hard and sharp and heavy. He's shaking. His entire body. He wants to drop to his knees and beg, but that flicker of knowledge, that Taemin is taking advantage, keeps him still and shaking until Taemin is already slamming his way out of the room, door loud in his wake and leaving Jonghyun behind.

Jonghyun exhales low and shaky. “Fuck,” he says, and it's such a pitiful little sound, barely even a curse. He's reeling still, trying to catch up, and he hates it.

And maybe, yeah, he hates himself for it too, but Jonghyun also can't help himself. Closing his eyes, he halfway sobs as he wraps his hand around his cock, trying to imagine it as Taemin's. Maybe the boy is a fucking asshole, but his fingers had felt good and Jonghyun needs it.

Later, he'll most definitely convince himself that his lips don't form Taemin's name as he jerks himself off, hard and fast enough that it hurts.

And after that... after all of that, he still has to get up and pretend to be okay. He has to get up and change out of stained pajama pants. He has to stumble out of his room and deal with Taemin, talking to Onew and looking soft and gentle and nothing like the boy who had just pinned him to the wall and fucked up his whole day.

Jonghyun shudders, debates skirting them, ignoring them. But then that's going to be different than normal, and someone's going to ask, and then he's going to fucking get interrogated about it. And Jonghyun doesn't really have the energy for all that right now.

Instead, he pastes on a smirk, sidles over to them with cockiness draped over him like a mask, his fingers catching Taemin's waist almost casually, ignoring the little jerk it earns him until Taemin turns to look at him, eyes narrowing. Jonghyun raises an eyebrow, but he pulls his arm away to keep from getting hit or something. “You're a goddamn cocktease, you know that?”

Taemin rolls his eyes hard. “You don't know the definition of cocktease yet,” he says. “And you fucking deserved it after that shit.”

Jonghyun still doesn't fucking know what he did wrong, but fuck this.

“Come on, let's go,” Taemin says to Onew before Jonghyun can get his thoughts together well enough to retort. “I don't think it's a good idea to be late, right? And Key and Minho should already be there.”

And maybe Jonghyun is just spiteful as hell, but the way Taemin says Minho's name reminds him well enough that if Minho's not around, he passed the fuck out last night And a small part of him feels vindicated enough that Taemin's about to have to deal with that shit.

That sense of spite falls away when they walk into the group therapy room and find Key and Minho sitting there in heavy silence. Key looks distant, more so than he always does; on days like this, Key might as well be hollowed out. Jonghyun's used to it, and so is Onew, telling in the way he ducks his head shyly as he slips into his normal seat, refusing to make eye contact with anyone as he murmurs a quiet, “Good morning, Minho.”

But Key never seems to be able to adjust quite right, and Taemin doesn't know, doesn't seem to think twice about it as he drops into the seat between Onew and Minho and leans his head against Minho's shoulder without fear.

Jonghyun doesn’t even try to hide his staring, the way he’s watching them as he sat down next to Key, reaching over to touch Key's arm curiously. It barely gets an acknowledgement, Key's eyes flickering to him for a moment before looking back, fixating on the scene in front of them as Taemin sighs, “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”

And Minho. Minho mostly twitches, looking like he's trying his best not to appear openly uncomfortable as he answers. “Good morning,” he says, and it comes out natural, the way it always does. But then it doesn't, all at once, Minho's tongue tripping over an unfamiliar name, uncertainty in every syllable as he adds, “T-taemin? Right?”

And it's not right. He's paired the syllables up incorrectly, placed the 'm' sound with the first syllable instead of the second, just that little bit off. Just that little bit wrong.

Taemin withdraws like he's been struck, panic flashing over his face so sharply that even that vengeful part of Jonghyun feels bad. It's too similar to the boy he saw last night, terrified and lost, and so different from the one who fucked around with him this morning.

“Taemin,” he corrects, but his voice is wavering, and he pulls back into himself hard. Right. Afraid of being touched. He lets Onew and Jinki. Had let Minho. Jonghyun doesn't quite know where he stands on that one yet, considering all that fucking bullshit.

“Right, Taemin,” Minho says, crafting the name with care. “I... stay up with you, right?”

Taemin looks miserable. Even Jonghyun can feel it now, the heaviness settling over Taemin. Onew reaches out to touch comfortingly, but Taemin shakes him off with a wan smile, one he clearly doesn't feel or mean. “I'm okay,” he says quietly, and it sounds like he's trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. “I... yeah, Minho. We spent the last few together at least. Before you slept.”

Next to Jonghyun, Key abruptly slumps in his chair, lifting a hand to his face and pressing it there for a moment, almost like he's trying to hide something. Jonghyun doesn't dare press.

“Oh,” Minho says, quietly. “I'm sorry. That I had to sleep last night?”

None of it sounds sincere. Won't for a day or two until Minho gets some sense of things back in order for himself. It sounds like he's reading from a script, sounds like he's just reciting things from his notebook, because, well, he is. And Taemin can tell, if the way he keeps tucking further and further into himself is any indication.

“Taemin,” Onew says quietly. “Are you--?”

“He's fine,” Key snaps, voice too sharp. “He's gonna have to get used to it.”

Taemin recoils a little again, reflexive against the harsh words, and now even Minho looks a little bit stricken, looking at Key hesitantly. Something in his notebook probably says that Key doesn't mean it, is just lashing out. But having it written down and really understanding where Key is coming from are two different things.

“Bummie,” Jonghyun says, voice a little warning. “Hey, man. Leave it alone. You know it's hard.”

Key sneers at him, but Jonghyun just stares back until Key huffs and turns bodily away, frustration evident in the tightness of his shoulders.

Minho makes a quiet noise. “I don't--”

“Don't worry about it too much,” Jonghyun says, trying to sound dismissive. He's not sure if succeeds, but damn is he trying. “Everyone's had a rough night. Or morning, I guess.”

“And why don't you all tell me about that?” says the doctor from somewhere so close behind them that Taemin jumps and even Jonghyun tenses, hissing out low through his teeth. Some fucking warning would have been nice, but instead Dr. Kwon just looks so goddamn pleased with himself as he takes the last remaining seat, smiling at them all as if they don't all hate him just a little. “I see you slept last night, Minho. How are you feeling?”

Minho stares blankly. Jonghyun's heard a couple of different questions to this based on how Minho's resets have gone. 'Fine.' 'Good.' 'Confused.' And, of course, Jonghyun's personal favorite, 'Who the hell are you?'

Today, Minho sits for a moment, staring at his own hands, and then offers, “Tired, mostly.”

“Understandable,” Dr. Kwon says, and then looks towards them. “And the rest of you? Taemin, would you like to share something with us?”

Jonghyun feels his stomach sink. Whether he's pissed at Taemin or not, that's fucking rough to get targeted first thing when you have a lot more to hide than someone like Minho. Taemin's fingers twitch up towards his neck, and he looks... fuck. He looks scared.

“I...” he starts, voice wavering. After a moment, he forces a smile, but it's too little, too late and the doctor is already clearly examining him as he all but chirps, “I got some sleep last night. Must have thrashed around some and scratched myself. Nothing to worry about.”

Jonghyun makes an involuntary noise, something a little like a scoff. God that was a shit excuse, but it made sense that Taemin didn't want to be worried about. Who would?

Jonghyun had seen what happened last night. That wasn't something you brought up in sharing circle and talked about like it was no big deal. He still has no clue what Taemin was running from, but it was something big.

“Jonghyun, is there something you would like to add?” Dr. Kwon asks.

Taemin whips his head around so fast that Jonghyun hears his neck pop, staring at Jonghyun in abject horror, like he's sure Jonghyun is about to spill his secrets. And sure, Jonghyun has never been the most cooperative person. But to ask him to spill someone else's secrets like that? And with Taemin looking at him like that...

God dammit. Why the hell does this kid keep dragging him back in like this? He's still upset about this morning. Just not nearly upset enough to leave him to this kind of shit.

Jognhyun's jaw tightens, and it takes a concerted effort to sound casual as he rolls his eyes, averting them from Taemin's pleading gaze. “Nah,” he says, “Princess over here just can't handle a little nightmare without freaking the fuck out and running to other people's beds.”

There. The truth, but not the whole truth. This way at least he isn't betraying the scared boy who had tucked himself into the corner of his room, crying and asking for help.

“Don't call me that,” Taemin says, but it's weak at best, more relief than snark. And when the doctor hums and is clearly looking Jonghyun's way instead of Taemin's, Taemin mouths a little thank you.

Jonghyun shrugs as nonchalantly as possible, but he's back to bristling half a second later as the doctor asks, “And was Jonghyun accommodating, or did he try to get you to sleep with him?”

“What the fuck?” Jonghyun hisses, shoulders tightening. He wouldn't – okay, well he had. But everyone, everyone here knew that if someone told Jonghyun to back the fuck off, he would. He had.

“Jonghyun,” the doctor asks, and it's patient, calm, exactly the tone of voice that makes Jonghyun shake. He's talking down to Jonghyun like he's a disobedient child, and Jonghyun's jaw clicks shut, rage sending a flush up his neck as he shook in his seat, fingers jittering. “I believe I was talking to Taemin.”

“Don't,” snaps Taemin, harsh enough that Jonghyun gives him a look. “Don't talk to him like that. Jonghyun doesn’t deserve that. He was great. Super accommodating or whatever the hell you just said. He didn't do anything wrong.”

And that really does surprise Jonghyun, startling him into uncertainty for a long moment until the doctor murmurs, “I see the two of you have bonded somewhat since Taemin arrived. Do you think--”

“I think that's none of your business,” Jonghyun snaps before he can help himself. He doesn't know where he stands here, and he kind of hates that. He doesn't know if he's mad at Taemin or grateful to him or both, and if this keeps up, he's going to have a fucking episode or some shit because the emotional whiplash is making his head spin. “I don't see you calling out anyone else for being friends.”

“I'm simply making an observation,” Dr. Kwon says, infuriatingly calm.

Jonghyun grits his teeth. “Then make them about someone else,” he says coldly. “I'm fucking done. And I'm pretty damn sure Taemin is too.”

And Taemin doesn't fight him, just settles back in his seat and nods solemnly, such a sharp beat of silence falling over the room that the tension is practically palpable.

“Clearly,” Key cuts in after a moment, his eyes sharp on both Jonghyun and Taemin, “things are a bit tense. Is there anything else you want to ask, doctor? Or are you done? Because we clearly only have the same old shit to say here.”

The doctor is looking upwards at the ceiling as if praying for patience, something that Jonghyun is sure wears thin pretty quickly with this group.

“I think that we should discuss your feelings about waking up this morning, Minho,” he says, in a clean ploy to change the subject.

Key gives him a look as he leans back in his chair, everyone looking towards Minho, who looks positively alarmed. Not that that's anything exactly new on the first day of a reset.

After a moment, Key smiles faintly, a wan little thing, and cocks his head. “Right,” he says, dropping his chin into his hand. “Welcome back, Minho.”

“Y-yeah,” Minho says, uncertainly, and begins talking.

Jonghyun scoffs and tunes him out. He's heard this spiel enough times. Instead, he spends the rest of group therapy staring at Taemin.

More than once Taemin looks back, and if nothing else, Jonghyun is at least pretty damn sure that he recognizes a truce when he sees one.

--

Next Chapter

#SHINee fic #SHINee fanfic #Jongtae #Minkey #Onkai #my writing #heartbeat #We're getting into actual jongtae territory here guys #buckle up~

[everysuperherofighting]

Best Albums of 2016

I think we all know how we feel about 2016, though I will say that on a personal level it was actually pretty good, and involved a lot of positive personal development, though also a fair amount of death, and I’m not talking about all the celebrities right now. My aunt, grandfather, and former band instructor all passed away this year.

As far as music, my tastes feel like they fall on the same continuum they always do, though there seem to be a few more old guy rockers than usual, which I guess means I am no longer aiming for “Noisey” but rather “Rolling Stone.” This is probably also personal: I am not an old guy yet, but I am getting closer and I am also becoming aware that I will probably not accomplish all of my artistic goals within the next 5 to 10 years, and so am becoming increasingly open to artists staying relevant into their middle age and beyond.

RIP all the folks, RIP all the artists and celebrities, RIP all the people in Syria and Yemen and the Philippines, and all the people killed in terrorist attacks in Europe and Africa and the Middle East, and killed in shootings (police, mass, and otherwise) in the United States,  and RIP the short term possibility of having a federal government that is at least potentially responsive to the needs of marginalized people. Here are the best albums of 2016, according to me:

Image via the Hold Up music video

1. Beyonce - Lemonade.

This album was cathartic when it was released at the beginning of the year, but now that we’re at the end we probably need it even more.

Though largely about infidelities within an interpersonal relationship (dammit Jay), with a heavy smattering of race commentary (particularly in the videos) and empowerment feminism, the frustrations and self-empowerment in the face of all adversaries expressed in these songs transcend the specifics. Especially in a year determined to put us in our place, to make us feel worthless or powerless.. Whether a cheating lover, an orange race-baiting huckster masquerading as politician (and ascending to the highest office in the land), the goddamn fucking forces of white supremacy/the patriarchy/global capitalism or our own private struggles with self-doubts and mental illness, this album had something to offer, if nothing else than a reminder to hold our heads up and say “fuck ya’ll.”

I didn’t like every song on this album but look: When I saw a room full of women, middle fingers raised, jamming out to “I’m Not Sorry” like a giant “fuck you” to whatever it was that was fucking their day up, telling them they weren’t valuable or whatever, I realized that it didn’t necessarily need to be for me.

Rubbery dancehall, Nahleans jazz,  futuristic (though I guess present now) R+B, diva voice: Beyonce does that thing where she overdubs like 20 different vocal tracks over one another, but her voice is already so powerful it sounds like a chorus of Amazonians or gods. And of course there’s the image of Beyonce walking around smashing car windows with a baseball bat in the “Hold Up” video, which now seems to be remarkably prescient.

The biggest pop star in the world right now has our back. We could do worse.

Watch “Hold Up”

2. Anderson .Paak - Malibu

Deceptively breezy soul and funk that inherently understands the political power of a block party. Like so many artists before, Anderson .Paak understands that sometimes just getting by is a revolutionary act, and thus this album often seems like a celebration of the awe one feels at their own continued existence. Some pretty good jams for fucking also.

Watch “Come Down”

3. Schoolboy Q - Blank Face

A gangsta rap album that absolutely nails the paranoia and sense of menace that must accompany the lifestyle. The vibe alternates between blazed out soul samples and claustrophobic, almost manic moments of paranoia. Sometimes you’re smoking the Kush and then sometimes there’s a black SUV in your rearview. Schoolboy Q rides over all this with straight-faced hood talk and almost gleeful depictions of acts of depravity, like so many others grasping power in whatever avenue is available to him. Kanye West has a show stealing feature and Vince Staples continues to shine, but I’m all about those Jadakiss and E40 bars.

Watch “John Muir”

4. Danny Brown - Atrocity Exhibition

Beats that sound like they were compiled from the intro to old VHS tapes and people banging on trashcans.  Little oft-kilter touches mirror the descriptions of substance abuse, the pitch-heightened background voice in “White Lines,” B-Real’s blitzed nursery rhyme delivery of the hook on “Get Hi.” Not that much music can probably still scare your cool boomer parents, but I’d nominate this one.

Watch “When It Rain”

Image via the Nobody’s Baby video

5. Sheer Mag - III

Sheer Mag sounds like the best basement band in the world, grimy rock n roll made by people who got punk but also grew up on Thin Lizzy and Jackson Five. Guitar solos that sound liberating instead of masturbatory and powerhouse vocals from Tina Halladay about love and heartbreak, like someone’s memory of what 70s rock n roll was like, inevitably better than it actually was.

Watch “Nobody’s Baby”

6. The Falcon - Gather Up The Chaps

Technically this is a punk rock supergroup, with members of the Loved Ones and Alkaline Trio, but it feels very much like Brendan Kelly’s vision, a chance to get a little grittier than the Lawrence Arms and indulge in his ever present artistic interest in the guy puking in the alley, then asking you if you know where to score some coke. There’s a song named after the video of David Hasselhoff drunkenly eating a cheeseburger, and though in a different band this may be a gimmicky (and like, really really out of date) reference to internet culture, here it comes across as a recognition - a dark moment is a dark moment no matter how meme worthy it becomes.

Watch “Sergio’s Here”

7. Jeff Rosenstock - Worry

Massive sing alongs, noisy genre hopping (or combining), and huge power-pop hooks that always seem to be just on the verge of descending into chaos. Jeff Rosenstock has often managed to make whatever he’s going through personally seem to speak to larger scale generational woes (I’m pretty sure there were at least two albums about not wanting to get a job, which came out at the same time that I and most of the people I know also didn’t want to get jobs). A reoccurring theme here seems to be the gentrification of places that you love, which is connected to the experience of getting older and feeling like you’re missing out. Jeff has definitely crafted his own “sound” at this point, so when he switches styles to the straight genre homage in the three-song punch of “Bang On the Door,” “Rainbow” and “Planet Luxury” (garage punk, third-wave ska and hardcore) in 3 blistering minutes, it’s a perfect reminder of all the music we (well, me) grew up loving.

Watch “Wave Goodnight To Me”

8. Kamaiyah - A Good Night In the Ghetto

Remember when people used to call beats “slappers?” Probably only if you were into Bay Area hip-hop circa 2007. Anyway, this shit slaps.

Watch “Out the Bottle”

9. YG - Still Brazy

Similar to how A Good Night in The Ghetto feels like an amalgamation of several decades of Bay Area hip hop, this is puuuuuure fucking LA fat bass, eerie keyboard sampling G-funk. Gangsta rap has always been political. Have I written that before? It’s worth saying more than once. Those last three songs though. FDT will obviously have a lot of shelf life, but “Blacks and Browns” and “Police Get Away Wit Murder” are sharp contributions to the tradition of “fuck this shit” also.

Watch “FDT”

10. Run the Jewels - RTJ3

A rush of weird beats, shit talk, and surreal imagery, hip-hop dispatches from a dystopian future, but one that feels weeks rather than years away. El-P and Killer Mike are honestly not that similar stylistically, (El-P is more from the highly conceptual east coast underground school, Killer Mike is more the southern testifying and telling straight truths school) but their mutual love of the game has always made this work and they are both world class shit talkers.

Watch “Talk To Me”

Image via the Chili Town video

11. Hinds - Leave Me Alone

Garage… pop I guess? that feels close to the vein, emotionally. I don’t mean heartbreak, though that’s here too, but also friendship, drinking wine in the sun, with surfy guitar melodies. There’s something that sometimes happens with some lady bands, where people kind of get into some sort of perceived naiveté or innocence or something, so I’m going to assume these women can fuck you up.

Watch “Warts”

12. Pup - The Dream Is Over

The frustration of reaching your mid-20s, realizing that you have not accomplished any of your goals and that you don’t have any prospects. In song form. It would sound like a kiss-off if the singer wasn’t desperately grasping for change.

Watch “DVP”

13. A Tribe Called Quest - We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service

Classic Tribe components still here - the swing in the rhythm, the walking bass lines, motherfucking Busta Rhymes(!), but with a foot firmly planted in the present. Did they used to swear this much? I don’t remember. Extended music breaks. Guitar flourishes. Q-Tip is clearly the ringleader, wearing the role more comfortably than ever, but with a kind of quiet humility that comes from age. Yeah, we still here, shit still sucks, but sometimes you find those little moments, you know?

Watch “We The People”

14. Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker

Is there hope for salvation before death? Or just further disappointment and failure? An album to drink wine to in a dark room, alone but for ghosts.

Watch “You Want It Darker”

15. Drive-By Truckers - American Band

Pretty sure the Truckers have always been angry and political, it’s just never lined up with current events quite this overtly - but there’s always been a real siding with the have-nots, the people screwed over by bad economics, and the (not just white) working classes, though sometimes this manifests as concept albums about Lynard Skynard. Still, with a band that clearly flirts with a Red State target audience, at least sonically, and judging from the youtube comments on some of their videos, hanging their hat so clearly on the “blue side” is a risky move and one that should be commended. Here we get stories about the founder of the NRA murdering a Mexican teenager in the 20s, the shooting at Umpqua community college, hypocritical religious folks, and Black Lives fucking Mattering.

Watch “Surrender Under Protest”

16. David Bowie - Blackstar

To be honest, I thought this sounded a little bit too much like Pink Floyd the first time I heard it (plus a sax player) but the sultriness of cuts like “Lazerus,” the keyboard line in “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” that sounds like it came out of an 80s fantasy movie, and the weird vocal flourishes and marching rhythm of “Girl Loves Me” won me over. Bowie has left this mortal coil, and either ascended to a tinsel covered 70s movie set or an 80s computer game about going to the moon, but it’s definitely some kind of heaven.

Watch “Lazerus”

17. Death Grips - Bottomless Pit

A soundtrack for glitchy meme art, ordering 2CI off the Silk Road, and those computer generated DeepDream images, while MC Ride bellows avant-garde street poetry. I’ve never been sure if Death Grips are railing against or with the shitposting internet culture that’s embraced them. Some of these tracks are just fucking metal though.

Watch “Eh”

18. clipping - Splendor and Misery

Breakneck raps over the sound of an airshaft opening on a spaceship. This is supposedly a concept album about a slave revolt in outer space. Musically this equates to old spirituals and malfunctioning computers.

Watch “Air Em Out”

19. The Coathangers - Nosebleed Weekend

In the music video for “Nosebleed Weekend” the women in the band crash a party of hipsters to punch everyone in the face, but then the video ends with them probably trying to keep a straight face while they get covered with buckets of fake blood. Tough sounding surf punk, much about heartbreak.

Watch “Nosebleed Weekend”

Image via the Victim of Me video

20. Descendents - Hypercaffium Spazzinate

There’s a lot of older musicians on this list for whatever reason (all the dead guys I guess,) but a few lyrics about dietary changes aside, this band could have stepped wholesale out of their 1994 variation. Fast, hooky, with the most underrated bass lines in punk.

Watch “Victim of Me”

21. Paul Simon - Stranger to Stranger

Alright, this one’s a little NPR but I will say that I think Paul Simon sounds a little more of-kilter, a little moodier than he sometimes does. There are dark things around the edges in this one, whether it’s the ghostly guitars on the title track, or the way his funny song about getting stuck outside a club you’re supposed to play suddenly starts alluding to class uprising, a buildup that feels both surprising and also strangely inevitable.

Watch “Wristband”

22. Mikey Erg - Tentative Decisions

A lot of emotionally earnest music (dare we bring up emo?) gets slammed, essentially for being melodramatic. It’s a difficult balancing act, but I’ve always felt like the Ergs managed to avoid this, and here Mikey Erg continues that streak on his first solo album, with tastefully poppy tunes full of yearning melodies and (more) broken hearts, ala Big Star or an early Beatles album. When I saw this guy live a few years ago, it made my friend get back together with his ex-girlfriend.

Watch “Faulty Metaphor”

23. NOFX - First Ditch Effort

There is no way I’m not putting an album that has a song where Fat Mike sings about being a fetishistic crossdresser in my top 25.

Watch “Six Years On Dope”

24. Ramshackle Glory - One Last Big Job

It’s amazing how many people’s favorite band this is with virtually no mainstream recognition. Like, even Bomb the Music Industry put out stuff with Asian Man, who’ve put out Alkaline Trio records and stuff. And yet this (and Patrick Schneeweis’s other projects) is like Bob Dylan to thousands of kids across the country. I knew something was up when all the kids at the Rainbow Gathering I went to (2011) were playing Johnny Hobo covers. Anyway, this is their last album, and as such is a somewhat slow, contemplative affair. Pat’s always been excellent at espousing anarchist ideals while also representing that problems and hypocrisies that accompany radical lifestyles. Swan song for a true alternative.

Listen to “Face the Void”

25. AJJ - The Bible 2

Very much continuing ideas first developed on Christmas Island, a collection of noisy rock/pop tunes with upbeat melodies and lyrics about losing your shit, dirty middle schoolers who hang out by themselves in construction sites, and the Herculean task of feeling kind of ok with yourself.

Watch “Goodbye, Oh Goodbye”

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

you’re not the poison; it’s me.

... um. titans 2.07 absolutely WRECKED me you guys, and i would like to tell you why in excruciating detail:

SPOILERS ahead

(and before i go ahead, i just want to say this: this episode deals with ptsd and psychosis and suicidal ideation explicitly, in ways that even i found difficult to watch. it’s very intense. please keep that in mind if you decide to watch it.)

1. usually genre tv shows like to pile on the trauma but deal with its fallout either rarely or in oblique ways--shots of the character brooding, a couple of ‘candid’ talks filled with frustrating euphemisms, then it’s on to tackling the next plot point. not titans tho--for this show, the trauma is very much the point. the plot is wafer-thin and takes a backseat as the show takes episode after episode to break down its central characters and hammer it in that there are no easy fix-its for complex trauma, and that Dealing with it is a continuous, sometimes lifelong process. it forces you to keep re-evaluating and re-contextualising the actions of these characters and challenges your assumptions.

1.5. for instance: let’s take donna troy. in s1 she was the put-together big sister to dick, content with living her life outside the superhero community while giving sound advice to dick about how he can get his own life back on track. now? she’s a stressed, paranoid wreck, plagued by horrible memories and taking her insecurities out on dick and jason and whoever else is available. deathstroke’s machinations aside, there’s something deeply dysfunctional about the way the original titans operated, the ways they brought both the best and the worst out of each other. it seems like none of them really understood the seriousness of what they were doing until they did something truly terrible that they couldn’t take back, and it was earth-shattering enough that donna completely abandoned her old life to live as a civilian. trigon’s vision for her in 2.01 reminded her that she was fooling herself; coming back to titans tower and actually having to face what made her run away in the first place has broken down the walls she’s spent five years putting up. it’s not pretty to watch, but... it tracks.

2. after having written post after post about dick cracking under relentless stress and the weight of his own guilt complex, it was startling to see him actually fall apart. halluci!bruce was absolutely brutal and really brought home the fact that Good Lord, Dick Grayson Is So Far From Okay That It’s Not Even Funny Anymore. 

because here’s the thing: dick is deeply unwell, and however the show proceeds with his character from here on out, this episode made absolutely no bones about that fact. his single-minded dash to find and kill slade is framed as both irrational and suicidal. he’s visibly on edge, bursting into bouts of uncontrollable rage. he’s shown to carry a guilt complex the size of mount everest, to the point where it actually seems delusional. he’s fucking terrified of abandonment, to the point where he’d rather cut off ties on his own rather than have others leave him. he’s constantly berating himself and this doesn’t give him a moment to sit down and think and try to form a rational plan. halluci!bruce even mentions meds and “uppers and downers” to cope, and i am genuinely concerned that that was what dick actually did to cope in the immediate aftermath of whatever the fuck went down with him and joey and deathstroke. maybe it’s ptsd with a secondary psychosis triggered by nearly losing jason the same way he lost his parents (and massive sleep deprivation, i imagine), or maybe there’s another underlying chronic mental illness. either way, he needs help. 

man but halluci!bruce was vicious. if this is what dick has running in his head at all times, no wonder he broods, and no wonder he takes others admonishing his choices with barely any protest! 

2.25. looking at this from a different perspective, tho, here’s another way in which bruce wayne functions as a symbol on this show. phantom!bruce is how dick normally externalises everything he hates about himself, and this dynamic plays out very literally in this episode. 

interestingly, and somewhat heartbreakingly, it took dick accepting and internalising his low opinion of himself and his veritable ocean of guilt for judgy!bruce wayne to turn into loving, concerned!bruce wayne, who would comfort dick and wipe his tears. (it is entirely heartbreaking that that’s what dick subconsciously craves from bruce.) dick must debase himself for love and acceptance. it’s fucking tragic. 

2.55. and what does it mean--for dick and for his friendships with the og titans--that he’s so convinced that they would leave him if he told them the truth about jericho? for one, even back then, it seemed like dick was doing a lot of the emotional labour for the team: as a leader he both funnelled and executed the team’s plans, with responsibility for the fallout falling unevenly and mostly on his shoulders; he acted as the go-between for the team and bruce, for donna and garth, probably for hank and dawn, given he was dawn’s rebound. later, hank and dawn are visibly concerned by how viciously he fights. after re-forming the titans, he continues to shoulder responsibility for the shit-show that deathstroke rains on them, although he didn’t know deathstroke was alive when he re-opened the tower. of course he thinks that the team will think that he’s beyond redemption if they find out the truth; of course he’d want to go and finish off deathstroke on his own--or die in the process--before any of them finds out. 

2.75. but guys, here’s the thing: in spite of all of this, dick grayson still went around to check on conner and jason and assure the latter that he didn’t blame him for running off on his own. he saw jason standing there on a precipice right at the end, and decided he was going to be opaque anymore, or fall back on what he learned from bruce. he sits down with jason and finally divulges the secret that he had been willing to die to protect--making himself vulnerable to save jason’s life. he’s trying so goddamn hard even though his brain is rioting against him right now and probably has been for years. it’s just--i can’t imagine a truer, more sensitive portrayal of dick grayson than this.

3. watching jason reach his breaking point was,,, Not Fun. it’s one thing to be seemingly passed on like unwanted baggage from guardian to guardian. to be viewed with contempt and impatience when he just wants to make sure his voice isn’t lost in the constant shuffle. to be looked at as an impostor by the very people he looks upto. to be assigned the role of hot-headed fuck-up despite all his attempts to be useful, to prove himself. but to have all of that fall on him all at once on top of (poorly) dealing with a near-death experience? yikes.

3.25. and the horrible, tragic, human part of it all is that donna and the others probably didn’t even know what they were doing to jason by piling on him like that? he’s a relative outsider to both rachel and the og titans. he’s an arrogant prick that’s easy to hate. without dick and gar to stand up for jason, he’s cornered by people who haven’t even gotten to the point of seeing him as a vulnerable kid that’s struggling, just like the rest of them.

3.5. and so the two robins perch on the ledge, each convinced that they are poison that will either kill or drive their friends away. it’s a fraught moment of connection that stops jason from jumping, but he doesn’t step away. both of them are on a precipice in more ways than one; i can only hope they help each other land on the right side.1

also, bruce wayne? send your sons to therapy MY GOD

4. kory and rachel using their awesome powers in concert to cure conner! kory using her cultural background to connect to and help conner! conner mumbling in kryptonian! krypto fucking shooting across the sky with eve on his back! in such a sad and intense episode, it’s important to remember that some fantastic things happened as well!

5. here’s the thing: i don’t think dick killed jericho in the way that he probably thinks he does. dick is a hugely unreliable narrator--that’s been his Thing since s1. part of me thinks jericho should be dead; whatever happened with him and the titans has been built up to be such an earth-shattering event that it would kinda be cheating if he survived anyway. the other bigger part of me says: fuck that noise. JOEY WILSON LIVES, and that’s that

6. gar was sleeping? are you kidding me??? i’m assuming deathstroke drugged him or something so that he wouldn’t be there to Talk Sense and stop these melodramatic fools from tearing into each other. i can only hope that there’s some Big Plans for him down the line. 

#titans #titans spoilers #dick grayson #jason todd #donna troy #bruce wayne #cw suicide #cw mental illness #meta