#and then suddenly there's this delightful ratcheting Oh Shit Oh Fuck Oh Shit Oh Fuck Something Is About To Happen

[cool-as-steel]

my father brought us all nice lunch but unfortunately I got to The Part in a book that I forgot had really rather sickening necromancy in it and now I am feeling much less joyed by my chicken katsu

#ramblings #the captain's library #still reading elemental masters - now I remember what else got me quite so scared reading unnatural issue the first time #this IS definitely one of the better books in the series for sheer Ominous Dread Of Incoming History though #there is the looming shadow of the first world war all through the first two thirds but there's other stuff to be worried about so it Creep #and then suddenly there's this delightful ratcheting Oh Shit Oh Fuck Oh Shit Oh Fuck Something Is About To Happen #and then it HAPPENS. and also simultaneously you get the most uncomfy bit of necromancy in All of the books in the series #it's a combination of the purposelessness and the carelessness and the - well I can only call it inhumanity #the people involved could have done the same work just as well had they been allowed to remain living humans but the necromancer simply #does not Care about the fact that they're People. and he kills them and leaves them to rot upright (still working!) just because he can #and he's not even living there for them to be working For him! #well yeah back on track I still think peter almsley would never marry a woman but otherwise the book is pretty good as these go #I really must get around to doing some kind of rating of my own opinions on all of the elemental masters books I've read so far #reserved for the cat was not so interesting that I bothered with a review and steadfast retreads the same ideas much better #and the progression of What The Author Thinks About Women's Role In Things from serpent's shadow to jolene is Quite interesting

[xwinterdreams-blog]

For you, I have to risk it all

Team Fuck fill for @stevetonygames for "Proposal" for @meidui

Steve looked over at Tony covertly, while the other Avengers were distracted, arguing over what movie they should watch. Steve smiled coyly, and Tony knew what was coming next.

“Want me to come by your room tonight?”

Tony sighed internally. He licked his lips, heart ratcheting up. Tony wanted to say yes. He always said yes. Who wouldn’t want someone as sexy and responsive and just willing to explore, as Steve, in their bed.

He was Tony’s every fantasy. But there in lied the problem. He simply wanted Steve too much, and he had all these fantasies that had nothing to do with sex.

He wanted to go out on dates with Steve, share in the city that they both knew so well, but with completely different experiences. Tony wanted to spoil the shit out of him, quite frankly.

Tony imagined Steve’s pride would resist that kind of thing at first, but with enough cajoling he was sure he could swing it. It was just how Tony enjoyed showing his appreciation for people he cared about, giving them things that would make them happy.

And after everything Steve had gone through in his life, going without in his younger years and giving himself selflessly ever since then, the man deserved to be treated like he was special. Tony wanted to be the one to do that.

To make him blush with embarrassed delight when Tony bought him gifts, or organised a date that was extravagant yes, but that was designed with only Steve’s happiness in mind.

It wasn’t only the things outside of the bedroom that Tony was holding back, either. He had to resist every impulse to show Steve how much affection he had for him, when all he wanted to do was kiss every square inch of him all the while whispering everything he loved about Steve into his skin.

“Tony?” Steve prompted.

“Not tonight.” Tony said it more sharply than he intended. But the difference between his fantasy of Steve as his boyfriend who knew exactly how Tony felt about him and the reality of Steve suggesting some friends with benefits fun, was jarring.

He wanted to say yes. At least that way he could be close to Steve if nothing else. But increasingly, waking up to a cold and empty bed had just made him feel hollow. It hurt too much. He didn’t have it in him tonight.

“Oh.” Steve’s expression was at once surprised and disappointed, and Tony felt bad. Really he did. Steve didn’t know what was wrong so it was hardly his fault.

It reminded him that he really needed to talk to Steve about this, and soon, but he didn’t feel up to it tonight. It felt too strong, too raw.

“I have some things I need to finish in my lab, I’ll catch the next movie night.” He said suddenly, unable to stay here under Steve’s probing gaze a minute longer.

“Tony wait-”

He didn’t. He couldn’t. Tony bolted from the couch, and the room, unable to resist one final glance at a very confused Steve before he left.

Tony had a shitty night's sleep. It was restless. He kept thinking about what he should say to Steve—should he end it? Ask for more?—and coming up with worst case scenarios. Steve laughing at him, dismissing him, ending things.

Tony didn’t think he would ever be cruel even if he didn’t feel the same way. But try telling his brain that in the middle of the night.

The next day he avoided all people, holing up in his lab. Not that he got much work done, his concentration was absolutely shot. By the time the evening came around, he’d been going back and forth and back and forth all day long about what to do.

This couldn’t continue. It would hurt him too much, and Steve deserved to know that at least. Deserved the chance to respond. And if it was the worst case scenario, well, Tony had to know. Even the slimmest possibility of Steve responding positively was worth it.

He knocked on Steve’s door, doing his best to shake off the ridiculous nerves. He was Iron Man. He’d faced a wormhole in outer space strapped to a nuke. He could face this.

“Tony,” Steve said, his face a picture of surprise. “I didn’t expect to see you.”

“Yeah. I know. I’m sorry about last night.”

“It’s fine,” Steve shrugged but it wasn’t very convincing. “You don’t owe me anything.”

He didn’t owe him anything. Tony hated that. He wanted Steve to have expectations.

“I have a proposal,” he rushed out before he could talk himself out of it.

“Oh?”

“I think we should stop this whole friends with benefits thing.”

Steve’s face fell. “Did I—was there something I did wrong?”

Fuck. “No honey, not at all. Unless you count making me like you too much. Then yes, it’s entirely your fault.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I want more, Steve. That’s my proposal. I want dates. Making… love,” ugh he was so sappy “not just fucking. I want you to stay in my bed all goddamn night. I can’t do this casual shit anymore.”

“I thought that was… what you wanted. You said so.” His brow furrowed as he remembered whatever dumbass thing Tony had said to start them on this journey. “You wanted to keep things light. You said you liked your space.”

Why did Tony always have to fuck himself? If Steve disappeared so quickly because he thought he was respecting Tony’s needs he was gonna punch himself in the face.

“That was before I knew you. Before I knew how much I like you. I don’t want any space. I want you in my space, nearby, all the time.” It was pathetically true. He got distracted wondering what Steve was up to far too often, sometimes he wished Steve would just hang out in his lab so that he could just look up and know that he was close.

Steve looked pretty damn shocked, but anything else he might be feeling was lost on Tony. “I had no idea.”

Tony took a deep breath—not particularly confident because Steve hadn’t expressed anything about his feelings–but determined to keep going. “Do you, Steven Grant Rogers, want to be with me? For better or worse?” Let’s be honest here, with him involved there was going to be plenty of both.

“You’re not… actually proposing, are you?”

“What?” Tony startled. Okay maybe that had been a bit marriage-y, but that was jumping the gun way too much. He just wanted to call the man his boyfriend! “Of course not. Way too soon. Maybe someday, if you’re into it…” he trailed off, eyeing Steve who had a pleased smile, and looked pretty happy, so that had to mean good things, right? “But for now I just want to call you mine.”

Steve threw himself at Tony. Literally. Tony stumbled backwards from the weight of Steve’s muscular body, but he clung onto Steve to keep his balance, and they fell into the most passionate kiss they’d ever had.

“I’m sorry for not saying anything,” Steve panted when they pulled away. He started placing frantic kisses all over Tony’s face and neck, every bit of skin he could reach. Talking between kisses.

“I’m just a bit blown away. I wasn’t expecting. And after last night. I’m just so glad you’re not ending things. I want you all the time, Tony. Anything, anyway I can have you. That’s why I come knocking on your door or suggesting we sneak away for some fun. I just want you.”

Tony grabbed Steve’s face and looked him in the eye. “I’ve been a real dumbass, huh? Worrying over all this for nothing?”

“I should’ve talked to you too, told you I wanted more. I hated leaving you at night when all I wanted to do was hold you.”

“Let’s do that right now, I want you in my bed.”

Steve nodded.

“You’re never leaving, okay?”

“I may need to eat occasionally.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Will you move into my room?”

“Yeah. Yes. Please.”

Tony slicked his mouth over Steve’s. “You have no idea what I’d do for you baby, but you’re gonna find out. I’m gonna treat you so good.”

There it was. The embarrassed yet delighted blush, Steve’s eyes sparkling with happiness. That was everything he wanted.

#stevetonygames #misunderstandings #fwb to lovers #mutual pining #confessions #getting together #sweet #heartwarming #stevetony #stony #fic #fanfic #myfics #steve rogers #tony stark

[eldritch-araneae]

Bumblebee

Welcome to my long post about this boi because he's my fav ahah!

First impression:

In 2011 it I watched the first Transfromers baymovie. It was the "ohh he's an alien who quickly befriended a hum that so cool I love him!" thing, I so easy to please when it comes to interspecies relationships. I enjoyed the movies and Bumblebee quickly became my fav.

Then love for him solidified more and I found out about his G1 version and his info immediately spoke to me om personal level. He's cute, getting along human and seem gentle, but he also struggles with hiS place in the world and among his own friends.

It hit close to home.

Impression now:

I know I keep repeating myself a lot, but Bumblebee deserves a good writing! I want to see this original self with his struggles to be properly explored!

It only he wouldn't fall into " cute mascot of the show" box =/

He has so much potential for incredible character arc. This subject rarely appears, and if it does, it usually resolved quickly, which is not how it works.

In Plight of the Bumblebee from old marvel comics, he gets depressed ( yes, not just upset) about he don't feel belong among Autobots. He feels useless and even responsible for losing the battle ("If I were more help" ), firmly believing no one will notice if he's gone. He wishes to be a human because humans are weak, and if he was a human, someone would need him.

Then he just runs away without a word.

And then much later in Go for a Gold & Win if You Dare he compares himself to meteors, that burn in atmosphere before making any impact. And even if they do - they crush to pieces. Not to mention he constantly talks himself down ( "I'm not smart as Wheeljack", "I'm not strong as Grimlock") almost through entire the comic.

This this depressing as fuck, and believe me, just because your friends saved you or because you realized the importance of teamwork those feelings will not go away. Sure you will feel validated for few day, but they will come again, and again, and again.

He feels alienated from his own people, he feels weak, useless and unwanted, he has a constant need to prove himself, even if it kills him. His highest stat is courage, and this is probably why!

All this brings up an important question I haven't found a answer: what happened to him?!

Insecurities, especially like these, never appear out of thin air!

He shows signs of neglect at best, or abuse at worst.

Dreamwave's Guide said that Sunstreaker is bulling him and constantly makes fun of his failures in front other Autobots who laugh, believing it's just teasing. But cmon, I don't need tell you how damaging this shit is, especially when it's done for years.

But sadly, it's just a guide, it's not even a comic, so why?? Why not explore this??? Like seriously!

Even in TFA where it was shown that Bumblebee was abused in bootcamp, but the show never, ever made it a trauma, which is ridiculous! Optimus, Ratchet and Prowl had their own struggles, but Bumblebee must remain okay? As if being constantly picked up, and his legs being detached while he was locked isn't traumatizing enough??? I swear, people don't realized how bulling can break people and drive them to suicide ugh.

Another thing that bothers me is why Bumblebee needs to die (Goldbug) in order to become mature and stop stressing about what others thinks? And if he reverts back to Bumblebee, his insecurities are suddenly back as if nothing happened??

This is why I will not calm down until I see proper writing for him. I will demand his presence in each TF media and I don't care if fandom hates him xD

Because cmon, you can have a character with struggles and dark secrets who is also is full of hear and tender =/

Seriously, hire me Hasbro!

Favorite moment:

Ohhh there are so many across multiple continuities! I love every moment when he interact with his human friends and Windblade! ))) And generally Bumblebee is such delight to see, even if I picky about his looks ahah.

Idea for a story:

This is entirety of Sparkpulse! He not only has insecurities, but he has to deal with horrific trauma and phobias. He' not just a cute mascot or angry boi - this Bumblebee can do both!

He's like force of nature, a benevolent being who will bear many blessings to people he care about, to people who treat him kindness and respect...but if you wrong him, you will pay in full.

I explore a lot for ideas here. Like anger is not being inherently evil emotion, but a useful and powerful tool if controlled.

Or the fact that cute and kind character can be genially terrifying if he want to be.

He has so much compassion, but at the same time he can be relentless and merciless. Yet even here, he knows the price of life and will only resort to killing if literally anything else failed.

He's dedicated and wise, but also too hard on himself.

He's incredibly strong, but this strength is not limitless. Bumblebee must learn to rely on others, that it's okay to be weak, that he doesn't have to be useful in order to live.

This journey is long and full of hardship, but he's not alone and with his friends help he will let himself to make a first step towards healing.

Unpopular opinion:

I would only say that Bee is not bad character and actually can very complex. It's just Hasbro refuses to write him properly, sadly not many ppl see it and explore possibilities.

Oh well, I will have to do it myself then)

Favorite relationship:

I love his relationship with Windblade, like said in her post, it's very Ghibli like and full of love. I also love his relationships with humans! I would say much more, but I'm a bit tired and I don't know where to start.

Also his relationship with Starscream is such fun concept, that I will dive into it in my cont!

Favorite headcanon:

Oh gosh, there are way too many of them, the entire Sparkpusle is build on headcanons and ideas xD

#sparkpulse au #ask meme #bumblebee

[pass-the-bechdel]

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, once.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven (30.43% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Significantly flawed, and well-known in fandom for it. Unpopular opinion? I still think it’s better than the first Avengers film.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Natasha and Laura pass in a single-line trade. It’s sooo close to not counting.

Female characters:

Natasha Romanoff.

Wanda Maximoff.

Maria Hill.

Helen Cho.

Peggy Carter.

Laura Barton.

FRIDAY.

Male characters:

Tony Stark.

Steve Rogers.

JARVIS.

Thor.

Clint Barton.

Strucker.

Pietro Maximoff.

Bruce Banner.

Ultron.

Sam Wilson.

James Rhodes.

Ulysses Klaue.

Heimdall.

Nick Fury.

Erik Selvig.

Vision.

OTHER NOTES:

Everyone talking about Strucker like we already know who he is...

The “Shit!”/”Language!” gag was funnier before they hung a lantern on it. Not least because it takes almost a full minute before Tony harks back to it (fifty seconds, actually. I checked). If you’re gonna make a Thing out of it, you gotta follow up immediately, not after fifty seconds of cutting around to different character intros and action shots and a whole lot of other dialogue. 

Urrgghh, ok, I’m going to break my standing rule about not discussing source material, because we gotta acknowledge the colossal wrongness of re-writing the Maximoff twins - canonically Jewish Romani - as willing volunteers in a Nazi science experiment. It gets worse the more you think about it. There are a few things about this movie which generated significant negative outcry, and this incredibly offensive decision is one of them.

Tony and Thor fighting over who has a better girlfriend does have a certain charm to it. If you’re gonna have a testosterone-off, it might as well be about how great your partner is.

I got a zero out of ten on this out-of-nowhere forced romance crap with Natasha and Bruce. We’ll come back to this later.

“I will be reinstituting Prima Nocta,” Tony declares, as he prepares to lift Thor’s hammer and thereby theoretically take charge of the Nine Realms. Primae noctis (believed to in fact be a myth) refers to a supposed Dark-Ages law that granted lords the ‘right’ to take the virginity of any newlywed peasant woman who lived on their land. So, this is a wonderful little rape joke from Tony (or, y’know, not so little, since primae noctis in reality would make Tony a serial rapist). Ha ha ha ha. Hilarious. Good one.

I’m really mad about the parts here that are total garbage, because mostly, the revels sequence has a nice low-key quality to it, good solid team dynamics. 

I can’t fucking believe that they played the ‘and then Bruce falls with his face in Natasha’s cleavage!’ gag. I cannot believe it. Is this a disgusting frat-boy comedy from the nineties?

Honestly, Tony, just shut up and admit that you KNEW from the get-go that it was wrong to try and make Ultron happen (that is why you kept it secret from everyone else to begin with); don’t try to defend the decision now that you’ve got a ‘murderbot’ on your hands. Take responsibility for a bad choice instead of talking shit about how you had to and everyone else is just too short-sighted, damn it! 

Andy Serkis is delightful.

The Iron Man/Hulk fight absolutely KILLS the momentum of this film. It goes for way the fuck too long (eight minutes) and has no narrative significance at all. Pro tip for action scenes: they should always be driving the story somewhere. You can pull off eighty minutes of action so long as your plot is advancing alongside/within it.

Also, Iron Man causes a huge amount of additional damage during this fight, in the service of the aforementioned pointless action. His efforts to minimise Hulk’s effects are extremely poor, and calling in his relief organisation to clean up after the fact does not negate that. 

Gotta love that throwing a wife and kids at Hawkeye at the same time as we suddenly start pushing this Natasha/Bruce thing. That’s not transparent at all. I also understand this to be a major deviation from Clint’s identity in the comics, and very unpopular with fans for that reason, but regardless; reinventing him as a family man to reset the romantic blather after baiting fans with the possibility of Clint/Natasha in the first Avengers movie is such a shitty move. I was not invested in the ship myself and would have loved to have them reinforce the just-friends relationship between Hawkeye and Black Widow, because there are not enough platonic friendships between compatible men and women in fiction, but 'they’re not interested in each other because they’re busy with someone else!’ is a weak reinforcement indeed. Less forced romances, and definitely less token wifey who exists for no other Goddamn reason at all. This comes out of nowhere, and not in a clever-surprise kind of way.

“You still think you’re the only monster on the team?” Natasha says, after telling Bruce about her sterilisation. This earned a HUGE backlash, and for good reason - despite all arguments about how what Natasha meant was that her being raised to be an assassin makes her a monster, the direct implication of her words as they are phrased and as the discussion is structured is that her inability to have children makes her monstrous, and that’s deeply offensive. It’s also completely in keeping with a narrative which is often played out against women, in which their value as people is attributed directly to their ability to produce offspring, so it’s not even like this outrageous implication of monstrosity - the corruption of what it means to be female! - is that unusual. It’s awful, but not unusual. Add on the fact that 1) Natasha’s nightmare-flashes specifically foregrounded her sterilisation over all other details of her training, supporting the idea that she believes that it’s what makes her irredeemable (instead of, y’know, all the murdering and stuff), and 2) this is Joss Whedon’s work and he is OBSESSED with highlighting the womanhood of his female characters and treating it like their defining trait while also variously punishing them for it, and you’ve got every reason to interpret this terrible fucking line as exactly the heinous thing it (presumably, unwittingly) seems to be. 

Steve ripping a log in half with his bare hands is the funniest thing in this whole movie.

Thor’s brief side-adventure with Erik Selvig is pretty out-of-place. He just...goes for a swim in a convenient magic pond that Selvig chances to know about. Seems normal.

Ultron is full of such boring, empty rhetoric. Reminds me of Loki in The Avengers, with all that sound-and-fury. 

I love Paul Bettany.

Man, they sure do find Natasha instantly. It’s almost like making a damsel-in-distress of her who needs to be rescued by the team was completely meaningless...

Breaking my no-BTS rule (since I already have done for this movie at this point) because it’s well-known how Joss Whedon ordered Elizabeth Olsen not to show exertion or ‘ugly emotion’ on her face in this film, because God forbid she compromise her attractiveness by being human. Joss Whedon is not human; he’s fucking trash. 

The final fight sure does just, y’know, get to a point where it ends. They really did not ratchet up the tension over the course of the Sokovia conflict, it just goes along until it stops (also, they say Sokovia is a country, but then they never call the city anything else, it’s just Sokovia. Is the city conveniently named after the country (very confusing), or is it a city-country, like The Vatican? I kinda assume it’s option three, which is that no one bothered to care because it’s just some fake European placeholder anyway and we’re not supposed to notice such a dumb oversight).

“I was born yesterday.” This is the best quip in this whole thinks-it-is-way-wittier-than-it-is movie.

Helen Cho deserved better than to be a prop rapidly dismissed and then just trotted past at the end for an ‘oh, she survived, btw’. 

Back when I reviewed the first Avengers movie, I said that I considered that film to be heavily overrated, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that I actually like this one better. The two primary problems I had with that first film were the overly simplistic plot, and the fact that most of the characters were OOC compared to previous films, and this movie does do better on both scores, so I feel more engaged by it, and less annoyed. That said...this movie has still got a lot of problems, and those include iffy characterisation and a plot with various holes, nonsensical complications, and conveniently ignored or smoothed-down dynamics. When I say I like this movie better than the first one, I mean just that: I like this better. That does not mean I am here to sing its praises. 

The tacked-on romance is part of the problem - for Clint as well as Natasha (but especially for Natasha). After Hawkeye was so heavily under-used in the first film (and his slightly-ambiguous relationship with Black Widow was the only human element that made him a character instead of a prop), Age of Ultron attempts to compensate by giving Clint a personal life, in the form of a magically-appearing heavily-pregnant wife and a pair of nameless children. The function of this family appears to be 1) to give Clint a reason to not be interested in Natasha, and 2) to ‘humanise’ him by giving him something to fight for and get home to, because we all know nothing legitimises a character quite like some otherwise-irrelevant dependents. Want a man to seem lovable and important? Give him a pregnant wife. That’s what women are for, anyway, right? To enhance a man’s story? In this case, to provide a man whose purpose in the story has been contested with insta-personality, because ‘he’s secretly a family man, ooh, twist!’ is way better than having to spend time on giving him something to do in the plot that is actually meaningful in some way. Great logic. Makes Hawkeye super dynamic, right? 

Natasha, unsurprisingly, is hit much, much harder. As the only female avenger and one of only two prominent female characters in a cast which has seven-to-nine male characters of equal or greater importance/screen time (YMMV on whether or not you think Fury and Vision count for that list), the pressure is already on for Natasha to be served up a quality narrative, because if she doesn’t get one, well...she doesn’t have six-to-eight alternative characters to pull the weight for her gender. The best solve for this problem would be to avoid the ‘Token Woman’ cliche in the first place, but since we missed that boat...not having the personal story of your only primary female character revolve completely around her womanhood and her catering to heteronormative expectations of a love interest would have been a good choice. This weird, forced, chemistry-free thing with Bruce Banner? Was the worst thing they could have used to define Natasha’s presence in the film. It sticks out like a sore thumb every time they have an awkward interaction, and it leads in to that atrocious ‘monstrous infertility’ element (though that particular egregious mistake could have been included with or without a romantic blunder, it...probably wouldn’t be, and we’d all be the better off). Even the Hulk-whisperer part of the relationship - while not awful on its own with all the unnecessary romance and Unresolved Sexual Not-Tension removed - serves to highlight Natasha’s female-ness by making her the soft maternal figure for the team, because God forbid one of the other male members of the team be asked to ASMR-speak to the Hulk while delicately caressing his hand. If Natasha’s presence in the first Avengers film leaned too heavily on her gender identity as a defining trait (and it did), this movie doesn’t fix that problem at all: it doubles down on it. 

The good news for most of the excess of male characters is, they by-and-large don’t feel as OOC as they did in the first film. The boorish romantic entanglement aside, Bruce Banner is still a naturalistic character highlight (all credit to Mark Ruffalo, who probably doesn’t know how to turn in a bad performance in the first place), and Thor’s dialogue is way less ridiculous this time ‘round, so he lands a lot closer to his personality from previous films simply by virtue of sounding like the same guy (unfortunately, the plot does not have the faintest idea what it wants to do with him as a character). Steve Rogers is still being written as if being Captain America is his character, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of his identity, albeit one which conveniently allows him to behave in a stereotypical self-righteously bland manner, thus avoiding the need for any nuance in his perspective or actions. This borderline fanfic-flamer ‘Captain America is my least favourite character so I’m going to write him as a boring stick-in-the-mud and then hopefully no one else will like him either!’ approach doesn’t grate quite as badly as it did in the first Avengers, and it can’t cancel out the innate level-headed charm of Chris Evans, so as disappointing as the bias is, it’s still a better balance here than it was last time. The one character who is not so flatteringly handled, however? Also happens to be the one who was arguably handled best last time, and unfortunately, he’s the one who is essentially treated as the ‘lead’. 

The big problem for Tony Stark is that this movie is not interested in digging in to the pathos of any character, it’s all-flash-no-substance on that front, and Tony really, really needed a less heavy-handed slathering of ‘afraid of what might come (feat. messiah complex)’ to motivate his actions and reactions in this film, because without any exploration he’s basically just a billionaire kid playing with matches. If this were an Iron Man film (either the first or third one, anyway), we’d get into some tasty deconstruction of Tony’s mental state and confront his hubris, etc, and - crucially, most crucial of all, it’s a mainstay of all his past stories in the MCU - Tony would own up to his mistakes, listen to the advice of those around him, and take contrite steps toward fixing the problem not just in the direct sense of ‘beating the bad guy’, but also in the personal and emotional sense of working on his own flaws and making amends with the people he hurt along the way. This movie offers none of that. To begin with, Tony’s ‘I know best and I will not be taking any questions’ approach to creating Ultron feels like a significant step backwards in his character development so far (Iron Man 3 was specifically about addressing his PTSD and associated tumultuous emotions surrounding the fear of imminent alien invasion, so his reactionary and secretive behaviour in this film feels particularly out-of-touch with a mental reality Tony has been explicitly working on for the past couple of years); Tony is actively aware that it’s a bad call and thus hides it from the other Avengers until it’s too late, and then he’s bizarrely unrepentant about his mistake. Worst of all, he actually attempts to repeat that mistake, only worse, late in the film (the fact that his idiotic ‘mad scientist’ pep talk actually convinces Bruce to help him again is the weakest character moment for Bruce outside of the aforementioned romance crap). The plot rewards Tony’s second, far worse mistake, in the creation of Vision, who turns out to be ‘worthy of wielding Thor’s Hammer’ and whatnot and conveniently provides every necessary skill to defeat Ultron in a deus ex machina so overt you could use it as a textbook example, so even though Tony had absolutely no way of knowing that he’d get a good result this time and almost every reason to believe he’d just compound the existing problem, his reckless disregard for the literal safety of the planet is treated like a good thing because it happens to work out this time, and they just kinda sweep under the rug the fact that Tony is playing God (and being uncharacteristically stupid and selfish about it - in other films, Tony is normally only reckless with his own safety, and it’s when his actions spill out into unintended consequences for others that he realises the error of his ways and cues up a positive learning curve; it’s what makes him palatable). At the end of the film, once Ultron is gone and Tony has thrown some dispassionate wads of cash into ‘relief efforts’, he strolls and quips and eventually drives off into the sunset in his expensive car, with nary a mention of, I dunno, maybe a little guilty conscience? Maybe a hint of having learned a valuable lesson? The closest he gets is just suggesting that it might be time he retires from Avenging, but neither he nor anyone else lets on that there’s a need for serious self-reflection. The Tony Stark in this movie is the nightmarish male-fantasy version of the character, the playboy with the cool tech and no limits who does whatever he wants and then...literally rides off into the sunset in the end, no muss, no fuss. He’s kinda like a complete reversion to his original self, pre-Iron Man, frittering money around and designing weapons of mass destruction while convincing himself he’s bringing peace to the world one explosion at a time, but that Tony has no business here, seven years of character development down the track.

While we’re talking iffy characterisation, we should also segue into plot, and that’s something we can do easily enough by looking at our villain, Ultron. Calling Ultron an actual character feels...ambitious. He’s a CGI robot full of empty rhetoric and, you guessed it, more of those quips that this movie has in place of any meaningful dialogue. I’d call him self-fellating, but he ain’t got nothing to fellate, so instead he just blathers a lot in a manner that sounds vaguely poetically intelligent but is, upon a moment’s consideration, just vapid nonsense (much like Loki in the first Avengers, as noted above, but at least Loki had the benefit of a flesh-and-blood actor delivering his lines with conviction; James Spader does solid work as the voice of Ultron, but trying to make a CGI robot who spouts a school-kid’s attempt at edgy philosophy sound like a genuine menace is an uphill battle). Speaking of genuine menace, I assume the reason the film is called Age of Ultron is because A Couple of Days of Ultron Causing Disturbances in a Handful of Specific Locations was too much. For all the big talk (and there is..so much), Ultron doesn’t get up to all that much trouble, most notably in the sense that he apparently has his code all over the internet and yet he doesn’t bother stirring up a single ounce of chaos with that ungodly power. Why bother including this as an element of the character if it achieves zero story? Is it purely to make Ultron seem ~unstoppable~ because he keeps downloading into new robots? Because it didn’t really land, y’all. They try to play it like a big victory for the good guys when Vision burns Ultron out of the ‘net, but in context it’s meaningless because he didn’t do anything while he was there. Pretty much everything about Ultron was all talk, little to no action - even a whole bunch of the trouble he did cause happened off-screen, with Maria Hill just popping in to let us know that ‘there are reports of metal men stealing shit’. Cheers, cool. And you know, Ultron makes a song and dance about how he’s going to save the world by ‘ending the Avengers’, but then he...does not pursue that at all. He tries to make himself a pretty body, the Avengers thwart him, and then he enacts a doomsday machine to destroy all life on Earth. Like every other aspect of the character, the whole ‘end the Avengers’ schtick is just white noise, there’s no meaning in it. Ultron is just a same-old-same ‘What if Artificial Intelligence wants to WIPE US OUT?!’ cliche, and maybe that’s what he was in the comics too, I don’t know, but it’s the job of the film to tell that story in a dynamic way, and they had two and a half hours to do it. And yet.

There should be more to this than a nondescript placeholder villain concept and a series of action set pieces that just kinda happen until they stop. At least the first Avengers had some variety in each of its action sequences, using the location and the different skills and weapons of its antagonists, whereas this one is just ‘there are robots and the good guys punched and shot them until they were all broken, the end’. Even making the city fly in the end doesn’t actually make it interesting, not least because the characters spend most of their time running around the (weirdly, perfectly stable) streets not having to deal with any consequences of being up in the air anyway, and the doomsday device is too nebulous to ratchet up any real tension about figuring out how to deal with it. The conflicts with the Maximoff twins have at least some spark of life in them, but the characters themselves are treated to an over-simplified and very contrived narrative arc that uses what they do and what they know more as plot devices than as details of actual people’s lives, leading to a cheap death for Pietro so that Wanda will be distracted enough to abandon the big ol’ doomsday button, and it’s just all so convenient. There’s no heart in any of it, and it makes the moments that try to have heart all the more embarrassing and out-of-place (don’t even get me started on what a prescribed attempt at tugging the heart-strings it is to have Hawkeye name his magnificently well-timed newborn after Pietro, because DAMN). When I said I liked this movie better than the first Avengers, I meant just that: I like this better. That’s not to suggest that it is significantly better in any sense, because it isn’t, and I can’t even argue that this one has a better story, because honestly, it doesn’t. The first film made more sense, it was just less interesting to watch, and the things about it that were contrived were contrived in different ways. The first film was weaker and more irritating on character, and character is always the most important part of a story for me, so as annoyed as I am by the major character blunders in Age of Ultron, I’m still not as annoyed as I was after The Avengers. That is damning with the faintest of praise; this is just not a particularly good movie, it makes a poor use of its cast at the best of times, delivers a sub-par action extravaganza, and the script is not half as witty as it gleefully convinces itself that it is. It comes as no surprise, I’m sure, that I am very glad a certain writer/director departed the franchise after disappointing everyone with this outing. I say I like this better than the first Avengers, but gee, it’s a close call.

#Avengers: Age of Ultron #Marvel Cinematic Universe #Bechdel Test #female representation #MCU #Age of Ultron #Avengers

[gffa]

do you have any ObiWan recs? Because I l've read ReEntry and all of akathecentimetre's but I'm at a loss for other good prequel based ones

Oh, dear anon, you don’t know what kind of paralysis this gave me for a good solid minute, because I HAVE SO VERY MANY, HOW CAN I POSSIBLY NOT GIVE YOU LITERALLY 200 RECS?  There are so so many good prequels writers out there LET ME YELL AT YOU ABOUT SOME QUALITY FIC.✦Fire and Ice by Yesac is the fic that really got me into prequels fic and is an incredible story about the duel on Mustafar going differently, where Anakin wins and basically takes Obi-Wan and Padme hostage, while he’s this unstable font of power, who actually has to learn some really hard lessons before he can really start to earn his way back to the side of good.  It has some of the best Obi-Wan characterization in any fic I’ve read, the balance of his care for Anakin versus staying true to his morals and the sheer solidity of who he is is *kisses fingers* perfection.✦ starbird by imaginarykat is one of the best characterizations for Obi-Wan I’ve ever read.  wicked thing tends to be more popular (and is also wonderful) but for my money, starbird is the one that really helped me get Obi-Wan as a character, in addition to having some of the most sharply hilarious moments ever.  You really feel the weight of Obi-Wan’s presence and character in this one.✦ Equinox by lilyconrad is gorgeous all the way around!  Even if Sith!Obi-Wan isn’t usually your thing, I would gently encourage giving this one a shot anyway, because it’s not really about Obi-Wan falling into darkness, it’s about Obi-Wan, but it’s not actually Obi-Wan himself, and it’s complicated, but it gets at the heart of the character, while still showing how much of the light he is.  It’s a deliciously lush gothic horror story + his relationship with Anakin that explores who they both are and has some truly stellar smut.  I love all of Lily’s stuff, she writes a lot of Obi-Wan’s character, so you can pick up anything by her!✦ Cataclasm by dendral is amazing as well, it’s a story where Obi-Wan is whammied with some extra Force visions and so he has to walk away from everything he knows to go do some Force-related shit, but he remains so very much himself (and such a Jedi, in such a beautifully told way) and there’s worldbuilding and plot and it’s just gorgeous. someday when i’m gone away we’ll be all okay is also stellar and made me cry the kind of tears where my throat hurt from the lump in it and yet it’s perfect for the characters.  (It’s deathfic, but worth it, imo!)✦ I really love panharmonium’s fics as well, who hasn’t written much, but always has such clear affection for the world and the characters!  The Mathematics of Repair is probably my favorite, it’s sparkling and wonderful just-post-TPM early days of Obi-Wan & Anakin’s relationship!✦ The Living Force; Parables for Padawans by gloriousclio is this really stunning fairy tale-like exploration of Obi-Wan and the Jedi, not just feelings but beautiful wordcraft, too.✦ Smitty has written three STELLAR fics about Obi-Wan and Anakin’s early days and what’s amazing to me is that they were written in NINETEEN-NINETY-NINE and yet utterly NAILED their dynamic! The House That Obi-Wan Built + Sofa, So Good + House of Cards.  The hilariously written snark + underlying care is spot on to their dynamic.✦ In all the World by Ammar is an amazing combination of the early days of Obi-Wan and Anakin’s relationship, worldbuilding, AND case fic!  I remember thinking that this could have been a novel published by Star Wars itself and I would have still been impressed at all the things it absolutely nailed right and built up!✦ Supreme Chancellor Kenobi by stonefreeak is another amazing series where it’s not just about Obi-Wan, but he’s a central figure in it!  And even when she writes other characters she does an incredible job with them, like, the Quinlan piece is one of the best I’ve ever read for him!  Basically it’s exactly what it sounds like–Obi-Wan finds himself suddenly elected to the position of Supreme Chancellor, which means everyone now has breathing room to actually FIX THINGS since Palpatine can’t make them worse, but also it’s HILARIOUS because he kind of really hates it, no matter how good he is at it!✦ The Dark Path Lit by Sun and Stars by A_Delicate_Fury is a gorgeous time travel fic that does an amazing job with his character.  There are small moments with Luke that just floored me with how many feelings they gave me, but also the fic just nails everything it wants to do.  Plot!  Characterization!  Keeping me on the edge of my seat!  Action scenes!✦ Soldier, Poet, King by Glare is a fave because I’m weak for Soft Sith stuff in fandom, especially when there’s such a charm to the writing of his and Anakin’s relationship.  I still remember these great scenes of Anakin’s mental landscape form and how Obi-Wan interacted with him, that sense of all that power and Obi-Wan’s hand metaphorically on the back of his neck, their dynamic is so good.  Plus plot!  \:D/✦ I love everything by Ripki, but you can start with The Atlas of Our Ruin, which is a time-travel fic that forces Obi-Wan and Anakin to really tear into all the difficult stuff from their pasts and spill everything out everywhere, in an attempt to lance the wounds.  It’s a gorgeous look at both their characters and the relationship between them, it’s SO TASTY to read and ouchy-but-cathartic in the best way.✦ The Journey of the Lights by Pandora151 is more time travel fic (this fandom is really good at them) that just consumed me while I was reading it, where Qui-Gon is dumped forward into the future and it winds up forcing some things to come to a head early, and there’s a lot of Obi-Wan having to juggle a lot of different relationships and difficulties, and it’s SO GOOD.✦ Remedial Jedi Theology by MarbleGlove is the kind of Legends-based (instead of Canon-based) fic that I love to see, because it’s so THOUGHTFUL about the Jedi and their philosophy/theology, as well as some really stellar Obi-Wan characterization.  He’s going through A Lot in this fic, but he faces all of it and himself and his growing understanding of everything (because we never stop growing and understanding) with such cleverness and skill.  There’s some quality Mace moments in the fic as well and some great Anakin stuff, but it’s at its heart an Obi-Wan fic and it was a joy to read.✦ Seed by belldreams is one of my favorites for how much heavy lifting it does with Obi-Wan and balancing his feelings with being a Jedi.  There’s such good, thoughtful characterization here, where he really has to look at himself and he really thinks things through, there’s such a solidity to his character here that is SPOT ON.  Also, FUCK OR DIE FIC, we were blessed by this one.  (Upfall also has some really quality Obi-Wan thoughts, too!)✦ In All But Name by Mirror and Image is one I read early on in fandom, so I can’t speak to how well it would hold up for me re: the relationship with the Jedi (I suspect not as well as my fond memories would suggest) but that’s a personal quibble and the point is that it’s really good Obi-Wan focus and it’s all about him beginning to train Anakin on Naboo instead of going to the Jedi Temple, there’s a whole lot of focus on children’s education, because that’s what the authors teach as well, so this one totally engrossed me.  I remember Coalesced Matter was a good Dooku & Obi-Wan & Anakin fic, too!✦ In fairness, I haven’t read Reprise by Elfpen yet (I’m hoarding it) but I’ve enjoyed the other fic I’ve read from this author, so I feel confidence giving this a rec.  Plus, it’s all my favorite things, like TIME TRAVELING OBI-WAN.  :D✦ The Exchange by MissLearn is another one I loved, where it’s centered on the Obi-Wan & Anakin relationship, as they exchange places in time and that forces a lot of things to come out, but it gives me SUCH FEELINGS and the characters around them were written wonderfully and UGH SO GOOD.✦ Shadows of the Future bystormqueen873 is one I haven’t read since the very early days of my reading, so I can’t say how it would hold up, but I remember being utterly IN LOVE with this story and how much it fixed.  One of the things that it really did well was building up to the big reveal of Obi-Wan’s time traveling, that the fic really knew how to ratchet up to that moment so that, when it finally happened, I had SO MANY FEELINGS about it.  Plus, lots and lots of warm-hearted, fluffy slice-of-life moments as everything gets fixed!✦ I like all of anecdotalist’s fics, but starting with Clarity is probably best, it’s a nice long fic that fixes a lot of what goes wrong during ROTS and just utterly engrossed me.  Plot!  Action scenes!  Anakin being a disaster, but listening to people who actually want to help him!  Though, The Fallout of Anakin Skywalker’s Knighting will always have a special place in my heart for making me cry over feelings about Obi-Wan.✦ Tano and Kenobi by Fireflyfish is time traveling Ahsoka this time, who becomes Obi-Wan’s Master and everything starts slowly shifting towards the right (or sometimes just straight up blowing over to the right) and it’s a DELIGHT to see their dynamic, to see Ahsoka really growing into the role of being a Master, to see Obi-Wan’s relationship with her grow.✦ The Hand Dealt by not paranoid enough is one I read awhile back, but it’s a Canon Divergent fic, where things go a little differently on Tatooine and it’s sort of a mix between a slow burn and just being about the early days of his relationship with Anakin, and I remember it being REALLY GOOD.✦ I like everything of Valairy Scot’s that I’ve read, she’s another Legends writer that really is a lot of fun, and I’d say start with A Good Place To Die.  It’s pretty much an entire novel of Obi-Wan whump + recovery, which it REALLY embraces and is super satisfying if you’re into that sort of thing!  Plus, man, Anakin is SPOT ON in this fic, for how deeply he cares, how brilliant he is, but also what a disaster he is when he can’t get out of his own head.  I also remember really liking Our Honored Dead.✦ I also like wreckageofstars’ stuff as well!  Echoes of Mortis is an ensemble piece, but it’s satisfying for his character and has great plot and action and things diverging from canon in a fascinating way!  Also a HILARIOUSLY GREAT read is Obi-Wan and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad (Life) Day which is just as funny as promised.I AM MISSING SO MANY GOOD OBI-WAN FICS, BUT THIS WILL GET YOU STARTED.  I LOVE OBI-WAN KENOBI AND I LOVE THIS FANDOM FOR PROVIDING ME WITH GOOD STUFF.

#Anonymous #obi wan kenobi #anakin skywalker #ahsoka tano #fic recs

[replicarters]

hellraiser 3 funtime carnival, final

part 1 || part 2

happy easter! let's welcome it with BLOOD

the good thing about last time is that it was very gay. the bad thing about last time is that we've established the villain can and will tear the entirety of people's skin from their bodies, and then consume them as dinner. but this movie is a gay love story now, and god willing, there will be no dead lesbians by the end of it. there will be a lot of other dead people, sure. but hopefully no dead lesbians.

okay joey's girlfriend is officially in the hands of pj or jp or whatever the fuck this total douche's name was.

and he is very, very eager to get her eaten by his new carniverous friend

but before that, we have to jump back to dream vietnam, just the place everybody wants to be.

except now there's someone else here with an Accent and he's all "joeyyyyy wassup girl". oh my gosh who could it be!

tons of soldiers blow up and die and joey wakes up screaming

now let me tell you a movie that scares the bajeezus out of me: it's poltergeist. i don't think this movie will become that so i'll just take this shot at face value.

okay except for that it's like... making scary noises. you remember the episode of x-files where scully heard voices in the tv and unscrewed all her light bulbs? it's those noises, but much more loud and scratchy and unnerving.

motherfucker, get out of there! i'm going to set this television on fire.

he says YOU HAVE TO HELP ME and then goes away again. help you with what? consuming kid cuisines where the chicken nuggets are made out of human thigh meat?

jp is in here DRIVING A WEDGE BETWEEN GAY LOVE talking smack about joey while terri cries. god i hope jp gets eaten at the end i hope it so bad.

oh but wait! terri suddenly exclaims "SHE WOULDN'T" while she sobs, and blames herself for things that haven't even happened. honey :( joey hasn't gone anywhere and she's going to come and save you THIS I BELIEVE.

"come hug me baby, but do it over here next to the statue."

"mmmm come hug me over here"

"no baby hugs are way better next to grotesque works of art~"

oh no and then he says "come to daddy" shlfkhld NO

oh no oh no terri gets up!! no!! i bite my nails that i painstakingly regrew this past week.

AHHH HE'S AWAKE AND HE HUNGERS. at the very last second terri decides she doesn't want to do a hug, but jp grabs her by her very sparkly shirt and pinhead opens wide for another nutritious meal.

then terri breaks out brass fucking knuckles oh hell yeah girl, and she socks jp right in his smug, awful, ugly face

terri runs to the door but pinhead yells WWWAAAAIIITTTT. "why run away~?" he says. you can come live in my stone stomach with all the other people i've eaten. it's cool. it's progressive. it's modern art.

lmao oh my god, then pinhead, ever the hungry man, offers terri the chance to off jp in exchange for ~dreams~.

i mean, she's considering it, and i would too if all i had to do to unlock a world of dreams was toss some loser into a living pincushion's gaping maw.

well, he's a little heavy. where are those convenient chains right about now?

oh, there they are. holy shit, though, terri really went for it.

bye byeeeeeee! i didn't even have to wait until the end of the movie for jp's demise! this is AWESOME.

jp doesn't get eaten so much as he gets, like, giant nails driven through his head or something, and then pinhead yells a lot and the statue gets all crusty with bloooood.

oh and then it... pees? i don't know what's going on, some goop comes out of nowhere and dribbles all over.

ooh, that's... euugh...

gross flesh bombs just... explode from it. just gunk dropping off of it all over the place, smoking piles of gunk. it's icky.

oh that's... that's not good...

"terri. we are going to open the local spirit halloween store together... 6 months early!!!"

poor joey isn't getting any sleep, there's old-timey music coming from somewhere and all the lights are doing weird glows. also this apartment is fucking sweet as hell, how does she live here.

she opens a glowing closet, which, she has balls of steel to be doing that. but i guess if all your shit is glowing in your house at 3 am and you have 40s on 4 playing out of nowhere, you'd probably want to see what was up.

there really was a literal radio just sitting in the closet. so she takes it out and puts it on a table.

she turns some dials on it and then mr. video starts telling her to do stuff, noooooope buddy i need to know your motivations my dude, i need to know what you're all about.

maybe don't follow directions from mr. video/radio/dreamland. he tells her to go to the window which i guess is fine enough? but what's she gonna see out there... nnnn....

okay, this guy's just out here chilling. who are you now???

it's no problem for joey "balls of steel" summerskill, who is going for it. all in, baby! literally all in, her whole body in, to... the... window.

she ends up on the other side of this darksided cs lewis wardrobe intact.

look at this princess serenity dress she wears to bed every night, love it.

"who the fuck are you and why won't you let me sleep"

"hold up... gotta stare at the cube." this guy has the same hairline recession as michael eddington.

"i just walked into madness for you!" that's really what she says and i'm tickled by it. girl knows what fuck is up. it's all insane. least this guy can do is pay attention!

uh oh what's this now, what's this indiana jonesing over here.

joey goes for it, because she's a very brave girl, and now it's vietnam time again.

"joey, how kind of you to come." literally her alternative was watching you stare at the cube. you better start explaining some shit!

well he doesn't start explaining anything, just slinks away behind the ridge. joey follows him, looking at all the nasty soldier corpses.

"you have to help me; i don't understand." ME! i don't get any of this. dump some info on me, mr. video!

"you have to help me," mr. video says. buddy, you better be, like, the misplaced sealant on pinhead, otherwise i'm out.

he takes off his hat and he says his name Was elliot spencer.

AND THEN JOEY INTRODUCES HERSELF AND SHAKES HIS HAND i'm laughing. TOO PURE. "hi dead man who won't leave me alone nice to meet you."

he says she's brave, which is true! and says "you've probably never shaken hands with a ghost before." i mean PROBABLY NOT.

well she says "ummm captain spencer, what the hell is going on???"

"hell is exactly what is going on." ahhhhh. because it's been raised! we hell now.

they set off for a walk, a nice stroll through what spencer the ghost says is the limbo between heaven and hell. he says he can't do squat in the real world, but joey can.

"there is a monster out there, joey, and it's me." eeeeep.

anyway so he's pinhead because war is hell, and he originally opened the box and got mad chainz, yo. stopping him will require "great courage".

joey doesn't know if she has that, but spencer is like, "girl, you just walked through a goddamn solid window to talk to me, you're fine."

the cube is the gateway to hell and pinhead wants it, and spencer says joey has to let him come for it. aw helllllllllll no! eff that, why can't she just drop the cube in a volcano or something?

"but what if he takes the box from me before i can-"

"he can't take it, it must be given to him." oh dear so he's going to try to persuade her to give him the box. PERSUADE HER LIKE HE PERSUADED TERRI TO LET HIM EAT JP? just great. i have large worries.

let's have a little party pitstop.

my favorite baby is here, and it sTARTS MOVING AHHHHHHHHHHH HELL N O

OH GOD EVERYTHING IS MOVING

and then there's an explosion

and H E  C O M E S

everybody goes screaming and running and chains start flying. a guy gets his hand cut and his palm spurts blood LIKE A FOUNTAIN just like i've been expecting this whole time. another guy gets a stick of wood through him.

this girl's drink comes to life and also she's still sitting at a table while the entire place is in a full-on panic.

the bubble becomes a pinhead head, which then becomes a huge dagger of ice that impales the girl in the mouth. i don't know, i'm laughing at that one. let this be a lesson to us all: if, while in a club, madness begins all around you, just run. leave your $12 drink. it's not worth it.

the sleazy bartender gets barb wired. a girl gets her face torn. pinhead cackles in the background.

here's my thing: how is joey going to fight all this shit? SHE'S JUST ONE PERSON and pinhead can do all this?! man... i have concerns...!

more killing! you know what's going to happen to the dj, don't you?

weeeeeeee! maiming!

pinhead starts locking doors. people start getting chains to their faces. and their necks. and through them, while other people get them through their faces behind them. just all-around a delight for everyone.

there's one last door that's not shut, but do you really think it's going to stay open?

NOPE! you're in pinhead's funhouse now!

and as the whipping of the chains grows louder, and the screaming dies down, blood flows out under the door.

literally. how is joey going to win this thing.

no sleep for joey as she wakes up, again, to news reports of a "catastrophe" at the boiler room. that sure is one way to put it. joey, poor sweet innocent brave joey, gets her ass dressed and calls grandpa cameraman.

oh boy. it's time. it's time for joey to bring the pain to a very bad man, armed with nothing but that box against his MYRIAD OF SPOOKY POWERS. I HAVE EXTREME CONCERNS! that's all i'm saying!

mmmmmm and the tv was unplugged the whole time. CONCERNS RATCHETING UP A FEW MORE LEVELS.

it's raining, it's pouring, that door up there's fuckin opening on its own. grandpa's car was outside but grandpa was not in the car oh god he is almost certainly mutilated by now.

and we got some folks HANGING AROUND............................

yeah there's bodies everywhere and joey's scared out of her mind. PROTECT THIS POOR BABY.

joey holds onto the cube for dear life, because SOME GHOST thought it was a GOOD IDEA to send a 27 year old mortal human in to fight a needle-faced hell man with NOTHING MORE THAN A BOX.

it's gross, she's crying, there are just... so many bodies. she's looking around trying to find grandpa, growing increasingly more distraught as she sees, you know, severed heads and stuff. lmao and there's one guy with about 15 billiard balls stuffed into his dead maw, which i found pretty comical.

welp joey, who is absolutely going to have nightmares for the rest of her living days, just screams out for grandpa, but i think she and i both know he's not going to answer. oh, grandpa, what horrible thing has happened to you?

joey goes farther in and some lights come on

another doorway beckons

and inside, it's like a banquet hall of... terribleness. i don't have any words left to describe all this, my goodness. and joey's still crying. i don't blame her. she came all the way the fuck in here instead of getting on the first plane to the other side of the world like i definitely would have, she deserves to let some tears out.

oh, and grandpa?

is very dead, with his head replaced by a camera.

ohhhhh everything is beyond misery

pinhead appears, waxing poetic, blah blah death and stuff. suffering. humanity's darkness, whatever.

TAKE HIM DOWN, GIRL. SEAL HIM UP.

"mmmm gimme my box kiddo"

naw she's not here for that, so pinhead starts yelling "DON'T DEBATE WITH ME, GIRL. JUST COME HERE AND DIE WHILE YOU STILL HAVE THE OPTION OF DOING IT QUICKLY."

"you're gonna have to come and get me, you ugly fuck." OHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

IT BEGINS

now with the knowledge that pinhead really can't touch that box unless he's given the box, joey takes off and almost gets run over by a cab outside.

cab hits a pole instead but listen, bud, your sacrifice is duly noted. hell's getting stopped tonight, bro! if you live, you'll get to see it!

then the pole falls over, knocks out all sorts of shit, and the cab lights on fire.

uh oh pinhead's doing pinhead stuff. WILL THE CUBE PROTECT AGAINST ELECTROCUTION?

oh my good god then pinhead sets off a fire hydrant and once the water is everywhere, where do you think he puts these nice cables?  C O N C E R N S

pinhead's impromptu death river comes barrelling down the street, but joey gets up on the sidewalk and the water sluices harmlessly by. phew.

except for now chains are coming out of the sewer. nnnnggggaaaahhhhh!! they do get her a little bit! me scream!

more stuff blows up! i'm very tense! joey keeps running. the sewer's blowing up, every electric thing is blowing up, THE MANHOLE LID comes spinning at joey's face but she dodges it. everywhere, EVERY LITERAL PLACE SHE GOES, stuff blows up and is on fire.

"what the fuuuuuuck where's the part where i get to go home and live a peaceful life"

"a peaceful life where all my friends are dead, and this place is fucked." hey... hey where's terri...? did... did she died...?

eeeep you're on pinhead camera! KEEP RUNNING

OH NO it's grandpa, and he's a weird camera borg now :(

oh joey honey i love you sweet girl please hang in there

"HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT HE DID TO ME, YOU LITTLE BITCH," not grandpa anymore roars. "HAVE YOU SEEN?"

then all the tvs blow up

then some guy???? who is just walking around out here????? joey runs into him and screams at him to run, but he's all, "hey baby where you going? everything's cool." oh YEAH, EVERYTHING'S REAL COOL.

so that guy dies when borg grandpa spears his eye camera through his head.

here comes pinhead, slinking out of the shadows.

just in case you forgot, this is the general state of things. not great. could be better.

oh there's more dead borg corpses walking around, too. that's a different one over there; it's cd head from the club.

L E T ' S   J A M   T O    T   S W I F T

when is enough enough, pinhead?!

it's never enough. guess what walks out of that explosion, it's another borg corpse.

whoaaaa and this one spits fire. SURELY PINHEAD HAS PROVEN HIS POINT BY NOW.

then the cops roll in, and joey again implores them to just fucking run. they don't.

one of the cops gets gasoline on him, and if you might recall (joey does), one of the dead borgs breathes fire.

joey wisely does not stick around for this, leaving the cops to their piping hot demise.

what now? now joey ducks into a church and just collapses. same.

you better be a priest, sir.

"father there's an awful lot of sinning going on outside, my only friend is a killer zombie, and new york is in general aflame."

this idiot priest tries to tell joey demons aren't real. haha! dude! you've missed several updates.

several. updates.

there he is, the man himself.

and then, oh my god, lol:

"then what the fuck is That." shdfklshlkfhs

leeeet's go if you don't want to die!

hey if you thought stuff was done exploding, you were wrong.

come on, that is ripe for becoming a deadly projectile.

or a melty mush. ooh, but a molten one. eugh, it couldn't just melt to melt, huh? had to be a scorching melt.

rarrrrgh i hate sunday school!

then listen, pinhead stands at the altar, ready to perform his own sacraments, which involve pulling a slug out of his head? and then putting the slug into his other hand (he's losing me here), then all the candles in the church start blowing up, then he pulls out another slug, puts that slug into the first hand, and then a wall starts cracking...

look, if i understood it, i'd let you know.

the rite of slug is now complete. whatever windows remained are, you guessed it, blown to kingdom come. then the altar crumbles, and for some reason, the priest thinks he's going to be a hero. no. wrong. pinhead pulls out slug number three, i think, i couldn't really tell. i think that's the only thing i could have been was another slug.

joey's over here rubiks cubing. there's not a great deal of time left in the movie, so, everybody cross your fingers some evil about to get sealed.

oh ew i think what pinhead pulled out was a flesh glob, and then he stuck it in the priests mouth, huge ick.

but joey gets the cube to go blue.

WHAT'S -UP- MOTHERFUCKER

joey taunts pinhead with the cube and bolts again. she makes it to the best place to be in the middle of a hell siege, which is a construction site. yes.

she immediately hears shit creaking around, because this will never be easy.

ohhhh good, it's more happy friends.

oh no no no and one of them... one of them...

IS TERRI!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOO MY BEAUTIFUL LESBIAN LOVE STORY ;________; also note terri's direct line of smokes now.

"i can dream now, joey..." auuuuugh this wasn't the dream i wanted!

"terri..." her voice is so tiny and weak and defeated. i hate this, i hate this, HER ONLY OTHER FRIEND IN THIS WHOLE WORLD AND SHE'S A ZOMB.

well she tries to mess with the cube some more but borg jp and borg terri circle around her, beating her up. :(

and guess who arrives atop the hill, and threatens joey with "dark decades" of pain. oh golly.

more zombos come in.

"ahhh, more friends, come to play with you, joey."

"PLAY WITH THIS, PINHEAD"

joey gets the cube to go blue but this time...

it starts opening up!!

it starts autobotting and the zombos are looking at pinhead like, uh, dad? what do we do/???

then the cube starts shooting out blue stuff and ghostbustering all the zombos into it. they all scream and cry about it but there's nothing to be done, battle over, cube wins, that's it. pinhead tries to resist but he goes in, too... i... i think... we don't actually... see him...... go in.............

is that it? can joey go home now? this poor girl has been through An Ordeal.

joey tries to ask good ol ghosty if that's it. hello? is he there? don't flake out on us now, pal.

oh, what... is this now. wasn't that just dirt on the ground two seconds ago?

oh okay we're... here now, i guess.

look everybody, it's joey's dead dad.

so joey saved the world and gets to hug her dad, that's a pretty good reward. it's not going to bring back the scores of dead people, but this is okay.

wait

WAIT

WAAAAITT OH GOD WHAT THE HELL

"joey, they said you'd have something for me. something you won't need anymore." OH MY GOD STOP I'M HOLLERIN

"this? oh here, take it!" HONEY NO. JOEY NO. OH MY GOD

oh my god my entire soul is fleeing my physical form

I'M GONNA FRIGGIN FALL OVER AND DIE

well what the shit happens now

"save your tears. i'll reap your soul slowly."

then i legit don't know what the hell happens next, joey thinks about the window, and then all of a sudden...

...we're there? past the window?

"couldn't resist playing games, could you?" ah our old chap there he finally is

"you had to come through the window of her mind" okay say whatttttt. the window was in joey's mind all along? well that's kind of stupid if you ask me.

uh oh oh no oh dear it's time for chains. this is not the kind of kinky shit i am after let's not go down this road. cries and watches this through my hands.

oh no oh geez. pinhead stop i can't... do this... do not talk about pleasures right now... while this is... oh lord this is too weird

what... in the seven hells... is that. pinhead and ghostie take their sweet time watching each other while this THING rises up toward joey.

no. no fuckin way. i'm done. there's like three minutes left and i'm ready to leave.

bro. you're way too calm about this.

"you're right," he says to pinhead. "we do belong together."

and he reaches out and gets pinhead to drop the box. all right noW DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT BACKGROUND HELLSPAWN

okay hellspawn and all the chains and weird things disappear, and then ghostie and pinhead fight, i guess.

me irl: "uhhhhh ok"

ah now they're a... tangled flesh monstrosity.

sure seems like... pinhead absorbed ol ghostie, though. that's not... great.

oh but... maybe it didn't go so hot for pinhead after all?

ghostie's head pops up and says "JOEY. SEND ME TO HELL." oh god please do. right now.

joey/cube otp

she messes with it a bunch while pinhead stalks closer, yipes!

now it's swiss army knifing. that's not what we need right now we need the other thing! the blue!

all right just kidding she gets it to be a dagger and stabs him good.

yeeeeowch! my pancreas!

yeah see ya. finally, once and for all, i think he's outta here.

ah, and there's the cube

NOW can joey finally go home? live in peace? all that good stuff? please leave her alone for the rest of time.

man stick that thing in some cement where it belongs, then throw it in the bottom of the atlantic.

look, cement! really get it in there deep. it doesn't really seem that deep. there were like nine more hellraisers after this so i'm thinking the cube makes its way out of the cement.

oh my sweet girl, go home and never think about any of this again. get some rest. get a therapist. stay far away from any and all ugly statues the rest of your life. you got a transport to space to catch; you don't got time to be running around down here!

joey goes home.

but there's one last thing.

that building they built on that construction site has some familiar designage.

THE END!!!!!! no seriously that's it. pinhead is the whole building?!!?!?!? NUKE IT.

ughhhhhh rubs my hands over my face so much for not having nightmares. thought i'd be free when i finally finished, but i think i am more unsettled than ever. really good! exactly what i wanted! man, what the fuck happens to joey now? she goes home and has ptsd for the rest of her life? somebody write me that fanfic. just kidding, don't, i don't want to think about it. only a happy life for joey now. no more hell raising for her. hope she moves to monterey and forgets all her troubles. maybe gets a nice girlfriend, settles down, never has a nightmare again.

oof. i gotta... do a juice cleanse or something. 2 spook. and jake is exactly right, i should never ever watch the rest of these movies, not ever in my life.

hey jake? you there, bud?

hold me ;_;

#picspam #terry farrell #2 SCARE 2 SPOOK #ds9

[mllemusketeer]

The Paper That Made Everyone Hate Me

Hey you guys asked me for this backstory for the self-insert verse, so here it is. I am going to HAVE to post this on Ao3. It’s getting too giant to do otherwise. 

Okay. So I’ve had a bunch of curious requests about what the hell I wrote in a paper that pissed both Megatron and Ratchet off. The short of it is that it’s a long story. The long of it is this:

In grad school (at least in the sciences), you don’t pay the school. Often, the school should pay you. Now, with the economy fucked up, often it doesn’t quite work this way, but for PhD students like me, it usually still works like this. Mind you, your actual wages put you well below the poverty line, but usually you can sorta make it work.

The standard arrangement for this is that you work for the school on a part-time appointment either in research or teaching. The school passes itself a check for your tuition and health insurance and assorted lovelies, and then passes you a considerably smaller check with which you are supposed to somehow make rent and feed yourself. Research happens every so often; far more common is getting a position as a teaching assistant, or TA, for a class. Being a TA often sucks; you do all the shit the professor doesn’t want to do, which is largely being the intermediary in the merry war the professor and the students perpetually wage over what should constitute sufficient effort to earn a passing grade. You have (often, though I’ve worked with far better profs who do involve their TAs in class design/decision making) limited ability to affect policy, but if anything goes really wrong with your class, it’s your fault. Also, they will jack your teaching load up as far as they possibly can between semesters, and god help you if you attend an institution at which the TAs aren’t unionized. You will be screwed.

But it pays tuition.

An extra god help you if you get the morning labs.

Which I do.

7:30 am, to be exact. Three of ‘em.

GAH.

Anyway, so it was the fall semester before the Paper That Made Everyone Hate Me. I was teaching a lab class. It was August. It was fucking hot, interspersed with thunderstorms, and for the gritty icing on the shit cake, dust storms too, which are like thunderstorms if you replace the entire rain thing with horrible blowing dust. The light outside can go from sunny midday to I-think-I-saw-this-in-Interstellar brown in about 5 minutes, which is as much time as you have to dive undercover after you get the weather service alert to when the storm hits. They’re gross. But I digress. The point is, August around here is the armpit of the year.

There had been some confusion with the rosters of my three classes. This one student had apparently been repeatedly misplaced. They didn’t wind up in my lab, but had been listed there for a few hours while this was awkwardly sorted out. I went ‘meh’, because it wasn’t my fault, and I couldn’t do anything about it, and I didn’t particularly care whether or not the dude was in my lab, not if I didn’t know anything about them. Turns out I should have paid attention.

Motto of my life, really.

Anyway, there was this field trip. It was on a weekend. It involved the TAs driving those godawful 15-seat vans that handle like bricks as we took the kids to the botanical gardens (yes, if you are in college, chances are your TAs call you ‘the kids’ behind your backs. They learn it from the professors. Besides, it reassures that one TA you’re inevitably older than. Yes, you’re probably older than at least one of your TAs. Secret lives and all that, right?) and prayed not to die in the like, five mile trip, because have I mentioned those things drive like bricks?

So there I was, driving a white van with the University’s logo stamped all over it, glad at least the damn thing had government plates so I couldn’t be pulled over for rank incompetence, while also praying that said rank incompetence wouldn’t kill everyone in the van, when a giant robot swept down out of a clear blue sky and kidnapped the entire van.

It’s a good thing I’m a real asshole about making everyone buckle up.

There were screams. I just sort of clutched the wheel, yelled at everyone to stay calm and in their seats. AS IF. I felt like an idiot even as I said it; this was not a situation it was easy to stay calm in—but there’d be fewer broken bones from being flung around if seatbelts were in play, and the ground was already far enough away that jumping had become a very terminal option.

I had just finished signing all the forms, waivers, ect to conduct research at NEST. This included a will. I’d fucking laughed at the thing when I’d turned it in. I was a bioethicist! Bioethics wasn’t exactly risky. Definition of ivory tower, really, and this according to academic researchers. I mean, really. But I signed all the forms, all the waivers, and even drew up the will with a certain amount of amusement. After all, one could always get hit by a bus while crossing the street. A will wasn’t the worst thing to have on hand to fairly distribute my pitiful savings. I didn’t even have a dog at that point.

Now, that will was suddenly very relevant.

Because, if my memory served, the purple and black robot carrying us was probably a member of the Decepticon command trine and we were—

VWOP

—boned. A note for the unexperienced; Skywarp’s teleport ability sucks when you’re a passenger.

We were so fucked. We were so so so fucked. I spent a moment in an agony of guilt over the fact my research project had doomed my students to an early grave. For fuck’s sake, I’d only just had the protocols approved! I didn’t know interviewing Autobots about similarities and differences in patient autonomy would be dangerous! I’d thought my worst problem would be Ratchet, who abruptly seemed like the sweetest, fuzziest person ever, and I’d never even met him. I was interviewing his staff, after all, not him, because he was too damn busy.

I should mention here again that I was very small fry indeed at NEST at that point.

I really, really hoped I’d be seeing Optimus Prime somewhere. Any minute now.

About then, Skywarp dropped us, none too gently. Thank god the van stayed upright, but there was some serious screaming and this time I joined in. If I survived, I thought, clinging to the wheel like it was my best friend, I would have to be surgically removed from this steering wheel, because I was never letting go.

Which was when I realized we were on the ground again, and had a functional van. I slammed the accelerator—

—and a claw came down and punched through the engine like it was a slice of bread. Not Skywarp’s. So much for that. Before I could decide what to do next, the roof of the van rolled up like the lid of a tin of sardines with a horrible noise of splintering plastic and screeching metal and I was looking up at Megatron.

There were many more intelligent things I could have said.

There were even more profane things I could have said.

What I actually said was a very small, “Oh dear.”

Megatron stared at us for several long seconds.

Then, “Skywarp! The boy is not here!”

And fixed a glare on me.

What I should have said was, “Due to FERPA, I cannot disclose the presence or absence of any student in this class.”

What I actually said was, “Um. There was a problem with the rosters, I guess?” because I was not about to die for the fucking Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Whoever the hell Megatron was after was probably well away by now, protected by Autobots. I wasn’t putting them at risk, probably. It wasn’t like any other vans had been nabbed. My immediate problem was not dying and keeping my students alive, and I was hoping those goals would be achieved at the same time.

Look, if I were a really good TA, I’d be able to tell you what my students were doing—if there was any terrified crying or whimpering or if some dude in the back was making paper airplanes to bounce off Megatron’s nose but to be entirely honest, I had no idea. Because I was occupied with one thought, and that thought was that I had to keep Megatron talking. Talking meant no mashing into a paste, right?

“Humans,” said Megatron, absolutely disgusted.

“Yeah the computer system is terrible,” I said, which made him give me a very surprised look indeed. I think he may have expected me to sit there and wait for death, but like my grandmother before me, I am incapable of keeping my mouth shut. “No one knows how to use it.”

He stared at me, then at Skywarp. “Get him,” he snarled, and Skywarp took off, leaving me with about a dozen Decepticons and a very grumpy looking Megatron and a bunch of terrified students.

Hold up, you may be saying. Hold the fuck up right there, Mlle, I do not for a minute believe the universe is so fundamentally careless that you of all people would get kidnapped by Decepticons, why on Earth would they go for your van, and really the best I can offer as a response is Jazz’s after-action reconstruction of events. Which runs so:

There was an epic roster fuckup, and a certain college-age associate of the Autobots  was placed in my section for about six hours. This happened to be a period within which Soundwave hacked the university’s database to see if they could kidnap said associate. Therefore, my name and roster photo were associated with that person, and the general conclusion was that if they nabbed my class, they’d nab the person they were looking for. They got into the syllabus too (making Soundwave officially better informed about the course than many of its participants) and saw there was a scheduled field trip. So Skywarp was instructed to nab the van I was driving.

Leading to what was Officially The Worst Lab I Had Ever Taught.

Megatron was still eyeballing me.

Which gave me the opportunity to do something truly outrageous.

“So,” I said, and unbuckled my seatbelt, then stood on the seat to try and feel a little less short, “It’s a delight to meet you.”

These were words that Megatron in all probability had never heard from a human before. He smirked. That kind of bearings on a human, Jazz later told me, was something Megatron would at least pause for. He was damn well aware of what he seemed like, damn well aware any sensible human would be utterly terrified, and fully aware that the various beings he’d killed over his long, long lifetime were more than capable of this kind of courage. He’d killed them anyway, in service of his Cause.

When Jazz told me that later on, I all but crapped myself all over again, because at the time I read that smirk as a sign that me being stupid ballsy had bounced the van from the category of things that were going to get smashed and killed into one that involved maybe not getting smashed and killed. Maybe earning the respect of the bad guys so they’d let us go. It was a long shot. The long and short of it was that it encouraged me and I grinned back at him and said, “I’m a grad student studying bioethics. I’m fascinated by Decepticon philosophy. Would you be willing to expound on that? I have forms here detailing exactly how I’d use any information you give me, so you are fully informed of the implications, and I’d be delighted with any information you’d care to share!”

You know, even with all the oh shit surrounding the whole ‘kidnapped by Decepticons’ thing, I still think my best achievement of that day wasn’t surviving, but the fact that I actually did talk Megatron into signing the consent forms for my interviews. He read them all, too. I was really glad I’d spent hours refining them. Really, really glad. He asked more questions than the lawyer on my committee did.

But he agreed.

And it turns out, once you get Megatron monologuing? You’re all set. I set up the recorder, pulled out a notebook, and glanced over my shoulder at the students. They all had brought lunches for the botanical garden tour, so we were probably good for about six hours. Bathroom breaks, though… I hoped we wouldn’t have to deal with that.

I didn’t dare do much more than glance at them. If Megatron thought I wasn’t listening—well, I didn’t want to find out. So I sat there and took notes and recorded and asked questions. Megatron monologued. I got a lot of useless military philosophy, but I did get him onto bioethical topics eventually.

The most important of which was patient autonomy.

Which he was surprisingly vehement about. Apparently, a wounded Decepticon has every right to refuse treatment. The philosophy seemed to be if they’re idiots and die, so be it. It’s their right and means one less idiot taking up resources. (Decepticon bioethics, however, seem to place allowing oneself to be subject to experimentation in a different category, as a duty. Decepticon bioethics are weird, but I found this out much, much later.) It was unclear whether this was the result of resource scarcity or was a true philosophy not dictated by necessity, but I wrote it all down anyway.

So I wrote and listened and recorded and shook out my cramping hands and made all the right noises, particularly when Megatron got onto the subject of memory surgery (about which he was oddly vehement) and in short got a spectacular interview right up until Optimus Prime FINALLY fucking showed up and punched my interview subject in the face.

At which I grabbed notebook, recorder, and instructed my students to evacuate the van and fucking hide.

We got carried out of there in the hands of several Autobots, including Ironhide and Bumblebee and Ratchet, and my students were surprisingly happy with me, given that I’d spent the last several hours interviewing the guy who’d taken us hostage, and ignoring them completely. I had a short period sort of in the limelight, but not very long because it didn’t make an amazing story, really, and then a lot of therapy. Rollercoasters are right out for me, forever. A little too Skywarp-esque.

Anyway, after a while I went back and conducted my interviews with the Autobot medical staff and found some very interesting things, namely that Autobots do not actually place strong emphasis on patient autonomy when it comes to refusing necessary medical treatment. Ratchet will hunt you down. This was surprisingly consistent.

So I sat down with this information and the human bioethical literature regarding these things and wrote a paper in which I made three points that made everyone hate me:

1.) Human concepts of autonomy in patient choice to seek treatment and Decepticon concepts are fairly similar, with Decepticon concepts being somewhat more liberal.

2.) Autobot autonomy in patient choice to seek treatment is significantly reduced when compared to human and Decepticon standards.

3.) While Autobot and human ethical standards surrounding consent to experimentation are very similar, and Decepticon standards lag far behind, the attitudes behind whether a patient is obliged to seek treatment influence a far more frequent occurrence at this stage in the war, and are an interesting indication of convergent values in two opposed factions (humans and Decepticons). This is influenced by Cybertronian history as briefly outlined in the introduction.

Literally no one liked this.

Ratchet hated it because it compared Autobot ethical mores to Decepticon, and the Autobots came out as less respectful of personal autonomy, which was probably his fault as CMO.

Humans hated it because apparently “with Decepticon concepts being somewhat more liberal” constituted an insult. How dare I compare them unfavorably to aliens. How dare.

And Megatron?

Megatron hated the implication that humans and Decepticons were in any way morally similar.

It was a tiny paper. Teensy tiny. Ringed round with disclaimers that this was comparing one eensy bit of human bioethics and Decepticon cultural expectations, that in no way was I expanding the observations to other parts of Decepticon activity (I did get KIDNAPPED while researching this guys, I do not have warm fuzzys for the cons, thanks) but everyone skipped right over that and flipped their shit.

Got me grant funding though. 

[mllemusketeer]

How I Met Jazz

I just finished a fuckton of awful grading. Have the next installment of the self-insert ‘verse. One day, I may even start posting this on Ao3....

So the story of how I, nerd by day, supernerd by night, wound up with Autobot protection ought to be told. Or at least part of it. It was mostly due to The Paper That Made Everyone Hate Me.

First of all, due to a series of increasingly implausible incidents, I published a paper that pissed off Megatron, bewildered Optimus, and enraged Ratchet—and my advisor, and a bunch of people in my field. Long story short, the field of bioethics is not a placid lake. Tempest in a teapot is closer to it. Tempest in a teapot with laser guns, now.

Technically, due to confidentiality and all, when a paper is in-press, people don’t share it widely; the reviewers aren’t supposed to chat about what they’re reviewing. But the journal I submitted the thing to has a digital submission portal and doesn’t take paper submissions, and anything digital, Jazz tells me, is something that Soundwave can get into. Nevermind that whatever system sent the paper to the reviewers may have been less secure than might be hoped.

Which I really wish I’d known to start with. Because the result was, about three weeks before I was supposed to find out whether the thing had been accepted or not, Megatron found out about the paper. A paper in which I’d quoted him. For which I’d interviewed him (long story, blame Sam Whitwicky, because who else). And blew a gasket.

So toward the end of June, when everything is just beginning to get unbearably hot and tempers (human and Cybertronian) are starting to fray, it comes to Optimus Prime’s attention that one of the human graduate students loosely associated with NEST (I’d gotten a base pass, very restricted, written and had the protocols for my research approved—just interviews, all temporary, had started the research proper, but was a significantly less august personage than the interns responsible for getting Starbucks) was getting Decepticon death threats. He wasn’t pleased. Never mind that Ratchet apparently was Reviewer #2 (no, you’re not supposed to find these things out, but since when has Ratchet been observant of rules when it doesn’t suit him? The answer, according to Jazz, is never...) on the paper, and was as about as delighted as Megatron about said paper. He was all too happy to give Prime the rest of the details, which, again, you’re not supposed to do. But there aren’t really rules for how to apply this when someone is at risk of becoming paté, so he got away with it.

From my perspective, it looked like this:

6 am on my fucking birthday: Decepticon death threat regarding the paper. Cell phone, email to every email address I owned, tumblr message, facebook message, twitter, everything. At the same goddamn time. Somehow overrode all the silent modes on my devices. My room was a hellstorm of cheery binging, beeping and clicking for about three minutes. That was worse than the stated intention to turn me into paste, really.

6:10 am to 11: contact advisor about what to do about death threat, chew fingernails, get very useless email back, shrug, contact police and the NEST representative, go teach class because lab won’t wait for death threats, and I am quite literally more scared of my lab coordinator than Megatron. Megatron doesn’t write my paychecks. I am a grad student and have fucked-up priorities, okay?

11 am: Get contacted by Optimus fucking Prime about the fucking paper (spot where my morning went to shit/off the rails. Base pass does not equal even seeing Optimus Prime. I was too far down the food chain for that.)

11:10 am: Get picked up by a bunch of really buff guys in a humvee, one of whom starts explaining the situation to me as if I’m four, come on dudes, I’m a grad student not an idiot…okay, fine, actually those things are the same.

12:35 pm: Arrive at Autobot base

12:55 pm: Spend 20 minutes kicking my heels in what looks like an office 40 feet off the ground while people stare at me, have yet to (I think) see an Autobot. (I was wrong, actually; it wasn’t a humvee, it was a Topkick, and it was Ironhide, and that one guy was just pretending to drive, and Ironhide snickered about this for weeks, because that’s absolutely the level of Ironhide’s sense of humor.)

1:00 pm: Call from angry lab coordinator for not showing up to teach lab, try to explain, dude in a suit shows up and offers to take the phone. Since I am now enduring the full blast of an outraged lab coordinator, I comply. It suddenly is a very short phone call. She even apologizes.

1:01 pm: Meet Optimus fucking Prime.

1:30 pm: Have a really excellent talk with Optimus fucking Prime about my paper; he really can learn everything about anything very quickly. Like, in an hour.

2:00 pm: Finish substantially less excellent talk about the fact that me becoming paté is a serious risk, and what the hell did I do? Also, he is a little taken aback I’m not involved more with the Autobot/human research initiative; he thinks I should be much more involved, not just a visitor. It’s a very promising paper, he says, though unnerving.

2:01 pm: Pause.

2:02 pm: Ask Optimus fucking Prime if he could be the co-chair of my committee.

2:03 pm: HE SAID YES.

2:15 pm: SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK SHIT SHIT DID I DO THAT SHIT FUCK DAMMIT WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF I AM REALLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH SHIT FUCK DAMMIT SHIT SHIT SHIT HE’LL HATE MY WRITING SHIT

2:30 pm: FUCK FUCK FUCK GAAAAAH HOW DO I TELL MY ADVISOR

2:45 pm: FUCK FUCK SHIT BUGGER DAMN 

2:50 pm: why do I do this to myself

3:00 pm: Okay he looks like he’s finishing up oh shit did he just ask a question what did he ask quick nod look like you understand

3:00 pm: Wait shit what does he mean, someone to keep an eye on me, am I getting a bodyguard dammit should not have zoned out in front of the new chair of my committee

3:10 pm: Met Jazz.

It didn’t go well.

The discussion between Optimus and Prowl about who it would be best to assign to keep an eye on me took place that morning; Jazz had been told about it about twenty minutes before he met me, and he was not pleased. He had things to be doing. Important, Megatron-irritating things. Babysitting was none of the above.

Besides, that last prank he’d pulled with Sunny and Sides hadn’t really been that bad.

He looked down at me. I looked up at him.

“I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” said Optimus, and left.

Silence.

“Well,” said Jazz, “I suppose if Bumblebee can manage with Sam…”

I had not met Bumblebee and had no idea what Sam he was talking about at this point, so the sentence made no sense to me. I just stared at him.

“So,” he said, flopping on a pile of shipping containers arranged in a roughly Cybertronian sized chair shape, “what do you do for fun?”

Which was where things really went downhill.

For fun? I stay in and write. Or I go for a walk. Or I cook, or sew. I go camping. I go hiking. I do not, in fact, do basically anything that counts in Jazz’s book as fun. Except swing dancing. Erratically. And badly. But he perked up like nobody’s business when I mentioned it. Going exploring, yes, that was pretty okay, we’d be doing a lot of that if I wanted to come along on his (safer) patrols. Other than that? Nothing.

It’s quite an experience to watch 15ish feet of robot sort of deflate. To be fair, Jazz, though not pleased with the situation, was resolved to make the best of it. But I’d just told him that the best of it wasn’t going to be all that fun. And I was feeling guilty because look, I hadn’t meant to piss the giant destructive robot dictator off, it had just sort of happened. I mean, no one expects giant robot dictators to read the bioethical literature, that’s well outside the job description! I’d not only pissed Megatron off, but I’d chosen literally the most boring way to do it and now this nice big robot was looking at me like I tended to look at iceburg lettuce—with a sort of resigned determination to do what was polite (in my case, eat the flavorless, useless vegetable; in Jazz’s case, interact with someone who seemed to him to be the human equivalent). God. This was going to be horrible and boring for both of us.

We both turned out to be wrong about that, as it turns out. Eventually.