#anyway that post made me pissed off LMFAO. why is that word always singled out | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

meggannn · 3 years

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i would also like to see post sidonis + backstory wip info

the backstory fic: this was an attempt to write my shepard's life pre-enlistment, explaining her relationship with the gang and the girl she took under her wing who was eventually killed in a gang war. but trust me that it was really bad and that's why i abandoned it a long time ago! lmfao

the post-sidonis thing: this is a rewrite of the conversation with garrus following the sidonis quest, where garrus is pissed that shepard prevented him from taking the shot. but the reason that’s sat on the backburner is because i eventually realized (as you and i have discussed lol) that i hate garrus’s loyalty quest and i’ve rewritten it in my head, so any attempt to write a post-sidonis fic will have to come after i’ve written my actual sidonis quest rewrite, and i just have too much going on to think about that at the moment lol.

it’s not very long, so here is the entirety of the document, from back when this was just about garrus being angry. be warned this is old and unedited, gdrive tells me that the last time i looked at this was in 2017:

Garrus storms into the battery, jams the lock, and activates the privacy shields. He narrowly avoids driving his fist into the wall, but -- after a split-second of consideration — doesn’t feel assured he wouldn’t break a bone against Cerberus’s bloody top-of-the-line warship. Instead, he slams his hands against the console, ignoring the flashing lights as the screen awakens from sleep, grips the edges, and sighs.

What the hell had she been thinking?

The thing that gets him — the thing that bloody gets him is that it had come down to the line, to the second he’d seen the pinpricks of his dark eyes, a single trigger keeping him from putting the ghosts of his team to rest --

No. Suddenly there was Shepard, too, and she was harder to budge than his own conscience.

Even in his own mind, he struggles to find the line between the commander, the friend he knows her to be, and the help -- the accomplice he nearly made of her. He knows that Shepard has always, always trusted the evidence and her gut in tandem. And the facts are that he asked her to take him at his word, without proof. The detective in him knows it isn’t for lack of trust that drove her to step into his shot, it was out of necessity: to question the suspect personally, to hear it straight from the source without bias or filter. Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.

If he asked her why, Shepard would certainly explain. She would spin him some bullshit about taking the high road, or about revenge not being the answer. What he’s worried of, what he’s terrified of, is that she would explain, and he would let her, and that she would convince him it was for the best. He didn’t want to be convinced -- he wanted to be right on his own terms, he wanted her help with this one fucking thing --

A faint beep from the other side of the door snaps him back into the present.

“Override,” comes Shepard’s voice from the other side. A swish of the lock and a rush of air at his back.

Garrus clenches his teeth.

There’s a tense sort of silence for -- he counts -- about a minute and a half. She cracks first.

“It wasn’t because I didn’t trust you,” she says finally.

“Shepard -- ” He pushes off the console and turns around. He vaguely registers that the door is closed again behind her; good. No reason for any of the crew to hear this. “Don’t feed me any crap on revenge getting the better of me. You waited until the moment I had him in my scope to toss it all out the window to satisfy your conscience. I asked you for help. You agreed.”

Even as he says it, he knows it’s not entirely fair. She hadn’t kept her disapproval secret; it had weighed on him through the scuffles in the warehouse, like a weight around his neck, knowing this was his mission and Shepard had disapproved -- and he can’t rightfully claim he had given her room to argue her case.

“I didn’t wake up this morning planning on putting myself in between a sniper and his target,” Shepard snaps back. She scrubs a hand over her face; Garrus has the presence of mind enough to notice she looks exhausted, like she’s been wrestling with the decision herself. “It happened in the moment. I stood there. I listened. I’d heard the story from you, but I needed to hear it from him.”

“And what, exactly, did that piece of filth say to change your mind?” Garrus snarls. He feels full to bursting with some unnamed energy and stalks the length of the corridor in two quick strides.

Shepard is still staring at him, so infuriatingly calm. “You know exactly what he said. If you still think I blocked your shot out of kindness for him, then you haven’t been paying attention.”

“Right,” he spits, and he needs to nip this pseudo-moral bullshit at the root before the conversation gets sanctimonious again. “It was for my benefit. That explains why I feel so much better, you know, now that he’s still alive.”

“Don’t turn this into a joke. You know why I didn’t move. The galaxy wouldn’t have lost a decent man if you’d pulled the trigger.” She pauses for a moment, assess him, and something goes cold in his chest as he wonders if she finds what she sees lacking. “Then again, maybe it would have.”

He takes a step closer to her. He didn’t intend the move to be intimidating, but he realizes just how much he towers over her in this moment, with his neck bent down. Her eyes close, in a tense sort of irritation. “I’ve killed before, Commander,” he says, not aggressively. “We wiped out a few dozen mercenaries between the two of us just today. And you draw the line at a degenerate bastard that cost my men and half my face?”

“To tell you the truth,” she runs fingers through her hair and laughs in the sort of half-hearted way that says nothing about this is funny at all, “I’m still not entirely sure I do, Garrus.”

“Do not,” he says lowly, “tell me you’re regretting it.”

Shepard drops her hand and stares at him. He’s never seen her attention fixed on him with such hard, determined purpose. It’s the look she normally gives mercenaries they’re shaking for information, criminals they’re convincing. Something about it makes clench his jaw further, a pool of shame and anger mixing equally in his chest.

“Vakarian,” she says his name slowly. “I could stand here and give you a laundry list of reasons why you shouldn’t have committed cold-blooded murder in the middle of a public square.” Shepard stares at him, all five feet of her, and despite himself he feels like a fresh recruit again, fifteen years of age with markings fresh-painted across his face, staring up at a livid drill sergeant. “But you’re not interested in listening and I’m not interested in fighting with a wall. Come talk to me when you know who you’re really angry at.”

She turns and moves to open the door.

“I took him on my team,” Garrus growls. “I put my faith in that asshole. He let me down. He let his team down. It cost their lives.”

“You imagine you’re the only one who’s been betrayed in the galaxy?” Shepard looks at him over her shoulder but doesn’t turn around. “The only one who’s seen their entire team dead on a commanding officer’s mistake?”

Garrus has a flash of remembrance that Shepard has seen two of her crews slaughtered; once at Akuze, and again over the blistering snow and wind of Alchera. He grapples with another sinking feeling at the knowledge that she is heading a team through the Omega-4 relay against odds so impossible that most of the ground team had taken to jokingly calling it a “suicide mission.” Garrus has used the phrase himself more than once in conversation with the crew, in that half-serious tone he seems to have adopted after Omega when joking about the probability of his own demise.

Looking at the mission’s leading officer now, it suddenly doesn’t seem so amusing.

“You know it’s not the same,” he says around a dry mouth.

“No, it’s not,” she sighs and rests her forearm against the door, forehead leaning against her wrist. “…And if my CO on Akuze had survived, I can’t promise I wouldn’t’ve wanted to put a bullet in his head myself.”

“Then why, Shepard?” He’s tired of arguing. The burst of adrenaline from earlier is gone, anger fading into the kind of bone-weary exhaustion that he’s only known to follow a failed mission. He can't help but think that is exactly what this is, the disconcerting feeling that the justice hasn’t been seen to, that the responsible party got away, and it stings something else in him that he’s feeling it with Shepard for the first time.

Some tension in her body seems to evaporate. Shepard slowly looks up at him. “I don’t know, Garrus,” she says calmly. “You tell me.”

And that’s the part he can’t understand, and he hates himself for not understanding.

Shepard had stood aside, in that last second. It hadn’t been an accident. The gap between her skull and Sidonis’s had extended about a meter. Garrus is a good enough sniper that Lantar’s brains would have smeared the floor without Shepard feeling the whistle of the bullet pass by her forehead. She’d said her piece, woven her magic, and then stepped aside, and damn her for making him feel guilty in that moment for wanting what he’d needed. What closure could come from letting him go? What benefit could come from letting a murderer, a betrayer free to roam the galaxy? What good could it do his own conscience?

And yet --

He could’ve pulled the trigger anyway, and he didn’t.

He could’ve moved position. He didn’t.

“Go. Just -- tell him to get the hell out of here.”

Fuck it. Just -- fuck.

#writing notes #perihelions #fic snippets

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lafortis · 5 years

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(star) Why do you hate Game of Thrones

GoT spoiler up to about season 6? or so? maybe. under the cut.

D&D (david benioff and D.B. weiss, the show runners, if you’re not familiar) are, as of at about season 5 imo, absolute hacks too ratings-drunk to adapt the books well. they valued theon’s character development from witnessing a rape more than they valued SANSA AS A CHARACTER, more than they valued her book arc that they cut to get her raped, which they had been building up to so way to make a goodly section of her story pointless, or more than they valued logical internal consistency wrt littlefinger’s behaviour. there are some things that they decided to cut for screen time mid-series, meaning there’s foreshadowing and groundwork laid in the earlier seasons for things (IMPORTANT things) that never fucking happened.

the first four seasons were (imo) REALLY good; i was looking forward to the Mountain and Oberyn’s fight so much i reread that section like ten times, and it delivered. I mean their adaptation of daenerys’s storyline always rubbed me the wrong way a little, but it was understandable cus she reeeeaaally could have used some more judicious editing in the books lol. the first time i got really pissed was season 4 ep 10 (which i saw in theatres ffs), which was amazing, and the tyrion jaime jailbreak scene was almost literally word for word lifted from the page, which was amazing, and then… they just… cut the conflict? between them? they depart both still friends, which makes tyrion going up to tywin’s bedroom and killing him basically random patricide for its own sake rather than an actual motivated action. it also left them with fucking nothing for jaime to do (when he was SUPPOSED to be gaining independence and realizing cersei sucked, which i think he did anyway but for like worse and less interesting reasons) and left tyrion with basically just post-patricide depression (which like lmfao cry about it) rather than literally having the oldest wound his heart had ever suffered re-opened!!!! which was like actually compelling!!! and like all they had to do was mention tysha ONCE for like TEN SECONDS in episode ten but nope no screen time had to cut that subplot. ten minutes of jaime and tyrion talking about fucking nothing in a jail cell? sure! can’t mention her there tho. no time.

anyway, after that i was waiting to binge season 5 as a whole and then sansa got raped on screen for literally no reason except that they had accidentally cut jeyne pool (disregarding the fact that she was missing from the books for that long too and no one had any problem remembering who she was THEN, literally just say like “hey that’s jeyne pool sansa’s childhood friend” and you’re FINE), and i kind of was out. gone. done.

i hear it’s gone downhill from there which is unsurprising to me, because if there’s one thing i learned it’s that when they try to write for themselves they shit the whole thing up for real so now that they’re off book it’s not surprising.

OH ALSO WHAT THEY DID TO DORNE

AND HAVING TOMMEN AND MYRCELLA KILLED FOR LIKE NO FUCKING REASON

oh AND olly as a character entirely. fuck that dipshit little kid. fuck him. he literally fucked up the only part of the azor ahai prophecy they kept in the series by obviously being the one to kill ygritte on screen rather than it having happened by an anonymous member of the night’s watch and thus symbolically being Jon’s own sword

smh.

also i think it was a logistical/filiming thing but cutting Lady Stoneheart was the biggest mistake they made rly not like consequentially and i’m not that mad but like that shit is fucking sick. like every time i tell a show only person about that they get their minds fucking BLOWN it’s SO COOL

it went from a really good adaptation of a really good and compelling fantasy novel to one step above elevated fanfiction in the course of seemingly about a season and now it all just seems like wank. like whenever i hear about it from ppl it sounds like it’s gone from “deconstructive, subversive fantasy” to just “fantasy” which is like… pretty lame and not at all suited for the big screen imo

good fight choreography tho, no matter what they do with the story, and i love every single actor in the series, just… canm’t fuck w it anymore

#star emoji anon #Anonymous #hs anon #sry i have a lot of opinions i dind't even get to all fo them in here

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