#as far as we fucking know there's a planet where magic is literally real

[oxy-codone]

do u ever have a thing that you believe is true but also don't believe it. I believe in Aliens bc im not an idiot who thinks earth things are the only form of life in billions of galaxies and systems.

But i also dont believe they've ever visited earth- but i also kind of do?

Like if an alien lifeform that has amazing technological advances exists; we might not know simply bc of how advanced they are. Like I don't necessarily think they HAVE entered earth but also I think it could be possible. Like agnostic but about aliens where it's like "maybe but i dont fucking know, anything is possible". it seems improbable but also people years and years ago thought space travel would never happen at all and that it was impossible so. Like if they DID visit earth and not communicate wouldn't be too surprising to me, but i also don't rlly think it's true.

#weird thing where it's like. the universe is so vast that we cannot comprehend what could be real and what isn't #liiiiike i do 100% believe in ghosts and think there's more reality in that then aliens visiting earth for fun #half bc why COULDNT it be possible? The universe is never going to be something we fully understand- we have guesses #but even physics itself isn't a set concept- we think things work this way but sometimes we realize things #we thought as previously impossible on a physical level is actually possible #so an alien visiting earth? Ya maybe i dont actually really think so but i also kind of think ya that's a thing #it's weird #as far as we fucking know there's a planet where magic is literally real #(and tbh imo magic is just a form of science- if it does exist it has a scientific reason to it that we are disconnected from) #idk man am i making sense here my pills are kicking in #space #fm

[notedchampagne]

Sam, tell us the third house dynamics theories. We need it.

ALRIGHT one day ill need to support my claims with actual book lines but for now as far as we know, the third house is more or less the diplomacy/politics planet. the book says "Beneath their glittery exterior, they are a font of personal and political intelligence." but this is a very objective description and im much more interested in the subjective view through the tridentarii twins, so.

things we know about the third house through the view of the tridentarii:

usually with the royal heirs, giving them the same last name isnt common, even with twins. iirc taz said that by the chance that the twins are given the same name, theyre also given a plural- hence the existence of tridentarius vs tridentarii. this fact plus the knowledge that ianthe and coronabeth are so insanely codependent implies that they were ENCOURAGED to act as one whole

this whole fucking thing is perceived as creepy/unhealthy to the readers ESPECIALLY with the theming of corona & ianthe as the real necrocav pair instead of babs, [ NONA SPOILERS ] nona initially thinking ianthe in naberius' body was crowns boyfriend, etc etc like jesus fucking christ. it is abnormal to everyone except the two of them

not to mention other tidbits like them playing "suicide", coronas repeated "fake suicide baiting", [HARROW SPOILERS] the reveal that corona and ianthe both pretended to be necromancers to avoid whatever their father would do if he found out (even at the cost of others perceiving ianthe as the insecure and lesser one), the excerpt in as yet unsent where judith mentions corona and ianthe were allowed to only invite one person at their own birthday parties while their parents invited everyone else to mingle and posture around with - everything gives off the imagery that the entire planet revolves around politics under the image of lavishness and beauty

it then fits in perfectly they they would attempt to make their twin princesses a joint pair for not only popularity/appearances, but also for strategy. "heir and a spare" and whatnot. if both princesses are identical pillars in one corner, a loss to one wont immediately collapse the structure

ID ALSO LIKE TO MENTION HOW THEY JUST EAT LIVE FLESH? "The Third House has a traditional specialty for flesh magic, particularly that of animaphilia." GIRL HELLO? theres a pretty genius meta post theorizing how naberius likely ate his swordplay instructor to get that near-perfect skill, and we already know the twins used to use babs as a literal fucking chew toy. out of all the houses i think theyre the most accustomed/prepared to use lyctoral powers (next to the eighth house) due to them already surpassing other houses’ limits for drawing power from dead/live bodies. personally it just fits in So Perfectly with politics and intel-gathering the way they really hold no limits at getting what they need. of course the tridentarii act like that OF COURSE

#thanks for asking ily #the locked tomb #coronabeth tridentarius #ianthe tridentarius #talking back

[empty-pizza]

thoughts on harrow the ninth (actual) chapter one and also chapter two

man i got confused. apparently i read parodos last time, not chapter one. also i hadn't noticed the prologue was the night before the emperor's murder. i promise i am paying attention now. also i accidentally read some of chapter two before chapter one because i mixed up what i had already read.

and as someone paying attention, i am noticing that at the end of the prologue, harrow says three syllables. and i am big time on the train of saying that some timeline (or memory) fuckery has occurred. so i think those syllables may be GI DE ON.

anyway onto chapter one.

lol harrow doesn't get it. you gotta listen to the sword. seems fairly, uh, literal, that she vomits when holding it, though. is the sword magic, or is this some kind of psychological issue?

it's a great sword. the kind gideon used. maybe harrow's body (lowercase b) recognizes gideon on some level and knows something is wrong.

i am also very curious about the line about the body making it so time can be relied to work right. hmmmmm.

now, chapter two.

god has SERIOUS gamer energy. i will not elaborate.

this man is very reasonable and sensitive. too much so. the vibe i get is that he could rationalize anything. he is happy to show his sensitive side because it makes you sympathize with him.

i wonder how many of harrow's secrets are out. we're sending a bunch of new people to her house. does god realize she puppeted her parents? is that water under the bridge?

i can imagine many reasons why the cost of resurrection might be too great. but i have to wonder why the cost of returning to the houses is also too great. that's a funky one.

there's a really interesting paragraph in here where i can't tell if it's just describing things in a fancy way or if it's implying that the Body is harrow's? then is harrow, say, in gideon's body? or does the Body just look the same as harrow? or am i reading the completely wrong thing from this?

this planet stuff is neat. so planets get converted from thalergic to thanergic, which is very confusing. is that why we lack much agriculture here? they turn the planets from something that can sustain life to something they can draw necromantic power from?

so big g resurrected everyone because the planets died and a bunch of Resurrection Beasts spawned. imma be real: this is extremely cool. like extremely fucking cool. incomprehensibly powerful beasts that are near-impossible to kill? fucking baller.

ah so they chase big g. so that's why he can't go to the houses. not even for a day? I mean, how far away are they. hmm.

all of this, however, might not be as true as it seems. that's the thing about this god fellow. he really does not seem like a liar. that makes it extremely dangerous if he is a liar.

okay. that was all fun and games but we're getting to the serious stuff:

what the HELL is with this body shit?

the body of the locked tomb had been with harrow for a long time. again, this really seems like something harrow would have acknowledged back during book one. the more details we get the less i can believe that this was going on all along. there is fuckery about.

the body has not spoken to harrow since the night her parents died. THIS IS NOT TRUE. we just saw the body said "This isn't how it happens" when Harrow was talking to Ortus. i repeat: there is fuckery about.

harrow walked with her? dreamed of her? there's all this history? tf????

what made harrow half a lyctor. she seemed a pretty proper one last time.

they're saying ortus died. like. tf???? that dweeb? he is not the one that made a sacrifice for harrow's lyctorhood. the suggestion that it was ortus makes harrow SICK!

what does mr. god suspect? he said the name a third time, almost like he was experimenting what effect it had on harrow.

there is absolutely fuckery about, of the major variety. the question is whether it's time fuckery, memory fuckery, or extremely clever fuckery i can't suspect. like this could be something like gideon jumped into a hole that makes her retroactively never have existed but the vestiges of her soul push into reality through harrow's perception and try to help her. or it could be that nothing crazy happened and this is just all one giant con that the narrative is somehow cleverly pulling on me. but it's gotta be SOMETHING. if the book tries to gaslight me i'm pushing it away and gaslighting myself.

the body could be gideon in some form, but it could also not be. what the hell would have magically associated gideon with the locked tomb itself, making her the Body of the Locked Tomb? it could be some incarnation of that girl harrow saw inside the locked tomb, too. man who fucking KNOWS what this shit is.

harrow names colors that the body's hair could have once been (she says in death, not in life) and does not mention red as a possibility.

#pizza reads locked tomb #the locked tomb #tlt #harrow the ninth

[omegasmileyface]

Vital tenets of media depicting space travel

it's big. everything is SO far apart. a lot of beloved space media doesn't give you any sense of vastness and desperate farness. desolation. i still love them, but its very important to me. if youre making a space journey, the distance should be mind-bogglingly farther than you can imagine, and uncomfortably long in waiting times. this can expand to other, less literal parts of your story. scales human minds can't easily comprehend.

things that are almost like home... almost. historically, i think of planets that looked suspiciously like SoCal and aliens that looked suspiciously like humans due to limitations in effects in film and TV, but today we see this more in ideas like parallel universes and convergent evolution. when you travel, you often come across something that reminds you of home, but with something a little off. these coniferous forests look like back in the rockies, except there are trees I've never seen before where the spruce and tamaracks should be. this culture has a "let's eat dinner together" tradition just like mine, but everyone is sitting on the floor. it's almost familiar enough to feel like you know what you're doing.

relating space travel to a historical parallel. i think if you were creative enough you could subvert this, and "reflect the past in the future" is a core idea of sci-fi in general, but like... Firefly works really well because it uses the moral values and story themes of Westerns, yeah? and you don't have to go all in like they did, but think to yourself "what were humans like in times of far travel and expansion? can i draw inspiration from Polynesian sailing culture? or Chinese train lines? would humans react to the back-and-forth shipments of resource ships more like they did to British commerce sailing or to USAmerican trucking?

number 3 above should help define your aesthetic. i am a strong believer that sci-fi aesthetics should have some thought behind them. dont just make things blue-and-white LEDs and sleek plastic Apple™core futurist because you can (or just because it's a nice shorthand for the imperial bourgeois, though that can absolutely be an influencing factor. because i agree). would touchscreens be practical or not on this ship? would things be dirty due to a rushed, uncaring labor culture, or clean due to strong health infrastructure, or somewhere in between because it's just home? is the equipment uniform because it's part of a single government program, or all over the place because everyone does it, or a mash-up of the two because there are strict tech requirements to make it work and it would fuck everything up if you deviated a little but you decorated on top of the necessities?

BE FUCKING WEIRD. space is weird. look if you want to get some kind of social commentary across or be lauded as Perfect you should probably follow everything i said above and also carefully think up a scientific system where everything you mention is consistent and you very carefully don't mention anything that wouldn't be consistent. if that's where you want to go, godspeed. i liked Ender's Game as much as the next youngest child with an abusive brother. BUT don't be afraid to be camp. break rules (my rules, others' standards of the genre, the laws of physics, your own previously-established rules) when it's fun. make things stupid and pretty for no reason. assign numbers to things that could never ever make sense. even the most serious of space travel stories do well with a scene or two where Someone Gets Space Madness or A Wormhole Appears And Everybody Gets Genderbent or We Need To Have An Alien Fashion Show To Afford Repairs or what have you

refuse to make up your mind on whether space is magic and gods are real or not

[erigold13261]

Who do you think is the most powerful NSR character magic/physical wise?

Oh DJSS for sure. (and this is gonna get messy and not properly organized lol) [Okay while writing this I actually think Tatiana might be more powerful, but I wrote most of this from the perspective of DJ so just read and hang out til the end for Tatiana's part lol]

That bitch not only survives being blasted into space, but they also can shoot literal beams of ultra charged sunlight at you and change his size. Not to mention being able to throw asteroids and planets (disco balls) at you that he has full control of. I'm pretty sure if they were actually trying they could kill you in an instant.

Plus I just imaging them as being able to survive in situations that others would never be able to. Not having air, too cold or too hot of temperature, not having food for long amounts of time. DJ and his elemental half of him is very strong and able to do incredible things if he just had a kick in his step.

Sure we see Mama also change size (not counting the end where everyone grows) or Eve manipulate other people's minds, which is power right in itself. But the combination of things DJ can do (and potentially do) outweighs what we see the others do, at least in magical/non physical powers.

Like, going back to Mama because she was also someone I immediately thought of, she is strong, yes. We know this. But she is also using Yinu for attacks during the fight. Yinu shooting the notes while Mama is being more of a tank, with some attacks thrown in occasionally at the beginning and then mostly Mama attacking.

She does have great control over her powers as well, being able to grow far bigger than DJ did (but we don't know if DJ just didn't want to destroy his planetarium unlike Mama who didn't care and just broke the building) and being able to snap to just slam chunks of land down at B2J.

Her power comes more in the environment I feel like. If she couldn't root into the ground (like if it was all snow/ice, water, sand, or something like that) she would be far less effective in her powers. While someplace with lots of plants, like Natura, gives Mama an advantage in her powers.

But DJ's powers come mostly from within I feel. Yes he can use outward powers like the disco balls/planets, but my main thing I cling to is the beam of light he shoots out of his chest along with those noodle arms they could literally use to destroy shit if they were big enough and slammed those things down.

Going to Eve, she also has all her power come from within. I would not say she is very physically strong, maybe more than the average person/human as I feel like she works out, but her power comes entirely from within herself. But her powers are incredibly strong.

Eve can mess with people's minds, which is usually a very OP power to have where you can literally just snap someone's reality and fuck them over for life. But we don't know the true extent of her powers. Does she need the person to be able to SEE her illusions (that would make her useless to blind people, making Neon better than her as I see him as blind) or does she just need a brain to mess with (which goes into the question of if DJ even has a brain for her to connect with, because I don't think they have a real brain, making her powers useless against DJ and them being stronger than her).

Or her powers could be literally changing reality but only temporarily (or a combination of these). However, looking at all of this with Eve, even if she were able to mess with DJ based on her powers, it would be a thing of who's mind is better/stronger. And in that situation I think the two would be evenly matched. They are both extremely smart in their own fields and I feel like the two are self aware enough that they would be able to hold their own in a psychic match against the other. So yeah, compared to Eve, I think DJ can match her in her own powers along with outranking her in their physical prowess.

I don't even think I should have to mention Sayu because mer powers are all based in tech. Whenever ze is in the real world ze would either be a hologram or a robotic body that wouldn't have much power to it, not like when Sayu is in mer tech world. So DJ would easily defeat a Sayu that is in the real world.

But when it comes to the tech world, if DJ did whatever B2J did and went in to fight Sayu.... hmmm, I can see him having both and easy but also hard time. Sayu's attacks are quick and kinda unpredictable at times, with 4 people basically attacking you at once. However, DJ feels like they would be a very hard hitter with lots of health. Sure his speed wouldn't be that great, but he'd be able to destroy the programmer chip things easily. Heck he might literally be able to just attack Sayu directly or grab that trident when ze would try and hit the ground/him with it.

I would say that if DJ can survive/protect his head from constant onslaught of damage (which he seems very bad at doing) he would be able to defeat Sayu pretty easily. If he can't protect his head then Sayu would win, or at least it would be a tie as we don't know WHAT a black hole in that situation would do.

And all of that is if we aren't taking into account how close DJ is with Sayu (or how I see them). DJ would be able to read Sayu and the Crew very well, giving them an advantage over them because I can see the crew and Sayu talking to him about fighting or moves they know how to do, but DJ wouldn't talk to them about his own fighting. So DJ would be able to out beat Sayu just by knowing them really well.

1010 and Neon J are very skilled fighters (at least Neon is definitely). It would also be a 5 or 6v1. Already making it advantageous to 1010. However, 1010 isn't really that strong, they have their shields and their finger guns. Both of those won't really do much damage to DJ, as he will probably be able to easily destroy a 1010. And heck, he would be able to swat the factory right out of the sky.

However, once Neon truly joins the battle using 1010 bots, I can see the fight becoming more even. As explosives are used and quick attacks like the saws or staves, I can see DJ getting run down during the fight. Especially if Neon keeps his distance, which I think would be 1010/Neon's best advantage. If they stay far enough away, they could use their weapons to slowly whittle DJ down. The only thing they would have to worry about is the sun beam and asteroids (maybe the disco ball/planets depending on where they are fighting) which they can have their shields protect them (if fans are around).

So if 1010 and Neon can keep their distance from DJ, which does seem easy to do with their jetpacks/boots and the flying factory, then I can see them winning with some scratches to their bodies. But if this is a close combat fight, definitely DJ for the win just from the size changing alone (like imaging DJ could literally just pick up any of the 1010 and throw them lol, I mean they could do that with almost anyone but still).

And then with Tatiana, I do think she is powerful. She should be, with her fireballs and time movement, I do think her and DJ could be very evenly matched.

Like will that light beam even hurt Tatiana? I'm sure it would somewhat, but not NEARLY as much as any other character who gets hit by it. It definitely would not burn her at all. She could also smack those asteroids away or dodge them easily with her time powers.

I was going to say that I don't think she would do much damage to DJ, but honestly as I am thinking about it I think she would. Even if DJ grew really big, he would be able to block the fireballs very easily, but they would still HURT him. They are fire balls after all. And the ones he can't block, because we all know what a pain those pink parryable fireballs are, would be an easy shot to the head, making the damage even more significant.

I can see DJ doing some damage to Tatiana too though. Constantly hitting her with rocks and beams of light would slowly whittle her down, but she would dodge most of them. His attacks are slow and heavy but Tatiana's are quick and heavy. She would definitely be able to out damage him while still taking on only some damages.

So yeah, I am starting to change my mind. Tatiana would actually start to kick DJs ass. She is hard to hit, takes damage really well (even taken less damage from some of DJ's attacks because of her elemental side), and hits hard too (not to mention she hits with swords which is another added form of damage).

I actually think Tatiana would beat DJ in a fight. But I don't think Tatiana could beat everyone else like DJ could. Tatiana would have difficulty getting shots on Eve and 1010/Neon. I do think she'd be able to take on Sayu, unless something stops her fire (like if the level was coded as not being able to have fire in it because they are supposed to be under water) then I can see Sayu winning, but only by a margin because Tatiana is even faster than Sayu's attacks. And Tatiana would win against Mama alone because of the fire advantage, but might get knocked down if Mama and Yinu can work together fully (those triplets and music bombs would easily overwhelm Tatiana if she also had to dodge Mama at the same time).

So for a quick recap, I think DJSS would be the strongest overall character with Tatiana being able to beat him. There are instances where other Megastars could beat DJ but only if they have the right advantages (such as speed or range). If I had to rank everyone it would probably go:

1.DJSS

2.Tatiana

3.Eve

4.1010+Neon J

5.Mama+Yinu

6.Mama

7.Neon J

8.1010

9.Sayu

10.Yinu

#nsr #no straight roads #eritalks #noart #asks #sorry this is long #but i wanted to talk about d/jss #he is just so powerful #if they just put in effort #they'd be able to kick anyone's butt #other than t/atiana #lol

[bellmo15-blog]

Villains In Fiction Act Like Villains? *Gasp!*

So, there was a post I saw on Twitter last night that was poking fun of some of the sillier complaints people have about Disney Star Wars and the post contained screenshots of posts from Ticktok complaining about how certain factions, the Empire in particular, had been depicted in Star Wars media recently and these shots contained a bunch of fickle arguments such as “where is the war in Star Wars” as if people don’t understand that war isn’t all just big explosions and screaming “FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY” at the top of your lungs. You know, it was the stereotypical “Disney Star Wars bad” kinda stuff you’d expect to see at this point. However, there were two particular screen shots in this post that bothered me the most. This shot from opening of The Force Awakens where the First Order assaults the village on Jakku which ends with them all being executed, and another shot from one of the recent episodes of The Bad Batch showing that the Empire has started experimenting on kids with that same episode also showing Cad Bane kidnapping a literal baby.

And these complaints, they got to me. Like they actually got to me and not in a good way. Because ignoring the fact that the sequel trilogy actively goes out of it’s way to show the audience that the First Order is A LOT more brutal than the Empire anyway and this opening assault is a great way of showing that and this wasn’t even the first time in cannon that Cad Bane had kidnaped children, they were acting like the Empire being as evil as it is is a new thing. No it is not! This is the same group of people who killed Luke’s aunt and uncle, blew up an entire planet, tortured Princess Leia for information and would of killed her two if Luke, Han and Chewbacca didn’t show up to save her, Darth Vader killed some of his own men just because they fucked up at their job, blackmailed Lando into luring our heroes into a trap and set up a shield generator on a planet they likely didn’t ask the consent of the local Ewoks beforehand. And let’s not forget the Galactic Empire is also being led by a man who manipulated his best solider from childhood, planned a mass genocide on a group of what’s basically Space Samurai wizards and any Jedi that DID survive often ended up working for this new regime to basically hunt down and kill any Jedi who survived Order 66 and let’s not forget Palpatine basically lied his way into power. The Empire experimenting on children in The Bad Batch is no different from how they acted in the past BEFORE Disney brought the rights to this franchise!

However, this post of the Star Wars fanbase just being the Star Wars fanbase also highlights a bigger issue that extends to all works of fiction. Apparently, we can’t have villains in fiction who are irredeemable assholes that do some really horrible shit anymore. And I really have to wonder, do you people NOT know some of the really horrible shit villains have done in fiction over the years. Do you also know that some of them also have no real motivation to do half the shit they do other than “just cause” or because of “insanity?” This really isn’t a new thing or anything!

Don’t believe me? How about we bring up Green Goblin from the first Sam Rami Spider-Man film? This is a villain who literally becomes a villain though a science experiment gone wrong leading to him going insane and he actively takes joy in the horrible stuff he does. Does he have a reason to continue doing evil shit after killing off the Oscorp executives who screw him over at one point? No. Is he still a joy to watch on screen? Yes!

Or how about Risky Boots from the Shantae series. Does she have any deep or personal or sympathetic reason as to why she does half the shit she does in this series, including kidnapping Shantae’s Uncle, stealing her genie magic out of her, inverting Shantae’s Genie Magic to turn her evil or helping the Empress Siren just for the sake of a ship? As far as we know, no! She just really likes being a pirate and stealing shit save for the one time in the series she had no choice but to work with Shantae to stop the Pirate Master. And that’s fine! Because she’s still an incredibly entertaining villain.

Or what about Bowser from the Super Mario franchise. Does he have any detailed reasons as to why he constantly goes after Princess Peach? No! And yes, there is the Super Mario Bros Movie where he wants to marry Peach but that’s a different cannon altogether anyway.

And what about Commander Tartar from Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion who wanted to commit mass genocide on the entire Inkling and Octoling race just because he wasn’t happy with how they had become the new dominant species on earth and wanted to replace them with a new race?

“But Bellmo, we need our villains to be sympathetic otherwise what’s the point of half the stuff they do.” No no no. You can NOT just sit here and tell me making a villain Sympathetic instantly makes that character likable or justifys half the shit they do. Because even the ones who are do some pretty horrible stuff.

Don’t believe me still? How about Magneto in the X-Men movies? Now one look at this guy and you might think that he has a noble goal. He wants mutants to be respected and the X-Men universe mutants are seen as freaks or monsters. Well guess what, Magneto does some pretty awful shit in these films just for that goal. In the original X-Men he was more than willing to sacrifice Rouge, who casual reminder is ALSO a mutant, just to turn a bunch of people into Mutants despite the fact that we see before this point that it does NOT end well if a normal person get’s forcibly turned into a Mutant. X-2 despite helping to stop a plot to wipe out all mutant on the earth he then ends up turning that plan on its head and try’s to have all non mutants wiped out instead. Last Stand he rally’s a bunch of mutants to his side because of a recent “cure” for mutations and his plan is to literally go to the source of the cure, who is a literal child, and probably kill him two. And that’s not even counting some of the stuff he does in the First-Class saga such as being more than willing to blow up American and Russian boats with mislles, thinking the best way to stop the apocalyptic future we see in Day’s of Future Past is to kill Mystic because her actions in the 70’s lead to what happened and willingly working for Apocalypse because he has nothing left anymore. Yeah, I don’t care how much of an activist for mutant rights Magneto is, if I was a mutant I’d be going straight to the school run by the telepath in a wheelchair. Which is ironic for me to say considering Magneto is arguably one of the best parts of these movies. He’s incredibly well acted and his dialogue with other characters is great to listen two.

“But Gannondorf is a sympathetic villain in Zelda Wind Waker. He had good reason for doing what he did.” Yeah, a sympathetic villain who lied his way into the Hylian Royal family and plunged Hyrule and the Sacred Realm into chaos. And that’s just in the Adult Timeline. Don’t even get me started on how he basically used Zant to try and take over Hyrule again in the Child Timeline or how he actually kills OOT Link in the Downfall timeline.

Look, the point I’m trying to get across with all this rambling is that I don’t get why villains acting like villains is such a shocking thing to people nowadays. What, are we going to complain about Heroes being Heroes next? Villains doing villainous shit isn’t a brand new thing nor do they all have to be sympathy to justify the shit they do either. But then again, we live in an age where media literacy is deader than my hopes for that Sands of Time remake to be finished. I know I said this already a while ago but I swear to God, I will NEVER forgive what a lot of overly critical Youtubers from the 2010’s into now have done to an entire generations ability to consume media.

[dajo42]

so you have the timeless child, right? a kid of an unknown species that fell through a wormhole or some shit and landed on the planet gallifrey.

this kid has the power to cheat death by undergoing a process of regeneration, which changes every cell in their body and they begin a new life as a person that has a new face and acts differently.

their adoptive gallifreyan parent experiments with this to see if the power can be controlled or harnessed. the child undergoes an unknown number of experimental regenerations and eventually the parent figures it out.

from here the power is given to other gallifreyans, but they impose a limit, presumably through only giving them a certain amount of regeneration energy, but to be real its basically just through magic science. the limit is 13 bodies, meaning they can regenerate a total of 12 times.

society on gallifrey advances to the point where they develop time travel, and a new society calling themselves time lords develop, sworn only to observe the events of history and the future and never to interfere.

obviously some of them interfere.

among them is the timeless child, who at this point may or may not have taken up the mantle of the doctor. we just dont know. they may have a type 40 tardis, which is a gallifreyan time machine. we literally do not know. either way the being (?formally known as?) the timeless child ends up going on a lot of missions for an agency simply named division run by their adoptive parent.

at some point, and a currently unknowable amount of potential regenerations later, the child/doctor ends up fundamentally disagreeing with the end goals of division.

this might have been the doctor later known as the fugitive doctor. we do not know for certain. if it was, they also spent time disguised as a human on earth for some time.

either way their exile involves having their memory wiped and being forced to regenerate into a baby and given to another adoptive family on gallifrey.

as they grow up they take on the mantle of the doctor either again or for the first time, and eventually they either steal a type 40 tardis for the first time or through a quirk of destiny or a weird millenia long bootstrap paradox which is a whole other thing ends up stealing back exactly the same one they used to have.

eventually this incarnation regenerates.

crucially, as their memory had been wiped and they had been forcibly regenerated into a child, they believe this is the first time they are ever regenerating. as far as they are aware, they are a normal time lord. their regenerative ability has been forcibly limited so they only have a set number of regenerations left.

maybe.

it might not have been limited. they might just believe that when its not true. either way, as this was the "first", they can now regenerate 11 more times, as far as they know.

their second incarnation is later forcibly regenerated again, this time for totally different reasons, and this is where yet another complication comes in.

at this point the doctor either regenerates straight into their third incarnation, or their regeneration is secretly interrupted so they can do more secret missions and their second incarnation continues life for a while and then potentially regenerates either, once again, straight into their third incarnation or into the incarnation known as the fugitive doctor.

the latter option is not directly confirmed in canon but it is a popular fanon theory that holds a lot of water due to weird anomalies in timeline placements of specific events.

either. fucking. way.

eventually or immediately the doctor regenerates into what will henceforth be called their third incarnation.

then their fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth in numerous tragic ways including falling from really high up, the bbc being absolute bastards, and getting shot multiple times in america for some reason.

during the eighth doctors life cycle, a war breaks out between the time lords of gallifrey and the daleks of skaro, a species its weird that i havent needed to mention up to this point considering their prominence throughout the story but whatever. the eighth doctor initially refuses to join the war but is eventually mortally injured trying to save somebody and is persuaded that the war will not end without their participation.

the doctor chooses to regenerate into a warrior, and denounces the name of the doctor due to participation in war going against everything they stand for and why they chose the name doctor in the first place.

this incarnation eventually ends the war by teleporting gallifrey into a pocket dimension so the daleks blow themselves up, but due to the timeline being out of sync due to the presence of multiple incarnations of the doctor, they will soon forget the outcome of this event and believe they ended the war with their original plan of just fucking blowing everything up.

for a few brief moments at the end of this incarnation they accepted the title of doctor again, but this was immediately forgotten about as soon as they regenerated due to old age like five seconds later.

the following incarnation of the doctor thus denounces the war doctor as ever being a doctor at all due to aforementioned moral incompatibility. they continue in what everybody assumes to be their ninth incarnation, keeping the very existence of the war doctor secret.

this means that anybody with a knowledge of the rules of regeneration would assume the doctor can regenerate a total of 4 more times, whereas the doctor knows about their secret incarnation and knows they can only regenerate 3 more times.

unless their regeneration was not actually limited.

which.

fuck. whatever. lets say it was and they have 3 more.

eventually this incarnation known as the ninth doctor regenerates into the tenth doctor.

the doctor can thus regenerate 2 more times as far as the doctor knows.

the tenth doctor proceeds to spend a long time asleep then wakes up, has a swordfight, loses a hand, immediately grows their hand back and carries on doing doctor things.

the hand they lost has its own fucking story arc. but whatever the point is eventually the doctor is near death again and begins to regenerate but they simply use the regeneration energy to heal themselves and funnels the rest of the energy into their own dismembered hand.

this, crucially, uses up a regeneration as far as the doctor is concerned. it also causes a whole second doctor to grow out of the severed hand and then go live in a parallel universe but im literally losing my mind at this point so thats... thats fine.

it also means the tenth doctor keeps their same face and personality, which other people may think means no regeneration was actually used, but ultimately as far as the doctor is concerned this means they can only regenerate 1 more time, which they resist for a long time but are ultimately forced to succumb to.

as far as the doctor knows, the eleventh doctor is now their final incarnation. between their secret war regeneration and the regeneration they funnelled into their hand they have used 2 more regenerations than anybody familiar with the rules would likely assume.

the life of the eleventh doctor lasts for a long time but ultimately they grow old and believe they are about to die permanently but at the last second the time lords open a crack in reality from their pocket dimension and give the doctor more regeneration energy.

maybe.

it could have just been fake. because the doctor might still unbeknownst to themselves actually have unlimited regenerations.

but also it could be real because their regenerations may have been forcibly limited when their memories of existing as the timeless child were erased.

we literally do not fucking akan,, nwnan, z .wkal, .... know. sorry i passed out for a hot second there.

anyway.

as far as the doctor knows, when they proceed to regenerate they begin a new cycle with a completely unspecified amount of potential regenerations. it has never been stated if the limit still applies. the limit might never have applied to begin with.

like, at some point the twelfth doctor gives somebody a whole bunch of regeneration energy and its never specified if this means they lost incarnations or if they even can lose incarnations. other time lords dont even seem to know. its honestly probably just easier to assume the number of regenerations they have at this point is either unlimited or some ridiculous number like 507.

the doctor later regenerates again.

this incarnation, known as the thirteenth doctor, finds out all the stuff about the timeless child, thus recontextualising their whole existence.

then they decide it doesnt matter because they are still themselves.

then they decide it absolutely matters and they need to know how many lives theyve had.

then they decide it doesnt matter again even after the universe fucking ended and was reset off screen because they got too close to finding out.

i am not joking.

then their body gets briefly taken over by their enemy known as the master who it is wild i havent mentioned up to this point but whatever. the master forcibly regenerates the doctor into. the master. which. might be a regeneration, it might not. it is later reversed and the doctor is back to the thirteenth doctor again for like, an hour, before they get blasted by a giant fucking laser jellyfish and regenerate again.

i am still not joking.

in a mystery that is currently not explained, the fourteenth doctor for some reason has what appears to be the same body and possibly personality of the tenth doctor.

while this is the current incarnation the next incarnation has also been revealed to us the viewers at home and is known in marketing material as the fifteenth doctor.

this continues the tradition of ignoring all the above bullshit and just following the number that makes sense.

so. in summary. heres the fucking order.

___________________________________________

[UNKNOWN NUMBER OF INCARNATIONS OF TIMELESS CHILD, THEY MIGHT CALL THEMSELVES THE DOCTOR AT SOME POINT]

[Maybe The Fugitive Doctor- Jo Martin]

[memory erased]

First Doctor- William Hartnell

Second Doctor- Patrick Troughton

[Maybe The Fugitive Doctor- Jo Martin]

Third Doctor- Jon Pertwee

Fourth Doctor- Tom Baker

Fifth Doctor- Peter Davison

Sixth Doctor- Colin Baker

Seventh Doctor- Sylvester McCoy

Eighth Doctor- Paul McGann

War Doctor- John Hurt

Ninth Doctor- Christopher Eccleston

Tenth Doctor- David Tennant

Tenth Doctor 2: Tennant Boogaloo- David Tennant

Eleventh Doctor- Matt Smith

[new regenerations granted, maybe]

Twelfth Doctor- Peter Capaldi

Thirteenth Doctor- Jodie Whittaker

The Master- Sacha Dhawan

Thirteenth Doctor 2: Lucky For Some- Jodie Whittaker

Fourteenth Doctor AKA The Threepeat- David Tennant

[some other wacky shit might happen later this year for all we know but whatever]

Fifteenth Doctor- Ncuti Gatwa

_______________________________________

hope you enjoyed reading this!!! i hope it makes some sort of sense out of 60 years of endlessly shifting canon!!!!

and yes i know i didnt even take into account non canonical extended media doctors like shalka or fatal death!!!

or how and when the valeyard, a character comprising the darker aspects of the doctor, spawns into existence!!!!!!

or the doctors potential future final incarnation when they eventually retire from saving the universe, an incarnation played by tom baker and known as the curator!!!!!!

thats all for another fucking time okay!!!!!!!! im just here to make numbers make sense

okay bye

#doctor who #dw spoilers #long post

[shatteredatthealtarofwinchester]

Umm, wait. It's more a 15x20 rant than an analysis. I'll call it... a ranalysis. 😏

I just saw J*reds last online panel again, where he called the finale "magical full circle storytelling". 15x20 is his "favourite episode ever" because he "is a fan of good storytelling". Uh-huh... Okay. So the following just was built on pure rage. This makes it more of a rant than an analysis. As usual. You guys know me.

Well. There are various possibilities here, Jared. Possibility A is, you are lying, what I do not believe. To lie that obvious you have to be a talented actor, which you are not. Possibility B is, you really think that way. You believe, the finale was "magical full circle storytelling" and you actually loved it, it was indeed your favourite episode. This again brings me to the only conclusion: You have no fucking idea about good storytelling, not even decent storytelling.

Lets look at every single ending, shall we?

Dean. We all know you think Deans death was a "success story." You think that Dean "ultimately gave his life for his number one on planet." I am sitting here, laughing in pain. First of all, let me say that Dean didn't died for Sam, Jared. He didn't took a bullet for Sam or sacrificed himself or whatsoever. He died in the most ridiculous accident I've ever seen. But lets go back to the very start.

Dean’s childhood was highly abusive. Dean was 4 years old when he saw his mother burning alive and learned that monsters are real. In that age he developed PTSD and stopped talking. Dean had a childhood with a father that was an alcoholic and physically and mentally abusive, who had believed that Dean had a “killer instinct". When Dean was about 6 years old, John forced him into a nurturing role for Sam. In the same age Dean was forced into the soldiers role as well when John taught him how to shoot and hunt. Dean had to obey orders without questioning. If he acted “out of line,” (aka something John didn’t like) John chewed him out or left them alone. Dean was trained to be Daddy’s blunt instrument. Dean gave up his own life to keep Sam safe, because he had no other choice. More than a brother Dean had to be a father and a mother to Sam. He suppressed everything, every psychological pain, every emotion, he just lived to protect Sam and to obey as Johns blunt soldier. Short: Dean gave up HIMSELF for Sam and John. Not because Dean wanted to, because he was forced into it! Dean hated himself, he was suicidal. He was convinced he isn’t worthy of anything, especially not being loved. Dean never had a life for his own, never had a choice, never had a chance, never had own original thoughts, never felt safe or loved. He was used to being left. He felt like he was nothing. Worthless. He was dead inside. Broken. You get what I mean, Jared? Since you own a mental health campaign, you should. And guess what Dean did? He kept fighting. Despite everything, he kept fighting. And his mindset slowly changed. He understood that his father was an abusive bastard, he unterstood that he was forced into a life he never wanted. He understood that he is more than that, that he is not like John. He changed. He opened up. He even wanted to retire. And now it gets interesting, because something happened that REALLY is the start of magical full circle storytelling. Something in Deans mind clicked while Cas' confession. His confession was fundamental to Dean to finally accept his own goodness and the value of his life and love, of his identity. It was the moment of breaking free of the structure that had controlled and corrupted him his entire life. It was the only way out of his abusive and traumatizing cage to experience something for his own the very first time. For the first time in his life he had a chance. A choice. The start of his very own life. Free will, baby! Well, no. Because exactly in that moment he stumbled into a nail and died. Do you even realize how dumb this is? Do you even realize what you did? Wait, it gets worse. Yeah, that's possible, even if you dont believe it. In heaven he goes right back to the life he has spent his whole journey learning to free himself from: Left only with the persons he had been forced, time and time again, to sacrifice his identity, goals, and soul for. None of the family, support, or love, nothing he has built or chosen for himself remains. This is not magical full circle storytelling, Jared. This is abysmal pointless butchering. This has NOTHING, not a single percent of magical or good storytelling! YOU call that magical? YOU call that a success? Seriously, what shit are you on? If it would've been full circle storytelling, there is not one single fucking possibility that Dean would've died in the end. I don't know whats going on in your twisted brain, but Deans death never was and never will be a success. To make it magical full circle storytelling, he MUST have been the one who survives and overcomes his trauma (and raise a certain someone from perdition.)

Sam. He's actually the one who kinda got the best ending, huh? I mean, it was fucking horrific, but it was the best if you compare it to the others. When Sam was young, he wanted a normal life far away from hunting, while the truth is, Sam always was more like John than Dean ever will be. Over time his mindset clearly changed. He even said: "When Dean came to get me at school, I told myself, one last job, you know, (...) it was always one more job and then I was gonna go back to law and to my life. I guess, I really understand now that THIS is my life. And I love it." Sam couldn't imagine a normal life anymore. He had the chances for that and he declined. He loved hunting. He loved working and making progress with the BMOL, he very much enjoyed being a MOL and even took the lead often. I can clearly picture Sam as the lead of a rebuilt version of the MOL, that would've made sense. What did Sam get? Right, the ending he didn't wanted anymore, but since we yeet every single development of every single character out of the window, Sam has to be Season 1 Sam again, BUT with a fancy party wig! And there he is! And what a happy life he lives, exactly what he wanted, woohoo! So much joy, so much fun! Oh look, there is BlurryWife™, who Jared made sure is not Eileen, because “Dean wouldn’t want Sam to be with Eileen”. But wait, didn't Dean wanted Sam to be with Eileen? Didn't Dean literally said: "If it was to work, Eileen, you know... She gets it, she gets us, she gets the life. You could do worse. And she could certainly do better, like SO much better. I'm happy for you, Sammy." Yeah, NO. This was just a writing AND acting AND producing mistake and had no matter at all. *cough* So... As you can see, magical storytelling strikes again. I can feel the magic, I can feel the full circle, it's... Amazing...

Castiel. Castiels story was magical, it was mindblowing. I've never in my entire life seen such a meaningful and deep storyline and I mean this. It's fucking massive. There is this blunt angel soldier, one of the post powerful forces, who was built to blindly obey, who lived for aeons of years, who wasn't supposed to feel anything, but he fell for a broken, suicidal, abused human who never felt loved or worthy the very moment he touched him. He fell so hard he rebelled against his own race, against his own family, against everything he had without any safety. He was the ONLY one in Chuck-knows-how-many universes who GREW outside of Chucks CONTROL! His love was so fucking massive, it couldn't be controlled by the God who built every-fucking-thing. Chuck built millions(?) of parallel universes, heaven, hell, life, death, purgatory, the empty, he created every single being, the light, darkness, every single angel, demon, leviathan, monster, animal, plant, sea, blade of grass, every centimeter of mountains, the four seasons, emotions, what the fuck ever. Everything you can ever think of, Chuck created it. And he controlled it. In every single one of his fucking millions of universes. But not Castiel.This is actually not possible. You can't outrun god. You can't outrun the one who creates, writes and controlles everything. But Cas did. Out of love. And not only that, you also imply that what happened between Dean and Cas was the only thing  that was real. Everything else was corrupted, controlled, manipulated, written by Chuck. But what happened between Dean and Cas, he couldn't affect.

Seeing Cas standing there, crying, confessing his love to Dean actually even makes me think that Dean made Cas human. Dean completed Cas. Cas didn't simply said "I love you", he actually said "In all existing universes, in all millions, all aeons of years, you are my only happiness." And Cas completed Dean. He freed Dean. While Dean was used to being left, was used to feeling worthless and unlovable, Cas saw Dean exactly the way he is and chose to stay. With every obstacle, every difficulty he loved him even more and yes, freed him from the abusive structure that had controlled and corrupted him his entire life. Something that no one else could, not his parents, not Amara, not God, not even Sam. Beautiful, isn't it? Unique. Mindblowing. Pure. You enjoyed it? Let's fuck this up in 3...2...1...

Castiels story ended exactly the same way it started. A blunt angel who doesn't care about people and feelings, blindly carrying out instructions from a new God, obeying heaven. No progress. They threw away 12 years of character development and managed to give him the same stupid and senseless ending like they did with Dean. Dean died and Cas... Wasn't there?! WHAT!? There is no single fucking way Cas wouldn't save Dean or wouldn't be there when Dean enters heaven! There. Is. No. Fucking. Way! The way they represented Cas in the end doesn't only imply that Dean isn't important to Cas anymore, he even ended up exactly the same way as if Season 4-15 wouldn't have happened. The ending is exactly the same! He's with God in heaven, supporting him with instructions, not caring about anything else.

Okay, I got it. Summarizing you can say: Jareds "magical full circle storytelling" is to yeet 95% of the past 15 years. No other characters matter, the story itself doesn't matter, every single characters development doesn't matter, it even doesn't matter what the brothers really want, they don't get it anyway.

Okay. But that's not all. As if this wasn't bad enough, they didn't just butchered ... EVERYTHING, they also salted and burnt every single Mantra they ever stood for. I'll make these short, I promise!

Team Free Will. *snort* Dean couldn't escape his fate, he always believed he'll die on a hunt as Daddys blunt instrument and he did. He kept fighting to die exactly the way he felt he was "supposed to". Message? No matter how hard you keep fighting, no matter how long you'll keep it up, you can't escape your fate. Sam couldn't change his fate, he ended how he started. Cas couldn't change his fate, he ended how he started, same for Jack, he ended how he was supposed to. YEET THE FREE WILL, NONE OF THEM CAN CHANGE ANYTHING!

Family don't end with  blood. The biggest lie that has ever been told. Do I even have to explain that? No need, right? Don't make me wanna throw up again, please. We all know that 15x20 blasted "Family don't end with blood" in millions of pieces.

Always keep fighting. THE AUDACITY to praise that while Dean is dying! After everything Dean has dealt with, It makes me wanna scream. Dean kept fighting, he always kept fighting, no matter how hard it was, no matter what forced him to his knees, he stood up again, and if he wasn't able to stand up, he crawled. He kept fighting no matter what, despite everything. His mindset changed. He wanted to live, he wanted to experience things, feelings and people differently or even for the first time. He changed. He wanted to retire, toes in the sand. He knew he earned it. Thats why he kept fighting. For what? To die the very first moment he had a free will. To die the very first moment he had a choice, had a life to build for himself. Always keep fighting, but the moment you come close to what you want, what you fought for, you die. It's been more than 3 months and I am having tears in my eyes while typing this. As for Dean, no matter how hard you fight, no matter how long you fight, you don't reach what you deserve anyway. Give up. As for Sam, AKF leeds to Emptiness. Grief. Psychological Trauma. Mental illness. Absolutely nothing worth fighting for.

I wanna go cry now, bye.

#jensen ackles #misha collins #j*red p*dalecki #spn #spnfandom #supernatural #spnfamily #dean winchester #castiel #destiel #deancas #dean #cas

[raptorific]

A big pet peeve of mine-- and I’ve seen it referenced a lot online lately-- is the whole “a teleporter works by scanning your body, destroying it completely, and making an exact copy with your memories in full at a second location. You are killed and a clone takes your place” argument. It’s a narrative for people who want to sound smart without putting in any atual thought.

For one thing, a teleporter doesn’t work by any known mechanism. Information can be “teleported” from one particle to another without any information carrier between the two, but we can no more say how a teleporter would work than we could make a statement on how a leprechaun would realistically find the end of the rainbow to hide his pot o’ gold. 

The thing is, this whole idea is based entirely on trying to explain how the teleporters on, specifically, Star Trek would work in real life. It refuses to accept that the teleportation mechanism on “Star Trek” (converting human bodies into energy in a way where the mind remains conscious and active while they’re in energy form AND so they convert back into matter upon arrival at their destination) could be recreated, but asks people to accepts that an equally ridiculous technology (the ability to, in full, scan the structure of a human body at a subatomic level, fully annihilate that body into its component atoms, and transmit that information to a location with a sufficiently advanced 3D printer to recreate your atomic structure exactly and render it physically within seconds) could be devised in “real physics.”

It’s an explanation that seems to realize there’s already an explanation and laughs at it, then presents an equally ridiculous explanation and says “that’s how it’d work with REAL physics!” The people claiming it want to seem smart, but don’t seem to have much in the way of answers for why they think “near-instantaneous atomic 3D scanning and printing” is more scientifically sound than the actual way Star Trek’s teleporters work, which is “the computer converts your body into a ghost made of lasers, then they fire it out of a cannon towards the surface of a planet, and you turn back into a real boy on impact.”

This concept of teleportation has come back into popularity in recent years because Skinny Pete and Badger mention it on “Breaking Bad” when they’re talking about Star Trek. The thing people forget about this is that Skinny Pete and Badger are idiots, and on top of that, they’re on a lot of crystal methamphetamine, a drug not particularly known for making you act smarter.

In real life, if they ever invent a teleporter, it could be literally anything! It doesn’t have to be the Edgelord Meth-Bro “what if Star Trek was actually super fucked up and all the characters stepped into an incinerator four times an episode and everyone pretended it was okay because they cloned them?” theory! Maybe they’ll figure out how to open artificial wormholes, like in “Portal!” Maybe they’ll figure out how to fold the fabric of spacetime like in “A Wrinkle In Time!” Maybe scientists will finally invent magic, like in “Harry Potter!” Maybe teleportation is impossible in real life! We just don’t know!

What we do know is that teleportation explicitly doesn’t work that way in the vast majority of science fiction franchises that feature it, and the one time it does work that way, in “The Prestige,” it’s not even real teleportation, it’s just stage magic that uses a whole other science fiction concept to fake it.

So as far as I’m concerned, the only people who insist “teleporters are just a xerox machine that shreds the original” are either people dumb enough to be fooled by a fictional magic trick from a movie that shows you how the trick is done, or people who are still chasing the high of that short period 15 years ago when they could go online and say “actually timmy from the fairly oddparents is in an insane asylum and cosmo and wanda are how he hallucinates his psychiatrists” and not be laughed at

[livvi-ah]

Types of Fanfiction AU’S

Enemies to lovers au

This is one of my favorite fanfiction tropes. It’s definitely an extremely common au but it makes sense. Two people have a hatred for one another that turns into a burning love for one another. Ugh I don't know. I feel like it makes for some really hot scenes. Imagine hating someone so much that everything they do just irks you but you can't help but have some hidden feelings for them because they're just so hot when they do literally anything. I don’t know, but I love them and can't really put into words how much they pull me in.

Friends to lovers au

Biggest cliche of all time. But the best stories. Best friends who have harbored crushes on one another for years but kept quiet in fear of ruining the friendship. But then someone else comes along and makes them realize that they care of said best friend and can't live without them and boom. They're together. Lovely. Love them. 

Soulmate au

I love soulmate au’s. If I could I would LOVE to live in a world where I have a definite way of knowing who my soulmate is. It’s a cliche but I live for it. There’s so many ways you can link soulmates too. Timers, hearing each others thoughts, having connecting necklaces that nobody else but your soulmate has, tattoos, etc. And to top it off soulmate au’s are almost always beautifully written. It’s a Win Win (wink wink). 

Alien invasion au

Okay, I haven't read a lot of au’s that have anything to do with alien invasions but the ONE I have was so good. It was a Namjoon fic and the reader and Joon were actually rivals at first at the academy while training to fight off the aliens. SO FREAKING COOL. These types of fanfiction’s aren't really my favorite because they make my anxiety spike with the thought of aliens really coming to earth and wiping us out but they still make for interesting stories. 

Supernatural au

Supernatural au’s are some of my FAVORITES! There’s just something about them that pull me in. Mermen BTS? Yes please. Vampire Stray Kids? Yes lay it on me. Werewolf NCT? Yes just yes. It’s one of my favorite types of au’s because you can do so much with it. 

Demon/angel au

Okay, so I know this can go under the supernatural au category but honestly these fanfiction’s deserve to be in their own category. I’ve read a few BTS demon and angel au’s and to say they were some of the best fanfiction’s I've read would be an understatement. Demon BTS is just so attractive. Imagine trying to summon a demon and suddenly MIN FUCKING YOONGI is in your living room and KIM FUCKING SEOKJIN is your guardian angel living next door to protect you from Yoongi who can’t leave because of the spell you used to summon him there. Literally a masterpiece. This is an actual story I read, can’t remember the name though but I’ll try to find it and link it. I’ll link any stories I referenced if I can find them.

Arranged marriage au

I am going to be honest. I don't like these. I don’t read them. I’ve read a few and they weren't bad but they weren't my favorite. But imaging being arranged to marry your bias of any group. I mean obviously normally the bias doesn't even want to be in said arranged marriage but hey, they learn to love you. 

Mafia/gang au

I will say this a million times, mafia au’s are hot. I don't know if something is wrong with me but I am insanely attracted to the guys in gangs on Tv shows. Like in Riverdale I am in LOVE with Sweet Pea. Something about a man being part of a gang just brings me in and makes me salivate like Pavlov's dogs. ANYWAYS so imagine my happiness when I realized there's fanfiction about BTS, Stray Kids, NCT, literally any fandom being part of a gang or the mafia. I love these au’s and they are in my top three right next to Soulmate au’s and  supernatural au’s. I am big on bad boys and it’s very obvious. 

Magic au

I guess a magic au can also go under a supernatural au but man do I love these types of au’s. I recently started a BTS au where the boys are all a different kind of mythical creatures that has to be protected by the reader because someone or something is out to get them and it’s sooooo good. I don’t know just anything magic and fantasy related are great to read for me. 

Alien au

I know we have the alien invasion au listed above but this one is a whole other category. This category has to do with aliens but they aren't invading Earth. One of my favorite fanfiction’s of all time is a Taehyung fic where Tae lives on another planet called Sehebon and the reader is part of the Interplanetary Relations Commission, which basically helps planets open up to other planets I guess? I don’t know how to explain but anyways, the reader is there to give the Interplanetary Relations Commission information on Izo Huen and its citizens. Reader meets Tae, Tae likes reader because she's a small human and he wants to learn more about Earth. This fanfic is called Sehebon by httpjeon. It is such a good fanfiction. I definitely recommend reading it! I love these types of alien fanfiction’s because they don't bring the war between human’s an aliens that alien invasion au’s do but instead bring two completely different species from different planets or even galaxies together. 

Prison au

Much like the alien invasion au I have only ever read one prison au. I don’t remember much about it other than Namjoon saving the reader from getting hurt when she first arrives and she becomes part of their group. She ends up with Taehyung but the reader gets amnesia and yea. The fanfiction was great but not my favorite because of the ending. I’ve realized I'm a sucker for happy endings and sad ending’s just make my anxiety worse. BUT that doesn't mean the fanfic I just mentioned was bad. It was far from that. It was so good that it actually snagged itself a spot on my top 10 favorite fanfics. 

When did this turn into me just saying my favorite fanfics instead of explaining what happens in the au’s usually? Anyways if you have any other types of fanfiction au’s you think I should cover let me know! OH! Below are links to each fanfic I talked about and can find!

Alien Tae au mentioned: Sehebon by @httpjeon

Magic BTS au mentioned: Different Skins by @writersrealmbts link goes to a masterlist for multiple stories! Different Skin’s is the second on the list.

Alien Invasion Namjoon au mentioned: Taking Flight by @rmnamjoons

Demon Yoongi Au mentioned: La Douleur Exquise by @cinnaminsvga

BTS Prison au mentioned: A Real Memory by always5hinee on Quotev

#types of au's #types of fanfiction au's #bts au fic #bts #stray kids #nct #fanfictions #kim namjoon #kim seokjin #min yoongi #jung hoseok #park jimin #kim taehyung #jeon jungkook #bang chan #lee know #lee minho #seo changbin #hwang hyunjin #han jisung #lee felix #kim seungmin #yang jeongin #i.n #lee taeyong #moon taeil #johnny suh #nakamoto yuta #qian kun #kim doyoung

[ichayalovesyou]

Why Does God Need A Starship? (Live Reaction):

I always thought Sybok was cool and interesting and NOW I’m sure! You know it’s times like these that I’m grateful I kinda came back into the Star Trek fandom on my own, because I don’t have to deal with Opinions of older/louder Trekkies. This one kinda has a lukewarm reputation but I’m getting the vibe that I’ll genuinely enjoy it.

Yet again Bones is serving up some LOOKS damn! Look at these elder gays! Spock has rocket boots, amazing. “Because it’s there” and then falling off the goddamn mountain is such a James Tiberius Kirk thing to do 😂 “HI BONES!” These guys omfg. OH MY GOD SO WE DO SEE CAITIANS OUTSIDE THE CARTOONS?? Hell yeah! Also pole dancing to no music, is... weird. Lmao. Also okay I’m sorry Sybok is cool! Sybok is cool and interesting and I really like him! (Not morally obviously dude is shady as all fuck, but a cool dude nontheless!) Always fascinated by Cult Leader type villains, especially when they point out valid criticisms about the society from which they came (important distinction is that the CAUSE is not vilified, but the person and their means, something M****l has largely forgotten)

Awww I may ship Hikura, but Uhura & Scotty are also cute as hell!! Awwwwwww!!!! Old married couples can be so freaking cute. Chekov & Sulu are LOST ohhhh my god this is hilarious, these two idiots. Also can we talk about how Koenig’s eyebrows are slowly gaining sentience and Takei aged like fine wine? Lol. THE HOLY TRINITY OF ELDER GAYS ARE CAMPINGGGG! I’m- oh my god they’re so cute. “Marshmelon” this is cute as hell oh my god. They’re indulging and messing with Spock at the same time I’m dead! They’re singing ohh my god this gonna give me cavities with how sweet it is!!!

This Klingon dude is frickin ROCKING the eyeliner! Bruhhhh was the frickin spotlight necessary! Leave the gays alone SHHHH they’re SLEEPING!! Lmao. Yo I’ll be real this movie starts incredibly slowly but I seriously do not mind, it’s relaxing to not have to worry about missing important details if you look away for a second, it’s nice. WAIT? Does Jim’s shirt say GOT MILK?!!? Oh no, it says go climb a rock, oh thank god [“fatty milkers” flashbacks]

Seriously McCoy is just radiating so much old southern lady/gay energy in this movie and I love it so freaking much “if you ask me (and you haven’t) this is a horrible idea” he sounds like my North Carolina living Meemaw. Wow you can see Spock low-key taking psychic damage from seeing Sybok 😲 V’tosh Ka’tur of the highest order huh? Still disturbing that his government literally cast him out, that’s a red flag 😬. What happened with Sybok is probably a lot of why Spock was pressured to be as Vulcan as he was, I’m sure Sybok was a massive scandal/shame for Sarek, and knowing him, he’d end up making that his kids’ problem not his 🙄

Oh neat!! Chekov is in the in the captain’s chair. Oh this is the song they replaced Nichols’s voice for 😤 but also GIRL THAT WAS BADASS AND THAT SONG WAS A BOP! Quick question, wow these “alien” horses are somehow even worse than the unicorn dog (also it’s a desert planet, wouldn’t it be better to have, like, alien camels or something?) This dude’s Klingon is freakin impeccable btw! He’s really got the vibe down! Jim did you forget how fuckin bananas strong Vulcans are??? Sybok went like 😡☹️ when Spock pointed that laser rifle at him 😂😂😂 again even tho I know Scotty and Uhura are married but it’s scenes like getting held hostage right there where they radiate such POWER COUPLE energy GAWD! 🤩

Stay out of this Bones we’re having a lover’s quarrel! Jim is taking fucking psychic damage from this entire conversation lol. Okayyyy whatever Sybok is doing is definitely some kind of mind control type thing, that shit is creepy af no thank youuuuuu (spores anyone?). Oh my god Spock & Jim are so married lmao, that “I’m sorry” Vulcan kiss in the brig man Aw. (Oh man Magic’s of mega-tsu got devani mixed by that comment lame!) SCOTTYYYYYY!! YAS!

Yay rocket boot glomp! Lmfao! Sybok needs to brush up on his earth history Columbus did NOT figure out the world is round 🙄 Ah Scotty being like “listen, you’re not okay rn so I’m not really down for whatever you think you wanna do right now it can wait until you’re right in the head again” and they could’ve not done that and it would’ve been creepy (especially by today’s standards) but they didn’t! And that was awesome!

Bones being skeptical and has every right to be! He’s faced down would be gods and would-be messiahs before! Also I’ve seen people judge Bones for being the first to cave but Sybok totally did that shit to him without consent! He didn’t go back on his beliefs, Sybok forced him to! BONES PROTECTION SQUAD IS HERE AND ITS ME! Oh Bones, man, poor babeyyyy (fuck Sybok!) 😭😭😭 OH MY GOD BONESSSSSS Sybok leave him alone! Goddamnit! Leave him alone!

I think Jim can see Spock’s Sybok induced vision cuz they’re ✨Bonded✨ (it didn’t seem like they could see Bones’s, other than what Bones was doing). JIM KNOWS SO MUCH BETTER! ITS HOW HE BEAT THE SPORES ITS HIS CORE! I UNDERSTAND AND LOVE HIM FOR IT!!! Spock 😍😍😍 he’s like, you’re bullshit happiness pill doesn’t work on me cuz I am whole for the first time in my life, and I love my husband, and I already learned my lesson decades ago 💚🖖🏻💚 (who knew how important the character development from This Side of Paradise AND Return To Tommorow would be??? Hell yeah!)

I love Scotty so much 🥰 hardcore badass Hufflepuff from beginning to end! Also I hope Sybok appears in SNW that could be really really interesting if they do it right! ITS GOD (derogatory) REVERE HIM! Oh here comes that legendary question!! “What dies God need with a starship?” Red flag don’t call Jim a creature! Oh shit god has laxer eyes oh no lmao! Bones snaps out of whatever Sybok did to him when “God” hurts his friends and we LOVE HIM FOR ITTTT! Awww Spock & Sybok and be saaaaad, oh shit! Into the lightning to fight a mirror of yourself like Lazarus in that one episode!

OH SHIT THE KLINGONS ARE HERE! Oh damn Spock just swore a cuss the right way, at a Klingon General no less! General dude just went “caotain tell Kirk you are sorry!” LMAO! NOT IN FRONT OF THE KLINGONS 😂😂😂😍 KISS DAMNIT!! God this whole after scene is so good, maybe the god is the friends we made along the way. “I lost a brother once” you also lost SAM dummy, I know you were just telling Spock you love him but still. SHUT UP SPOCK IS PLAYING ROW ROW ROW YOUR BOAT ON HIS LYRE??

Okay, seriously, I unironically love this movie, it might be my favorite out of the ones I’ve seen so far actually. TMP felt like the movies getting their sea legs, but it was slow and messy, it wasn’t as thought provoking as it wanted to be (aside from Spock’s wonderful arc in that film). WoK & TSFS are amazing for drama and angst and Spirk content, but they weren’t really asking the big questions Star Trek is wonderful for. Then The Voyage Home is just plain silly and fun and wholesome. But this, this movie had depth! The whole premise is “what is god and is there is one?” I LOVE that as someone who has a very complicated relationship with spirituality. I also already loved the TOS episodes This Side of Paradise, Return To Tomorrow, The Omega Glory and The Way To Eden, and this movie had the best of those concepts! Sybok was such a fascinating antagonist/anti-hero and I hope we get to see him explored more on screen one day, even if it’s just through Discovery/SNW flashbacks. It may have started off slow and it’s not without its flaws but this felt like the Star Trekkiest TOS Star Trek movie so far!

#star trek #star trek v: the final frontier #the final frontier #why does god need a starship #star trek tos #tos liveblog #liveblogging #Sybok

[fireemblems24]

SS Chapter 18 & 19

Whew, felt like it took a long time to reach this next chapter. Life's been busier than usual lately, but here we are.

Spoilers possibly up until Silver Snow Chapter 18 (and other routes around the same time).

Pre-Battle 18

Should I tag this as Verdant Wind spoilers since they basically follow the same plot? Only slightly kidding.

We storming the capital now! Woot! Is Edelgard really going down in one freaking chapter though?

Are they finally going to acknowledge that Byleth's marching to chop down his former student? Because so far he's felt exactly nothing about Edelgard. Not regret, not longing, not horniness, not anger, not vengeance. It's like she's some faceless evil emperor he's never meant before for all the emotional impact their former relationship's had in part 2 so far.

ARE WE GONNA GET RHEA BACK SOON??? Please. I want to see what role she's going to play. There's still so much I don't know about her.

Ok, seeing the map, I don't see Edelgard, but I do see both Hubert and the Death Knight despite defeating them a million times already.

They really shouldn't let us fight the Death Knight so many times if they wanted him to come across intimidating. Even early on, Lysithea with Dark Spikes and Dimitri with a horse killer weapon just melt him. Maybe it's harder on Maddening.

Battle 18

Ugh, I hate split maps. No, Seteth, I don't want to split up.

Hubert sounds so sinister. OMG I love him. He doesn't care - at all - that there were his former classmates.

So Lysithea nuked the Death Knight into another dimension . . . again. Is he dead for real this time? Because it seemed official this time. Finally.

Oh, unique dialogue with Hubert and Ferdinand. The drama. Too bad his Boltings have a 0% hit chance on Ferdinand.

Now time to waste Hubert's second Bolting.

LAMO that Imperial Soldier lady also has Bolting, but Linhardt just waited her out. She did a total of 1 damage to him lol. She's got 5 though and that's annoying, so Petra just took her out.

Having Byleth finish Hubert off since I bet there's more unique dialogue.

Hubert threatening Byleth. Name a more iconic duo.

OMG Byleth' gaunlets broke lamo. Guess someone else will actually finish Hubert.

Wow, Hubert's generic dialogue "not even death will make you consequential." Told that to poor Bernie. Still took an arrow to the face though.

And seems like he's dead-dead this time.

Does he always give you a Goddess Icon when he dies. Because that's funny if he does.

Oh - MVP Petra! She deserves it. She's really catching up to Ferdie and Sylvain. It's just - she never dodges like Ferdinand does, and can't take the punishment Sylvain does.

Post-Battle 18/Pre-Battle 19

WAIT - WAIT - WAIT - WAIT. DEDUE. DEDUE IS HERE? MY BOY? HE'S HERE. WHY IS HE HERE? 😭😭😭😭😭😭

Yeah, wtf is he doing in Enbarr?

Oh - Dedue here's for Edelgard's blood. Nice.

Does this mean I get to use Dedue????

Holy shit, Dedue. He infiltrated Enbarr and gathered intell?

What a champ.

Dedue is low-key the best spy in this game guys. Gathered intel to help an invading army take a castle literally under Edelgard's and Hubert's noses and let's not forget how he broke Dimitri out of prison.

Dedue 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

And Rhea's inside! We get to see Rhea AND Dedue again.

Wait, why is Dedue leaving me? No 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Don't worry Dedue. In another playthrough, I am pampering you and Dimitri and in the next one, you two are getting married pairing up.

I'm guessing we're not going back to Garreg Mach between these battles? Because that would be - eh - make no sense.

Oh, so now we have the "I don't want to kill Edelgard" or "Can we walk the same path as her." Why are those two my only options though? Where's the "fuck yeah" option? It's way more fun to embrace the kill 'em all thing. Except Dimitri and Dedue because my heart

Ok, Caspar, you're forgiven for your CF nonsense calling Edelgard out.

Why is Seteth always lying to me? He keeps saying "I'll leave it in your hands." But then doesn't and yells at me.

Battle 19

Ok. I decided I'm playing these two back-to-back.

Does Verdant Wind do this too? Fight Hubert and the Death Knight, then jump straight to Edelgard, no month in-between?

Because it if it does - it's going to take forever to get to Azure Moon, because, unfortunately, I won't be able to play this game for close to a month after this because of work and other stuff.

Mannnn, I am NOT looking forward to this map with my VW gang. In SS, my Sylvain, Ferdinand, and Petra are all super reliable. And Lysithea can nuke anything. No one in my VW gang is as good as any of those four (though, Claude has gotten more speed lately - thank the stars).

OMG DEDUE IS BACK. HE came, but he's green. WHYYYYY.

So . . . does Dedue have unique battle dialogue with Edelgard? She's all that's left and he's marching towards her. I think I'm going to test this. I'd laugh my butt off if he crit and killed her.

No unique dialogue, but it feels good letting Dedue get a hit on here. I get Dedue could kill her. I could just keep healing him, and she's got no one left. Should I do it guys?

I think I'm going to do it.

I'll let Byleth peck at her with his puny magic damage so I can get that dialogue, and then Dedue's killing Edelgard next round probably.

LAMO Sothis is a false Goddes, but like, she's living in Byleth's head so. We know she's not false.

Oh, well, Edelgard crit Dedue. So I just reset things and my ever reliable Lysithea nuked Edelgard onto another planet, as she does.

Weird she and Lysithea got unique dialogue though.

Ohhh cut scene. Why does Edelgard have a sword though?

Why is Edelgard asking Byleth to kill her? I guess it makes sense. He was her teacher here.

She does know all these people are killing each other because of her, right?

Oh, wow, he just lopped her head off. That's maybe as badass as when Byleth just offed Randolph (or however you say his name). I'm legit impressed the game didn't milk that harder.

Though they did that "I wanted to walk with you line . . ." Which . . . I'll take it. That's not too bad. She did, but what a twisted path she's walking.

I'm a bit conflicted about her death here though. It seemed kind of . . . weird? I expected Edelgard, from the way she talks in CF, to do down fighting. Not pleading to "my teacher" on her knees and panting.

MVP Lysithea. Guess landing that last hit on Edelgard motivated her.

Post-Battle 19

Are we finally gonna see Rhea?

Why did Hubert right us a letter?

Oh, it's about those mage people. And they want revenge. How original. If they're the enemies of all of Fodlan, why did you fight with them? Like why not take them out, then Rhea, who doesn't . . . you know . . . want to destroy the world?

Hubert and Dedue the real MVPs of this route though.

I can't with the name "those who slither in the dark" though. How lame.

Seteth said "kill every last one of them" though.

RHEA. REAH's BACK. 😭😭

And her hair is down! She looks pretty. She looks sickely though.

Oh, we going to learn some stuff now?

I don't remember who Nemesis is. So he's a grave robber. And a genocider. Wonderful. So is that when Seteth's wife died? Or?

I'm guessing we don't get playable Rhea, though I bet someone would've told me already if we did, because she's in such poor shape.

Now we get to kick the people's ass who killed Jeralt?

RHEA IS COMING WITH US

OMG Caspar wants to carry Rhea on his back 😂and then Dorothea has to point out how that might not work for our short king.

No one really mentioned Edelgard and Hubert dying though. Maybe in the monastery?

Guess I'll find out later. Now to go play these exact same maps, but with the Golden Deer!

#fire emblem 3 houses #fire emblem three houses #silver snow #dedue molinaro #rhea

[austennerdita2533]

Hey!

I love Penelope Douglas for sure check her out! She writes some of the best smut tbh. I’m working my way through her devils night series right now-I’m on book 2. It’s good so far, definitely dark though. I’m interested to see how she goes about a redemption arc for the character Damon right now I don’t think he deserves one but I hear such good things about his book, Killswitch, but that’s book 3 so I will see how it goes. I definitely recommend Birthday Girl from her though I loved it and the couple from it are my favorite age gap could I’ve ever read. I find myself still re reading some of their best moments.

I am slightly embarrassed by Credence though so I hope it doesn’t bother you too much if you read it. Just so you know before going into it, it is about her and her step uncle/cousins. To be fair they are not blood related and very distance to the point she didn’t even know about them. But she does call him Uncle Jake during a sex scene, and the two others call her cousin during one too. There’s also a MMF scene with her two cousins. But on top of that there is a sexual assault scene (it does get stopped but the intent is there)-personally I wasn’t a fan of how she inwardly dealt with that scenario it felt like she was blaming herself for it instead of holding the other character accountable. Uncle Jake also does kiss her when she is still 17. So if any of that makes you uncomfortable don’t read it.

I’m so happy you liked the atlas six as much as I did. I can’t believe we have to wait until next year for the sequel to see what happens. It’s too long!! I also liked Callum the least, I still appreciated his character though and what he brings to the story I just wasn’t a fan of his, probably because of his problems with Libby/Parisa. Plus his powers terrify me-as someone who likes to have full control of my emotions the fact that someone could just change everything scares me. I also loved Nico he is my typical character that I love the whole I’m an asshole but soft and caring for the people I love gets me every time. Parisa is my queen though I’m obsessed with her. Like I’m literally in love with her, I wish she was real so she could be with me instead. Not that she would because I’m broke have 0 magic or power to give to her, but still. But I have a thing for power hungry women so I was gone the second I met her. But anyway if she was real she could destroy me or do anything she wanted to me and I would say thank you. Reina I also love and agree she could destroy the whole planet and one day probably will. I just love how she is there and wants all that knowledge but also doesn’t give a fuck about anyone else. Tristan also grew on me I’m still not completely sure how much I like or don’t like him yet he gets annoying sometimes because he is constantly in his mind about his alliances but I also love how loyal and caring he is. Libby is my girl!! I also relate to her as well since I was an outcast and battled inadequacy and all that (you and I must have some stuff in common!) Out of all the characters I relate to her the most and am rooting for her so hard-also because the author made her from Pittsburgh and I’m also from the area so I felt personally attached. But Olivie just did an interview and said Libby is getting a corruption arc and I am so excited about it!!

Okay ships- so I will be honest and I think it’s an unpopular opinion but oh well-I am a nicolibby stan. They have every single dynamic that I love in a ship and they could potentially be my favorite book couple of all time if that is the road they are being taken. Honestly I was obsessed with them from their first interaction so i have it bad for them. Obviously I know they were not romantic in this book but the potential (at least for me) was there especially in some of their quotes in the end. I fully believe they are soulmates though-even the author said they were born on the same day and feel like their other half is missing in an interview once-whether that will be platonic soulmates or romantic soulmates I have no idea and I could see either happening. My heart will break if it is platonic but it’s okay I can just live in my own little head about their potential.

But I get the idea and also like both libbytristan and NicoGideon and could see those happening instead of nicolibby too. I wouldn’t say I would be mad about it either-I do like both just to me the potential of nicolibby works more for me! My only thing about libbytristan though is I’m not sure how much of their tension/feelings are real (like did any of it exist before Parisa put the idea of the other person in their thoughts to lead to all the feelings.)

Weirdly enough since they probably my least favorite characters I also adore Tristan and Callum together. Their dynamic just works for me.

And I love Parisa and Dalton too and I’m so interested in how that relationship pans out because they have some stuff to figure out. But they work well together and honestly they are just so sexy together so I’m down for it. Although I do ship myself with Parisa more than her and Dalton but I’m biased.

Honestly though all the ships are wide open though so I’m curious to see what ends up being endgame. But omg yes the twist I was not expecting it-I’m so excited for the rest of this trilogy!!!

In other news though I finished up the ravenhood series. I know you said you either read it or it was on your tbr. But god I loved it. That series broke me and then put back all the pieces. If you haven’t read it and want to feel both heartbreak and happiness I highly recommend it!

Oh and don’t apologize for babbling as you can tell I also babble!!

-ACOTAR anon

Hiiiii sweets!

I've been sifting through a bunch of summaries of Penelope Doulgas' work on Goodreads and there's a bunch of stuff there I think I'd enjoy. I'm all about good smut. I didn't realize she had that many books. I'm excited! Thanks so much for the rec! I love dark romances/erotica every now and again so I'm also going to have to dive into the Devil's Night series at some point.

Oh, and idk if you know about it/read it but a couple of my friends told me about the Crossfire series by Sylvia Day a while back. It's BDSM, like Fifty Shades, but supposedly loads better. I don't know if you're into that but I figured I'd just throw it out there anyway. The smut is supposed to be steamy. I haven't read it yet but I do have the first four novels on my Kindle (where they've been sitting, unread, for about 2 years now)...so that's something haha.

And please don't be embarrassed about Credence. Seriously, the most wonderful thing about reading is you can go wherever tf you want in your imagination. No one can stop you. There are no rules. No restrictions. You can be whomever or whatever you want to be for a while, morality notwithstanding. One of my favorite things about books is that I can experience the most bonkers, outlandish out-of-this-world stuff that I'd never dream of wanting/liking in real life. It's liberating!

Thank you for the trigger warnings, though. I appreciate that. None of them sound off-putting enough to keep me from reading it. (Tbh, I want to read it more now.) I've read loads of books where characters marry or have sex with their cousins or siblings *waves at ASOIAF, the Secret History* so it doesn't bother me. I've also read most of Lolita and all of My Dark Vanessa by Kate Russell, which both romanticize pedophilia in disturbing degrees, so it takes a lot to put me off. If curiosity could kill then I'd be long dead by now. Hell, sometimes I will purposely read things I know will upset me to my core. What can I say? I'm a weirdo. 🙃

I DON'T WANT TO WAIT A YEAR FOR BOOK 2 OF THE ATLAS SERIES, EITHER. AHHHHH. How am I going to make it that long? It seems so far away!

Callum is the most terrifying of them all right now, imo. I think that's why I disliked him the most. Like you, it shook me to my core to imagine someone like him being able to toy with my emotions. I have a tendency to detach, to keep my emotions pressed close to my chest so that I can't be manipulated or hurt, and the idea that someone could have power over them, over me in that way is...no freaking thank you! I would put as much space between him and me as possible. Most of the Atlas crew had the right idea there. He does bring a lot to the story, though, like you said. I have a feeling he's going to be one of those characters I "love to hate" as the series progress. I might even grow to "hate to love" him, idk. He's just such a shady bastard! And so judgmental/mean to the girls.

I'm with you on Parisa, by the way. She's the kind of conniving, ambitious siren of a woman I can get behind. She has a similar vibe as Katherine Pierce on TVD. I mean, there's nothing in her arsenal she won't use and I love how she weaponizes her beauty. It's delicius. She's unpredictable. Definitely the type of character who inspires "scared and aroused" energy any time she walks into a room. Like, she could choke you and instead of crying you'd just ask her to do it again...harder lol.

Reina has the same kind of "no fucks given" attitude I have because I genuinely don't care what people think of me, either. I'm just here to do my thing. Be nerdy. Learn. Whatever. And Nico is my fave for the same reason as you--the asshole who only has soft edges for those who matter to him. *heart eyes*

Omg, Libby is going to have a corrupted arc? AHHHHH. That's going to be amazing, I cannot stinking wait! I was sort of hoping she'd go dark so now that it's confirmed I'm even more pumped. Also, I think you and I have more in common than either of us realized. I'm from the Pittsburgh area, too! How wild is that? Maybe there's something in the water here and that's why, like Libby, we've both felt inadequate and like outcasts at different points in our lives? Olivie might be onto something here...🤔

The thing that's been so cool for me about this series so far is that there are a bunch of potential pairings I could get behind. And I kind of like that it's not clear cut right now. Most series I know who I want together or who will be together like halfway through book 1. I like that I don't know have firm preferences and am still open. That's novel. Not to mention fun!

I don't blame you for shipping Nicolibby so hard, though. They're definitely one of my top contenders for a romantic pairing. They have that enemies-to-lovers element with witty banter that I always gravitate toward. And you're right about Libby/Tristan. I don't know how much of their connection was manufactured because Parisa intervened, either. That'll be fun to puzzle out moving forward. And Callum/Tristan should NOT be a ship I like but they have a palpable something that I can't put my finger on. I've got my eye on them, for sure.

The Ravenhood series is still on my tbr. I'm so happy to hear you enjoyed it so much, though! It's rare to read something that just ticks all your boxes. The next time I'm the mood to binge a series I'm gonna have to pick that one up. :-D

I've been trying to clear out my backlog of ARCs lately. (Not possible because I'm getting more on the regular - as in constantly haha - but I'm trying.) I just finished Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult, which has a Sliding Doors premise that is set during the pandemic where the main character has a parallel life experience (one, where she's in the Galapagos Islands on vacation when the shutdown hits so she's stuck there with strangers, alone, not speaking the language; the other, where she's in Manhattan with her surgeon boyfriend and recovering from COVID). It's intense but so, SO good! Picoult is such a good writer. Anything I've read by her has been moving, with rounded and real characters. I haven't been disappointed yet. I so recommend her.

Oh, and if you're into nonfiction/biographies at all I finished The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson not long ago, which is about Winston Churchill as well as those around him, and it was fantastic! Read more like fiction. I loved it. I am no longer surprised it was on all the BEST lists for 2020.

#anonymous #darling acotar anon #replies #the loveliest of lovely people #ashlee bree talks books

[writingbakery]

“an andorian, a bezoid, & a tessian walk into a bar”

another one of my favorite works is here! i originally wrote this for a different fandom, & rewrote it to fit here. i’m in love with this story, it’s one of my absolute favorites; please leave me feedback about it! a second part is in the works ✨ taglist; @secondhand-trash @redbeanteax @togasknifes

[some notes: denki is an andorian, a very tall race of aliens who are very nimble, skilled silent warriors when needed. hitoshi is a bezoid, from a mining planet, broad, tough, good with any sort of weapon but mainly guns, & you are a rare species called tessian, lil shapeshifting aliens that were often sold as slaves way back in the day on illegal black markets due to their skill! ULC means universal language chip, & the fleet is my version of the interspace police! ]

[pairing; poly!shinkami x reader]

[warnings; space jokes, cussing, dangerous scenarios, extremely Buff Aliens, violence, angst, fluff]

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

if you asked hitoshi shinsou what he would describe as a perfect day, he would tell you this: waking up in his quarters on the isla bella, the smooth glide of their ship through space flowing uninterrupted. there are no parts that need replacing, no angry merchants on their tail for undelivered merchandise, nothing but the clean quiet of the stars & the faint glow of space flitting through the small window by his bed, denki fast asleep against his chest. he’d card his fingers through the andorian’s glimmering gold hair, kiss along the slope of his nose & bask in his quiet beauty. that would be a perfect day for him; lounging in bed with his freakishly tall, giggly lover without a care in the world.

the last thing he’d consider to be a perfect day is running across the burning - literally in flames burning - sand of a deserted planet with two grogorians firing photon lasers at his skinny ass, skidding between the roaring flames of the ground beneath him & the sting of the lasers with denki screaming unintelligible commands & curses in his ear via comm. he’d consider that a bottom of the barrel kind of day.

you can probably guess which kind of day he’s having.

cursing under his breath as he slips between the burning flames, he does a cursory peek around the open desert, eyes searching for the opening that denki was furiously insisting “was right there, hitoshi shinsou for the love of god open those damn sultry bezoid eyes and LOOK” - he refuses to acknowledge the compliment, focused on the seven million fucking grains of sand & his boyfriends panicked voice in his ear when he finally spots it. a haze in the heavy heated air, almost like a mirage, a split in the vast landscape that led down somewhere dark, hidden. he lets out a sigh of relief loud enough for denki to hear, a sign that he’d found the entrance, before a photon blast skims just past his ear, leaving a three inch skidded burn across his cheek.

oh right. the grogorians.

stealing from the grogorians was the stupidest goddamn idea denki had ever come up with, which was saying a lot; once, he’d thought the seven suns on Naboor all rose & fell at the same time, shrieking in hitoshi’s ear about “planetary instability” & “socio-economic collapse” for a full ten minutes before he saw the suns rising & falling one after the other, in turns. that had been a field day, not one hitoshi was eager to repeat. the grogorians were fiercely territorial, completely tucked away from modern civilization & technology, & were at least seven feet tall. you could fit two shinsous in one of their chests; he wasn’t quite ready to see that up close.

ducking & weaving across the barren landscape, he slides through the slit in the ground with practiced ease; he’s run for his miserable life far too many times at this point. he can hear the grogorians shouting above the hole in the ground, too big for them to pass through, & he winces as his ULC - universal language chip, something kaminari had insisted he get implanted- deciphers the strangled words into curses he can understand. he’s really glad his parents are dead, because whatever blood curses the grogorians are spitting at his family tree sound awful.

the cavernous tunnels he’s slid down into are cool, spacious; coned lights illuminate the rocky path deeper & deeper into the planet. its all but deserted, the only inhabitants the two grogorian guards he’d narrowly escaped from. denki’s voice filters in through the comm again, calmer now that hitoshi was safely inside.

“we’ve got twenty minutes max before their distress signal goes through,” the andorian warns him, tracking the surrounding space around the planet from the isla bella. “follow the main tunnel straight through. the crown should be there. ten minutes to get there, i phase you straight out, we fucking book it into warp drive & we’ll be seven million credits richer by tomorrow morning. and you can finally treat me to dajang.”

hitoshi rolls his eyes despite the fact that denki can’t actually see him, trudging through the tunnels a little wearily. “remind me again why i always have to be the one getting shot to hell & back?” he grumbles as he walks, no real heat to his voice.

“you love my ass too much to risk it getting shot at, baby you know that,” denki laughs through the comm, ever poking fun at hitoshi’s expense & he’s sure to give the andorian a long, drawn out sigh before switching off the comm & pushing further into the darkness.

denki’s right though, hitoshi muses as he moves, his eyes glinting violet in the lamplight. the bezoid would rather die than see denki in any veritable danger, keeps him up on the ship to guide him & yank his ass out at the first inkling of a problem.

he’d been protecting the stupidly tall, wildly cheery andorian from the first day they’d met, cooped up in some stuffy bar off V-7. he’d had absolutely zero self-preservation skills even then, picking a fight with a damned Dervisian of all people, just because the man had insulted his shirt. hitoshi, not overly fond of watching handsome morons get punched in the face by meatsacks twice their size - & maybe he appreciates the long, toned legs & pretty face a little more than he lets on - steps in with ease, no matter how short he feels between the two of them. the dervisian cracks a height joke, because he’s an asshole, denki stabs him in the shoulder with a four inch dagger he pulls out of his too tight pants - & of course hitoshi spends far too long wondering just how he managed to fit it in the first place, mind all fuzzy - & they somehow manage to kick off an interspace bar fight. wonderful.

once the dust has settled & the chaos calmed, hitoshi finds himself with three new bruises, a cut cheek, & an armful of very grateful andorian.

“i hear the fleets coming. wanna get married?” denki wiggles his eyebrows suggestively, & hitoshi chokes on his own spit.

“what for? they’re keepers of the peace, not wedding officials,” he manages, glaring up at the - stupidly tall, stupidly pretty - andorian that’s managed to wrap himself into his arms.

“if you’re married they can’t deport you. i’d really like to avoid interspace jail,” denki winces, & hitoshi snorts.

“or we could run, like normal deviants of the law,” he points out, much to denki’s chagrin.

“and where is the fun in that?” the andorian pouts, & hitoshi knows he’s screwed.

four years, seven interspace incidents, four run ins with the fleet, & one rusting junktrap of nuts & bolts they called a ship later, they were inseparable. one complete idiot with a penchant for charming the pants off everyone around them & simultaneously launching them into trouble, & his over exasperated, eternally exhausted boyfriend, who was consistently saving his ass. they were an unlikely duo, but they worked like magic, & despite the fact that he had to risk his ass every damn day, hitoshi was pretty happy. him & denki made a little solar system all their own, a shining sun & its orbiting planet, & he likes that. he’s happy.

as happy as a thief for hire could be, really.

the problem with their particular profession, however, is that denki is basically one big ass radar for trouble. if something can go wrong, it will go wrong, disastrously so, & hitoshi is always caught in the middle of it, fleeing for his life with someone shooting at his ass (it’s always his ass, & he can never understand why. )

it’s for that reason, & that reason only, that hitoshi is the one creeping down the dark, deep tunnel, his nerves frayed as he keeps his eyes trained on every nook & cranny surrounding him. he can see the faint glow of an upcoming room ahead & hurries his pace, eager to grab the crown & escape, maybe finally treat denki to that dajang he’d been whining about - he’d never been fond of the strangely shimmery, horned fish, but if it made denki happy, he wasn’t going to complain.

the tunnel opens up into a small, brightly lit room, warm & pulsing with energy. the grogorians kept the crown here for good reason, the sheer amount of dead souls crafted into the metal & jewels enough to make anyone’s skin crawl. hitoshi gingerly steps closer, hands twitching at his sides as he moves into the light and - wait a minute.

wait a goddamn minute.

there’s a person on the raised pillar, small & decidedly not threatening. your little body is curled loosely around the crown, shivering gently, & hitoshi realizes several things all at once:

one, the tiny body is a tessian, and a young one at that, a couple years younger than himself.

two, the grogorians have definitely arrived earlier than scheduled. fuck. he clicks on his comm to hear denki screaming incoherently about danger, & winces heavily.

great.

third, the booming, heavy rumbles of the grogorian ship - & denki’s frantic yelling - has woken you up, the little tessian, arms still caging the crown close to your chest as though seeking out its warmth.

up close, hitoshi can see a smattering of pink freckles dusted across your honey gold cheeks, bright, messy hair falling into big, bright eyes. you yawn, then blink, eyes flashing & settling into a light, rosy pink at the same time your little fluffy ears twitch atop your head, a matching color to your eyes. your tail twitches slightly, four light gold rings wrapped around it, & it’s obvious you’re about young adult age. you yawn again, a tiny, unfiltered squeak escaping you at the sight of hitoshi in front of you.

you’re absolutely adorable. hitoshi is absolutely fucked.

dimly, he registers denki’s panicked shouts & the shaking of the tunnel walls, can feel the ground trembling beneath him, & he snaps out of his reverie to glance at the crown again. said crown is tucked up against your torn shirt, tessian hands - so delicate, so cute - keeping it close.

“hey, hey! don’t touch that! there’s like, eight thousand dead people in there,” hitoshi scolds before he can think, & you simply cock your head, confusion written all over your face.

“no, don’t squeeze it tighter - stop it! hey! are you even listening?” he seethes, reaching out a hand to snatch the crown away. you shift back quickly, frowning just as deep as hitoshi as you hug the crown even closer. it’s clear you can’t understand a word hitoshi is saying, & the grogorians have started some sort of blasting contest right outside the caverns.

great.

hitoshi swears under his breath, racking his brain for any sort of solution. “hitoshi shinsou, you are ASKING to die, they’re blowing the fucking cave open! can i phase you out yet? you too busy admiring that handsome face of yours in the stupid crown’s fucking reflection?” denki sounds hysterical, voice on the verge of near meltdown & hitoshi knows he’s out of time.

he’s got two options: stay & deal with the grogorians, or run.

he runs.

leaning forward, he tucks both hands under your armpits & yanks you forward, tosses you over his shoulder, & books it out of the tunnel.

he can barely hear anything over the blood rushing in his ears, your tessian wails, & one denki kaminari screeching like the world’s ending.

“phase me out phase me out PHASE ME OUT-“ he’s shouting above the din, phaser blasts surrounding him on all sides, & he doesn’t stop running until he feels the familiar pins & needles of the transporter, turning them into a mess of glittering gold dots that wink out just as a grogorian fires right where hitoshi’s head had been.

he slams into the floor of the isla bella with a groan, denki immediately in front of him. he sits up slow, careful not to shift too abruptly & disrupt the reanimation process, when denki snatches you right out of his arms.

“hitoshi what the fuck, you were only supposed to grab the crown, not adorable little tessians! and what were you doing down there, young alien?” denki has gone into full andorian mode, pinching your little tessian cheeks as he sits you in his lap - hitoshi’s just glad he’s got the sense not to do that to him.

you still can’t seem to understand, tilting your fluffy bright head of hair as you stare up at denki. you chirp, then hum, one hand reaching up to pet denki’s head, before smiling brightly.

denki coos. hitoshi snorts.

“i found them sleeping on the crown. they can’t understand us, they don’t have a ULC, so i just grabbed ‘em & ran,” hitoshi explains, getting up to ensure that they were in hyperspace, blasting millions of lightyears away from the grogorians. he chances another glance at the tessian sat comfortably in denki’s lap; you’re a little dirty, clearly having been stranded in the caverns a few days.

denki frowns at hitoshi’s back, brushing over the phaser burn on the ass of his pants with one hand as he speaks.

“the poor thing must be terrified, being surrounded by all that. switch your ULC to interpret mode, at least we’ll be able to understand them, & talk to them,” denki says quietly; looking down at the fluffy bundle of tessian in his arms. hitoshi can already see the gears turning in his head.

once they’ve switched settings, denki speaks.

“what’s your name, sweetheart?” he asks softly, clearly trying to make you comfortable.

the series of chirps & coos you let out shift almost in midair, turning themselves into words that hitoshi can actually understand.

“[y/n]? [y/n l/n]? oh that’s so cute! tell us, [y/n], why were you down there all by yourself?” denki prods, voice still soothing & calm. you, the tessian - [y/n], hitoshi thinks, too precious - sit up a bit, animatedly speaking now that they can understand you better. the squeaks & chirps are downright adorable, & hitoshi has to look away from flailing hands & a sunbeam smile to center himself again.

“and what were the lot of you thinking, sneaking down there? your whole little tribe, just gone, huh? i’m so sorry, sweetheart,” denki winces, & hitoshi can sympathize - tessian tribes were tight-knit little groups, & losing them meant a death sentence for whoever was left behind. they were pack creatures, always in need of others. hitoshi can see the gears turning, & he speaks before the andorian can.

“no, denki.”

“toshi! look at them, aren’t they the cutest thing you’ve ever seen! we have to keep them!” denki all but wails, pulling you so close to his chest that your cheeks squish together. you don’t seem concerned in the slightest, just giggle against denki’s face. hitoshi’s resolve weakens a little.

“we’ve got no space, denks, not to mention we’re not exactly the safest group for them to latch onto,” hitoshi protests weakly, even as the andorian pouts at him.

“we can’t just leave them alone, they’re so small, & no one will protect them!” denki is dangerously close to tears, & hitoshi never does well with a crying denki. he opens his mouth to protest again, try & make his point, but just then you yawn again, slow & long, the tiniest of squeaks escaping you & when you open your eyes again, they’re gold just like denki’s hair, your ears matching.

hitoshi’s determination evaporates.

“fine, fine, we can keep them. but if anything happens to them, it's your fault,” he grumbles, settling into the pilot's chair to monitor their progress.

denki cheers. you chirp happily.

hitoshi bangs his head on the control panel.

what have i gotten myself into this time, he thinks dully, but deep down, he knows he doesn’t mind. not too much.

───── ⋆✩⋆ ─────

after finally managing to pry the crown out of your hands & delivering it to the client - hitoshi doesn’t even wanna know what the creepy old Lavastian wanted with it, he’d had to take three showers under the hydrospray to get the itch off his skin - they’ve set a course for the driard system, to rest before their next assignment. being that their work schedule is so…flexible, it gives the trio a little time to get adjusted. and by adjusted, hitoshi means getting used to having you, a fluffy little alien, hanging off him at all hours of the day.

he’d thought that denki was clingy, the andorian typically seeking out hitoshi’s hands to hold or shoulders to rest his head. his people were affectionate that way, much different than hitoshi’s bezoid counterparts. he’d adjusted though, sacrificed personal space & eventually, had grown both used to & comfortable with having denki draped over him like a blanket at all times.

[y/n l/n] is an entirely different species - literally & figuratively.

firstly, you’re a clinger. where denki lounges, you squeeze with - surprisingly - strong arms & legs, wrapped around hitoshi’s frame like a verealis vine.

you’re so touchy you’ve got denki beat, & the pair of you seem stuck in some sort of exceedingly needy, relentless cuddle war. hitoshi’s got his money on you, even if he doesn’t admit it.

secondly, you’re scarily helpful. you seem to turn up right when hitoshi needs something adjusted deep in the ship, or when denki can’t seem to locate something correctly on their navigational screen. you’ll shapeshift into a teeny, tiny ragran rat to scurry through chambers & fix a wire, or tap on the control panel just so to show the correct star system, & its quite frankly impressive.

hitoshi’s starting to think you were made for them, just a little.

normally he leaves the sappy shit to denki, the andorian’s well flowered language easily explaining all his emotions & thoughts. but there’s something about the little tessian that shakes him up a little, changes the dynamic. denki doesn’t mind one bit.

he relishes in hitoshi’s newfound sweetness, even if it’s just a “that wasn’t completely awful, great job, babe,” or “you know, that shirt isn’t as hideous as i thought. brings out your eyes.” he knows hitoshi is simply trying his best, knows that words never got very far on his home planet.

you like that he’s quiet though, for some reason. you chirp & chatter enough for the both of you whenever you’re together, silly stories of whatever disasters you & denki had gotten into on the ship - hitoshi’s suspicious you’re both responsible for the six broken panels along the corridors, impromptu games of touch & go be damned - or telling him memories of your time on Tessero, your home planet. you’ve got an easy way of speaking, soft & languid & it calms him down like no other, settling into his bones & dimming the chaos in his mind for a little while.

your cuddliness extends even to when you’re asleep, tucked up neatly between denki & hitoshi in the big bed of their quarters. you’re a calm sleeper, curl up tight into a little ball with the pair of them draped over you, like a tiny tessian heater. it’s sweet & soft & so fucking domestic that hitoshi has a hard time believing it sometimes. he’d even started pressing kisses into the top of your head as he moved along the ship, much like the gentle ones he presses to denki’s lips. he’s not scared by it, per say, but he is a little surprised; he’d always been a little closed off, reserved. you had snuck up on him swiftly, without him even realizing. he finds he rather likes it.

the few days of travel before you reach the driard system are calm, simple evenings of dinner & talking together as you all soak up the simplicity of space. somehow, it’s comforting. you’re a twinkling, bright little star amidst their solar system, & hitoshi likes that. a shining sun, its orbiting planet, & the brightest little star.

───── ⋆✩⋆ ─────

everything goes to shit once they step foot on Ovalia 7.

the leisure planet is tucked at the edge of the star system, a quiet haven for those always on the move. it’s denki’s favorite place to go after a successful deal, & they serve the best dajang this side of the galaxy. hitoshi likes that no one ever speaks to them there, everyone wrapped up in their own little vacations.

denki books them a room at their usual spot, ignoring the innkeepers curious glance at the request - one big bed, a nice tub, window view, & hitoshi’s certain he thinks you’re all a couple. the thought doesn’t bother him, & he realizes with a jolt that they act like one, all three of them. they cuddle & hug & kiss, & hitoshi sits on that a moment before shrugging it away. if denki didn’t mind it, neither did he, & he focuses once more on relaxing.

they’ve just settled into a local restaurant, plates full of dajang & ocuro & everything else that tickle their fancy when hitoshi hears it. heavy steps, familiar ones, although he can’t quite place it in the haze of relaxation. he ignores it in favor of feeding you some of his mulrag, the spiced meat a clear favorite with your tessian palate & he can’t help his grin. he lets denki feed him a warm bite of dajang, rolling his eyes at the andorian’s little smile & affectionate pinch of hitoshi’s cheek. everything is nice, sweet & lazy in the warm air.

and then all hell breaks loose.

eight of the biggest fucking grogorians hitoshi’s ever seen in his life burst through the door, weapons armed & faces set in such hostile expressions that everyone is scattering. denki hauls you up & to his side, dragging hitoshi by the collar until you’re all crouched behind the bar, hidden from view. “i should’ve known they’d track us,” he all but whines, peeking over the wooden edge of the bar. a photon shot quickly makes him duck down again, cursing lightly. “plan?” he asks behind clenched teeth, tugging you closer.

hitoshi pauses, weighs his options.

“the two of you book it to the ship. i’m going to distract them,” he says quickly, thinking back to the conversations he’d been eavesdropping on earlier - thieves never took a real vacation, always on the lookout for something new to snatch.

two very drunk, loud Avarians had been seated just behind them, rambling on about the very expensive, very valuable statue hidden deep in the recesses of the abandoned temple just off the main road. many had tried to steal it, but had always gotten stuck deep in the underground channels trying to escape. the elders guarding it weren’t exactly friendly either.

a plan starts to form in his head, one that would both enrich them & save their asses from this absolute mess. he’s quite proud of himself, if he’s honest.

then a bottle explodes just above his head, & he jolts into action.

he fires a few warning shots at the wall behind the grogorians, turning & racing out the door in a clear attempt to lead them out. the grogorians take the bait easily, & he races down the road towards the temple as you and denki sneak out the back of the restaurant.

the temple is huge, dusty & a little worn around the edges. the priests guarding the door take one look at hitoshi shinsou, panting & shooting over his shoulder at several grogorians & lose it, screeching & running for cover just as he’d expected. he pushes through the open door with the hostile aliens right at his footsteps, racing through the dark corridors deeper & deeper into the bowels of the temple. halfway down denki clicks onto the comm, hastily spitting directions & instructions as the grogorians start shooting again. “this is all your fucking fault! i told you stealing from them was an awful idea!” hitoshi shrieks as a laser just misses his shoulder, ducking as he runs.

“oh sure, blame me for making sure we stay employed!” denki shrieks right back, your chirping frantically frantically filling the background.

hitoshi feels the heat of another photon bullet just barely graze against his ass as he books it down the narrow hallway, cursing every single god & denki kaminari for the absolute mess he’s been roped into. over the comm link he can hear the andorian yelling muted commands as he leads hitoshi through the vast hallways, the relic just within arms reach.

“i’ll phase you out once you have it!” denki starts, before hitoshi starts shouting again.

“i’m not gonna PHASE through solid rock, denki! just hold off, i’m coming!” he yells through the comm, feet skidding across the rough terrain as he snatches the little gold statue right off the podium. concerned little chirps & squeaks flood the comm, & hitoshi halts all his movements to swear loudly.

“[y/n l/n], you keep your adorable little ass on the ship, you hear me? don't even THINK about it-“ the ground shakes with another blast, the heavy yelling creeping from the farthest corridor.

hitoshi curses every single god & denki kaminari twice. and then he runs.

the maze of corridors gets more & more confusing as he bolts through them, solely relying on denki’s guidance in his ear & the gunfire right on his heels. finally, finally he can see sunlight again, pushing through the open door & stumbling into the street again - right into the waiting trap of about ten grogorian soldiers.

great.

they’d cornered him on both ends, trapping him in their space. denki’s shouting frantically, something about shield interference & blocking & hitoshi’s stomach sinks; they’ve got him.

“go to warp drive.” his voice is so sharp it shocks denki right out of his panicked rambling, the comm quiet.

then a furious “what the fuck did you just say hitoshi shinsou? we’re not leaving you-“

“take [y/n], & go to warp, denki! go, i can hold them off for a little while! the verlo sector, it’s rural enough that they can’t track you!” he bites out, eternally grateful that the grogorians don’t have ULC’s. he eyes them for a moment, takes a breath.

“i love you, denki kaminari, you crazy motherfucker. i love you. i love you too, [y/n]. take care of him for me,” he says softly, lets himself choke up a little, grants himself that one weakness. then he clicks his comm off, draws both his guns, & snarls. “let’s go, assholes! i don’t have damn day!” he shouts, keeps his voice level & confident.

and then he starts firing.

left, right, over his shoulder, he’s never shot so many times in his life, & its still not enough. there’s grogorians on every side, dodging every blast & hitoshi’s resigned himself to dying on this shithole lesiure planet, never seeing denki’s stupid bright smile again, or hearing your laugh.

and then he hears it, loud & wild & it makes both his heart soar & stomach sink.

“STOP SHOOTING MY BOYFRIEND YOU FUCKING JACKASSES!”

there stands denki kaminari in all his andorian glory, six foot six of anger & pent up chaotic energy standing just off the side of the gunfire. he gives hitoshi one big, blinding smile before he’s shooting right alongside him, the pair of them back to back as they fire.

“where’s [y/n]?” hitoshi calls over the sounds of the blasters, too emotional & charged up to address the fact that denki came to save him, denki who always, always stayed on the ship.

“i told them to monitor us from up there! once we take out these shields i can phase us up, i brought the control sleeve!” denki yells back, twisting & ducking as the grogorians rain fire on them.

the pair of them are deadly, lethal even, taking down one hostile alien after another until their guns run out. hitoshi curses at the dead weapon, tossing it to the side as he prepares to fight the remaining six grogorians hand to hand. beside him, denki gets into a similar stance, eyes narrowed sharply in defense.

“enough!” a voice bellows, harsh & loud, ringing out across the entirety of the street. hitoshi pauses, dread building up in the pit of his stomach. the grogorians part, & he hears denki gasp beside him.

the grogorian leader steps out slowly, every step sending a thundering rumble across the land. “you steal from us, fight us at every turn. your intolerance is shameful,” the alien snarls, fury written all over his face. hitoshi doesn’t point out that the grogorians stole that particular relic from the Astonians, & the fact that they’d been chased, not chasing. he has a feeling the man wouldn’t appreciate his sentiments.

“i will kill you myself ! your arrogance knows no bounds!” the alien thunders, hands reaching for the sword tucked into his belt. its easily the size of hitoshi’s entire body, & his blood runs cold.

“since we’re about to die, it’s time i fess up. i’m the one who broke your music box,” denki whispers behind him, hands clinging tight to the back of hitoshi’s shirt.

“oh for god's sake you idiot, we’re about to die & that’s what you tell me?”

“i’ve always loved your ass in these pants. skinny or not, they give you shape,” denki says tearily, & hitoshi nearly screams.

“denki shut up, for the love of space - stop fondling my ass, we’re about to die-“

a set of angry, loud chirps interrupt them all, the grogorian leader turning & snarling. hitoshi stops breathing.

there, in all your tiny tessian glory, stands you, [y/n l/n], clad in hitoshi’s favorite leather pants & denki’s too big sweater. your eyes are narrowed, an expression of pure fury on your face that hitoshi’s never seen before.

it’s a little hot. denki seems to agree, if the gasp he lets out is any indication.

the alien laughs, staring down at you almost in amusement. “come to watch them die, little one? i could probably get a hefty price for you, couldnt i? maybe pleasure slave, the markets always up for those.” you chirp angrily. hitoshi sees red.

“don’t you fucking touch them-“ he snarls, all traces of fear gone as he shoves the grogorian back, fists clenched. behind him, denki spits, eyes lit up with that special kind of rage hitoshi only sees when he's really caught up, the anger boiling in his blood. the grogorian shoves the pair of them back so hard they go sprawling in the dirt, his voice a growl as he steps towards them. “you dare touch me?” he bellows.

behind him, you let out a sound somewhere between a screech & a growl. and then you start shifting.

hitoshi knows that you can shift into any number of things, he’s not stupid. but they’d all been limited to small, cute things, adorable & easy to hold.

the form you take on is neither adorable or small.

a sixteen foot, scaly dragon stands before them, with the face & claws of a lion & the fiery rage of a bat out of hell.

hitoshi screams. denki nearly pisses himself.

the grogorians scatter, shouting & running & you pick them off easily, picking one up between your claws & tearing him clean in half. the rest die in a similar fashion, tossed against buildings & burned alive when they get too close to your flaming breath. the leader dies last, your sharp fangs tearing him limb from limb until he’s a tattered pile of mush at their feet. its singlehandedly the most horrifying, yet gratifying thing hitoshi’s seen in his life.

you shift back to your original form easily, small hands & cheeks covered in blood. there’s a bit of grogorian in your hair. you smile up at them like nothing happened, let out little chirps & squeaks & hitoshi is stunned, really.

denki pulls the bit of grogorian away from your fluffy ears, before wiping the blood off your cheeks & tugging you into a kiss. it’d be cute, if there wasn’t so much carnage around them. you smile up at hitoshi, chirps out something about love and tribe and home.

hitoshi pulls you into a hug, kisses the faintly bloody fluffy hair, & laughs.

“let’s go home,” he agrees easily, takes denki’s hand & thinks, for a moment, that he’s complete.

denki smiles so bright it puts the sun to shame, & you giggle into his chest, cheery as a star.

all the bits align just right, he thinks, & leads his little solar system home.

#bnha shinsou #bnha kaminari #shinkami #shinkami x reader #poly fic #shinsou x y/n #shinsou x you #shinsou x reader #kaminari x reader #kaminari x you #alien fic #space opera #evywrites #bnha fic #boku no hero fanfic

[leorizanzel]

bo-katan for the star wars themed asks 👀

Bo Katan - Which fictional character would you sell to Satan for one corn chip?

Oh, this is a great question because I have a great answer: K*lo R*n (starred out because I don't want weird Ad*m Dr*ver stans coming for me)

(under a cut because this is a long rant)

Alright, so I know he gets a lot of hate (and for good reason), but I have serious issues with how his character's written. It's clear from the jump that Kyle Ron's written solely for the aesthetics and the parallel for Darth Vader. He has no real purpose, no real motivation - like, I don't exactly know what he wants. Why does he work for the First Order? Is it for power? We know immediately that he's the son of two of the most famous people in the entire galaxy, so theoretically, he should want for nothing as far as access to legitimate power or fame. We know at the very start that he's one bad fuckin' dude; if it wasn't obvious from the start that he casually slaughters villages, then for sure it's obvious when he decides to literally blow up FIVE GODDAMN PLANETS. LIKE. WE CAN'T EVEN WRAP OUR MINDS AROUND THAT LEVEL OF DEATH. But other than that, what else do I know about him other than he's literally the poster child for White Male Alt-Right Entitlement Rage? Why in the absolute fuck should I care that the Dark Side tempted him for most of his life when he, and let me not be too on the nose here, MURDERED FIVE PLANETS?

Along those lines, there was a massive missed opportunity to use Kyle Ron as a way to explore the seduction of fascism through the legitimization of the privileged victim complex. ("Woe is me! My parents are heroes of the big war and no one cares about little old Ben!" or whatever, I truly don't understand his motivations and they never explain them well AT ALL.) They placed far too much weight on the whole ~Dark Side~ shit instead of his political radicalization.

If Kyle's supposed to be a parallel for Anakin's journey, the writers failed at that. For all the flaws the Prequel Trilogy had, they made sure to let you know that it wasn't magic that solely tempted Anakin, it was fascist politics. That popular Anakin and Padme meme came from the scene where Padme listens to Anakin spout fascist propaganda and expects her to just be alright with it.

I think they shied away from it because it would've made any attempt at his "redemption" look bad, but I mean, for me there's no coming back from DESTROYING FIVE PLANETS. That already made him irredeemable to me; no stupid self-sacrifice really made up for that.

Yeah, overall his whole story arc is just a huge mess. I genuinely don't understand how people love him, even from a weird Byronic hero standpoint. What's there to love? An aesthetic? He's a giant nothingburger, and he's not even worth one single corn chip.

#ask game #man I clearly had a lot of feelings about this

[drshebloggo]

how to make WW84 a stronger movie

As sort of requested, here’s a beefed-up version of the list of notes I made watching WW84 because I was getting cranky with the execution of this movie and couldn’t help but jot down ideas. I WANTED to love this thing but the script was not selling its ideas to best effect.

For me, I think there were a few challenges inherent in the movie they wanted to make. BUT with a few different choices here and there in the way the story was told, it would’ve improved its impact without sacrificing what they were going for with tone and characters. 

CHALLENGE #1: this movie is set SO far in the future from the events of the first film. 65 years have passed, and Diana is still just gliding somberly through her life and that makes me SAD. All her friends are dead! She’s on her own and cursed with immortality!! She lives in an ‘80s decor sadness chamber surrounded by photos and memories of people she’ll never see again!!!

And yet the film gave us no real textual information about that. They did the laziest thing possible, which was pan the camera around a million photos on mantles and told us NOTHING. Literally WHAT has Diana done for the past, say, THIRTY YEARS since her Earth Friends all died without her??? Has she literally made NO OTHER friends? She’s still sad about Steve 65 years later and nothing else has progressed?

This lack of specificity leaves Diana fading in the lead role of her own movie despite the fact that there’s TONS of material there that they just... ignored. For me, she read flat, which bummed me out majorly. Her best stuff was with Steve because that actually MEANS something. But it’s all she’s got in this film. They didn’t bother filling in any other information about her life. 

FIX IT: literally just make Barbara already friends with Diana at the beginning. Not only does it make Diana more interesting, it reduces the sheer amount of exposition that the film piles on in the first 45 minutes. This also means you can bring Steve back sooner than the 45 minute mark, which would help grease the wheels in the first third of the movie. And it also means that Diana losing Barbara to inhumanity would actually have a greater impact on Diana beyond “oh my kooky new friend turned into an evil cat; this is vexing.”

CHALLENGE #2: the tone is WILDLY different than the tone of the first. They went from WWI trench warfare to shopping malls and fanny packs. It’s a HUGE tone shift, and it takes some getting used to. But there are good things to it; namely it provides great comedy for Steve, who is a definite bright spot in the movie. 

Overall I’m on board with doing a superhero movie that pivots away from grit and darkness and toward camp and comedy, and it’s cool to do something new rather than reiterate the same tone from the first film. But I think they could’ve done more to sell the tone shift. 

There are HIJINKS inherent in the premise that I’m guessing were fairly unilaterally unexpected. There’s a vaguely historical magic WISHING STONE and three buffoons each made a wish and turned shit upside down. I myself wish that Maxwell and Barbara and Diana were rendered in triplicate, as equal collaborators in this batshittery. I don’t think you’re watering down Diana’s role as lead (no more than giving her no other emotions to play than sadness) by doing so, and it even works nicely to own the idea that Max and Barbara are on equal narrative ground as Diana.

As far as the villainy goes, Max is more recognizably a Bad Guy, but Barbara is NOT, and it’s fascinating to show at least Diana and Barbara working together but slowly falling apart as shit goes SIDEWAYS. Hijinks can be zany and also meaningful! What if a villain is just a friend who wants something different than you and you have to come to terms with that and stop them from doing dumb shit? There’s an element of screwball to this premise and I wanted them to lean in more. This would also give Diana more to do than cry and fight.

FIX IT: show Barbara getting her powers using the same tropes of other superheroes getting their powers and figuring them out. Play it like she’s Peter Parker finding out she’s Spider-man. Hell, do a montage with all three of them using/abusing their powers: Barbara beating the shit out of things, Maxwell manipulating people, Steve and Diana making the fuck out and enjoying the shit out of it. These are the joys of wish fulfillment! 

AND, if they had set up the rules of the artifact beforehand (see Challenge #3), then the audience would know they were watching very happy people who are going to have their LIVES RUINED SOON. And that is good storytelling. (Maybe this is oversimplified, but honestly half of good storytelling is just making the audience feel two opposite emotions at the same time. The other half is dramatic irony, which would also apply to this trio montage.)

CHALLENGE #3: What the hell are the rules of this magic wishing artifact anyways??? The audience should know them before the characters do. The way this movie doled out information was bananas. They waited right before they were going to the tell the audience something to show us what they were about to tell us. Just show us earlier and tell the characters later!!! That way WE’LL already know because we’ve seen it, and THEY’RE not saddled with expositional dialogue to make sure the audience follows the idea.

FIX IT: For the love of humanity, nix the opening sequence with the horse race and make it about the damn stone!! Rip off Lord of the Rings and tell the history of the innocent but dangerous thing. Rip off Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and animate something about how it gives wishes at a cost. Hell, let Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright(’s unbelievably ripped arms) tell young Diana the story so they can still hang out and be a part of the film! Throw in some lore about the gods, just to remind us where Diana comes from and her belief system, and we’re good to go.

While you’re at it, toss in the whole point of the film into the moral that Diana’s moms impart to her at a young age. It’s not a spoiler. We don’t wonder if 1984 Diana will do the right thing. She does not need to LEARN this moral. She already knows the moral, but she still has to make the hard choice to let Steve go and of course it doesn’t come easy.

In summary: that horse race had little to do with the rest of the movie and it’s wasted story space, especially for setting up the entire magical premise that the movie hinges on, let alone the actual message of the film.

CHALLENGE #4: Do we care about Maxwell and his kiddo enough to rest the entire movie’s resolution on it? Ehhhh. The glimpses into young Max’s abuse is another example of showing information RIGHTBEFORE it’s important, rather than setting it up earlier to pay off later. It’s a far weaker choice.

FIX IT: Age up Alistair. If he’s a teen or preeteen, then the stakes feel higher because it seems more monumental to undo the trauma of neglect at that age. Much like in his business pursuits, the clock is ticking and Max is running out of opportunities for success in all realms of his life.

Maybe show Maxwell trying to reason with Alistair earlier in the movie, saying that he’s a good dad because he’s not as bad a dad as his own father. It shows us how he justifies his behavior, gives us the information that he had an abusive dad, and gives an actual interaction between father and son other than “daddy you’re not here” and “shhh son here’s a pony.”

Possible other fix-it which connects to other fixes: what if Barbara actually renounces her wish before Max does? It should be more painful to the audience to lose Barbara to her wish because we’ve technically LIKED her at one point. She means something to Diana, and so she means something to us. Honestly, the audience has rooted for her independent of Diana! The scene where she realizes she’s not powerless against her harasser but then completely loses herself in violence against him? One of the movie’s best. It’s pretty dissatisfying that she just goes completely off the deep end and then nothing with her is resolved after the wishes are broken.

But, with the way the movie is set up, the big emotional climax is the scene of Diana getting through to Max/the entire planet, so it’s hard to undo that and give it to Barbara instead, considering that it won’t wrap up the plot. But geez, do SOMETHING with Barbara that’s based in actual emotions. Don’t hinge your entire movie’s emotional resolve on a father-son relationship that’s two-dimensional and doesn’t have anything to do with the main character! You had emotional investment in Barbara; use it!!

At the very least, have Diana get through to Barbara in some way, either before Maxwell renounces or after, and maybe even intercut it with Max and his kid. 

CHALLENGE #5: I experience great existential malaise at watching a mylar balloon drift off into the ether. Was there no better visual for the final moments of the film? Asking for myself, and also the planet. (This one is mostly a joke... but seriously, you guys, the PLANET.)

#ask box #spoilers #uhhhh I should probably keep this out of the tags #I wanted to like this movie a lot #but it came up short for me and it hampered my enjoyment a little bit #so I tried to take note of how it could've been improved with a stronger script #instead of complaining vaguely and dunking on it #WW84 #Wonder Woman