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sapropel · 3 years

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The main things that turned me off of conversion for now were

1. I have alot of shit on my plate and am low income as a result so finding a place that will help might be hard because locally there really aren't any synagogues around

2. The synagogue I did find locally was uhhh...... Hhhhh. Their web page had a huge section about Israel in a positive light..

I love the religion, I love certain values it holds however I refuse to align with anyone who justifies colonialism and bloodshed against another group of people while ignoring past bloodshed done onto themselves. It makes 0 sense to me and is highly hypocritical.

Hypocrisy was one of the reasons I hated Christianity so much. Constantly causing bloodshed, huge present and past history of colonialism, huge present day history of wanting people like me who are gay or trans dead and in the ground.

the difference with Christianity is that there isn't even a present day persecution or justified worry of safety despite the fact that I've seen jack chick esque evangelical fuckers unironically act like they're holocaust survivors whenever a pride parade happens within 1 mile of them.

It makes me sad, I don't see the point in colonizing or maiming a group of people who should be your equals.

It's racist at best, dangerous and actively contributing to more death and violence at worst.

The thing is there isn't really a "point." It creates its own point. Real actionable Zionist sentiment was basically non-existent until the rise of European nationalism. It's literally the exact same brand of nationalism that gave birth to fascist Italy and other great failures of modernity. And when "Israel" was a proto-state basically its entire existence was contingent upon its continued usefulness to Britain as a tool of control over India through the Suez. Zionist claims to the land are super shaky at best and straight up revisionist at worst. Post-facto Israel has tried to give itself legitimacy through fearmongering, genocide, and forging alliances with other imperialist powers. It's doing what America did (and is doing) but it's happening in the age of mass media and we are all watching colonial revisionism happen in real time.

If you are letting the prevalence of Zionism keep you from Judaism, I would say you should keep thinking about it. If you treat Judaism as too thoroughly engulfed in Zionism, you do the work of Zionists for them--you legitimize their claim that Judaism is Zionism is Israel. You legitimize the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism which is incidentally exactly how my local rabbis have been fucking me over since June. You are of course totally within your rights not to convert to a religion that doesn't work for you, but I hope you rethink the implication that converting to Judaism is akin to aligning with Zionism.

And yeah, Zionist hypocrisy is a systematic issue within American Jewish institutions in a feedback loop with Jewish populations. Any institutional apparatus is going to have systematic issues that reflect the dominant discourse of the greater cultural framework--mainstream Jewish institutions are going to, both by the nature of maintaining relevancy in America and by the natures of fearmongering and cultural amnesia, have a vested interest in participating in capitalism, imperialism, racism... You are not going to find mainstream insitutions that don't perpetuate them. That's why they're dominant. You are no more aligning yourself with Zionism by going to a synagogue than you are aligning yourself with capitalism by shopping at Wal-Mart. Anything you meaningfully do in public is in some way going to be "problematic" on some level because public space is designed to keep itself alive by those values.

It's exhausting to make yourself never come close to anyone or anything bad at all--refusing to associate with anyone with a problematic ideology is a doomed enterprise. I've been there. A lot of Zionist sentiment is implanted in people's minds with lifelong propaganda and destructive mind control techniques, and it's important to recognize that. That doesn't mean Zionist adults don't have a responsibility to unlearn it, but I think it's possible to have compassion for people who do try to do their best with improving themselves. Most people you meet want to be good and don't want to be willfully ignorant. I try to think about how difficult it is to convince the average well-meaning white American of the merits of decolonization/land back. Most well-meaning Zionist Jews are going to feel the same way about Israel--actual systematic justice and decolonization are not in their lexicons. Decolonization is hidden behind thought-stopping techniques that they have been inundated with from day 1. But most people do have a basic sense of goodness and are willing to sacrifice something for it. Most people are willing to give ground for the sake of human decency. The only way I can survive talking to people I know are Zionists is by understanding that we both want the world to be a better place and if I dwell on the specifics of how I perceive them to be evil, the possibility of us having a working relationship and any hope at productive dialogue drops to zero.

You don't have to be patient with Zionists or Zionist institutions. You don't have to forgive them. You don't even have to be compassionate. But you do need to understand, intellectually, that imposed cognitive dissonance is a very powerful tool of mind control (and I'm not talking about woo-woo shit I'm extrapolating from cult research and personal experience) and that the pathos of Zionism isn't supposed to be logical. Fear trumps hypocrisy. Fatigue trumps informed consent. Charisma trumps logic. Any bigoted ideology is going to fall apart under logical scrutiny, and that's why the only battleground for maintaining bigotry is necessarily charismatic and emotional.

We haven't yet, of course, acknowledged that there are also tons of anti-Zionist Jews and that the concept isn't absurd or fringe, no matter what the dominant Zionist discourse says. It's important for us not to let Zionists be the stewards of Judaism--Zionists do not OWN Judaism. Just like the most Orthodox of Jews also don't OWN Judaism. Judaism is only what you make it to be, and if you leave it alone because you are too worried about Zionism, that is all Judaism is ever going to be for you. Of course, you still have to contend with Zionism, and if you actually are interested in being a Jew, you would have to find a way not to let it kill your Judaism. I've come close (ish) to giving up on Judaism a couple of times because of Israel and Zionism, but I'm glad I haven't. I've stuck it out long enough to give myself to tools I need to separate the two and see the situation with more clarity.

#j tag

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partywithponies · 4 years

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hi! i've only ever seen the bbc version of father brown and i've never read the books (i know, i'm so sorry), but i'm super curious about the different versions of father brown and you seem like an expert on each adaptation, so i was wondering if you'd be willing to give me a rundown of sorts on each version/series? i know it's a lot to ask and i may be opening the floodgates here, but there's not a ton of info online elsewhere and i'd love to learn more! thanks either way. ciao!

OH BOY YOU’VE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE ANON

OKAY SO

As briefly as possible:

The books:

Proof people who complain about the BBC show being “too political” don’t actually know the books at all

Father Brown straight up calls capitalism “evil” and “heresy”

Chesterton says that millionaires dying isn’t a tragedy

Inspector Valentin betrayed us and broke my heart, ACAB I guess

Since every police officer he befriends lets him down in some way, Father Brown’s only real friend is Flambeau, who he goes absolutely everywhere with. They only go on holiday with each other. They’ve been all over the world with each other. I love they

Book Father Brown pretty much never does his goddamn job. We literally never in all the books see him giving mass or taking confession. The closest we get is when he gives an impromptu sermon after seemingly coming back from the dead, where he literally only says "You silly, silly people. God bless you all and give you more sense." then runs away to send a telegram. Useless priest. I love him.

Book Flambeau is. Incredible. Amazing. Iconic. None of the adaptations have been able to fully capture book Flambeau’s true energy, for he is a walking contradiction who contains multitudes. If all the onscreen Flambeaus fused into one being, THEN you’d have something vaguely resembling book Flambeau.

Book Flambeau is MASSIVE. He’s at least 6′4, he’s broad shouldered, has huge hands, and his super buff. He can just. Pick people up and throw them. He can knock people unconscious with one punch. He fills doorways when he stands in them. He terrifies most people just by drawing himself up to his full height. He also has a very short temper and a very short patience.

He’s very agile and athletic and can move silently, despite his size. He’s also a master of disguise, somehow. (Explain, Chesterton. Explain. Is everyone in this universe apart from Father Brown, Flambeau, and arguably Valentin massively stupid? Actually don’t answer that I’ve read these books)

Book Flambeau has a habit of flinging people full-bodily down flights of stairs when they anger him or threaten him or Father Brown. Book Flambeau also carries a walking cane with him literally everywhere that has a sword concealed in the handle, plus book Flambeau insists on taking pistols on holiday with him, even when he was just going for a peaceful fishing holiday in the Norfolk Broads. King.

(Which all makes it so iconic that Father Brown, described as tiny and meek and sensitive, saw this man when he was still a hardened criminal on top of all this and said “THIS ONE I LIKE THIS ONE. I JUST THINK HE’S NEAT” and went off on a jolly through London with him.)

Flambeau’s past is extremely mysterious. We no nothing about his family or his childhood or where he’s from or why he turned to crime. We know he used to be a soldier, and a part of him misses it. We know he used to fight duels semi-regularly, and liked them to be fought the very next morning after they were organised. We know he always used to make sure to visit the dentist on time, even when he was a hardened criminal. (King of good teeth.) We know he was in a gang at some point. We know he was a student at some point. We don’t know what he studied, but we know he knew Leonard Quinton in “wild student days in Paris” ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). This is literally all we know about his past before he met Father Brown. The man is a riddle wrapped in an enigma. (That’s why Flambeau is so big. He’s full of secrets)

(Fun fact: in the book universe Flambeau is famous and popular in America, so you could say that in universe Flambeau is America’s Favourite Fighting Frenchman.)

Flambeau also loves cats and children, believes in fairies, likes pointing out rocks that look like dragons, and likes giggling and mucking about on the beach with Father Brown. A baby.

One time Father Brown called Flambeau “full of good and pure thoughts”, but I don’t think that’s quite true, Father. I think Father Brown just has endless faith in Flambeau.

Another thing I think is really neat is that it would’ve been so easy to have Father Brown be the genius and Flambeau his dumb muscle sidekick but that’s not the case at all! They’re both geniuses and they’re both each other’s sidekick, and in fact it’s Flambeau who’s the famous professional private detective, Father Brown is just an amateur. Father Brown is often defined by his connection to Flambeau rather than vice versa, both in the text (the text will frequently refer to them as something along the lines of “Flambeau and his friend the priest”, and on two separate occasions a long list of Flambeau’s possessions is ended with “and a priest”), and in universe (Father Brown himself is massively famous in America in universe largely because of “his long connection to Flambeau). I don’t know I just think it’s neat.

One time a man threatened Father Brown with a gun and Flambeau just beat him unconscious and then Father Brown and Flambeau just drove away and left him unconscious on the path. It was awesome.

(I’m sorry I rambled about Flambeau for so many words I just. Really really like Flambeau you guys. Father Brown and Flambeau are like two separate crime drama character tropes, the hard boiled cynical P.I. and the cosy eccentric amateur detective, but together as a double act, and I just think that’s really cool.)

Father Brown himself is if anything even more mysterious. He’s just “Father J. Brown, formerly of Cobhole in Essex, currently London”, and he’s “Flambeau’s friend”, and that’s all. That’s all he needs to be.

I also really really love Father Brown himself. I love that he’s allowed to be cheerful and optimistic and childish without any of this making him less clever, and in fact he’s shown time and time again to be cleverer than grumpy cynics who are scornful of childish things. Like, the whole giggling childlike thing isn’t even some kind of act, he’s a genius who understands true human nature, and he also really really likes puppet shows and building sandcastles who telling fairy stories, he really does get a “childish pleasure” from seeing Flambeau swing his sword-stick, and he really does have “strong personal interest in tomfoolery”. I love him.

I must share my favourite book quote about Father Brown himself: “But neither of them is very like the real Father Brown, who is not broken at all; but goes stumping with his stout umbrella through life, liking most of the people in it; accepting the world as his companion, but never as his judge.” uwu uwu uwu I’m cry.

Chesterton just subverts all the expectations character wise, the cheerful bumbling priest is a genius, the violent criminal is a true hero, the noble police officer is a corrupt self-serving murderer. It’s great. We stan. 10000000/10

(I’m not very good at being brief, am I?)

Father Brown, Detective (1934):

The first movie! It’s completely ridiculous. I love it a lot.

It was released just at the start of Hays Code, which, among other things, stated that crime and immorality should not be glorified or glamourised, and all crime and immorality must be seen to be punished by the end of the film. In practice in the case of this film, this means two things:

Paul Lukas!Flambeau is the only Flambeau to actually go to prison (and stay there).

He’s by far the Flambeau who deserves it the least. Lukas!Flambeau never hurt a soul. He just wanted to be loved. #FreeMyBoyHercule

Okay but in all seriousness. There’s a reason I call Paul Lukas!Flambeau “Himbo Flambeau”. Where other Flambeaus are violent or dangerous or geniuses, Lukas!Flambeau is just a big dumb idiot who respects women and has a great sense of humour and writes all his letters in the third person like Elmo for some reason. I would die for him.

At one point Flambeau in disguise is talking to the police, and when the police criticise Flambeau, disguised Flambeau says “Oh but I assure! I have read many things about this Flambeau! He is a fearless, handsome fellow!” The absolute idiot. I adore him with my whole heart.

The film is set in London, like the books, but an idealised Hollywood version of London, i.e., almost entirely unlike London.

Walter Connolly!Father Brown is also entirely lacking in braincells. Look at these two idiot men:

I love them.

Oh oh! And the most important thing, the thing that carries over into most other adaptations? NEW ORIGINAL CHARACTERS!!

This movie invents a few characters that weren’t in the books, but the most important ones are Mrs Boggs:

She doesn’t really add much to the plot but she’s funny and I love her so I’ll forgive it.

She’s Father Brown’s housekeeper, she’s basically just the fussing maternal female character archetype who fusses around in the background, but she does it well and plays it with charm so I’ll allow it.

(Honestly this whole film is just. Not *technically* good or original, but just so charming and with so much heart that I unironically adore it.)

She tries to make Father Brown drink his milk because it’s good for him even though he doesn’t like it, and keeps checking back in on him to make sure he’s drunk it, it’s literally like a mother and her small child.

She objects to policemen in the presbytery because of their “big muddy boots on the carpet” but is fine with just letting Flambeau in whenever despite the prevailing rumour in London being that Flambeau killed a man. We stan a queen of having priorities.

When Inspector Valentine summons Father Brown to the station, Mrs Boggs pops up in the background, assumes Father Brown’s being arrested, and says “Oh dear, I knew it!” and it makes me giggle like an idiot every time.

The other, more important original character invented for this movie is my girl Evelyn Fischer:

I love her, I would die for her, she’s flawless.

She’s basically your typical bored and rebellious young aristocrat, but she has a chaotic streak that I adore.

She sneaks out of her family’s mansion to go to a seedy underground club/illegal gambling ring in Soho (I mean I assume it’s Soho, a seedy part of London in that general vicinity, at least. I’m not about to get bogged down trying to understand the geography of London according to Hollywood), flirts with a bunch of strangers for fun, then when the police raid the place and everyone else is panicking she stands stock still, cheerfully says “Oh goody, I shall probably get my name in the papers!” and has to be physically dragged out of the building by Flambeau.

Later on Flambeau breaks into her bedroom in the middle of the night and she’s just very calmly like “What are you doing?”, and even when she finds out it’s Flambeau, a man widely believed to be dangerous and violent, instead of being scared, she calls him an idiot right to his face.

She forms the third part of the main trio of the movie with Father Brown and Flambeau (RIP to Valentine, demoted to tertiary character in a loose adaptation of the one (1) story where he was the main character lol) and together the three of them share a single braincell and have to take turns with it, while Mrs Boggs fusses in the background at the trio’s increasingly bonkers decisions.

The movie ends with Father Brown and Evelyn sharing an emotional farewell with Flambeau through the window of a police car and promising to look after each other until Flambeau’s released, wow poly rights.

The Adventures of Father Brown (1945):

The adaptation there’s the least amount of information about, but I’ve done my best to find everything I can find on it.

An American radio show made towards the end of wartime, it’s a bit of an odd one, and believe me Father Brown adaptations have gone some odd places.

Only two episodes survive, or at least if more do survive then whoever has them is being very selfish and hoarding them to themselves because only two episodes are publicly available anywhere, and the audio quality of those is a bit dodge. (Though that is to be expected, they do appear to be home recordings, from 1945. Honestly we should be grateful to even have two full episodes.)

If the actors I’ve found are the right people, this show featured by far the youngest Father Brown and Flambeau, at the start of the show the actor playing Father Brown was only 36 and the actor playing Flambeau was only 27. They’re BABIES. (Honestly I’d like to see more age variation in Father Brown adaptations, as I have extensively rambled about before, the characters have literally no canon ages in the books, I think people ought to be a little more imaginative instead of always building on the adaptations that came before, even if it is really cool to see traces of all the previous adaptations in each new one that comes along. It’s something I haven’t noticed as much in adaptations of other golden age detective novels, but the Father Brown adaptations do seem to be stuck in some kind of game of “yes, AND” with each other. I would REALLY like to see an adaptation where Flambeau is older than Father Brown though, it's just something we've never had before despite there being literally nothing in the books to suggest this can't be the case, and I just think it'd be neat.)

This show is really really painfully American, in a real old fashioned "golly gee whizz mister" kind of way, to the point it almost feels like a parody, and I honestly find it kind of endearing.

Even Flambeau frequently slips into a very American accent to the point that my affectionate nickname for him is "The All-American Flambeau", and it's great. He's great.

Honestly I could accept the accents and the slang, for some reason the only thing that really threw me was Father Brown referring to money in cents and nickels.

Needless to say, this adaptation is not set in London. It is instead set in Generic Unspecified Smalltown USA. It's fine. This is fine. I already have so many films and shows set in London, I can swallow my London pride and let America have this.

It's hard to get a real grasp on characters from just two episodes, but I like this Father Brown and Flambeau, even if they are a little overly serious, and even if Flambeau doesn't really do much. He may be a bit serious and a bit useless but All-American Flambeau stays up late anxiously waiting for Father Brown to get home safely and it's very sweet. What a good boy.

All-American Flambeau also carries handcuffs around with him for some reason? But no weapons? Why is All-American Flambeau one of the few Flambeaus not to have a gun? Oh well, he's still sweet.

The 1945 radio show also gives us some original characters, but they're very much side characters and not part of the main plot and it's very hard to get a good grasp on a character from just a few minutes of audio from just two episodes but here's what I could gather:

Nora is another fussing housekeeper! She seems younger and less maternal than Mrs Boggs, but I don't know if that's just because the whole cast was on the younger side. (Could the radio station not find anyone over the age of 40? Were they in short supply in 1945 or something? Ah well.) She seems dedicated to helping Father Brown get some peace and quiet that he never goddamn gets because someone always goes and gets themselves murdered. In both surviving episodes a knock at the door disturbs Father Brown’s rest, Nora opens it professionally, sees it's Flambeau, and immediately drops the professionalism and is immediately like "oh it's only you", so I can only assume every episode started this way. I do hope so.

Father Peter is a junior priest who answers to Father Brown and takes over his duties on his days off. He's implied by the dialogue to be considerably younger than Father Brown, Nora, and Flambeau, but if their actors are anything to go by then they're not that old themselves, and though Father Brown seems to talk to Father Peter like he's a literal child, he is still a priest so I very much doubt that's the case. He seems sweet and harmless, but he's only in one of the surviving episodes and only in that towards the end and mentioned briefly at the start, so it's hard to judge completely. It's highly unlikely that the reason he's not even mentioned in the later surviving episode is because he turned out to secretly be an evil murderer, but, this being a Father Brown adaptation, not entirely unfounded. (But no, he's probably just a sweet boy who exists to have exposition delivered to him.)

Father Brown/The Detective (1954):

The Alec Guinness movie! The one haters of any of the other adaptations complain that adaptation isn't more like, but in my humble opinion, actually the worst adaptation.

Like, I don't hate it! The cast is mostly stellar actors and if I just saw it as a movie on its own, it'd probably be fine. But as a Father Brown adaptation watched in context of the books and the other adaptations, it has a few issues imo.

Most glaringly it has Tone Issues. This film cannot decide if it's a comedy or not. The original posters certainly marketed it as one (see above) and half the cast are noted comic actors who were famous at the time for comedy, goddamn SID JAMES is in it, but the entire third act is played painfully straight, half the cast is mugging for the camera and trying way too hard to be funny while the other cast is giving extremely serious and subtle performances, like. I have no problem with a Father Brown adaptation being played for laughs, and I have no problem with a Father Brown adaptation being played for drama, both can work beautifully, but just PICK ONE, PLEASE

All of my other gripes with the film are very petty and nitpicky, this film calls Father Brown and Flambeau "Ignatius Brown" and "Gustav Flambeau" even though Father Brown has the canon first initial "J" and Flambeau has the canon first name "Hercule", and I hate it a lot. "Ignatius and Gustav" is the second worst thing any Father Brown adaptation has ever done to me.

My other petty nitpick with the movie is that it makes Flambeau literal nobility. The man is a duke. In my opinion Flambeau should always either have a completely mysterious past or be a nobody who came from nothing, someone who grew up with land and title and many servants and a family coat of arms, living in a whole entire castle with his family name and coat of arms engraved into the side of it, growing up and stealing from people, is a whole lot less sympathetic in my opinion. Like to be fair his parents are dead which is sad I guess and his castle has seen better days, but dude. You still own a castle. People who live in castles do not get to lecture other people about materialism.

THAT SAID, Peter Finch is still the best thing about the movie. I love all Flambeaus dearly, even the ones that are little bitches. He’s a bit of an emo “oh woe is me” sadboy, but he’s very charming, and actually good at disguises and being undercover, get dunked on Lukas!Flambeau.

Guinness!Brown likes to feed ducks and Flambeau calls him “the angel with the flaming umbrella”, which makes my inner Good Omens fan who loves finding parallels between Aziraphale & Crowley and Father Brown & Flambeau go 👀

There is one really good scene, in the Paris Catacombs. And by “good” I mean “really really bafflingly gay”:

I truly, truly do not understand how this scene was written, directed, acted, filmed, and edited without ANYONE saying “hey lads does this seem a bit gay to you?”

Father Brown, literally lying on top of Flambeau and pinning him to the ground, whispering: “I would like to set you free.” Flambeau, softly, gently smiling while his face is literal inches away from Father Brown, who is still pinning him to the ground: “Ah, now I begin to understand what you are.”

What the fuck, you guys. What the entire fuck. This scene keeps me up at night.

ANYWAY

This film is also not set in London. It is instead mostly set in a rural English village, and partially in Paris and partially in rural France. Paris is fun but I miss London.

This film also has some original characters. I should probably talk about them.

This is Lady Warren:

She’s Father Brown’s friend, and she’s a Lady, and that’s all I can really tell you.

She’s very well-mannered and dignified and sophisticated.

She gives me the vibe that she exists solely because the writers decided they needed a female character but then remembered at the last minute they had no idea how to write women, so as a result she is almost entirely irrelevant to the plot. I don’t want to say I don’t like her, because she’s done nothing wrong and it’s not her fault, but like. Why is she here? Poor thing, she deserved to be plot-relevant, really.

She lives in a big mansion and owns some very nice things, and she gets annoyed when she invites Father Brown to lunch but he just stares blankly into space thinking about Flambeau the whole time. (Mood honestly FB. Me too.)

She flirts a bit with Flambeau in one very pointless scene that came the hell out of nowhere, went nowhere, and was never mentioned again. It was like the writers realised how gay the previous Flambeau scene was and suddenly tried to convince me this man is a hetero. Nice try, writers. You can’t fool me that easily.

The other main original character is Bert:

Alright, own up, whose bright idea was it to put Sid James in a Father Brown movie?

Bert is a smalltime criminal who’s a friend of Father Brown, who Father Brown protects from the police, but tries to convince to get on the straight and narrow by getting him as a job as Lady Warren’s chauffer.

This is would be fine, were it not for the fact he’s played by Sid James, who only knows how to play Sid James, and is just Sid Jamesing it up in every scene. I don’t have anything against Sid James. I like my fair share of Carry On films. But Sid James does not belong in Father Brown and I want to fight whoever decided he did.

Father Brown (1974):

LADS LADS LADS! It’s time for the first TV show, and it’s time for my favourite boys:

Oh! OH! How I love Kenneth More!Brown and Dennis Burgess!Flambeau. They’re just. So cute. My two special boys.

Not only that, but LADS! We’re finally back in London!

A gritty, dirty, London in the 1930s no less, with cool London buses and political unrest and grimy pubs and the constant threat of world war. Alexa this is so cool play London Calling.

In one episode Flambeau gets verbally abused by an anti-immigration right-wing zealot. :( My poor boy. :(

(But it’s okay, shortly after Father Brown witnesses this, the racist shows up dead in exactly the place Father Brown earlier said would be a good place to commit a murder. Now I’m not accusing Father Brown of murder, BUT)

This show made the bold but valid decision to skip Flambeau’s redemption arc and start the show when Flambeau is already a seasoned and respected private detective who’s lived in London and been Father Brown’s closest friend for many years. As a result this Father Brown and Flambeau are ridiculously domestic with each other. Look at this peak Old Married Couple energy:

Oh! I just love them.

I would love to know how Burgess!Flambeau’s redemption went down though, because Burgess!Flambeau is BY FAR the least repentant of all the reformed Flambeaus. He proudly boasts about his crimes, he still believes he “deserved to succeed”, he still proudly talks about how “daring and outrageous” he was, which begs the question of why did he stop at all? Literally the only explanation I can think of is that he’s literally only doing this for Father Brown’s sake, which. uwu

Oh GOD I love Burgess!Flambeau. Obviously I love all Flambeaus a lot, and choosing a favourite feels like choosing a favourite child, but let’s just say: if the Flambeaus WERE my children, Burgess!Flambeau would be quite spoilt. My ~ Daring And Outrageous ~ boy.

More!Brown and Burgess!Flambeau are both really really socially awkward, uncomfortable in crowds, and nervously say “oh dear” a lot. They really are ridiculously cute.

They also only giggle and joke and act silly when they’re together, when they’re apart they’re both sort of sad and quiet and withdrawn. (This makes episodes Flambeau isn’t in a bit harder to watch because Father Brown is just kind of lost and lonely without his emotional support Frenchman, with three notable exceptions: that time Father Brown infodumped about the mating habits of whales at the Father Superior for a solid minute, that time Father Brown met a dog and reacted with unrestrained delight, and that time someone mentioned former criminals in passing and Father Brown’s whole face lit up and he started gushing about how Flambeau was living in London now and doing very well as a private detective, completely unprompted.)

This show also brought back book!Brown and Flambeau’s habit of always going on holiday together! Wonderful! We love to see it!

This show is also the first time in the entire Father Brown franchise where gay people are overtly acknowledged to exist! And Father Brown is non-judgemental! A roman catholic priest written in the 1970s and living in the 1930s who canonically isn’t homophobic! I have no choice but to stan forever!

You remember what I said about liking to point out Good Omens parallels? WELL

Kenneth More!Father Brown and Dennis Burgess!Flambeau both live in London

Burgess!Flambeau lives in a brightly lit, pale walled, airy and spacious, modern (for the time) London apartment, while More!Brown prefers gothic architecture and lives in an old, grey, cramped, stone building absolutely full floor to ceiling with books

They go out for intimate candlelit dinners for two at very fancy London restaurants

Desperate people come to Flambeau because he “knows the game on both sides of the fence”

Father Brown responds with a quiet and miserable “oh dear” when asked to actually do his job instead of just watching plays and drinking wine

Father Brown calls Flambeau “my dear” at times and it personally kills me

I mean. I’m just saying. 👀

Now, isn’t there a third important character in the books?

Oh yes of course:

HIM! THE BASTARD MAN! INSPECTOR VALENTIN HIMSELF!

(Nobody understands him! IT’S NOT! EVIL!)

This show is the literally only adaptation to include the Valentin betrayal and I’m not gonna lie. It’s a very difficult episode to sit through, it’s far darker and grimmer and more depressing than you would ever expect from Father Brown, but my god it’s done so well. Especially considering the teeny tiny budget they clearly had, only four sets are used the entire episode and the whole thing takes place inside Valentin’s house, but even that adds a certain claustrophobic atmosphere and just. It’s done so well.

I think the entire budget went on gore effects because the decapitated heads in this episode are disturbingly realistic for the time the show was made and genuinely grim to look at. Not to mention the intense downer ending. Not to mention this was THE FINAL EPISODE OF THE SHOW

THE INTENSE DOWNER ENDING OF THIS EPISODE IS HOW THE WHOLE SHOW ENDED

God it hurts so much but I lowkey love it.

Father Brown Stories (1984):

The second radio series, and the first BBC adaptation!

Thrilling times for fans of actors being the right nationality for their characters, because after previously being played by a Hungarian, an American, an Englishman, and a Welshman, Flambeau is finally being played by a Frenchman, Olivier Pierre!

Father Brown himself is played by Andrew Sachs, Manuel himself.

Not gonna lie. It’s kind of hard to figure out how to explain the radio show.

We’re? Maybe back in London? Honestly it’s really unclear.

Pierre!Flambeau is kind of adorable. He’s described as looking like book!Flambeau physically, huge and buff and terrifying, but he has literally none of the temper or predisposition to violence.

Pierre!Flambeau doesn’t speak very good English at all, and oftentimes will react with “...What?” when he hears a strange English idiom or turn of phrase.

One time he says “Perhaps we should.. push on? SEE HOW I AM MASTERING YOUR ENGLISH IDIOMS” and it’s the cutest thing that’s ever happened.

To try and get better at understanding both the English language and the English people, Flambeau starts obsessively reading Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, massive giant adorable boy.

One time Father Brown gets complimented of being academically minded and well read, and then asked if Flambeau is also a keen reader, and when Flambeau tries to say no, Father Brown interrupts and proudly and earnestly says “Oh yes! Monsieur Flambeau is one of our top Lewis Carroll scholars!”, it’s honestly adorable.

This adaptation finally uses “John” as Father Brown’s first name, as it should always have been! I love it!

This series said FUCK Father Brown having a mysterious past and no former friends or relatives! Now he has siblings, and friends who knew him before he was a priest who still call him “John”!

Father Brown himself speaks in a very sweet and soft and wavering way that makes my heart melt.

Sadly and unfortunately, I have to acknowledge the final episode of the show, which is the top worst thing any Father Brown adaptation has ever done to me.

It’s. It’s a crossover. With Sherlock Holmes. Actual goddamn Sherlock Holmes is in it. I hate it. I hate it so much. “Elementary, my dear Flambeau” shut the hell up, if this Flambeau won’t fling you down a flight of stairs then I will.

I deliberately avoided all Holmes-related media for THREE YEARS only for the awful man to spring up on me in Father Brown?? How could you do this to me???

I’m going to yeet myself into the sun, bye everyone.

(On the plus side, the Sherlock Holmes episode does have one of Father Brown’s parishioners recognise Flambeau as “a close friend of Father Brown and a frequent visitor to his room” ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), so that’s nice I suppose. I’ll still never forgive the writers of this show for putting me through this.)

Father Brown (2013):

YOU ARE HERE.

I kind of see the current TV series as a culmination of all the adaptations that’ve come before? I can definitely see echoes of all of them in it.

And it’s great! I really really love it. I love it a lot.

I think about it daily.

My one and only complaint I would have is that Flambeau isn’t in it enough. Not just because he’s my favourite, though I’d obviously not be fooling anyone who’s read all this if I said he isn’t.

And it’s not that I don’t love the show as it is, and find the one Flambeau episode a series always something really special, so I don’t know what I’d have the writers do, exactly.

But it’s just. In literally every other version of Father Brown, Flambeau is the second most important character and the second main protagonist, and to have him in this show so little that some fans or reviewers call him a “minor character” and others call him a “recurring villain”, though I myself don’t see him either of those ways of course because he’s still Flambeau, it’s just kinda sad and painful, y’know?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just being silly.

Hopefully he’s a regular in at least the final season of the show. If I don’t get my favourite partners in crime solving I’m rioting.

Anyway that’s my “””brief””” rundown on all the main versions of Father Brown!! I hope you liked it!!

#Anonymous #father brown #hercule flambeau #flambrown

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stina-is-a-punk-rocker · 3 years

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‘always and forever, lara jean’: a bungled mess of my thoughts while watching the movie

Alright, cards on the table: I never finished reading the book. I got bored a couple of pages in, so I just read up the summary on Wikipedia and called it a day.

Not gonna lie, I expected better from the movies. I loved the first movie; it was cute, it was fun, it hit all the right places. The second movie was… eh. Jordan Fisher is cute, so that’s a plus.

And then we got the third movie; the final in the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy.

And it was somehow even worse.

Maybe I’m exaggerating. Despite its shortcomings in the plot and character development-related departments (the fact that Lara Jean wrote addresses for letters she never meant to send is something that will bother me on my deathbed), the movies have their merits. They’re cutesy and charming and enjoyable, overall; movie-LJ is sweet and unashamedly a girly-girl, which is a refreshing change from the #NotLikeOtherGirls, pick-me girls and bruh girls we had in loads of other YA movies growing up. Peter’s pretty cute, too; he’s not a possessive freak like so many other love interests (The Kissing Booth, After, Anna and the French Kiss), and his and Lara Jean’s dynamic is cute, too. Not to mention- we finally have an Asian lead whose Asian-ness isn’t the whole focus of the story!

Again, maybe I’m being extra with all this. The series is, at its core, solely for entertainment purposes. Not every piece of media has to have an underlying message and you shouldn’t need to read between every goddamn line to find something worthy of enjoying. They’re certainly helpful for whiling away a couple of hours; perfect for bingeing with a pint of ice cream in hand, and all of this is in good fun.

Also, it goes without saying, but: spoilers ahead.

The film beings with Lara Jean scribbling a postcard to Peter while she’s in Korea with her family. The inclusion of that little snapshot of Asian culture made me so happy- seriously, fuck everyone who says diversity in media doesn’t matter. I’m not even Korean, and I was overjoyed at seeing a couple of scenes just from the same continent I’m on. The K-pop music in the background was a fun touch, too (although all Korean music isn’t K-pop, but that’s a rant for another day).

(Also: Blackpink has so many more suitable songs than Pretty Savage that go with the theme of the movies. Kill This Love in the second movie while Lara Jean is getting ready to go to her boyfriend’s match is bad enough- they’re supposed to be in love in that scene, goddammit.)

One thing that bothered me throughout the movies is how obviously non-Korean Lara Jean and Margot look. It’s like whoever chose the cast went for any random Asian- Lana’s Vietnamese and Janel Parrish is half-Chinese, and it’s so obvious. You seriously couldn’t find two Korean-Americans who even vaguely resembled each other so they could pass for sisters? The actresses do a stunning job and I don’t want to shit on them, but I just wish they didn’t go with the ‘all Asians look the same, what’s the difference?’ mindset.

Also, a nitpicky thing I’ve noticed in movies with characters who read a lot: no one holds their books up while they’re reading. Your arms start to cramp, which is why you keep your book in your lap while you’re reading, or you rest on your belly and hold the book in front of you. My spine and shoulders didn’t suffer years of torture as a chronic reader for you to include characters who hold their books up while reading.

A major gripe I have with Always and Forever, Lara Jean is how the characters are almost jarringly out of character- not from the books, but from the two previous movies, too. Lara Jean didn’t have much of a character to begin with, so I can’t say much about her (she dissed Oasis at one point; it’s okay for me to be mean to her), but the rest of them are either caricatures of themselves or just totally different people.

Movie Peter >>> Book Peter. He’s almost too perfect (except for the fact that he unironically loves The Fast and the Furious, which… ew), almost too much of the ideal boyfriend. Not that my perpetually single arse would know. How do boyfriends even work? I wouldn’t know the first thing to do with one; how often should you feed it? Do you need to take it on walks?

(In the notes I’ve written towards the end of the film, I’ve complained about Peter being immature and making Lara Jean feel bad about following her dream to go to NYU. He confuses me.)

Not to mention how distractingly adorable Noah Centineo is from some angles and under certain lighting conditions (other times, he reminds me of the human version of Shrek and that bothered me). King of weird Tweets and Instagram captions though he may be, he’s got a really nice smile, and his gravelly voice is both parts sexy and disturbing.

But I digress.

I’ll never forgive the directors for what they did to Kitty and Chris- two of my favorite characters, from both the books and the movies. Kitty’s annoying to the point of being borderline unlikeable- gone is the occasionally snarky comic relief we all came to love; in her place is an annoying brat whose every line comes out forced. Also, making soap is fun; fuck you, Kitty.

Chris is essentially Dixie D’Amelio’s character from that TikToker Grey’s Anatomy ripoff; the main character in One Direction fanfiction from 2012 who doesn’t want to go to the concert but her best friend gets a ticket for her so she can’t bail but Harry Styles sees her in the crowd and falls in love at first sight and 50k of mutual pining and misunderstandings late, they get together. She’s cynical and snarky and hates capitalism and consumerism and prom (because of course she does), but secretly, she’s into it (because of course she is). My guess is that she’s there to appease all the arseholes (including myself) who accused the characters of being too one-dimensional, but it seems too out of place in a movie that doesn’t have much plot to begin with.

I really, really hate how Lucas was done dirty- throughout every single movie. Of course, it’s Lara Jean’s story so not every side character has to be fully fleshed out- but you’d think three. entire. movies. would be enough to give Lucas a bigger role than the GBF and the token black guy for the diversity brownie points. Every single time Lucas shows up, it’s to push Lara Jean and Peter’s story forward. I would’ve liked to see a romance for him pushed forward instead one for Chris- especially because he says, at one point in a previous movie, that it’s hard to find other gay boys, so it would’ve been sweet to see him find love- and Chris’s character arc could’ve been focused on reconciling with Genevieve. Instead, we see the OG Reggie from Riverdale be the one to show Chris the bright side of monogamy, and Lucas gets a date to prom as an afterthought (another darkskin black dude, so no one thinks the film is racist).

Genevieve’s character in this movie gives me whiplash. Look, I’m all for girls supporting girls- healthy female relationships are something way too many YA movies lack- but she goes from bitch queen extraordinaire to friendly the moment the next scene calls for it. Her character isn’t consistent. A redemption arc should be executed cleanly and believably; you can’t have a character be a total prick one moment and then suddenly be, “Hey, if you get into NYU, let me know,” the next.

And Genevieve’s still an arsehole to Chris; at one point, in NYC, while they’re at the NYU campus grounds (I knew that Lara Jean was going to go to NYU the moment she saw all the banners; I fucking called it), Genevieve tells Chris, “University is for people who actually have a future,” and I recoiled. I’m not the nicest of people and yet that was going too far. Chris doesn’t hesitate to shoot back a, “You peaked in high school,”, but still. Y i k e s. You can’t convince me someone’s turned over a new leaf when they say something like that.

Lara Jean’s dad (forgot his name; gonna call him Dr. Covey) is as unremarkable as ever, and his new wife (forgot her name, too… Trisha? Trina? Eh, something like that) is… unsettling. I mean, I get that they’re all loved up and twitterpatted, but there’s something about all the smiling they’ve got going on that chills me to the bone.

Also, Trisha/Trina kinda looks like TikTok’s ThatVeganTeacher and it bothers me.

Another huge problem with this movie even being made is that the series never had enough plot to continue onto a trilogy. Lara Jean’s letters are what the plots of the first and second movies revolve around; the third only mentions them in passing. The final love letter from Peter was a cute callback, but there’s a massive continuity issue with the first two movies and this last one- both character and plot-wise.

Maybe I’m not articulating this clearly enough, so I’ll use an example: take Harry Potter, for example. Harry’s main goal throughout the series is defeating Voldemort. And it takes all seven books for him to get there, to finally achieve this.

Lara Jean’s goal in the first movie changes midway; from keeping up the façade with Peter so she can avoid the crap with the rest of the letters getting out, to making her fake relationship real. It forms a bridge with the second movie; the letter that went out to John Ambrose, and her dithering between Peter and perfection (I’m not sorry). But what does the third movie have to do with any of this?

There were way too many music montages. You couldn’t go five minutes without a random pop song playing in the background, and it was annoying as hell. Don’t Look Back in Anger was w a s t e d on this stupid film. The artsy scenery shots were even worse- no, I don’t give a fuck about the New York skyline or a bird’s eye view of whatever vehicle Lara Jean is in. A few shots of Seoul would’ve sufficed; the rest was overkill. This movie is way too damn long already (almost 2 entire hours!!!); cut out a couple of those. No one cares.

I thought they’d pull the whole Aladdin trope with character-A-keeps-trying-to-tell-character-B-the-truth-about-a-lie-B-believes-in-about-A-but-B-keeps-interrupting, but Lara Jean (typing her name out is annoying, why couldn’t she have a single name, like both of her sisters?) comes clean earlier than I expected. Peter’s reaction about LJ not getting into Stanford is… uncharacteristically mature? No “Why did you lie to me?”, no accusations, not an ounce of betrayal. Which I did not expect from a guy who’s a little bitch for the greater part of book one (I really don’t like Book Peter, in case you couldn’t tell). I know fuck-all about book three’s Peter, so I can’t tell if he really did adopt this mature, well-adjusted persona, or the movie did it to make Peter seem like less of a dick (like they did it with the sextape-that-wasn’t-a-sextape in the first installment).

On a sidenote, how do these main characters in YA books get into really good colleges with zero to no visible effort? These arseholes fuck around for the entirety of the story and have way too much going on to actually do schoolwork, but they waltz into Ivy Leagues at the end. And apparently, I’m not the only one bothered by this.

There’s something to be said about how the movies don’t really sexualize minors (characters who are minors, to be fair. None of the MCs look anything like teenagers), though. It’s almost weird to see them not getting drunk and partying and having sex all the time. Maybe that’s why Lara Jean trying to get her hand on Peter’s dick felt so stilted and awkward (I cringed so hard when she kept trying to touch him and he kept pushing her hand away, holy shit).

And the kissing. It’s to be expected from a romance film, but there was so. Much. Kissing.

The amount of product placements (… actually, I could count only two: Apple and a pair of Beats headphones Lara Jean puts on at one point, but the movie shoved so many iPhones in my face that I’m obligated to exaggerate) would’ve made anti-capitalist Chris mad.

I’m guessing this all takes place in a parallel universe, sans the coronavirus. Still, being in quarantine this past year and being socially awkward for every other one, it was agonizing seeing everyone so close together in NYC. When Peter kissed the ball (lol) (I have the sense of humor of a straight boy in middle school, don’t judge me) when him and Lara Jean go bowling, I had a visceral reaction. And what are the odds of Peter meeting his estranged dad at the very same bowling alley?

Speaking of Peter’s daddy issues (I’ve written “Hardin but diluted” in my notes; I watched this movie at, like, 1 AM; I’m not entirely sure what was going through my head at that point)- I hated how they guilt-tripped Peter into giving his father another chance. In the wise words of Hannah Montana, everybody makes mistakes- but leaving your wife and two kids for another woman is pretty far from a little oopsie on Mr. Kavinsky’s part. I don’t blame Peter for hating him, and I’m not in a place to judge whether Mr. Kavinsky (does he get a first name?) should be forgiven or not, but I feel like they let him off too easy and made Peter seem like a misunderstood teenager with anger issues for not accepting Mr. Kavinsky’s (crappy) apology at once.

And it adds nothing to the story at all; Mr. Kavinsky peaces out after having one (01) coffee with his firstborn, and he’s never seen again. If you’re going to introduce a subplot, make it tie into the main storyline- the very least you could do is make it an important enough part of the story to have more than 10 minutes of the run time. It makes no sense as to why they’d bring up Peter’s dad in this last film, when he’s already gone through two perfectly fine. I guess it was a ‘tying everything up’ part… even though no one cared.

Lara Jean’s handwriting is surprisingly ugly for someone who’s written that many love letters. And her styling took a definite nosedive; her outfits in the first movie were so effing cute, but now they’re just… meh.

There are so many conversations and lines that the writers must’ve thought sounded good enough for someone to type out the quote in curly font and slap it on a screenshot from the movie to post on Instagram, but when it comes to the actual delivery, they just sounded… weird.

Peter says one time near the beginning of the film, “You know what I’m looking forward to the most in college? Never having to say goodnight,” because he expects him and Lara Jean to get into the same college.

But I guess the word they should’ve used was ‘good-bye’, because this just makes him sound stupid.

At one point, Lara Jean asks Kitty how much Kitty’s gonna miss her when she goes off to college, and Kitty says, “A four.” Later on, she confesses, “I’m gonna miss you a twelve, Lara Jean,” and all I could think was, “But we’re endgame, Archie!”

(In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t let people know I’ve watched Riverdale; it lessons my credibility.)

Still, there remains some good to be found: all the baked goods looked very delicious and made me crave chocolate chip cookies. Peter wearing the socks Lara Jean gifted him at the beginning of the movie was a cute gesture, and Lara Jean giving Peter her teal hatbox? The one she kept her love letters in? Was so? Cute? Help?

And hey, it’s a cliché that’s been done to death, but I’m always a sucker for that part in movies where the girl walks down the stairs in a pretty dress with her hand on the banister and the boy turns around and his mouth falls open and all he can say is, “Wow,”- and this film did not disappoint! Not to mention how cute both Lara Jean’s and Chris’s prom dresses were.

Dr. Covey and Trisha/Trina’s wedding was cute, too- I struggled to decide whether Kitty wearing a necklace that says ‘feminist’ and a tux is a bit too on-the-nose, but I’ve decided that it’s nothing to get my knickers all in a twist about (for clarification: it’s not the necklace or the crossdressing that made me debate this; I just wish they didn’t make a big deal out of it- I wish they didn’t have Kitty and Lara Jean get into an argument about her not wearing a dress, if that makes sense?).

And the final letter- the one from Peter to Lara Jean- I ate that shit up; it was so, so, so cute.

In conclusion (why is it so easy for me to crank out 3k about my thoughts on a Netflix movie and yet when it comes to English Lit. at school, I’d stare at a blank sheet of foolscap for ages?), did I enjoy the movie? Not really. There were parts of it that I liked, but it was overall too boring and I kept wishing I’d watched the new SKZ Code episode instead every few minutes.

But that doesn’t mean that it was bad. I kinda feel a little sad, actually, now that Lara Jean and Peter’s story has come to a close; To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the first movie, is one of my favorites, and bitch though I might about them, the kinda grew on me… like an innocent plant, at first, but then like a fungus. Not a parasitic fungus, just not mutualistic, either… kind of like a commensal.

Maybe I should stop with the biology similes.

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pinelife3 · 3 years

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What’s this Pizzagate in the heart of nature?

The big tech story in Australia last month was Facebook’s decision to restrict people and organisations in Australia from sharing or viewing news content on Facebook. This was in response to the Morrison government’s proposed Media Bargaining legislation which is basically a Murdoch-serving law to try to get tech companies to pay media organisations for news content hosted/linked/displayed on their sites and, most galling of all, share details of their algorithms with Australian media orgs. The idea that Facebook would have to notify NewsCorp every time they want to tweak their algorithm is patently insane. So I admire Facebook’s petty, dramatic manoeuvre: “if the way we share news on the site is such a problem then fine, no more news for you”. After all the fuss, the Australian government agreed to amend the Media Bargaining legislation - evidently with terms more agreeable to Facebook, meaning news has been restored to Facebook down under.

One of the key responses I saw expressed in relation to Facebook’s initial news eradication was concern that disinformation would be able to spread more easily on the site - and that people wouldn’t be able to rebut disinformation with factual news articles.

So far as I can tell, the proliferation of disinformation online wouldn’t matter if people didn’t believe it. And most especially, if people didn’t want to believe it. After all, the web is full of persuasive writing and people who want to convince you of things - for whatever reason, conspiracy theories just seem to be very alluring. So rather than trying to protect people from their own stupidity by hiding disinformation... maybe we could look at why people are so credulous in the first place. Deep state? Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams? CIA Contra cocaine trafficking? The great replacement? Pizzagate?

I’m going to class conspiracy theorists into three categories of my own making:

I believe: well meaning, uninformed people who have been fooled or duped. The fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield which started the vaccines cause autism conspiracy was actually written to support a class action lawsuit. Wakefield knew the results in his paper were not true: in addition to his conflicts of interest, he had falsified data. The paper was eventually debunked and retracted but the conspiracy had its roots and has continued to grow. I think a lot of the people who believe that vaccines are dangerous are parents who are just worried about their kids - and also want to protect other kids from a threat they believe to be real. Why is one debunked article more persuasive to people than a million proving the efficacy of vaccines? It is literally beyond reason.

It suits me to believe: people motivated by self-interest who adopt a conspiracy theory to support their larger world view. Their self-interest could be anything from their own ego to gun rights. The conspiracies around the Sandy Hook Primary School shooting are interesting because you can see a clear motivation for people to subscribe to that theory rather than the truth. If you’re a keen gun-owner, arguining that the shooting was a hoax to generate anti-gun sentiment and thereby allow the Democrats to pass harsher gun restrictions is neat and comforting. No one could argue that the events of Sandy Hook weren’t inhumanly terrible - so the only option is to argue that they didn’t happen at all. Plus, in this worldview, no kids are getting hurt so you can sleep easy knowing you have seven semi-automatic weapons in the house.

I need to believe: the world is disorganised, scary, unknowable. Ocean deep, sky vast, dark impenetrable - and meanwhile our skin is so thin and delicate. So. Wouldn’t it be comforting to think that there’s a race of reptilian overlords that control the planet by whipping their tails against a complicated system of levers and pullies? That would explain a lot of the chaos in our world. Or maybe the problem is an elite coterie of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles? If only we could defeat those accursed pedophiles then life would be peaceful. Luckily, Q and a septuagenarian reality TV host are here to save us.

Across these categories, there are two unifying features:

Rejection of widely accepted truth

Investment in the conspiracy

As a comparison with the conspiracists above, here’s my take on a conspiracy: I think it’s quite probable that Epstein didn’t kill himself. I think that some powerful, shadowy entity took him out to protect itself. But I’m not obsessed by this idea. It would not surprise or upset me if this was officially confirmed - similarly crazy shit happens all the time. I haven’t devoted my life to revealing this truth. I guess I fit into the “I Believe” category: all official information says that Epstein took his own life but my scepticism of the unusual circumstances around his death and Epstein’s powerful connections leads me to doubt the official information. The difference is I don’t do anything about it. I don’t really care if I’m right or not - I’m not that invested in the conspiracy.

And that’s why it seems ludicrous to me that Facebook should be tasked with combatting the conspiracy theories spiralling across our culture. Simply being exposed to bad information does not radicalise you, does not conjure an investment in the conspiracy. If a normal person reads something creatively wrong or misleading they discard it from their mind. If it hits a chord with them, they may adopt that opinion themselves - see: astrology, Armie Hammer as cannibal, tarot cards, essential oils as serious medical treatment, etc. But the evolution from agreeing with a thought to militaristically insisting that the rest of society also agree with it is an abnormal progression. That strange impulse runs deeper in people than their Facebook timeline.

Most people have fears for the planet or believe there are major issues plaguing humanity - and we never do anything about it because it would be mildly inconvenient or because it’s too hard to care about every issue under late capitalism:

"But sorting my recycling is boring”

“Yeah yeah fast fashion is problematic but H&M is just so affordable"

"Of course I hate R.Kelly! But ‘Ignition (Remix)’ is my jam”

“At least they have suicide nets in the Foxconn factories now”

“I only buy free range chicken thighs because I care about animal welfare”

“I retweeted that thing about anti-Black racism. Yay racism solved!”

There are probably lots of people who believe in conspiracy theories but are ultimately apathetic about doing anything: they can’t be bothered talking about vaccines and politics all the time, can’t be bothered going to a protest, can’t summon the interest to care much. So what’s interesting then is that across the three categories of conspiracy theory belief (I believe > It suits me to believe > I need to believe), what a person believes in, and perhaps even the reason for the belief, doesn’t create any impetus to enact real world change. On both the left and the right, the impulse to do something about an issue is rare. Do you think conspiracy theorists, like the left, have a problem with performative activism?

Imagine that you agree that Sandy Hook was a false flag, that ‘they’ hired crisis actors to publicly grieve as if their pretend children had been murdered... do you then get in your car and drive overnight to Sandy Hook and start harassing those crisis actors at the pretend funerals? What do you call someone like that? The hero of their own story.

Just wait!

In their worldview, QAnon are unironically trying to save us from pedophile cannibals. Given what conspiracists believe to be true, they are acting in good faith and doing the right thing. If you believed this shit, you’d be upset too. The fact that they’re doing something about it is kind of admirable: they don’t want our babies to get autism from the measles vaccine, they don’t want a deep state to manipulate our democratic governments. It’s existential for all of us - we just don’t agree on the threat.

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Can you imagine how electric the riot at the Capitol Building must have felt for the people who led it. Brave, romantic, a grand gesture: it was like their Storming of Tuileries. Remember this day forever!

Modern conspiracists are actually similar to the sans-culottes in terms of being avid consumers of propaganda and inflammatory reporting. Disinformation and stirring rhetoric are not new - but shouldn’t people today be less clueless than 18th century peasants?

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Why are there are so many people who believe things which are untrue? They exist on this planet with us but interpret it so differently. These questions really are existential: an ancient, echoing maw pointing to the heart of human nature. The struggle for a more perfect world, whispers about where the danger comes from at night, arguments about how to protect ourselves.

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Has there ever been a society where people didn’t have differing views on how best to shape the world? It’s the central conflict of human existence: epic, older than language - and now we want Facebook to fix it?

#qanon #epstein #trump #anti-vaxxers #facebook #auspol #media bargaining code #pizzagate #sandy hook

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raphaelbrcoks · 4 years

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closed for @goldvnby

It’s too late to have stayed up this long, but too early to have woken up already, and so Raph basks in the purgatory that is the tender hour of 4:08 AM with an exhausted fondness. It’s not an altogether unfamiliar scene - Eddie is notoriously a restless insomniac, and though Raph needs sleep too much to give it up entirely for his beloved boyfriend, he’s not entirely opposed to staying up a bit when he doesn’t have work the next day. Ergo, this particular Friday night, up past their bedtime and passing a joint lazily between them on the fire escape as they sip on an expensive IPA and Trader Joe’s sparkling wine respectively. They had started the night making the kind of pleasant small talk that normal couples do (ie: how was your day? / what are we eating for dinner tomorrow? / will you pretty please go to the farmer’s market with me over the weekend?), but it had eventually shifted its way into their usual light bickering. A casual mention of the Ayn Rand section of Eddie’s bookshelf lead from one thing to another, and suddenly they were engaged in a not-so casual banter about Rand’s theory of objectivism for upwards of half an hour.

“Hey, not fair, of course I agree that creativity fuels society,” he responded to Eddie’s latest point. “But Rand makes it seems like capitalism is the only thing that gets us there when it’s like, honestly counterproductive if you ask me. She writes Anthem to create this dystopia without the free market and she goes ‘Look, individuality, the ability to invent, it all gets lost!’, but that is so absurd. In reality it’s capitalism that’s holding us back from genuine creation. I mean, have you watched a Hallmark movie recently? That’s a rhetorical question, I know you haven’t watched a Hallmark movie recently, I hope you haven’t watched a Hallmark movie recently, but if you had you would know that it’s just like, the same plot about a Christmas tree and a small town and the vaguely sexist sentiment of women giving up their corporate jobs to stay at home and bake cookies. Hallmark movies are just a microcosm of the way that art based on profit as opposed to art based on a genuine desire to make fulfilling art kills creativity. And now I’m upset that you got me heated enough to use the word microcosm unironically. Pass me that.” He plucks the joint from Eddie’s fingertips and takes a deep inhale, blowing it upwards in a concentrated puff. He takes a sip from his TJ’s can before fixating his gaze back on Eddie, accompanying it with a playful grin. “If you admit that I’m right I’ll reward you with some good news. Or if you’re not willing to admit that I’m right but still want the news then we can work on drafting a compromise. I think we could give the Treaty of Versailles a run for its money if we wanted to, but the Armistice of Mudros would be a bit trickier to outdo. They really had their verbiage down in 1918.”

#c: edward seong #raph content after five years <333

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thessalian · 4 years

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Thess vs Current Events

I really need to stop talking about current events with my mother. Unfortunately, at the moment it’s almost entirely unavoidable.

We talk, my mother and I, about once a week so that we can check in with each other, that kind of thing. She’s also offering help until my benefits come through, which is pretty much necessary at this point. Thing is, our views on what’s going on with the pandemic ... well, like our views on damn near everything else, they’re a little at odds. Turns out that my mother is very quickly coming around to the view of “We’ll have to end the lockdown soon and if people die, they die” and “it only kills somewhere between 1-3% of the people who get it, so...” Basically the slightly less overtly offensive version of “Kill the weak”. Never mind that we don’t actually have solid numbers about the death toll from this thing because they’re not counting people who die in care homes or at home. Never mind that the WHO is talking about the high likelihood of reinfection. Never mind that, as my mother herself said, there may never be a vaccine, and there certainly won’t be one any time soon. These are all incidental, says my mother. We have to get back to work, she says.

She doesn’t even have a horse in this race. She’s basically retired, and can work from home anyway. But she’s taken a weirdly gentle but very firm stance that those of us who go to work for longer hours than are actually productive for less pay than we need to actually survive must go back and do so even if some of us will die, or spread a disease that will kill someone else, or both. Then again, I guess it’s easy for her to say that, since she is basically retired and can work from home anyway.

I mean, I get that ending lockdown is going to have to happen. I’m trying to keep an open mind on both arguments, mostly because at some point in the not too distant future, government policy is going to be swayed more by late stage capitalism than by human lives, and I’d rather brace myself for the disappointment. But it would be nice if there was at least some pretense that someone cares. I honestly wonder what she’d think if the lockdown ended prematurely, the second stage of the curve ramped up, and people she actually cares about died. ...She’d probably still say that it was necessary. Nice to know that my life, or my aunts’ lives, or her cousins’ lives, are expendable as sacrifices to the Great God Capitalism.

I think the part that bugged me most is that, when I was taking about articles I’d read that contradicted her stance that things would be basically okay (articles from trusted sources that I’d double-checked with due diligence, by the way), she just said, “Well, you can’t take that too seriously; there’s a lot of fake news out there”.

My mother actually said the words ‘fake news’.

It took every muscle in my body not to scream at her that maybe she shouldn’t be quoting a man who either completely unironically suggested people inject themselves with bleach, or who pranked reporters by making the comment ‘sarcastically’ in a live press conference (because that’s the actions of a great leader, right there, trolling the media during a time of global crisis).

There are about ten different reasons that this has not been a good day. That was one of the big ones. But at least I mostly got through the conversation unscathed.

#Thess on COVID #Thess has parental units

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infinitelytheheartexpands · 4 years

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Opera Character Asks: Modern Life Edition

Hey everyone, this might be a weird set of opera asks, but this is about opera characters if they were alive now, in the late 2010s. (By the way, I am a product of the 2010s, and some of these are based on my real-life friends and me.)

So, send me an opera title and a question number (or several!), and I’ll tell you which character or characters I think would most likely...

1. Have a blog?

2. Have a vlog?

3. Be an Instagram influencer?

4. Do the Tide Pod challenge?

5. Do the Number Neighbor challenge?

6. Make the funniest memes?

7. Make the most niche (but still funny) memes?

8. Use the same meme format for all their memes?

9. Be completely unable to read for context on social media posts?

10. Argue about politics on Twitter?

11. Attempt to mansplain to a woman who’s right?

12. Start a flame war?

13. Go viral (and how would they go viral)?

14. Be addicted to Starbucks?

15. Work at Starbucks but get fired (and why)?

16. Be Vine-famous if Vine still existed?

17. Make the most apology videos?

18. Use Tinder most often?

19. Work for a ride-sharing service?

20. Host a podcast (and what would it be about)?

21. Say “OK boomer” most often and buy a lot of “OK boomer” merch?

22. Be the recipient of an “OK boomer” comment?

23. Claim young people are killing capitalism?

24. Vote for Trump?

25. Have anxiety problems?

26. Make self-deprecating jokes only?

27. Be nihilistic?

28. Post “I wanna die” every day?

29. Lead a protest?

30. Use a live TV appearance to protest?

31. Use a live TV appearance to do something funny/stupid so they can go viral?

32. Become hopelessly confused about technology?

33. Apply for a job at Buzzfeed?

34. Enter the Hamilton ticket lottery every day?

35. Somehow win the Hamilton ticket lottery on the first try?

36. Have a catchphrase?

37. Try being vegan?

38. Binge-watch Netflix every weekend?

39. Wear crazy socks all the time?

40. Write fanfic?

41. Be addicted to Fortnite or Minecraft?

42. Stream video games on Twitch?

43. Tip service workers more than 20%?

44. Say people/things are “cancelled” most often?

45. Say “mood” in response to literally everything?

46. Speaking of which, use “literally” the most?

47. Be really, really good at escape rooms?

48. Be really, really bad at escape rooms?

49. Be fascinated by VR?

50. Enter one of the TV talent shows?

51. Make obscure references and then get upset when no one gets them?

52. Do satire?

53. Follow God’s Twitter account without actually paying attention to any of the tweets?

54. Unironically follow both God and Satan’s Twitter accounts?

55. Dab the most?

56. Be the person who changes the world for the better?

(Also, if you have any other question ideas, send them my way too!)

@madmozarteanfelinefantasy @lessthansix @simone-boccanegra @carlodivarga-s @widevibratobitch @artdalek @tornaloadir @parmandil @deadpanwalking @operasuggestion

#opera #opera tag #asks #opera asks #modern au #send me asks #send me questions #this’ll be fun

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feanor-the-dragon · 4 years

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lol you really responded to ‘Military Kids walk funny’ with “I could shoot you” Y I K E S how’s it feel to be a laughing stalk and an example of unnecessary violence. You wanna shoot me too pussy??? Will that make you feel better about the micropenis you obviously have???

Ooookay. Hoo boy, there’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s just dive right in!

Firstly, it’s “laughing stock” which I believe may be a reference to the stockade, or stocks, where criminals were once bound in a public square for days to be laughed at by the public... and also had things thrown at them, which often maimed or killed them. The stockade was pretty horrible, actually. It was a form of capital punishment that looked less severe on paper than execution did, but in the end was often tantamount to a death sentence but with even more humiliation. Anyway, it’s “stock,” not “stalk.”

Second, no one threatened anyone. I said, in a fit of wild self-parody, that I could nail someone from over the horizon with a BB gun... an obvious hyperbole, as that is clearly an utterly ridiculous claim. Even if a BB gun could shoot that far, the spherical ammunition would be far too unstable at the velocity necessary to achieve such a range for the weapon to be accurate at all. It could and would go miles off-target. This was, in fact, a reference to another stereotype often assigned to me by college friends who assumed that military kids all have, like, spec ops training or someshit. I’m a crack shot, but I’m no sniper, and I would never seriously claim to be. That involves, like, keeping track of wind speed and direction, and the Coriolis effect an shit, and that’s a bit much for me to deal with, tbh.

Thirdly, I find it interesting that because I made a single joke which you immediately took as a serious statement despite the obviously intentional absurdity of the claims, you think I’m the one to jump to violence? When, you know, you were the one who started telling me to kill myself? I actually rather dislike real fights, and, with the exception of knocking down a few dickheads who walked out on campus with KKK hoods on, I’ve managed to avoid getting into physical altercations for the most part. I probably couldn’t shoot a person if I had to, and I don’t like my odds in a shootout because of it. I own exactly one firearm, a .22 Henry rifle, which stays locked safely unloaded in its case except for when I take it out to plink targets at the city shooting range every few months. Violence has it’s place, but, seriously, the ability to hurt and kill should carry incredible weight and never be used flippantly. You know... like a certain anon tried to do by telling me to kill myself some time ago. Do you tell other people to kill themselves? Have you considered how horrible it is to rob someone of their will to live to the point where they take their own life? Is that not tantamount to pulling the trigger?

Fourth, playing into a joke about a stereotype does not mean that I actually fit the stereotype. In fact, that’s a pretty widely used form of humor, sort of like the court jester going “yes, that’s definitely how it works, oh king,” except I was joking and not even being biting with my satire.

Fifth, I would like to address that military kids do not actually walk like that, since apparently you were being completely unironic and serious with that post. We walk like normal fucking people. What you’re thinking of is the ROTC peeps, who do march, because they’re having it drilled into them and they’re proud of it. Again, this was a stereotype which I found amusing because people who met me in college were surprised to learn I was a military kid, as I walked without marching and didn’t look like a bodybuilder.

And finally, my dude, if you have to insult a guy’s manhood in a completely unrelated conversation, it makes it pretty obvious that that’s where your own insecurities lie. It’s okay. I’m certain you are more than adequate in that department. It’s really all about how you use it, after all. But, believe it or not, not everyone’s self-worth is tied to the size of their genitals and how often they use them. Some people have other measurements of self-worth and other sources of self-esteem. I recommend you find one, like, I dunno, a hobby weaving baskets or doing pottery or something.

If you would like to respond to me, you can do it on anon, that’s fine. Just like, put the number 2 somewhere in the message so I know you aren’t just spewing knee-jerk responses and recycling old material.

To the rest of yall, you know... I accept and answer non-hostile asks too, and I would absolutely love to answer some asks that aren’t from people who have convinced themselves that my ADHD, left-leaning, capitalism disliking, want’s to eat the rich, nazi-hating ass is a fascist. Like, seriously, ask me anything.

#asks #anon #boot boi #the saga continues #tw: suicide mention #I probably shouldn't be responding to them #but it's oddly cathartic

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hozukitofu · 5 years

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the kids are doing espionage

He would like to preface everything by a singly stated -

It was Qing's idea.

He is only a simple tech boy, a robotic engineering undergrad, someone who just wants to corrupt enough of the capitalistic system and its funds to fund his recycling robot, to delete the littering problems around campus.

The facts that he happens to know like one bad form of martial arts and by virtue of being a robotics student, great with tools and improvised weapon creation, are irrelevant. Besides the point.

But Qing is deep down, within that core of his questionably existing heart, an opportunist - an investor of assets. She sees potential, she invests in it. That's always how it goes.

Zizhen is eating, simply existing, thinking about robots and redeeming himself at a round of chess with uncle Shao when Qing barges into his absolutely mundane life, waving a USB stick in front of his nose, crowing about how she cracked the capitalism code.

Normally he would care.

"That's great, cool, jie, but -" he doesn't even have time to bat the excited blonde away before a proposition is coerced into his food.

"You! Wanna be an anti-government agent?"

Zizhen almost drops his fork.

"I'm sorry," he blinks, not even bothering with his food any longer because his appetite had taken a nose dive out the processing plants by the back of the college. "What. Did you just say?"

Qing was going to elaborate, but he doesn't let her.

"No, it was rhetorical - jie! I'm not becoming your agent for hire! I'm too soft for killing people!" He denies, vehemently, because look at him! He wears clothes that have to oblige by fluffy and big standard, and his hair cannot be let loose outside of the house if it isn’t wavy and bouncy.

Doctor Wei calls him marshmallow unironically, on top of Romantic Guy, with debatable nuances under the friendly moniker because that’s his life goal, to be as soft and sweet as humanly possible. He is only someone who strives to dismantle the system in the ways he clumsily knows how to, but he always goes back to helping people at the end of the day.

Becoming a hitman for hire is never something he would consider, or ever would.

Qing badgered and wheedled, bombarded him with the benefits, the sheer overwhelming scale of everything good and pure tipping and burying onto his side of the balancing plates, to which he avoids, like one would, if a pack of mosquitoes with malaria starts heading your way. He had blended into the crowd. Worn disguises to avoid this woman's hawkish eyesight. Climbed out a window to avoid persecution and inevitable screeching. Legitimately broke into a dead sprint across the canteen as soon as he spotted Song-Xiao Qing looking for him.

One of these days she will catch up to him, and she will skin him alive, but not today. He weaves around busy college students arriving and leaving their lecture halls, his long arms tucked closely to his chest so that nobody snags them off him. It is a laborious chase that she incurred onto his person, and he dreads the reality where she finally hacks into a computer somewhere and puts a tracker onto him so that she can be two steps ahead of him and then she can beat him into the ground on the basis of him avoiding her like she will personally break all of his robots inside and out.

"Ouyang Zizhen!" He hears a death roar, and runs faster.

Gotta put that threefold authentication code into all of his login devices so that the two steps pre-planning stage doesn't happen. Yes. But run first.

He’s fallen asleep across a horizontal surface - he’s pretty sure that this is the first horizontal surface his eyes park on and his brain immediately decreed that We’re napping. Now. ASAP pronto LOL.

He comes back to the world of living when he is toed awake by a person, voice vaguely threatening and familiar to his ears -

“Ouyang. Ouyang.”

“Noo,” he whines, thinking it to be his father. “Dad I have the day off.”

“Zizhen. You will wake up or I will walk all over your face. Your choice, sweet guy.”

He sits up, immediately awake.

Look, he’s a coward. He has high sensors in-built to detect approaching danger to his person. It’s how he made it beyond high school to go where he does now. It’s nothing to be proud of - surviving, just barely, in this cutthroat world is a goddamn miracle, if he has to say so himself. So what if he’s a coward. He’s still alive. That’s what matters.

Also he has a feeling that if he had keep on sleeping, he will open his eyes in the next life, as a bug. Because he had been horrifically murdered in this life and that death was so bad that a bug’s body is the only viable and painless reincarnation the gods deem fitting for little poor him.

“I’m up,” he wheezes, vertigo slamming onto his head. “I’m physically with you but my brain had just taken a holiday. Please allow it some time to return.”

“I don’t need your brain for this,” Qing beams at him, mouth spreading in a Joker-ish feral look. “I’ve got a favour to ask.”

I’ve got a favour to ask sounds exactly like those questions that ask you for something but if you deny, you will die on sight.

The way his upperclassman is smiling at him gives him all the answers he has.

“What,” he grouses, mouth twisting, pulling his hoodie even more over his forehead and eyes, covering the majority of his freckles. They’re still here despite the lack of hours he spends in active avoidance of the sun and the majority of this goddamn school hates the sight of freckles like they’re something contagious so his instincts mostly had been ‘cover up’.

“Someone took something from me and I need a boy to get it back for Yours Truly,” she smiles, still feral and not the least friendly.

He squints suspiciously at her. “Why a boy. Is this hard even for you, lawbreaker extraordinaire?”

“I need a boy, you stupid robot builder,” she rolls her eyes, throwing a hairband onto the table in front of him. “Because someone from Gusu took my things and on virtue of me being a woman, I can’t enter without the security shooting me on sight.”

He groans out loud and slumps even further onto the table, hoping to become one with the recycled plastic.

“I don’t even go there. They’ll shoot me on sight too. They have stun guns -”

She cuts him up, retying her space buns. He lets out a huff of hysterical air and rethinks back to every wrong decision he had ever taken in this life.

“Which they’re not allowed to use on trespassers, chill. Listen, how you get it isn’t my problem. Get me the thing and I’ll squander all the favours you owe me.”

This sparks his interest. A-Qing is stingy. The stingiest person he has the misfortune of ever running across. She studies economics. She lives on cash alone. Just. Cash. She hoards money and favours and then harvests them like produce of her questionable farm.

Ouyang Zizhen owes Qing a lot of money for the completion of his robotics projects and the launch of his career as a junior lab assistant to the research team of the mechanical engineering department. She did all that, knowing that her investments were wise, and she constantly lords the favour over his head.

It sounds great, to get rid of one Song-Xiao Qing infinitely, but he can’t help but wonder if the catch, beyond You’ll die if you trespass Gusu like the absolute moron that you are. This sounds like it’s much more than just a suicide run. It sounds more like...a test? Of sorts?

“All the favours?” He looks up, hood slipping, his freckles all in glorious sight and judging his upperclassman. “Are you sure?”

Qing-jie grins at him, looking every bit like the crook she is. “Are you?”

“Heck, yes, why do you even ask. But I feel like you’re betting too much on this. How do you know if I’ll come back for you to squander all your favours for me? Seems fishy.”

“You’ll come back,” she waves him away. “I wouldn’t swear on it if I’m not sure. So, what of it, marshmallow? You want in?”

He can’t say no anyways. “You know I can’t say no,” he scowls, and refuses to shake her hand. “If I don’t come back, tell my father to take all my robots. And burn me paper money.”

Qing cackles right at his face. “You’re exaggerating, kid. It’ll be fine. I swear on it.”

“Your words are all lies anyways! Shut up!”

Research on how to get into Gusu? Actually kinda fun.

Actually sneaking into Gusu unscathed? Less fun. Bordering on traumatic.

Technically he knows the blueprints. Technically he knows that the scanning gates at the southern entry can fit an entire person if they just, like, lie down and limbo through the gaps of the plastic closing gates. Technically eight twenty-seven in the night is the time gap that he can safely limbo through without getting zapped by a stun gun. Technically from here he can just jog to the international student’s dorm and scale to the second floor, open the window fourth from the right, slide in, get the thing from under the desk, get out the way he did before, go home, change his name, get plastic surgery, genetically rewrite his fingerprints and DNA makeup, move back to Baling, call it quits.

Technically he knows all of this, but he had just slid through a scanning gate and his heart is trying to punch out of his own ribs. He’s wheezing as if he climbed up a mountain twice for no reason at all. None of this makes sense. Why is he here. He should go home. There’s still time. Father will be tired and disappointed but when is he not.

No, his brain, traitorous, but also wanting to get rid of the human leech Song-Xiao Qing, mutters. No we will get back that bundle for Her Highness and then leave her presence indefinitely. That’s what we’ll do.

He swings his feet, nothing short of Spiderman, into the intended room, huffing as it wastes him no effort.

Too easy. Smells exactly like a trap.

It’s nearly curfew, except that people haven’t been rushing back through the easy way in, because he saw people coming out and they pretended to not see him as he came in. Are they stupid. Are they not going to come back for roll call and suffer the wrath of Lan Qiren? Or worse, He Who Must Not Be Named.

He reaches for the bundle, stuffs it under his hoodie, and prepares for take off, when a door swing open and someone walks in, without turning the lights on.

His danger alarms not only went off, but into overtime and exhaustive underpaid labour.

“Ouyang?” He hears, hissed in the dark.

He should have covered his face, because wow he didn’t think he was that popular outside of his own robotics class for setting off that fire alarm back in first year. But. He is digressing from this imminent danger! This voice. That sounds distinctly similar.

“Do we know each other?” He hisses, crouching back in a Spongebob stance, eyes narrowed at the boy in the cats-covered face mask. He can’t make a run for it here but he can try for the knee caps.

“Yes. Oh my god, yes,” the person pulls his face mask down and lo and behold, it’s -

“Lan? Lan Jingyi?” He gapes, while sidestepping a stray tennis ball lobbing at his head. “Why are you here?”

Jingyi shoots back at him - “I go here. Why are you here?”

He throws up one hand, the other preoccupied with the bundle - “Qing-jie!”

“Bad answer, but expected,” Jingyi tuts his tongue, and shoves him out of the way. “You don’t seem the type to engage in trespass and theft.”

“Ha ha, pot calling the kettle black,” he sneers back, tracing back his steps. “Why are you here here. I know you go here, but this isn’t your room. Or anyone else’s room that you are affiliated with. It’s the international student wing. You never answered my question.”

He would not receive any answers because there are footsteps, grave and reverent footsteps, that bring pandemonium outside the corridor and Jingyi, not even thinking twice, shoves him into a wardrobe, finger on his lips.

“Quiet,” the boy hisses. “And when he’s gone, you can scram.”

Zizhen thinks that is the end of it, but somehow his bundle! Had gone missing from under his hoodie! When! And how!

“Lan, give that back!” He hisses, almost lunging and falling out of the closet. Jingyi shushes him even louder, forcing the doors to close in on his nose and shoes.

He grabs onto a wrist, clinging onto the arm stubbornly. Jingyi jostles his shoulder violently like he’s got himself a human-sized limpet that won’t let go and he elects to kicking it back to the depth of the closet, telling him to ‘stay put, come on, don’t make this harder for us’.

Zizhen is shoved back into the darkness of a small enclosed space with hangers falling onto his head and clothes dropping onto his shoulders. The tracking sticker he placed on his fingertip had migrated from him to the inside of Lan Jingyi’s hoodie. Now he waits.

There is a polite knock - because that’s Lans for you, polite even in walking and knocking.

Jingyi answers the door with a soft - “Hello, uncle.”

For a moment Zizhen thought he actually screwed up and somehow stumbled head first into Lan Qiren of all people on the night he attempted trespass and theft, but he listens some more, waiting for the dulcet tones of disapproval that the Lan Headmaster is so famed for dishing out at his relatives slash pupils.

“Jingyi,” he hears, and. Well.

This is worse than Lan Qiren. Somehow he had messed up even worse than Lan Qiren.

Lan Wangji, the Hanguang-Jun, is in the same room as him. The professor reliable for dishing out punishments at Gusu. The resting disappointed man. Doctor Wei’s long-term crush and object of pursuit. He’s caught. He’s gone. They’re going to string his corpse like a disappointing sight from here so that all across the country, people can see what happens when idiot college boys who sneak into prestigious Gusu get as a punishment.

He is suddenly religious. He asks for protection from the Buddha to the corner ghost to the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.

“I suggest you return to your own dorm,” Lan Wangji gravely - and flatly - informs Lan Jingyi. “Unless you want to introduce me to your friend?”

Lan Jingyi, for someone doing a theatre degree, is woefully awful at lying. He starts laughing hysterically and like a bloody hyena under noise suppression and the target of at least twenty stun guns and he’s lost all sense of control so now his fight or flight response is to laugh.

Ouyang Zizhen regrets not leaving his father with a dying letter. It’ll be awful and humiliating to find him as a human flag on the top of Gusu’s flagpole.

“What friend, Uncle Wangji? It’s only me here!” Jingyi hacks out hysterically, as footsteps start heading his way, purposeful and brisk.

There goes living through tonight then.

“Hmn, what’s in the closet, Jingyi?” Hanguang-Jun asks, as the doors of the wardrobe rattle and -

promptly stop.

Jingyi, because he’s panicking and somehow is still the greatest and most shocking improvised line under possibly murderous circumstances, blurts out, completely and utterly from nowhere.

“That closet is fine. It has no one in it! Well, not me anymore!”

Zizhen can barely swallow down the wheeze that tries to climb its way out of his nose because what.

To his credit though, Lan Wangji stops his advance onto his hiding place, and promptly takes Lan Jingyi out of the room, so he hopes that he’s not being thrashed thoroughly for well, being gay, but in keeping it and using it as a distraction tactic on their Hanguang-Jun.

Zizhen quickly kicks the doors open and tumbles out, sliding the window up and climbing out, his watch telling him dimly that he has two more minutes before curfew comes and security tightens. He would check on Lan, but he’ll be fine. Hanguang-Jun isn’t a blind rule follower as the people make him out to be - by people, he meant just Doctor Wei, who went through a period of time in his life actively cursing and mooning over Lan Wangji, and it’s entertaining and just embarrassing to bear witness to. No. Bad memories. Let’s forget that and go back and report to Qing-jie.

He’s going to start breaking ankles the next time Lan Yuan asks for a big hang out.

“He took the bundle from you? Without touching you?”

“I snuck in the death place for that stupid bundle and that’s all you cared about?”

“Damn Lan. Anyways, good job, it’s fine, I’m seeing the golden trio in, like, ten hours. We can haggle the bundle back.”

He hears this, but he also has the tracker sticker. Does it work? Does it not work? Unclear. He’s not too sure. He hasn’t been doing this illegal theft and tracking gig for long. He lets Qing-jie and her favours reinstate themselves as constant reminders in his life as he stumbles back to his laptop and kick starts it to see how he’s going to not set a hoodie and a person on fire.

The good news is Lan Jingyi and his Lan Approved Hoodie will not be catching on fire.

The even better news is that he can get rid of Song-Xiao Qing for life now, because he knows where the package is.

The bad news is that the package is in Jin Rulan’s home. His room, to be specific.

Okay, so maybe he met Jin Rulan a few times when he went to archery tournaments to cheer on Lan Yuan, a friend but also practicing archer to become as great as Wen Ning, Olympic-level archer. Maybe he and Jin Rulan had gotten into a few arguments over pointless things in the past, like all stupid middle schoolers do. The point is that since his friend is a friend of Rulan, he has the honour of being flung at, in the face, with the address of his sizable family manor, because Jin Rulan can and will, with no preamble or social niceties, and so now Zizhen knows where he lives.

Not that a simple Google search wouldn’t tell him which place this is, but being reminded with Jin Rulan, a runt then, probably a runt now, he hasn’t seen the kid in like, two years. A-Yuan doesn’t want him to start testing his robots on real life people and everyone who had ever interacted with Zizhen knows who’s first on his list to be humanly pitted (sorry, tested) against his robots.

He bikes to the manor, easily buzzes his way in with a screwdriver and some tinkling with the system, and strolls right through the front door.

He did do research before this. Everyone’s out. Jin Rulan is out. He’ll just take the bundle and leave, and they don’t have to talk about it anymo -

Lan Jingyi tackles him to the floor from behind the door to Jin Rulan’s room, with a distant bark of a guard dog and Jin Rulan’s dulcet tones shrieking the heavens, hard, so that his dead ancestors can rise as zombies in the night and slap Zizhen back to Baling.

“How is he here?” He can hear Rulan yelling distinctly, as he grapples with Jingyi and rips the sticker cleanly from under his sleeve.

Jingyi and him get along okay. When A-Yuan wants people to wait for him after guqin recitals, he has Zizhen and Jingyi wait for him, and they play jianzi as they quiz each other on class things they should know, bickering back and forth. They played soccer together a few times, and Jingyi’s good - Jingyi’s training to be in the under 20′s representative Asian Games in a few months. They get along fine. They love literature and art. Zizhen doesn’t want to set a short-circuiting robot onto him.

Literally there is no reason for Jingyi to wrestle him to the ground like this outside of the context of a soccer match.

“You found us, how,” Jingyi demands, frowning. “Did you put a tracker on me?”

He huffs, bunching up his knees and kicking up, before rolling away with the bundle. “I will neither confirm or deny your accusations. Goodbye.”

Rulan is at the window, slamming it shut, and holding out a hand, snarling rabidly at him. The scuffle he was tackled into had knocked over metal plates and car parts all over the floor, everything looks like it’s a disaster zone, if he was at home then Father would have lost it. The shining mistress of the Jin family snarls at him, forcing him to step away from the window with the sight of his sharp canines alone, eyes narrowing at him and his bundle.

“Give that over,” he frowns. “And then you can scram.”

“I broke into your house to get it back,” he stresses, with hysterical stress. “No.”

“No can’t do, Ouyang,” Jingyi’s voice drifts to him, as his wrist is seized. “We need it.”

“And Qing-jie needs it, but none of y’all are telling me what you need it for -”

The door eases open with a loud creak, like a bow on an erhu string gone wrong, and both boys might as well have screamed in his face because the expressions on their faces are thunderous.

“Uncle!” Jingyi squeaks.

“Uncle!” Rulan also yips, stepping away from the window, and coming over to -

Oh my god he needs to scream.

Doctor Wei and Hanguang-Jun are at the door, brows raised in vague interest at the war zone spilling out all over their socked feet, Doctor Wei humming interestedly at their thunderstruck and mutually devastated faces.

Jin Rulan is almost the same height as his uncle but he’s looking as if somebody ran over his finessed bow. He and Jingyi, who unhands Zizhen quickly, are both standing and arms splaying, kicking and shifting so that the mess of robot parts are somewhat not so obviously sprawling all over the floor.

“A-Zhen!” Doctor Wei beams, and proceeds to squeeze him in a hug until he dies, stuffing his face into a shirtfront with too much Versace sprayed all over it. “You didn’t say you were friends with the kids!”

“We don’t know each other,” he squeezes out, gasping as he’s released.

“Not a friend,” Rulan vehemently denies.

Lan Wangji lifts two unimpressed eyebrows. Rulan swallows back whatever else he was meant to say.

“Occasionally a friend?” Jingyi amends.

He turns and gripes at the Lan boy - “How can someone be occasionally a friend, you lump of spineless potato?”

“His insults are creative,” Doctor Wei notes, half way between an explanation and a praise. “Listen, kids -”

He then gets cut off by Jingyi and Rulan, talking not only over each other, but in synching fragmented sentences.

Jingyi “Uncles, we’re going to pack this up, we know you need the house for guests to come over -”

“ - and we will introduce you and acquaint everyone, but this guy needs to hand over his things first and then everyone can go,” Rulan finishes, hand still reaching out to Zizhen and his bundle.

He tries to step away, but two much taller men - Lan Wangji and Doctor Wei, are in his way, benevolently smiling and stoically staring down at him, and he feels his resolve crumbling. In fear, but also they are educators and they’ve perfectly polished the I’m not angry at you, I’m just disappointed and very very sad.

“Sounds like a party in here,” he hears the dreaded singsong, the sound of the dead coming to collect his soul and putting him through all the levels of hell.

Song-Xiao Qing pokes her head around Lan Wangji’s elbow and beams at him. “Oh you’re here! I thought I had to call for you! You made my job so easy, marshmallow boy.”

“Uh,” he’s still being held captive by Doctor Wei. “Please. Explain.”

Lan Yuan finally emerges, serene, beautiful, refreshing and soft-spoken.

“Many apologies for my family’s treatment of you, Zizhen-xiong. Would you like some tea?”

The gist of it is this -

It was a test. And his gut feelings were correct.

And the test was Would Ouyang Zizhen Make Good Agent. Apparently he passed, because nobody expected him to pursue the bundle all the way to the Jin Manor, along with wrestling with Jingyi so fiercely.

“You -” he looks at Qing-jie, who is sipping chrysanthemum tea so calmly, as if she hadn’t led him on some wild goose chase. “I actually have no words. That was very clever.”

“I have words,” Jin Rulan, apparently part of whatever the hell this is too, whinges from his post at the arm of Lan Wangji’s chair. “Why him?”

“What, besides the obvious?” Jingyi looks at his friend. “He held me off, and snuck into Gusu. Like, impressive?”

“The sticker was a nice touch,” Qing-jie notes. “Although we did make it easy on ya.”

“He’s calm,” A-Yuan smiles at him. “You’re very calm, even though you opposed to this vehemently.”

He gestures broadly, to Everyone Present. “I can’t exactly freak out before this peanut gallery. I want to live past 5 pm today. I have an aunt’s dinner I have to go to. I can’t die before that.”

A-Yuan shrugs like that’s a good answer. It is. He knows. He has a few fire-breathing aunts himself.

“So,” someone prompts. “About this -”

“The answer is still no,” he looks over specifically at Qing-jie, who he knows no doubt will be sending him on more of these trips.

“You did good though,” Jingyi notes. “Considering that you improv like, 9 out of 10 things.”

“Well excuse me for being new at this stuff, how am I supposed to -” he stops his snapping tone as a familiar face walks by, blinking widely as the entourage of idiots who may or may not are influencing a youth in joining the forces to lawbreaking. How is Hanguang-Jun in the middle of this, he just wants to talk. He swallows his caustic words, and cautions a wave to the boy. “Hey, A-Song.”

A-Song bows back to everyone. “Zizhen-xiong -”

“Calling me gege is fine, sheesh, this kid -”

“I’ll see you at tutoring, gege,” A-Song, Jin Rusong, literally the sweetest kid ever, smiles back politely, before he retreats back to where he has to go back to, leaving their Idiot Entourage to their own.

“You know my cousin?” Rulan quirks a judgemental eyebrow.

“Yes,” he replies, tersely. “Can you not pay attention? He said tutoring. I tutor him. Shut up, I’m only mean to you because you’ve an awful personality.”

Nobody is sure who laughed but there is a ripple of a muffled laugh as Rulan screeches that I’ll have your head, Ouyang!

“Our deal is off,” Qing-jie snaps her fingers before his face. “You can go now.”

“Just like that?” He squints, suspicious. “No forcing?”

“No forcing,” Doctor Wei smiles, the same Jiang-Wei smile that put the cardiac arrest in people’s hearts. People being undergraduates. “We’ll win you over one of these days,” Doctor Wei slaps a fist to a palm. “Our doors are always open for you to join, A-Zhen.”

Lan Wangji levels a stare at him. “Hmn.”

He’s not quite sure how Doctor Wei isn’t freaking out in the presence of his beloved Lan-er gege but he’s not going to ask or go there. He has a dinner to go to.

“Well,” he stands, and bows, because he still has manners. “I’ll be taking my leave?”

“I’ll see you off,” Doctor Wei also stands, turning to the four idiot monkeys first. “Here ya go, kids. Don’t be playing hot potato with that now.”

It’s then that he realises that his bundle is gone, yet again, and Doctor Wei had only hugged him once.

“Shall we go?” The Doctor’s eye glints, and he wants to bolt out the door.

“How are you a part of this too?” He hisses to the Good Doctor, the top medical examiner of the goddamn country and youngest biology professor in his college, as he is shown out.

“I’ll tell you when you join,” is the cryptic answer he gets, as the doors close behind him.

Tell me, his Kermit brain says. But then you’ll have to join, his rational robotics brain whispers back.

Zizhen elects to just scream at the door and turns on his heels marching out.

The nerve of some people!

#mdzs #future fic #modern college AU #ouyang zizhen #lan jingyi #a-qing #jin ling #lan sizhui #jin rusong #lan wangji #wei wuxian #there is a universe where people fear lwj more than lan qiren #it is here #spy AU #this is so stupid please love it for me

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justice-for-shayla · 5 years

Text

Survivor’s Guilt Part One

A/N: I’m so pleased to finally have this done. It took ages and I have so many drafts of it, but I’m finally happy with it. So far I have two parts of this, and I would probably write more in this universe if you like it! The next chapter is shameless smut.

Summary: You’re an actress whose been through something horrible and tragic, finally starting to get her career and life back on track. Josh is assistant directing a movie with his father, starring you. The two of you recognize each other as survivors, and it unites you in an unexpected way.

Word Count: 1800

Tag List: None, feel free to ask to be tagged!

Warnings: Panic attacks, violence mention, blood,

You’re not the type to sleep with the director’s son, or the assistant director, so when they’re both rolled into one, it should be obvious that Josh Washington is a bad idea.

But he’s a goddamn gorgeous bad idea, and you’re known for being a little reckless.

The tabloids liked to say that your ‘incident’ as they liked to call it, pretending to care about the seriousness of the matter, had left you as a shameless adrenaline junky, addicted to bad choices.

That pissed you off; you’d been an adrenaline junky for a long time before what had happened to you, but no one had paid attention before that.

The first time you saw Josh was like looking in a mirror. Not because the two of you resembled each other at all, but you recognized the look in his eyes perfectly; you’d seen it in your mirror every day since you woke up in that hospital after being rescued. He flirted and joked, hiding his pain well, but you saw through him.

That didn’t stop you from flirting back, hiding behind it just as much as he was.

“Morning, Josh,” You said, smiling brightly as you walked by him on set.

He lifted his head off the table and gestured vaguely at you with his cup of coffee. “Too early.”

Laughing, you pull up a chair and sit next to him. “The trick is to never sleep, then you can’t wake up too early.”

“That… sounds wrong, but too tired,” Josh muttered.

Reaching over, you ruffle his hair, something you hadn’t tried before; the two of you joked with each other, but didn’t really touch. The gesture perks him up a little, and he lifts his head all the way off the table to look at you.

You smile back. “It works for me. You should try it.”

Slowly, he manages a smile in return. “What would I do all night?”

“I’m sure you could think of something.” You decide that winking would be over the top, but your tone does the work for you; he knows what you mean.

For a moment, he’s speechless, but he recovers quickly. “Are you, um, ready for today?”

You’re so surprised by the question that you ask honestly. “No. I’m nervous.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, what about it?” The words come out harsher than you mean them, and you hate your defensive tone.

He shrugs, backing down. “I guess I just thought you were fearless.”

Tears prick at the back of your eyes and you blink furiously for a moment. “I guess I’m a better actor than I thought,” You say with a hollow laugh.

“After everything you’ve been through—” For once, he’s not joking. His eyes are wide and sincere and he stands up to step closer to you.

“Y/N!”

Both of you jump and turn towards the PA that had called you, stepping apart. “I’ll be right there! Sorry, Josh, I should go, but um, catch you later?”

“Yeah, definitely. You know where to find me.”

Filming goes well for the first half of the day. Your stress is rising the more time you spend in the woods, which feel too similar to the ones you almost hadn’t made it out of, but you fight the feeling, pushing it far to the back of your mind and focusing on work.

It gets worse when you see the blood. It’s not real, and it looks too red when it’s sitting in buckets and bags lying around next to lighting rigs, but your stomach still turns.

Josh seems just as uncomfortable around it, stealing glances like he thinks it might come to life at any moment.

“You okay?” You ask quietly in a spare moment.

He looks lonely and far away when he answers. “Yeah. Fine.”

“If you want to talk,” You offer lamely, “You know where to find me.”

He attempts a smile. “You have your own shit to deal with.”

He’s right, but you don’t want to agree with him. You’d rather talk about his shit than yours. Whatever it is, surely it’s not as bad as what’s haunting you? You can’t think of anything worse than your kidnapping, than the man who had killed your friend and tried to kill you.

“There she is!” Ezra walked over and tossed an enthusiastic arm around your shoulders. “Our very own Final Girl, how are you feeling?”

“Dad,” Josh hisses, but Ezra doesn’t seem to hear him.

“Good thanks.” Your smile is stiff on your face, but you would rather chew off your own toe than tell Ezra that you’re scared to film the next scene.

He smiles benignly and turns to go. “You’re going to kill this, Y/N, it’s why I cast you.”

You can’t help but glare at his retreating back. You know why he cast you, and it was because of the media attention this film was getting for casting a real life serial killer survivor as its leading lady. Part of you was disgusted, but the other part was thrilled at the opportunity it presented for your career.

Someone calls five and you look at Josh, forcing a slightly better smile. “Guess it’s time to capitalize shamelessly on my trauma.”

He laughs, but somehow you don’t think he found your joke funny. “Be careful, okay?”

“Yeah, of course. I mean, it’s all fake anyway, right? It can’t hurt me.” You hope that saying that will make it true. He doesn’t answer as you walk away to do your job.

Jerry, the guy playing the killer, smiles at you before lowering the spooky mask he wears throughout the film. It should be comforting to know that the nightmare man of the film is actually a forty-something guy with a wife and two kids who unironically likes pro wrestling, but it isn’t. Already, in the dim light of the forest, things are starting to feel real. Too real.

It’s the blood that finally snaps you. It comes from off camera, soaking you while you run, and that’s when you start to scram. Dimly, you can hear Ezra’s enthusiasm, he loves what you’re doing with the role, but you aren’t doing anything. You��re horrified.

This is real. The blood is Emma’s, and she’s dead. That man—you won’t even think his name—is distracted for a moment and you seize the chance to hit him and run into the woods. You don’t know where you are and the blood is in your eyes and your lungs and running down your skin.

You keep screaming after Ezra calls cut, only stopping when you run out of breath.

Everyone is staring at you.

You can barely see them, still too trapped in your own memories.

“Y/N, sweetie?” Ezra starts, but Josh cuts him off.

“Fuck off, Dad,” He crosses over to you, taking your hands in his and rubbing them gently. “What street did you grow up on?”

It’s an odd question, but you answer him, voice timid and foreign in your ears.

He nods, “That’s good. Did you live on any other streets?”

You shake your head; your parents didn’t move until after your ‘incident’ as they called it.

“What high school did you go to?” You tell him that too. “What street was it on?”

Again, you answer, and you realize that slowly the set is starting to feel real again. The memories are going back to the dark place in your mind where they usually are, rather than right at the front. You look down at your hands, still held in his and gag when you see the blood. You know its fake, but it looks real enough. Clawing at it, you try to get it off, to get yourself clean.

Josh grips you hands. “Stop, Y/N. It’s not real.”

“I need to get it off, I can’t… It’s too—”

“Come on.” He lets go of one of your hands and leads you away, past the cameras and the people and his father. He barely looks at them, only stopping to look at his father and say calmly, “Y/N is taking the rest of the day off.”

His father nods mutely and lets the two of you go.

In a better frame of mind, you might have felt bad about walking off set in costume, and about sitting in Josh’s nice car while still soaked in fake blood, but you’re took out of it to care right now, instead storing it to apologize later.

“I rented an apartment in the area so that I wouldn’t have to commute to set,” Josh explains as you drive. “It’s closer than anywhere else I could take you.”

You nod, still mute and lost in memories. On closer inspection, the blood doesn’t really look like Emma’s did, but that doesn’t make you feel much better.

The drive passes in a silent blur; you’re glad Josh doesn’t try to push conversation. After parking, he leads you up to a small, simply furnished apartment and locks the door behind him.

You stand frozen in the middle of the room, not sure what to do now.

“Y/N?” He seems to realize that you’re not able to do anything, so he gently leads you to the bathroom with a hand on your back. He turns on the shower and waits for it to get warm. “You can wash the blood off if you want?”

You still don’t move, feeling stupid and confused and more than anything you don’t want him to leave you alone. That’s what they did when they first rescued you. As nice as those nurses had been, they left you so you could wash off, probably thinking that they were doing you a favor, but you remember screaming as soon as you saw the blood in the water.

“Y/N?” He sighs when you don’t respond and carefully starts to undo the buttons on your shirt, peeling it off you all while assuring you that you’re safe, that everything is alright. He removes his own shirt and jeans and guides you into the shower.

The process of washing all that blood off is slow, and you feel yourself waking up gradually as it happens. Josh runs a washcloth over you, and you watch as the red runs pink and trails down your skin and into the drain. It’s a disgusting relief.

Several minutes into it, you start to realize how strange this is. You’re half dressed, standing in Josh’s shower in shorts and a bra while he washes blood off of you. In a better mood, this would have been a nice fantasy; Josh is gorgeous. As it is, it’s mostly just extremely weird.

“You must think I’m insane,” You finally say, your voice barely above a whisper.

Josh doesn’t take his eyes off the patch of skin on your shoulder where he’s meticulously scrubbing the dried-on blood. “No, I don’t.”

You put your hand over his to stop him, forcing him to look at your face. “Thank you.”

He nods. “Do you want me to go? You can finish—”

“Stay.”

#Josh Washington #Josh Washington Imagine #Josh Washington x Reader #Until Dawn #Josh Washington x Reader imagine #Rami Malek x Reader #Rami Malek Imagine

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flatstarcarcosa · 5 years

Note

10-20 for you and rust or negan please!!!

i’ll do half and half!! o/

also putting under a cut b/c its long uwu

Negan:

What’s something you and your f/o disagree on?

we argue a lot about allocation of resources and also his ego. really dwight and i are the ones that run things behind the scenes, negan’s just the one who gets to do all the yelling. when the saviors were first becoming A Thing so to speak he was definitely in control and had the right ideas, but everything went to his head with being The ManTM and sometimes I have to try to remind him we’re supposed to be helping people, not just playing dictator. also I vehemently dislike the points system because it’s just Capitalism 2~~! and i think it’s imbalanced but I’ve yet to win that argument.

Do either of you want matching tattoos? If so, what would you get?

negan thinks matching tats are cool, i think they’re really bad. im also not willing to risk getting sick and fucking dying off of dirty tattoo equipment no matter what everyone else is doing so that is an argument he never wins. (i personally also think he would be a big baby when it comes to getting a tattoo, since comic!negs doesn’t have any)

Do you and your f/o like to dance together?

naaaah. i’m sure negan would go all soft for that kind of thing but neither one of us have any rhythm and i’m just not into it regardless.

When (if) you and your f/o live together, what thing do you always have to have in the house?

toilet paper. a good portion of the odder things negan demands from people comes from him having seen me struggle (and in some cases get really sick) from not having it when it was just the two of us. he thought i was being whiny at first about the toilet paper until not always having it resulted in me getting laid out with a massive UTI once due to the slightest less-than-sanitary conditions setting my whole system off.

he’d rather other people think he’s a weirdo than watch me get that sick again. (he also doesn’t like me being that sick because it reminds him of lucille. he can’t do much when i’m already sick, but if he can prevent me from getting sick in the first place then he’s damn well gonna.)

Who gets scared and calls the other to kill a spider?

MEEEEEEEE. negan doesn’t understand how the damn zombies don’t bother me but if we end up in a house that has spiders or roaches i will quite literally scream my head off. on more than one occasion he thought i was getting attacked just to find me scrambling up the nearest high surface and pointing at the bug until he does something about it.

raid and ortho and other types of pesticides usually end up on the list of shit he expects his people to come home with.

Rust

What’s a movie you and your f/o like to watch together?

jurrasic park. rust isn’t big on movies in general but he does enjoy a good flick about man’s hubris fucking everything up, and i for one, like dinosaurs and am gay for jeff goldblum so it works out.

Which one of you spends the most money on the other?

rust probably by virtue of him having more money than i do. he has a steady job with CID, + lots of stashes of cash that he lifted here and there during his UC/Narco days. i on the otherhand am a “freelance” investigative journalist/photographer that likes fucking off and getting stoned. it’s a very fancy way of saying unemployed. he also doesn’t let me hustle people as much as i used to once i move in with him just because he doesn’t want to constantly be playing the “state police” card when i get into trouble because of it.

come 2012 the situation’s kinda reversed. he blew through a lot of his money between his 8 year breakdown and subsequent obsession with solving the yellow king murder(s), and i ended up getting a stable office job because i needed that sweet, sweet health insurance.

What animal can you and your f/o agree on being the cutest?

dogs. i also highly enjoy my pet frogs and think they’re adorable. rust insists he doesn’t like the way they look at him and that they’re clearly planning something, though he’s willing to admit the last part is probably just his paranoid tendencies.

Who’s the best at comforting the other when they’re afraid?

we’re both pretty shit at it due to the fact that we’re on the same level of emotional incompetence. rust doesn’t admit to being afraid of anything (until his big 2012 revelation anyway) and neither do i. we just dig deeper into our maladaptive coping mechanisms and it becomes more of a question of who can pull the other one out.

95 rust spends a lot of time pulling me out of mine, and then from 02 to 04 i spend a lot of time literally having to chase him out of his, and by 2012 im still cranky that i had to go all the way to fucking alaska to snap him out of it. we compromise for a bit and live off the grid in washington until he decides to head back to Louisiana in 2010. we both get a bit better after that, with him mentioning he’s terrified he wont be able to bring down the tuttles and their whole ass cult, and i have to make him realize that yeah, he probably wont. thats just how things are, but at the very least he can do something against them, which is better than ignoring the whole issue. he also has a lot of guilt after bringing down childress that he didn’t notice it sooner.

“i talked to him,” is all he says sometimes. “he was right there in front of me and i had all of the information about the man with the scars and i walked away.”

i have to remind him that at that point in 95 he didn’t have all the information and that as good of a detective as he is, he isn’t omnipotent and there’s no way he could have known the random dude on the lawn mower was the ‘green eared spaghetti monster’.

Do you and your f/o play video games together? If so, what games?

it’s less playing together and more of rust just halfway paying attention as he works on other things. he gets into casual mobile games once they start becoming a thing, mostly puzzle games because they keep his mind occupied. a lot of times if i’m stuck on a mechanism in a game, like say the puzzles in uncharted or something similar, he’ll get exasperated with my frustration and just take the controller and figure it out for me. i get so annoyed that he can figure shit out in a game he knows nothing about in less than ten minutes after just watching me try and fail to open a hidden door a few times.

Do you two like pineapple on pizza or no?

pineapple on pizza is DISGUSTING but rust is also not picky and will frequently eat it just to watch me gag. he’ll make direct eye contact and everything because he’s a sadistic asshole.

also i feel like negan probably unironically loves it because he tends to have shit taste sometimes.

#memes #ship: far from any road #ship: you me and lucille #fordcortinamkiii #*asks

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allthefilmsiveseenforfree · 6 years

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Sorry To Bother You

You need to see this movie - even if you don’t like it. Normally I try to be a little coy in my reviews, leave my assessment until after the cut just to hook the people in, y’know, basic marketing stuff. But this review is different. First, there will be spoilers a-plenty because it’s tough to discuss the biggest themes of the film without getting into some big reveals. Second, this movie is WILD, y’all. LIke Being John Malkovich had a baby with Get Out and that one scene in RENT where Idina Menzel is doing the mooing. You think you know where it’s going and then IT GOES A WHOLE OTHER PLACE. But...it’s still a Hollywood movie with a roster of established stars. Writer/director Boots Riley can’t really be that audacious, right? Well...

It depends on how shocked you are by a coked-out Armie Hammer gleefully (and unironically) uttering the phrase, “You’ll have a horse cock.”

A basic plot summary - Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is struggling to pay the rent for the garage apartment he lives in with his artist girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson). He gets an entry-level telemarketing job at RegalView, but doesn’t have much success until an older, wiser employee (Danny Glover) advises him to use his “White Voice.” Cash does, to his sudden and great success - so much so that he gets promoted to Power Caller, and steps into the world of RegalView’s elite, led by Steve Lift (Armie Hammer). But Power Callers aren’t selling encyclopedias over the phone...no, they’re selling WorryFree, the company Steve Lift started that encourages people in poverty to sign a lifetime contract so they can have guaranteed housing, meals, and work for the rest of their lives at no cost...and also no pay. And the housing is shared bunk beds. And the meals are cafeteria-esque prison food. And the work is slave labor. Cash is uncomfortable with this but hey, he’s finally making some real money, so he goes along with it and even gets invited to a party at Steve Lift’s house! And that’s where he discovers Lift has found a solution to the pushback he’s getting for WorryFree. He’s found a way to turn his laborers into human/horse hybrids, or Equisapiens. They can work twice as long for half the cost as all these whiny humans, and Lift just needs Cash to agree to become an Equisapien and become their Martin Luther King, Jr - to lead the Equisapiens in the direction that Lift and WorryFree have decided is best. Cash is horrified and exposes Lift’s evils, which just makes WorryFree’s stock prices skyrocket. Cash decides to stand with the striking workers in front of the RegalView offices, and in the ensuing riot, the Equisapiens escape and they help the striking workers win against the militarized police force that’s come to stop them. All seems like it’s back to normal until the next day when a horrified Cash begins to turn into an Equisapien. He and a couple other Equisapiens break into Steve Lift’s house and as we see Lift’s terrified face, the movie cuts to black.

Some thoughts:

This movie is getting compared to Get Out a lot, for a multitude of reasons: Lakeith Stanfield, a visionary first-time black director, a bonkers third act. These are surface level comparisons, but the feel of watching something new, and crazy, and so dark but also scarily-almost-maybe-plausible is similar enough that I think the comparison fits well.

Steven Yeun of Walking Dead fame kills it in the major B-story as Squeeze, the leader of striking RegalView workers who are fighting for a living wage from a company whose founder is literally making millions off of slave labor. It’s interesting to me that most of the striking workers appear to be white, and Squeeze is the sole person of Asian descent in the bunch. There’s an insidious tendency for East Asians especially to be seen as “white-adjacent” or a “good minority” - POC who are non-threatening to white people. Squeeze wants the telemarketers to unionize in order to negotiate for a living wage, and unions have almost overwhelmingly been organizations accessible only to the white working class. I think it’s telling that Squeeze, the “safe” POC, is the leader of this fight, rather than Danny Glover or Tessa Thompson, who are also employees of RegalView.

OK but I really don’t understand Tessa Thompson’s performance art piece. She is also using specifically a British White Voice when she’s talking to the people at her art show after she’s gotten angry at Cash for his White Voice.. This makes sense because the bulk of the show is about reclaiming images of Africa, and that voice reeks of colonialism. But when she allows spectators to throw cell phones, bullet casings, and balloons filled with sheep’s blood at her, is that because she knows she lives in a world where her body will be subject to violence? Because violence inflicted with her consent somehow gives it less power? Or is she just as complicit as Cash in trying to leverage white people’s racism to her own financial gain in an evil capitalist system?

I wish we had gotten more time with Danny Glover. Where did he come from? How does he know about the White Voice? Was he once a Power Caller? This is a character I wish had been fleshed out more.

The scene in which Cash is forced to rap at the party thrown by Steve Lift in front of a huge group of white people is one of the most cringeworthy, horrifying things I’ve ever seen on film. He tells them he can’t rap and they keep pressuring him until finally he just starts screaming “N****R SHIT” over and over again - and the crowd enthusiastically repeats it back to him. It’s “Scott’s Tots” level of brutal but covered in a thick gloss of racism, and it made me want to crawl out of my skin because I know this exact phenomenon happens to black people in real life.

Even though it was hysterical, I’m not certain I understand what was going on with the battle of niceness that Cash and his friend Salvador (Jermaine Fowler) got into when Cash abandoned the strike. Was it just because they were still genuinely friends and weren’t really that mad at each other?

Shout out to David Cross, who perfectly plays Cash’s dubbed White Voice, and to Patton Oswalt who is the White Voice of Mr. _______, Cash’s Power Caller boss. Both of them inject a sly, self-aware note of performance into their voices because they know that this kind of whiteness IS a performance.

This is the most I’ve liked Armie Hammer in a role since he played the WInklevosses in The Social Network. He is perfection as the smug, richer-than-God, hedonistic power player who genuinely thinks that the logical next step in his cure for poverty is turning people into horse hybrids.

Ok, the Equisapiens. I know this is the part that loses people. They think the film goes off the rails here, or that the horses aren’t necessary to make the point. That now everything the film is saying just feels ridiculous. But anyone who’s studied the history of labor laws can see that this doesn’t feel ridiculous at all. Unchecked capitalism is EVIL, y’all, and it’s also all tied up in the racism we’ve been seeing at play in the movie. The system cares about profit and nothing more - and anything that can yield more profit, no matter how inhumane, is fair game. Boots Riley is using an allegory, sure, but the satire only works because Jeff Bezos is the richest person to ever live in human history and his Amazon warehouses have been accused of various human rights violations on a regular basis. We’re talking sweltering heat, no bathroom or meal breaks, freezing cold, vermin...and N-O-B-O-D-Y C-A-R-E-S. Prime is just too convenient, amirite? To people that make decisions that privilege profit over human lives (especially the lives of the poor, which just so happen to usually be POC), Equisapiens makes a lot of sense.

There’s even more to unpack here than I can get into because I can’t fit it all into my brain. This movie is brilliant, unapologetic, and vehemently anti-capitalism in a way that no media I’ve ever seen is. You need to see it, your friends need to see it, and your family needs to see it, even if they hate it, because we need to confront the evils Boots Riley is tackling here, and that starts with recognizing them.

#118in2018 #sorry to bother you #sorry to bother you review #boots riley #lakeith stanfield #tessa thompson #danny glover #armie hammer #david cross #patton oswalt #steven yeun #movie reviews #film reviews

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shaldreth · 6 years

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I fell in love with Lotor and then realized he's a fucking idiot

AKA: a (bad) dissertation on Lotor's potential as a character and how his motivations basically undermined all of it.

Spoilers through the end of season 6; written pre-season 7.

Let's just get my credentials out of the way first: I recently watched Seasons 1-6 of Voltron in the span of about 2 months. I am vaguely aware of some fandom discourse. I know very little about the original Voltron show or its plot except what I've gathered from a single day browsing the wiki. And finally, I love manipulative trash cans. Doesn't matter if they've got gray morality, complete amorality, or if they're just plain evil: I unironically enjoy their existence (the only exception is Ni Jianyi who terrifies me, but, well, I attribute that to good writing).

So imagine my delight when in his very first episode, Lotor demonstrated that he'd been very competently keeping tabs on the political status of the central Galran Command even while exiled by: rooting out his main opponents, publically humiliating them, and positioning his Generals strategically in the audience to ensure that the crowd's response was positive and enthusiastic, all within probably a quintant or two of getting back. ....And then he blatantly admitted to manipulating public opinion not five minutes later. ....While looking unfairly gorgeous.

As character introductions go, it set a really fucking high bar, and I think a lot of people were immediately invested in learning what his endgame was. Regardless of whether his ultimate goals were ‘good’ or ‘evil’, people expected them to be competent and..... worthy. Worthy of all the time and effort that was put into this character, and the show in general. And then S6 happened. So buckle up friends because we’re gonna take an in-depth look at his journey from potential political mastermind to... merely obsessed, like his father.

Immediately after being appointed Emperor Pro Tem, Lotor goes out and retakes a recently liberated planet to bait out Voltron. Which is.... something that we never actually saw his father do. Ever. Zarkon seemed content to let rebel planets stay lost, which is really silly and not at all a sustainable method of ruling an empire (suggesting that Zarkon probably would have lost control of a large portion of the Empire sooner or later anyway even if Voltron hadn't managed to destroy him in Blackout). Anyway, it showed that Lotor is a competent tactician, since he gets exactly the information he needs and does way more damage to Voltron than he probably expected to. He even follows up properly by calling in reinforcements to save his ass fortify the newly retaken planet, which may have given him a nice boost in popularity back home.

(It also set up a number of obvious parallels between Lotor’s Generals and the Paladins of Voltron. Excellent teamwork and loyalty? Check. Cheerful personality? Check. Big strong type? Check. Brooding, dark-haired second in command? Check. ...Wait, that makes Narti Pidge’s parallel. Or maybe Shiro’s, since she’s sometimes mind controlled....? ANYWAY. )

We start to see a couple cracks in episodes 4 and 6, because it becomes clear that Lotor is actually not spending that much time managing the Empire. He's way more interested in getting the materials to build the Sincline ships. At this point in the series he's still doing a great job of evading detection and throwing misdirection everywhere to keep Haggar from guessing what he's up to, so it starts to look like he's trying to undermine the Empire from within. I mean, think about it: he set himself up publically as a celebrity to strengthen the Empire, and then he disappeared and did none of that. He even exiled Throk, one of his biggest political enemies to Buttfuck, Space - Population: Ice Worms after his public humiliation. Which is a really bad idea if you want to keep a guy out of trouble, but a really good idea if you want to give a guy the time and space he needs to get angry, start another rebellion, and further destabilize the Empire.

Lotor has lived in exile for years; he himself is the perfect example for how people rebel when sent to some corner of the universe with minimal supervision. He should know better than anyone that exile is a bad way to actually get rid of someone, yet he does it anyway.

Season 4 pretty much cements the idea that Lotor never actually wanted to rule the current Galra Empire, and was only using its resources for his own gain. He's removed from the position of Emperor Pro Tem with minimal fuss, and probably would have been quite happy to lay low for a while afterwards.... except that his dad then tries to kill him and he does the really dumb thing. I think almost everyone agrees that killing Narti was one of the dumbest things Lotor could have done. He could knock her out? Kill the cat?? Anything other than ruin his own party???

But nah. He stabs Narti and immediately the parallels between his group of Generals and Voltron shatter, because they betray him and try to turn him in to Haggar. Or, rather, he betrayed them.... .....actually maybe the parallels still apply, because I'm pretty sure that if Kuron had actually stabbed any of the Paladins at any point, the rest would have flipped out as well, so really the entire arc may be more of a statement on Galra culture as a whole.....

ANYWAY, the whole Narti thing might look like the place where everything starts to go south, but it actually doesn't ruin any of Lotor's potential. Killing Narti could either be the callous act of someone who's bad at communication and doesn't actually care about his team (which is his team's interpretation, and a fair one), or it could be taken as a really stupid moment of panic, which I’d argue is a little more interesting, since Lotor never panics. But either way, the outcome was the same: as soon as he had control taken away from him, he turned desperate and all his flaws started to come out. Narti's death was one of the dumbest things Lotor ever did, but I also want to argue that it's the one act that opened up his narrative potential the most, because it could have sparked some interesting discussion about whether all of his actions are due to being arrogant, maladjusted, and self-absorbed... or if any can be attributed to fear.

Unfortunately, while fanfiction capitalized on that potential immediately, the show never really did. I was hoping for a season of self-reflection as Lotor used his intelligence and manipulative skills to sway Voltron to his side and overthrow Zarkon and Haggar in retaliation for his one miscalculation of the series. I wouldn't even have been mad if he had betrayed Voltron again at the end, because it would have been in keeping with his suggested characterization so far, and I like competent opponents with actual realistic goals.

Season 5 looked like it was on track! Lotor was clearly still doing his best to manipulate Voltron as much as he could from a prison cell, furthering his goals despite his enormous setback. It's not really clear how many of his accomplishments during this season are due to careful planning and how many are due to luck; did he know Zarkon would offer the prisoner exchange? Did he know Sendak was going to be at the Kral Zera? Did he know Shiro was Kuron and would secretly hand over the Black Bayard so he actually had a fighting chance against Zarkon? ....Probably no to the last one, since it hinged on Honerva remembering her son, but who knows.

Regardless, Lotor takes a lot of risks and makes a lot of progress. He actually becomes Emperor. Dude, holy shit, congrats. Take a breather and regroup!! That big of an milestone should have been enough for anyone, but instead he pushed his luck searching for Oriande, becoming completely dependent on Allura for her guidance and her protection, and then he failed the White Lion's trial. Like, completely whiffed it. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. The S6 finale makes it clear that Lotor's morals and goals are almost completely opposite Allura's, and that should have been the perfect place to start developing him further as.... you know, an actual emperor and moral counterpoint?

Instead, we got Season 6, where Lotor turned his fakeness meter up to 11 to seduce Allura. ...Badly. Like... really badly. ... Okay, listen the nanny thing was weird, there’s no denying that. She showed up for one episode out of completely nowhere and was never mentioned again. But Lotor felt more natural during that first episode of S6 than he did the entire rest of the season while romancing Allura, and I think that was probably on purpose. His voice and his face and his smile when he spoke with Allura were all the same ones he used during his first scene in the gladiator ring, when manipulating public opinion. I don’t think we were ever really meant to believe in Lotor’s feelings for Allura when his very character was introduced with the same sort of deception.

And all of that would still have been fine if he hadn’t had such a stupid final motivation. I suppose Season 6 makes sense when you consider that his ultimate goals actually had nothing to do with the Galra Empire, but it doesn’t feel like a good culmination of his character arc. So, knowing that his ultimate goal was the creation of a new Altean Empire, Let’s briefly review:

- Lotor spent three seasons manipulating the public to gather support and popularity. The conclusion of this was Kral Zera, where he actually became Emperor. But none of this matters. “Emperor of the Galra” is actually unrelated to “Emperor of the New Alteans”, or whatever. Unless his plan was to marry Allura and spend the next 10,000 years carefully integrating his Alteans into the Galran Empire while giving them every advantage possible, becoming the Galran Emperor didn’t actually have much to do with his Altean goals. His Alteans aren’t Galra citizens. So why spend that much time making himself popular with a race he hated? Narcissism???

- Lotor may have also spent three seasons subtly supporting rebellion across the Galran Empire, because he made a couple conspicuously bad decisions when it came to handling his political opponents/rebellion planets. Conspicuously bad enough to be deliberate, given what we know of him as a competent tactician. But supporting rebellion would only have helped him if he had planned to use rebellion to take over, and we just established that being the Galra Emperor doesn’t actually help his main goals. So does that make all the seasons of subtle rebel support.... a side-effect? Carelessness? Supporting the Voltron Coalition didn’t really matter if he intended to replace Voltron with his own shiny robot.

- Lotor’s generals are all half-galra. Originally, it seemed like he had chosen to align himself with societal outcasts because he could inspire loyalty and comraderie in them, and because after a lifetime of discrimination at the hands of Central Command, they’d probably be willing to support his rebellion. That’s, like, a huge fanfic canon. But instead, his final, power-driven speech suggests that he chose half-galra Generals simply because he couldn’t stand to work with full-blooded Galra. Which makes his close-knit team and all their beautiful parallels with Voltron... accidental??

- Lotor spent let’s say... a season and a half? trying to seduce Allura. This makes the most sense out of all of his goals, because marrying into the last remaining full-blooded Altean royalty totally fits with the New Altean Empire. What’s stupid here is how he handled it. Instead of coming clean about his Altean colony and, I don’t know, properly hiding his tracks as soon as he realized he could marry royalty?? He left the quintessence farm up and running. We know Lotor can get into and out of the rift way faster than Keith and Krolia, so there was really nothing stopping him from going to hide a couple skeletons in his closet sooner than never. He could probably have won Allura’s loyalty forever if he had presented her with an Altean colony and pretended to need her help restoring Altean culture; instead, he did dumb.

I’m just... I’m sad, okay? I’m not sad because he was evil; I’m sad because he didn’t want to be his father, and he absolutely turned into his father, and there were almost no signs of that until the very end. He could have been evil and still competent! While there are parts of Lotor that are really well written, it seems like they were all pushed to the side to make way for his obsession - an obsession he wasn’t even that obsessed about previously!!! - in the final couple episodes of Season 6, and he just... does so many stupid things.

So really, in conclusion, either Lotor got quintessence sickness, Haggar made a Lotor clone while he was visiting her that one time, or we should all be more sympathetic of Zarkon's stupidity in Seasons 1 and 2 because clearly Galra politics are infuriating enough that being Emperor for a couple pheobs was enough to make Lotor lose his McFreaking Mind. Zarkon had been Emperor for 10,000 years; it's understandable that he was a little quirky.

Also, I saw a post a few weeks ago that basically said “the worst thing that can happen to Lotor is that he comes back from the void and gets obsessed with Allura like in the original show”, and I wish I could find it again, so if you know that post, pls link me. And I agree, that would really really suck, I don’t want that. But I’m hopeful that the writers just decided to adapt his character a little, so that instead of being obsessed with the Altean Princess, he was instead obsessed with Altea, and therefore that arc is already over. But I guess we’ll find out soon! Fingers crossed.

Feel free to comment with alternate interpretations of everything here!

#voltron #voltron the legendary defender #lotor #vld lotor #long post #this is a very bad dissertation #the final message is I'm sad #that's it that's the point of this post #not lotor hate though #more like #I wish you were better #this is my first post in the voltron fandom #and possibly the last #I just #lotor y #six more days my dudes #six more days

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chronicbatfictioner · 6 years

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Subtle - Chapter 8

Jason, however, did not pay attention - much - to the plethora of superheroes suddenly trying to be friends with him. He was merely thinking of the benefits when his old team regrouped while his new team was unavailable when he needed backups to handle some stuff. And because Jason didn't care, he never asked why they chose to find him at the same time, either. He just relished on the fact that that the two of them being there was beneficial for him.

That is, until his plan kind of glitched when Wonder Woman showed up.

"Your little bird boyfriend is... kind of toxic for our kind." Roy Harper - Arsenal - groused as they tried to get out of the stronghold of a wannabe terrorist group who had disguised itself as a PTA group - unironically hiding guns in cooler boxes and head for their destination as a college football team's tailgating party.

They - the terrorists - obviously didn't think that they would be stopped by Wonder Woman. Who asked them nicely to please stop shooting, she needs to speak quietly with the Red Hood, and then proceeded to wrap their vehicles around them.

"Eh, I'm going to suspend my opinion on the 'toxic' remark. At least we got this done unscratched." Jason commented. "What do you need, Wonder Woman?"

"Well, first of all, maybe for you to be less combative against someone who'd just helped you." she snapped. "There were kids in there that could've gotten hurt if I hadn't interfered!"

"I know! Why do you think I have Starfire out there on standby to grab the kids when it's possible! You didn't honestly think they'll not use those kids as hostages, did you?" Jason shot back, pointing to Starfire who had just landed, looked at the arrested terrorists, then at Arsenal, and both - very unhelpfully - shrugged.

"Won't it be easier just to use those contraptions... cellphones?" Starfire's sing-song-y voice carried on clearly even over the rattling sounds of people trying to un-bend the metals around them.

"You know that would not allow me to see his face, Starfire." Wonder Woman replied, unperturbed.

"It's not like I'm taking off the maaa...-- what the hell put me down!!" Jason yelped as Wonder Woman grabbed him by the waist and hoisted him into the air. He didn't struggle, because what was the point? Plus, he kind of preferred not succeeding in a struggle because they were out in a desert and way up high. "I'm getting kidnapped by Wonder Woman... The Bat is gonna have a field day with this..." he grumbled instead.

"Oh, stuff it, Jason. Even Starfire knows I'm not going to hurt you. I'm just here to talk. Not as Red Hood and Wonder Woman, but as Jason and Diana, please."

"About a certain little red bird that you don't think I'm good enough for... yadda yadda yadda... I get it, mom, if I hurt him, I'd get drawn, quartered, and my head-gets-put-on-a-stake, I get it!" Jason finally exploded, yanking off his helmet. "You know how many people talked to me about that shit in the past month?? I mean seriously, I've got Ra's Al Ghul wanting to know what my purpose is with him! The hell is it with you people??"

Diana frowned, and then cocked an eyebrow. "Honestly, I have known you before I even know of him. And I am wondering if he was good enough for you... You're a battler, a brawler. You live for the front lines. He's... cunning. More of a behind-the-scenes person than you are. He crafted happenstances to benefit him..." she mused out loud. "I care for you, Jason..." she placed a hand on Jason's shoulder. "I don't want to see you hurt."

The helmet fell off Jason's arm to the ground, he was so surprised. But Diana was not done. "I never thought... when you were killed, you know how it went for your father. But I... I'd only seen you a few weeks prior. Everything moved so fast yet so slow. One minute he was so overjoyed to have you, and then he was broken... But regardless," she shook her head. "I have yet the pleasure to meet Red Robin - aside of from his... general reputation. If you can find the time, I would like to dine with you and your boyfriend."

Jason blinked.

"What." He wondered out loud. Diana smiled, and waved - probably calling for Starfire to come fetch Jason.

"Everyone was worried for him, I think I am entitled to stand my ground and express my care, too, aren't I?" she asked before she went airborne, pausing a few miles in the air to talk to Starfire who was bringing Roy over.

"What just happened?" Jason demanded.

"Gee, Jaybird, I'd tell you, but you were the one talking to the lady. Lady - capital 'L'." Roy reminded him.

"Uh.. yeah. I--" Jason sputtered as he bent down to retrieve his helmet. "Anyway! Business done? Did you find the flash drive? So we can actually like, get some cash for this? Even if Wonder Woman was the one wrapping them up?"

"Of course I did!" Roy beamed, showing a flash disk in the form of - Jason had to roll his eyes at the predictability of them rednecks - a tiny gun. "What did she want with you?"

"She said I looked radiant and wished me well, she must be... happy." Starfire - Kory - remarked, almost incongruently.

"Princesses greeting each other a mile in the sky... and I'm far too jaded to even wonder how is it I didn't crap myself. But anyway! What did she want?" Roy returned to his initial question, because even if he has two seconds attention span, Roy could focus on things that interested him.

"She wanted me to bring Tim over for dinner." Jason replied, thanking high-heavens that his helmet's voice-modulator made his voice sounded cool and betrayed none of the giddiness he was feeling. Or the redness of his face as he looked at Roy's gaping mouth.

"Huh, how nice it is for the Amazonian Princess to summon you for a dinner. Please remember to wear a suit." Kory commented. Because of course she would zoom in on the fact that Diana was a princess, like Kory is-- was-- whatever depending on who was talking. Still, she has immediately thought of the situation in the fact that a princess, i.e. Diana - asking a commoner, i.e. Jason - to attend a dinner with her.

"I have no idea what to wear, " Jason admitted. "everything I know of royalty and stuff like that are from books. And I don't think they'd wear chainmails and or armors or stuff like that anymore, do they?"

"I... am not sure of Earth's customs, but I think you would not wear chainmails or armor into an official dining hall, unless said dinner happened in the middle of a combat. Leather, maybe, your best ones." Kory replied glibly, her eyes swept over Jason's jacket. "But! I shall be honored to accompany you and your beautiful boyfriend a trip to the mall to acquire new garbs!" she added excitedly.

"Oh boy," Jason groaned.

"And I shall accompany you three to see if you two has the same disastrous taste as your big bro." Roy grinned mischievously at him.

"No we don't. And we're not going to any malls. My boy-- Red Robin actually has someone to dress him and, need I remind you, Roy, is the adopted son of a billionaire. He wouldn't be caught dead in a TJ Maxx shirt..." Jason pointed out. "Wait, why are we talking about malls? We're vigilantes!"

"I don't think TJ Maxx has come up with a kevlar- and nomex-lined suits, Jaybird. But what do I know..."

#jason todd #Red Hood #JayTim #Roy Harper #Arsenal #Koriand'r #Starfire #Diana Prince #wonder woman #Subtle!AU #Tim Drake #Batfam

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