eddie is very emotionally attached to his hair. he loves the look, obviously, but also loves using it as a shield. he plays with it when he needs to fidget, he pulls pieces in front of his face when he’s flustered or nervous, he sweeps it over his shoulders to hide his face from time to time. it’s a built-in barrier and ever since he’d grown it out at around 15, he’d sworn to never go back. eddie’s hair make him feel safe.
that is, until he wakes up in the hospital post-upside down to find it cut short. too short-- can’t-twirl-or-play-with-it short. once the shock and relief of oh fuck, I’m alive, thanks steve, wears off, he laments the loss.
"steve, it took me years to grow it out. I’ll be 25 by the time it’s back where it was!" he admits during a rare moment when it's just the two of them in his hospital room. the machines beep evenly and steve sighs from his position in the hard, wood-backed chair next to the bed.
"man, I get it. my nickname was the goddamn hair for awhile, so I know it's a part of you but it'll grow back, right? and--"
"yeah yeah, I know it will, that's not the problem. it’s— ugh, forget it.” eddie instinctively reaches to pull his hair over his left shoulder to hide his face and is reminded of what the problem really is. he feels exposed and seen in a way that he can’t control and it makes his skin crawl-- particularly that it's steve harrington he feels so seen by, and he frankly has too many other crises going on to unpack that at the moment.
steve, for all of the ‘dumb jock’ jokes tossed his way, is perceptive. you don't survive high school in hawkins and four end-of-the-worlds without a dash of social intelligence, after all. so when he sees eddie reach for his hair like a phantom limb, he starts putting puzzle pieces together.
"why don't you want people to see you?"
eddie freezes with his hands falling to his chest, the IV in one hand pulling a bit at his skin. "that's not... I don't ... nothing, it's nothing." he sputters, unsure how steve has gotten such a fucking read on him.
"hey, I mean, I get it. kind of, at least? after the last few fights knocked my brain around, I've gotten some gnarly scars and bruises and I uh, I don't really swim or go around shirtless anymore because of it. I know that's probably not exactly the same but... yeah. I can understand. want me to get you a wig?"
steve watches as eddie slowly turns to look at him, and more importantly, to let steve look at him and his hesitant smile with furrowed eyebrows.
"why are you telling me all this?" eddie wants to think it's more than steve being steve, more than him just looking out, that it's personal. that maybe he likes eddie. hell, there must've been a reason he and wayne were the only two in the room when he woke up. and it clearly hadn't been the first time, given how close steve and wayne seem to be now. he'd pretended to be annoyed about their banter over the chicago cubs but really? it gave eddie a glimpse of something he wanted so badly, it made him ache. but that couldn't be it.
eddie's heart monitor beeps a little faster when steve reaches out to place a hand on top of his. steve looks up at the screen and back down to their hands with a small, hopeful smile.
"you're one of us now." steve shrugs and replies simply, as if that answers any of eddie's burning questions. he doesn't want to overwhelm him, but Steve can't help some good-natured Harrington flirting. "and it'd be a real shame for you to keep hiding that blush."
there's something here, steve thinks, a reason he wants eddie to let him look, to let him see, to keep making him blush from his neck to his nose. he'll give it time though. after all, the danger is gone-- they're here, and alive, and the world is safe, and they've got nothing but time to watch eddie's curls grow back.
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Floyd has made his fair share of mistakes for sure, but he would not date Creek, the troll who almost got everyone in Pop Village, including his baby brother who we know he loves a great deal, killed. I just can't see it happening
Branch would probably see it as a slap in the face and distance himself from Floyd, tbh.
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Another dilemma with centering stories around the idea of Superman-as-immigrant is that while Superman is certainly an immigrant, and there is a substantial body of older Superman stories (mostly from 1958–1986) that present his homeworld and its culture as generally noble (and frequently Jewish-coded), it has become very common since the 1986 reboot for Superman media to treat Kryptonian culture as either decadent and corrupt (as in most of the post-Crisis comics) or actively invasive and evil (as in MAN OF STEEL or MY ADVENTURES WITH SUPERMAN).
In these stories, Superman has avoided this decadence or evil mostly by virtue of having been raised by white Americans in Kansas, and his nobility lies in his express rejection of his evil/corrupt heritage in favor of (white) American culture. These are intrinsically anti-immigrant narratives (and sometimes antisemitic as well), regardless of how much feel-good gloss the story may attempt to apply to it.
The first season of the current SUPERMAN AND LOIS TV show, for instance, plays out an alarmingly literal "Great Replacement" plot in which Superman's half-brother Tal-Rho attempts to carry out a genocidal scheme devised by Superman's eugenicist mother to resurrect Kryptonians in the bodies of living humans, while MY ADVENTURES WITH SUPERMAN presents Kryptonians as brutal invaders who have attempted to militarily conquer the Earth more than once. Neither of these series departs from the general details of Superman's origin, but they assert unequivocally that Superman being an immigrant from Krypton is of moral value only because it gives him super-powers that enable him to defend the American Way from others of his kind, and to uphold white culture in ways other Kryptonians do not or would not.
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𝐗𝐈𝐈𝐈𝐂. Meaning behind searching for destiny vs fate.
It's really interesting that Dain states that the reason behind his journey alongside Lumine's is that they're searching for their destiny, unlike the English translation that talks about fate and not destiny. While both may be interchangeable due to their similar meanings, there is an important difference worth noting for Dain specifically: he's in a position in which he's been cursed recently with immortality, he lost his life, his people— everything. He finds himself in the context of the Cataclysm, he knows that he must protect other people who had nothing to do with the catastrophe that befell Khaenri'ah and so he does.
But what about him? What must he do from now on? This is where the importance between fate and destiny is: while fate could be considered the final destination, destiny would be the long road that takes place before reaching fate. Fate might be the end, while destiny might be the beginning and the in between. It's not so much that he wants to know what fate has in store of him, be it grand or miserable. It's the fact that he doesn't know where to head to, what to do with his life from this point where he lost everything onwards. And it's precisely this what is a potential reason to part ways with Lumine, destiny. In the present days, we see that Dain's destiny is stopping the Abyss Order and prevent them from seeing through their wicked plans, whereas Lumine's is the opposite as she stands by the Abyss Order's side to make sure their plans will work through.
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Lae'zel's character and her entire situation at the beginning of the game becomes so much more funny when you find out she's 22. It makes so much sense. Imagine you're 22 and you're exposed to this dangerous toxin or chemical or something - but not to worry, you learnt that this can be easily fixed, you just need to dial 911 real quick. Common knowledge. Everyone knows that. You learnt that in kindergarten, it's up there with fire alarm drills.
But the people you're stuck with have no concept of modern medicine and when you say "let's go to the hospital" they will say shit like "i think they kill people at the hospital" and "we should ask this swamp lady" or "this guy over there told me about this homoeopathic healer kind of guy but he got abducted" or "this random bard wants to help" and "I'm not going to dial 911 because I don't want the government to know my home address" or "maybe we should consider a deal with Satan". And then a bunch of them KEEP consuming the chemical because it makes them "stronger". One guy might explode for unrelated reasons. You have a few days before this situation is getting critical and suddenly they're solving crime and doing general charity for the community.
And FOR SOME REASON you still try to help these idiots and you STILL want to help them get the cure even though they all keep insisting the "doctors" at the "hospital" might try to "kill them" and they don't have insurance. And you keep telling them to just. go. to. the. hospital. before the time runs out and you all die very horribly of a very treatable condition.
And also you're 22 in a foreign country and you're responsible for shepherding this gaggle of idiots who are all ranging anywhere from 24 to 240 years old.
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I, a hearing person who likes subtitles just as a preference, shouldn't have to read a subtitle that's obvious nonsense, go back a couple seconds, and listen again in order to figure out what's going on. An accessibility feature should not be the most half-assed part of a professionally made production. Scripted media has absolutely no excuse for not having subtitles or having subtitles that aren't perfectly verbatim. Professional captioning services should be ashamed of the shoddy work that they put out. Captions should be treated as a part of the production, just like filming, editing, audio balancing, etc - and anything that releases with missing or bad captions should be seen as unfinished
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