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#player the fifth save

thepurevessel1 · 11 months

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My voicing of The Fifth Save: Hollow Knight (As Player, the one who's narrating)

A group project that we worked on! Tell me what ya think

#The Fifth Save #Hollow Knight #HollowKnight #HollowKnight Fan Comic #Fan comic #Hollow knight #hollowknight #Hk #HK #hk #Player TFS #Player The Fifth Save

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dykekarkat · 6 months

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worst feeling in the fucking world when the fandom falls victim to the delusions/lies that the character's feed themselves and than those lies are taken to be the True Essence of the characters

like i just finished rereading assassination classroom (for maybe the fifth time?) and focusing on karma + nagisa cus theyre my faves and like theyre fucking liars!!! ik its basically a dead fandom now so most of the content ive been looking at is years old at this point but like they would be sooooo happy to know accurate grasps of their characters are near nonexistent.

like karma WANTS you to think he's a cool genius lone wolf who only cares about his own abilities!! meanwhile basically every single action he takes in the second half of the manga proves each of those traits to be false outright!!!

like hes (sort of) a team player! he knows everyones strengths! hes thinking about other ppls feelings when it comes to the assassination! he's been putting in insane amounts of effort since he failed that one final!

nagisa WANTS you to believe that he's a fully selfless, weak, support player while being pretty much the exact opposite!! but he doesnt work in a team he works best alone! literally w express permission to work fully solo during the war arc! he wasnt thinking of how everyone else felt during his proposal to save korosensei! he wanted to be the one to kill korosensei (somewhat selfishly)!!

the narrative foils are narratively foiling and no one wants to give it the proper respect it deserves smh.

#whoops this got long #assassination classroom #karma akabane #nagisa shiota #karmagisa #this is more nuanced im simplifying it i just cant STAND how ooc theyre portrayed as all the time.

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putellasawfc · 6 months

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injured !

katie mccabe x arsenal!reader

fifty eight minutes into the game and your girls were leading by three - one, a healthy lead within the time given but you all knew you were capable of scoring a few more before the final whistle. you just had to stay focused and determined, and not let the lead you had allow any of you to sit back and relax, you had been playing for a long time now, long enough to know how quickly a game can change.

you were sweating like crazy, being one of arsenal’s best defenders you always had to put in a lot of work to prevent the opposing team from scoring any goals, and today was no exception. you had managed to do a decent job so far, stealing the ball back and kicking it out of play whenever it got too close to the goal (aside from that one that managed to graze past your foot and hit the back of the net in the twenty fifth minute), alongside catley, katie & lotte.

you could sense the growing frustration within the opposite team, for obvious reason. they were losing, and anytime they managed to get the ball near the goal it was taken by one of your teammates and the roar of the crowd died down. ebony salmon had been one player you had shut down a few times now, and everytime there was a disgruntled groan or a ‘fucksake’ flying from her mouth, agitated at how many times the goal had been taken from right under her feet, literally.

and now, as you watched her flying towards the goal with the ball by her feet, you chased after her at the same pace, ensuring you were in-front of her at all times, blocking her from getting a good chance at scoring a goal. she stopped, her eyes flying around clearly looking for another player she could pass the ball to, knowing that any attempt made at scoring now would be in vain. you stayed focused, on her, her feet, the ball, waiting for her to make a move. when she finally settled on another player within reach, she angled her body getting ready to pass, only a second later did you clock the way her eyes briefly glanced in another direction and you knew she was trying to trick you out. so as everyone moved in the direction they expected the ball to fly in, you stayed in your position.

and just as you predicted, ebony turned and ran towards all the open space she had just created. what she wasn’t counting for though, was for you to have already caught onto her smart tactic and head in the same direction as the player, staying by her and just as her foot flew back to shoot, you dived forward and kicked the ball backwards, down the pitch and closer to the goal your team were shooting for. in the midst of the save, ebony had stumbled and with you being in close proximity, you had fallen over her stumbling and you had both crashed to the ground. what was meant to be a quick scramble to get back up and keep playing, ended up being the worst moment of the game for you.

you weren’t even sure what had happened, one minute you were on your hands and knees prepared to catch up to the players and continue defending, and the next you were clutching your head in agony. the game continued playing for a few more seconds, before you heard a very familiar shout which was quickly followed by a whistle.

“oi! what the fuck are yer playing at? that’s a red card!” katie’s voice sounded miles away, but the anger in her voice was clear.

you clutched your head, the pain you felt was one of the worst injuries you had acquired since you started playing. the throb was coming from just above your eyebrow on the left side of your face, it was sore to the touch but you needed to apply pressure to stop the blood you felt on your palms from trickling down your face. you were surrounded by players now, both your own teammates and some of the girls from aston villa who were trying to figure out what had happened, seemingly the only person to witness it was katie, which wasn’t a surprise. your girlfriend did tend to keep an eye on you during matches.

“she just kicked her in the fuckin’ head for no reason!” katie’s voice caught your attention again, and you pushed yourself to look up to see the irish player being held back by caitlin, face red with anger and an arm gesturing to you who was still kneeled on the floor.

“it was an accident! i was trying to get back up, i didn’t realise her face was so close to my foot.” ebony attempted to defend herself, but was met with a scoff as katie didn’t buy her story.

by now, a medic had arrived and gently took your face in her hands. you moved your own hands from the wound to let her assess it, frowning at the wince and sharp intake of breath she took when she saw the injury. how bad was it? the older woman sent you a comforting smile and began to pull out some wipes from the bag she had brought on with her, “just gonna give it a quick clean lovie, might sting a little.”

you nodded in acknowledgment, eyes now finding their way back to the girls stood by you. alessia leaned down, placing a hand on your shoulder, giving it a quick squeeze. “you alright? that looks nasty.”

you shrugged, “it kills like a bitch but i think i’ll be good.”

she nodded, her blue eyes swarming with concern but she seemed relieved that you were still talking, aware of your surroundings, you were okay.

she was quickly replaced by katie, who kneeled down beside you and took a better look at your injury. she tutted in disapproval and her fiery eyes looked back at ebony who seemed genuinely sorry for what she’d done. you didn’t know if it was an accident, or if it was intentional and now she was regretting it. all you knew was that she was lucky you were in the middle of a game, or else you were sure katie would’ve been at her throat by now.

“are yer fuckin’ happy now? couldn’t beat her so you thought you’d give her a concussion instead? fuckin’ stupid.”

“hey.” you placed a hand on katie’s thigh, “calm down, i’m okay. don’t get yourself all worked up before you end up doing something you regret.” you spoke in a hushed tone, sending a reassuring smile her way when she finally tore her eyes off the culprit stood meters away.

she sighed, rubbing her own hand up and down your arm as the medic finished cleaning your wound. “i swear, my heart dropped to my stomach when i saw her foot fly out.” she shook her head as if the memory caused her actual physical pain. “thought you were gonna be knocked out by the time i got over here.”

“but i’m not. i’m awake and i’m fine.” you told her, “definitely not gonna get rid of this headache anytime soon but.” you shrugged. “i’m good.”

the anger in her eyes finally disappeared at that, finally taking you in properly and realising that you were fine. well, not completely fine. your head was throbbing and your hands were covered in your own blood, but it wasn’t the end of the world. thank god.

“i know, just worry ‘bout yer that’s all.” she sighed, running a hand through her hair, tightening her ponytail as she did.

“and i love you for it. but don’t let it ruin the rest of the game, pretend this never happened. don’t need you pissed off for the last half an hour, you’ll be off with a red card before i’ve even reached the bench.” you teased, heart warming at the smile that quirked up onto her lips.

“no promises.” she nudged your shoulder gently, wanting nothing more than to lean down and steal a kiss, but being in the middle of a match with hundreds of people watching and cameras pointing at the two of you in every direction, she’d have to wait.

“you’re definitely gonna need stitches, just gonna get you bandaged up and we’ll get you off to somewhere and get you stitched up as soon as we can.” the medic spoke, and you nodded along.

you were brought to stand, katie and the medic both holding onto you to help you stabilise yourself as the collision had made you a little dizzy and lightheaded. they helped you walk off the pitch, the girls giving you smiles and pats on the back as you passed them. the crowd cheered as you were helped off, and you smiled at the send off from your fans, giving them a little wave before you reached the end of the pitch.

“get yourself looked after love, i’ll come see ya after the game. i hope you feel better soon.” katie said, bringing you into a quick hug. her arms wrapped around your waist and you wrapped your own around her shoulders, careful of your injury as you did.

“good luck. don’t do anything silly whilst i’m gone please.”

“we’ll see.”

you rolled your eyes playfully at the comment, pulling back to see the defender already had a cheeky grin on her face. you exchanged ‘i love you’s’ and you watched as she jogged back onto the pitch before you were whisked away to get your stitches.

two hours and four stitches later, katie sat beside you in the car, a sheepish grin on her face as she told you about the yellow card she had received when you left. though she reassured you, it was nothing to do with what had happened, which you would’ve bought if it wasn’t for the fact kyra had already told you about the tackle katie had made to ebony only five minutes after the game resumed.

looking at the woman sat beside you, who looked back at you as if you’d hung the moon and the stars, you couldn’t bring yourself to be mad at her.

#arsenal wfc #arsenal wfc x reader #awfc x reader #katie mccabe x reader #katie mccabe #woso x reader #woso #woso one shot #katie mccabe one shot #awfc one shot

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wheredidhiseyebrowsgo · 3 months

Note

Any enemies to lovers future AU Sterek fics? At first they annoy each other just as much as they used to, but ofc that changes. Thanks, ur awesome

Oh definitely.

magical protection at the hands of a snarky spark by sychia_rin

(1? I 341 I General)

Stiles stormed his way through the room. The ward he literally just made felt broken.

He eyed the tall man standing on the balcony as he turned to face him, he quirked up an eyebrow looking as shocked as that grumpy face could get him. He must be some newbie guard.

"I just put that ward there shitface. Shoo," Stiles motioned for him to move. The guard stood in place, watching Stiles as he stomped closer.

....

Where an overworked Stiles works for the (royalish?) Hale family doing magical tasks. Vaguely Merlin inspired if you squint.

royal blue fits better with Derek by 08JustLizeth80

(1/1 I 3,129 I Mature)

Where Derek Hale is the prince of England and Stiles is the (extremely) ineloquent and mouthy first son of the United States.

Where Stiles thinks royalty is such an archaic concept it shouldn’t even exist (which has nothing to do with his inadequate and totally not existing crush on the prince).

Knot Your Typical College Romance by stilesanderek (minxxx)

(1/1 I 51,546 I Explicit)

In which Stiles loves studying at Beacon Hills Supernatural University and even though he loves his group of friends, he just wishes that Derek wasn't included in it. Stiles hates the guy fiercely, and he knows it's completely mutual, and what he also knows it's completely mutual is the hate boner they both have going on for each other. What happens after they finally hookup after years of tension, though, isn't something Stiles ever signed up for.

“Shut the fuck up, Stilinski,” Derek hisses, their foreheads less than half a dozen of inches apart.

“Oh yeah, big guy?” Stiles says, stuffing his chest in defiance, licking his mouth once and then finally saying, “Make me.”

all you have is your fire by hansuckss

(7/? I 20,624 I Mature)

“Why wouldn’t I? I mean, if it’s a matter of saving someone’s life. You know,” Derek smirked. “There are lots of things I can do for an hour.”

Everyone knows they can count on Stiles Stilinski, the most composed paramedic at the fire station, and he takes pride in his work. At least until a new firefighter shows up. The newest firefighter-in-training, Derek Hale, is a former football player with a huge hero complex and limitless energy. And until fate brings them together, Stiles can put up with the man's presence. Sparks fly—not in a positive way. The fact that Derek is hotter than the fires he puts out and annoyingly charming doesn't help.

Help Wanted (But Not Really) by reillyblack

(9/9 I 26,096 I Mature)

"Stiles, I'll clear up your confusion about the position. Derek here needs someone to live with him. He's a difficult person to live with, so I won't sugarcoat that. But his responsibilities at the company right now make it impossible for him to actually take care of himself and his home. That would be your job," Laura explained.

Both Stiles and Derek objected at the same time.

Five Times Detective Stilinski and Fire Captain Hale Had Sex In Public, and One Time They Did It In A Bed by bleep0bleep

(7/7 I 32,853 I Explicit)

"Did you say--" Stiles starts.

"What?" Derek growls.

"We're not a couple!" they both retort in unison.

"We're not together," Stiles insists.

Lydia coughs pointedly. "An incident report filed by 87th Precinct Captain Erica Reyes. March twenty-fifth, eight p.m. Came back to the precinct to grab my coat, only to hear Stilinski banging his new boyfriend in the holding cell."

Words Cannot Espresso How Much You Bean to Me by isthatbloodonhisshirt (wasterella)

(1/1 I 68,366 I Teen)

“You’re late,” Derek informed him coldly, jaw clenched. He barely even moved his mouth to speak. This guy was seriously scary.

And because Stiles was suicidal, he said, “No, I’m Stiles.”

The look he got could’ve curdled milk. Stiles even noticed that Derek’s muscles were tensing, arms bulging even more and wow this guy was scary and hot but mostly scary holy shit.

“You’re not funny,” Derek informed him coldly.

Stiles shrugged. “I think that’s a matter of opinion.”

Like it or Not by Halevetica

(56/56 I 80,902 I Not Rated)

Stiles works as the editorial assistant at Vogue. He loves everything about his job except for his boss, Derek Hale. Derek Hale is the worst and Stiles hates him. But when Derek drags him to the yearly awards dinner within the company, he is forced to play boyfriend for the night to make Derek's ex jealous. Things couldn't get much worse...or so Stiles thought.

(Fuck you they said) As they threw their threads from their wedding bed by dearericbittle (dutchmoxie)

(9/9 I 96,199 I Mature)

First Son Stiles Stilinski just accidentally caused an international incident. And apparently the only way to save human-werewolf relations is to marry him off to Prince Derek of Triskele. Stiles is going to need all of his acting skills to make the marriage look real, because the Prince is kind of a fucking asshole.

Enemy Lines by qhuinn (tekla)

(17/17 I 149,179 I Explicit)

This is the story of werewolf Derek Hale and human Stiles Stilinski: two people who grew up in the same town but completely different worlds, their realities split by the war between men and wolves.

Years later when Derek returns to Beacon Hills, he does it as Alpha of a military pack on a mission to capture those responsible for the region’s resistance. With his main objective, Sheriff Stilinski, out of sight, he settles for the next best thing: his son, Stiles.

Neither of them suspects they’ll need to trust each other if they want to make it out this alive.

The Final Pack by Kedreeva

(33/33 I 428,148 I Mature)

Humankind is fighting its way back from near extinction against the supernatural beings that fed upon the remaining humans in the aftermath of the 2012 apocalypse. On the front lines, Stiles' best friend gets bitten by a werewolf and Stiles must strike a bargain with wolves in order to save him.

#teen wolf #sterek #stiles stilinski #derek hale #enemies to lovers #anon

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sergeifyodorov · 11 months

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would you actually be willing to give like a pretty long rundown of those main guys from the 2015 draft class?? because i would be Very interested

Of course! I wrote this in a Google doc so I could get it all down. It's a LOT btw -- this is the abridged version, leaving out what are probably important details, and it's still [checks] 11k words long. Sorry about that.

Anyone who tells you that the draft is a science is an idiot not worth their twenty-dollar stadium beer. The draft has analytical elements, sure, but it is a crapshoot through and through. If you dare to take a look back on draft histories from the past ten years -- the past twenty, the past thirty -- only rarely is the first pick, the “best in show,” actually the best of his class. I mean, no wonder, right? How well can you determine how good a man is going to be at hockey when you have only seen him as a teenager? Accuracy and prophecy are not kin.

Every ten years, though, you come across someone whose trajectory is easy to map. A prospect who is so head and shoulders above everyone else -- in numbers, in the eye test -- that you cannot help but say that they are going to be The Next One. God save the poor boy you put that name on.

In this case, it is 2014, and they are speaking those words again. On the dingy ice of an OHL arena, a red-haired Toronto boy with scared fawn’s eyes paces around the circles, faster than anyone else in the building. There are articles written about him already, calling his experience the torture test and labelling him Jesus, the saviour, the new great. It will get worse for him from here.

A Generational Prospect

It is 2004, and all eyes are on Sidney Crosby. He has eclipsed QMJHL scoring records. He performs highlight-reel antics. It is known that he will make the NHL as a teenager, and that whichever team has him will have an asset they should not ever think to relinquish.

Now, in 2023, all expectations of him are blown away. He is fifteenth on the all-time scoring list, having played most of his life in the dead-puck era, and will be inside the top ten by the time he retires. He has never been below a point per game, having gotten to a hundred points as an eighteen-year-old rookie and only slowed down to ninety at thirty-five. He has won three Cups; two Harts; two each Art Ross and Rocket Richard.

Something similar can be said for his contemporary, one Alex Ovechkin, sixteenth in all-time scoring, second ever in goals. While neither were always the most singular, dominant player of the past eighteen years (has it really been that long?) their longevity and consistent high-level play have cemented them into that tier of all-time greats.

Such players only emerge once (or, for them, twice) in a generation; a “generational talent.” Gordie Howe was the first, before drafting happened at all, then Gretzky, joined as a part of the WHA merger, then Lemieux, then, debatably, Jagr through the early half of the dead-puck era, then Crosby and Ovechkin. Jagr was drafted fifth overall partly due to political constraints (it was 1990, and Czechia was behind the Iron Curtain), but all of the other drafted ones went first. While development curves for everyone else are hard to map, it is easy to tell, for them, how good they are as youths. We all call Gretzky the “Great One,” but he actually got that nickname before he was a teenager, because of how much better than the rest of his peers he was.

This is how we go up to the 2015 draft. Let’s say that it is September 2014, a full hockey season before the draft, so we can set the scene. Go back to the dingy Erie rink, watch the red-haired boy speed around the ice.

This is Connor McDavid. He was born in January just outside Toronto; if you are unfamiliar with the term “GTA,” I will pause now to tell you that it means Greater Toronto Area, and that it is the nexus of all hockey in the world. He is a Leafs fan, as so many of the GTA hockey-playing hopefuls are.

Connor is an unusual child, even by young hockey prospect standards. Entry to any of the CHL major junior leagues -- the OHL, the WHL, the QMJHL -- starts at sixteen, but select few can apply early, and if they are academically, physically, and emotionally deemed adept they can be accepted for exceptional status and join at fifteen. This happens once every two or three years nowadays; Tavares and Ekblad were the only ones to predate McDavid. As well as being deemed exceptional by the board of the CHL, he is exceptional among peers, too: intelligent and analytical, black-and-white, painfully shy. He works hard in school, desperate to avoid coming off as a “dumb jock.” Media interviewers ask for him, but they have to change the settings on their microphones in order to pick up his voice, it is so soft.

He has already won trophies; scholastic achievement, sportsmanlike behaviour, CHL rookie of the year. He will score at least one point in all but one of the first eighteen games of the 2014-15 OHL season, before breaking his hand in a fight (getting himself a Gordie Howe hatty, being that he already has a goal and an assist). He will score a hundred points in thirty-eight games, and a hundred and twenty points in the forty-seven games he will play.

Understandably, his name is penned in at number one on the draft board. Even such deficits as breaking a hand and being out for six weeks don’t tank his stock, it is so obvious how well on track he is to outpace all but the best.

He is sweet and shy, a captain of Erie based mostly on skill, and tight-laced into the destiny of future franchise saviour.

At least he has a friend, though, right?

Dylan

The 2014-15 Erie Otters are a good team. A great one, even -- third in league standings by season’s end, and you don’t get that far if your single generational superstar is sidelined half the year with a hand injury.

This is where Dylan comes in. Like Connor, he’s a GTA boy, and a young Leafs fan. Unlike Connor, he’s part of a serious hockey family -- the middle child of three. His older brother Ryan has already been drafted, in the first round, no less. He’s a real student of the game, too, a stats obsessive and a calm, steadfast personality.

Remember how we said the draft is a crapshoot? That’s very true. Prospects may have precise rankings when all is said and done, but in the meantime I find it best thinking of them as instead arranging into tiers -- there’s the generational talent in this year, but disregarding him we have a first overall-level, then a small handful of top prospects. Not saviours in their entirety, but certain to make a team very happy. Dylan projects as the latter group -- he’ll be somewhere between three and five. In 2014-15, he’s the OHL scoring leader, and takes the Erie Otters’ single-season record.

He and Connor are also best friends. Connor’s quiet, anxious even, but Dylan has a coolheaded sort of confidence that brings out the best in him. Rarely are they pictured without each other; rarely are they spoken to without mentioning the other. There’s a sweet little video out there of the Otters going to New York state and going on this little ziplining/outdoor climbing gym, and Connor and Dylan are about as glued to each other’s sides as you can be while obeying the harness safety rules. In hockey terms, while a little young for it, they’re married. Much like Crosby and Malkin are, although over a much shorter term, and publically the two Otters are much closer.

Dylan is the one I feel as if I can talk the least about. He is mostly defined by what he is not: not Connor, to start, and before the actual draft takes place that is the most of it.

Of course, that’s the most of what any of it is, isn’t it? These are teenagers, separated into imprecise tiers and mostly defined by which tier they slot into. The three boys below Connor, no matter how good they are, are defined by being not Connor.

Jack Eichel most of all.

Jack, to start, is American, unlike any of the other three. He’s a late birthday -- born in November of 1996 instead of the first eight and a half months of 1997 -- so he’s, in theory, had another year to adapt. (Brief footnote: the September 15 cutoff is what determines draft eligibility, either the year you turn eighteen or the year you turn nineteen. If you were born in, say, June of 2000, you would be eligible for the draft in 2018. If you had the audacity to be born in October of 2000 instead, you’d have to wait until 2019.) His development pipeline is also unlike the others, having come up into the NCAA, college hockey, and playing at the US National Development team before committing to Boston University. He won the Hobey Baker award as a freshman, and led the NCAA in scoring as a rookie.

He was marketed, coming into the draft, as the American Connor -- the new face of American hockey, a homegrown star, a fellow generational talent, although that was a feeble marketing strategy to dull the disappointment of going second to greatness. He was proud and polite, quiet but not scared, a young man uncomfortably aware of his own myth and rather irritated at the fact he had a myth in the first place. Taken in and treated well, he would probably have a well-suited disposition to a high-stress, playoff-bound team.

It’s unfortunate that that wouldn’t realize until eight years after he was drafted.

The Draft Itself, or, What Caused All These Problems In The First Place

The draft lottery rolls around. The lottery and the draft take place on different days -- the lottery several weeks before, so that for a long time the boys have an idea of to whom they will go. The first four teams to pick are, in order:

Edmonton. Edmonton had been very bad, for a very long time, and had three shiny prizes already to show for it: Taylor Hall, drafted first overall in 2010; Nail Yakupov, drafted first overall in 2012; and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, drafted first overall in 2013. I’m sure you already know this, but Edmonton was Gretzky’s team, while Gretzky won all his cups, and they now stand to get themselves another generational talent in Connor McDavid.

Buffalo. The Sabres have a few decent pieces: Ryan O’Reilly, Sam Reinhart. They haven’t made the playoffs in a few years, and have plummeted to the bottom of the standings, finishing thirtieth out of thirty.

Arizona. Arizona has never gotten off the ground, not once. They are a dust mote of a franchise, held in place by Gary Bettman’s fragile ego and the skimmings of Original Six markets. Their survival, as doomed as we know it is, is banking on a distant hope of good prospect luck and better PDO.

Toronto. While Arizona is the smallest of small markets, Toronto is… well, it’s Toronto. Remember earlier, how I said that the GTA is the nexus of hockey? Toronto is called the Centre of the Universe, and for good goddamn reason. The Leafs are one of the most storied franchises in the NHL, and simultaneously one of the winningest (the second-most Stanley Cups, after Montreal) and the losingest (their most recent Cup was almost sixty years ago.) Their fanbase dwarfs all but the most hardcore of French Canadian separatist contingents. There’s a common phrase now, when any hockey news is mentioned -- but how does this affect the Leafs? It’s well-done satire.

And with four teams, we have four boys. So I come upon the last one now: Mitch Marner. Mitch, like Dylan and Connor, is a GTA boy, a born and raised Leafs fan on an OHL team. He plays for the London Knights -- a diminutive forward (he weighs in at 160 pounds soaking wet at eighteen, and eight years later barely cracks 180) with fantastic playmaking skills, the creativity and gall to do things other players have never even thought of. He’s a sweet one, too, bubbly and energetic and cuddly and kind.

Here is how the draft goes:

The Oilers take the stage first, for the fourth time in six years. The ceremony is unnecessary. Connor McDavid is the name everyone knows they will say. Connor walks up to the stage, looking vaguely nauseous, and dons the jersey and the hat. (His facial expression in the interviews afterward is thoroughly dissected over the next eight years. Some say it’s simple stage fright; others say it’s personal distaste for the Oilers -- remember, Toronto boy, Toronto heart. I choose to believe it’s the first one. Not all of us are John Tavares.)

After a first-round prospect is chosen, they bring him down for an interview, then shuffle him off to some arena underbelly for photos upon photos. Connor performs his niceties, but before he is taken back, he asks to stay. He wants to watch Dylan get drafted.

The Buffalo Sabres come second, and pick Jack Eichel. Eichel is asked, throughout, how he feels about Connor, being behind Connor, coming second to Connor. The narrative being pushed is called McEichel -- the Canadian wunderkind versus the American one -- and he wants no part in it. He’s impressed by Connor’s play, in their few brief meetings he thinks of him as nice enough, he wants to carve out his own path.

This refusal to play along may have been the start of the discontent, in hindsight. The media clearly wasn’t going to get anything out of soft-voiced scared-eyed perfect Canadian boy Connor, but Jack, sharper edges and colder heart, might be good for a soundbite or two about this new league-made rivalry. Jack, though, ever aware, puts himself solidly into Generic Hockey Interview voice and backs off.

The Coyotes come third. Here is where a choice occurs, the first genuine decision. Connor McDavid had been slotted into first pick since the day he got accepted for exceptional status. Eichel had taken a few years more, but his place in second after Connor was well known for months on end. Dylan and Mitch, however, were up in the air. Do you pick the big one with more points, or the small one with star power?

The Coyotes follow the conventional hockey wisdom, and take the big boy. Connor waits to watch his friend take the jersey, then hugs him in the wings.

Finally, the Leafs.

Let’s actually take a step back to talk about the Leafs rebuild, for a second, because it, like everything the Leafs have ever done, is a testament to failure. Also, somewhat, because it is relevant. Also, moreso, because I can’t shut up about hockey and you’ve asked me to talk as long as I like. If you’re still reading, I want you to know that a) I am ever thankful for your time and b) we’re, like, just getting started here.

The Leafs’ last contending era was before the 04-05 lockout season, which means it predates the salary cap. They struggled in the midsection, for a long time, then finally fell enough to gain the fifth overall pick in 2008, with which they selected a big tough young defenceman named Luke Schenn, the first official piece of the Leafs’ rebuild, strange as it may be. Luke, while competent enough, was obviously not the sort of franchise-changing star the Leafs needed, and they struggled in the midsection again, before gaining, once more, the fifth overall pick, with which they selected Schenn’s partner, one Morgan Rielly. The two would be perfect partners, but we won’t know this for eleven years. Luke was traded twelve hours after Rielly’s draft.

Rielly is still in the AHL the next year, 2013, when the Leafs make the playoffs. This is the infamous 4-1 series: the Leafs go down 3-1 in the series, claw their way back up to game seven. They gain a 4-1 lead, going into the third period, and then blow it completely and lose the game, and the series, in overtime. They do not make the playoffs in 2013-14, and before the 2014-15 season begins they change management. The man they install as President decides to tank, and tank hard, selling as much of the Leafs as he can in the hopes of landing that elusive first pick.

They end up with fourth overall, and Mike Babcock, the Leafs’ head coach, does not want Mitch Marner, instead asking the then-management for the bigger defenceman, a boy named Hanifin who will go fifth to the Hurricanes. The Leafs take Marner anyway. Watch him as his name is called. He, like the first three, sits in a nest of other prospects and their families -- Mitch actually sits right behind Jack Eichel -- but unlike them, when his name is called the other prospects lean over to offer him congratulations, as well as his parents and brother. Mat Barzal, from across the aisle, offers a bro-hug as Mitch goes by.

The rest of the draft goes as usual. The 2015 draft, beyond narratively, is one of the deepest drafts in recent memory; players you may recognize include Timo Meier, Mikko Rantanen, Travis Konecny, Sebastian Aho (the Carolina one!), Roope Hintz, Kirill Kaprizov, Troy Terry… the list goes on. These players have their own stories, but few really tie in to this one. (So far.)

Summer passes; we move on. Training camp rolls around.

Connor McDavid, as expected, makes the team. He moves in with Taylor Hall, a fellow first overall. Jack Eichel also makes the team.

Dylan and Mitch do not. Dylan’s reasons are unknown to me, but Mitch is sent down because, again, Babcock does not want him. He’s naturally undersized and does not have a frame that builds muscle; Babcock is not under the impression that young men in Mitch’s image make good hockey players. Both Mitch and Dylan are returned to the OHL.

The stage is set now; each boy has a team. Eight years on, only half of them are on those teams. But we can’t worry about that yet! We have to make it to the NHL first!

World Juniors and the Memorial Cup

Once Connor makes the Oilers, Dylan Strome is named captain of the Erie Otters. Very cool, to only get what you deserve after the golden boy is gone.

Jack and Connor are off playing with the big boys. They’ll get their own section later -- we have to work our way up, not up and down and up and down. I’ve got to be somewhat cohesive, you know? So, we’ll stay, for now, in the world of junior hockey.

The Otters and the London Knights, Mitch’s team, are in the wonderful circumstance of not only both being very good at the same time, but also being in the same division as one another. This means they see each other quite often (no plane travel in the OHL. Bus only.) and have thus formed… a bit of a rivalry. It is becoming difficult to dance around: Dylan Strome, despite the politeness they’ve shown each other at the draft, hates Mitch Marner.

And why wouldn’t you? He’s the one Dylan fought with all last season for the OHL scoring title; he’s fast on his feet and can shoot from impossible angles; he makes plays you’ve never even considered, much less considered possible. He dangles through the Otters and scores the easiest impossible goal you’ve ever seen and laughs as light as air about the whole thing. And he’s tiny. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Marner drew a lot of comparisons to Patrick Kane in his junior days -- thankfully without the character in common, but as a hockey player. An undersized (almost comically so) London winger with otherworldly ability to manifest scoring chances out of nothing. The exact sort of irritating worm that not one of us wants on the other team.

So, of course, they get put on the same team.

The 2016 World Juniors are summoned. Connor McDavid, then dealing with a broken collarbone and a great deal of pressure, is not on Team Canada’s roster. Dylan Strome and Mitch Marner both are. Suddenly and thankfully, the media’s focus shifts from one, false rivalry in McEichel to a very very real one.

I don’t want to dismiss what happens next as a mere symptom of the fact that hockey players are engineered to get along with their teammates, even if they don’t like each other. Admittedly, it does start that way -- Mitch is a winger and Dylan a centre, and both skilled, so the coach puts them on the same line. Simple enough. And then they spark up a friendship.

Dylan’s reasons for hating Mitch were not personal, just hockey-related. Dylan hated Mitch because he was good and he knew it, the simple way a teenager hates their direct competitor. On the same team, though, the competition aspect is removed, and the barrier for hatred is gone. This is the Dylan/Mitch enemies to lovers arc, if you want to put it that way.

Mitch, for the record, I doubt ever hated Dylan. He doesn’t have that in him, never had. He saw a rival, sure, and as soon as that rival wore a matching jersey I assume he taped the word friend over whatever defined their relationship before. Mitch is probably one of the most gregarious, friendly, charming hockey players out there. Beyond his cute little face and on-ice highlights, even. He’s loud, sure, but when he talks he knows how to include you. He finds out what you like and talks about it, he singles you out if you’re shy and builds up your confidence. He’s just plain nice.

Dylan, like the rest of us, was charmed. Within weeks he went from calling Mitch annoying to telling us all about how he loves cuddling (!?) with him. They became fast friends and great linemates.

Dylan’s not the only one Mitch Marner befriends at Worlds, though. Somewhere between matches, Mitch takes an elevator at the complex they’re staying at, and ends up sharing it with a boy from the American team, a tall square-jawed Mexican centre with a Justin Bieber obsession. This is Auston Matthews, one of the projected top picks of the 2016 draft -- born just two days after the cutoff that would have made him eligible to go in 2015. He played with Jack Eichel at the USNTDP, before taking his age-eighteen year to go play pro in Switzerland. He holds the NTDP scoring record as a seventeen-year-old, and will continue to hold it until Jack Hughes breaks onto the scene. The two boys in the elevator do not yet know it, but they are about to share the mantle of franchise saviour, for the franchise most desperately in need of saving.

Either way. The Canadians place sixth at World Juniors, the Americans do better, the Finns win the whole thing. (In the long run, Laine turns out not to be better than Matthews after all.) Mitch and Dylan go back to their OHL teams.

Erie and London tie in points that year, but London wins the OHL title and goes to Alberta for the Memorial Cup, the CHL trophy. Mitch Marner takes home the scoring title, the Stafford Smythe (CHL equivalent of the Conn Smythe), and the Memorial Cup itself. He is one of the most decorated winners in OHL history, touted as being clutch, creating magic, and racking up points. He has close friends in Dylan Strome and fellow Knight Matthew Tkachuk, who will be selected sixth overall in the 2016 draft, the second American after Auston Matthews himself. And when NHL training camp rolls around in the fall, even Babcock cannot deny he is ready, no matter how slight he may still be.

Connor Complex

There’s nothing that fuels story like a good rivalry, and the NHL was obsessed with marketing this rivalry. The Canadian versus the American. The perfect child of a long line of red-blooded southern Ontario tradition versus the Boston boy with a chip on his shoulder. Jack and Connor, Connor and Jack. They hyped Jack up the time leading up to the draft, trying to hint that he was almost as good -- no, just as good -- as McDavid himself.

He was not, and everyone knew.

The 2014-15 Sabres, then the worst team in the NHL and having done an elite job at tanking (they are one of the worst teams in the analytics era, besides the 2022-23 Anaheim Ducks -- I wonder what prize might be waiting at that number one spot? Surely not someone named Connor.) wanted McDavid. The Pegulas, the owners of the Sabres, tried to hide their disappointment in him as pride. They had an all-American star, they said, someone who had grown up not too far from Buffalo himself, and in the same country, no less. He would be the sort of man to lead them into a new golden age, away from the misery of the tank years.

And yet the narrative persisted. McEichel, they whispered. Look at how good Connor McDavid is, and look at how much Eichel is not him. McDavid, they say, McDavid McDavid McDavid. No article could be written about Jack without mentioning how he came second to Connor.

The Sabres tried to quell the whispers. Look at our boy, they say. They signed Eichel to an eight-year, ten million dollar contract, and in the beginning of the 2018-19 season they named him captain. Isn’t our boy great.

The team does not improve. The Sabres hadn’t made the playoffs for three years when they drafted Eichel; they still haven’t made the playoffs today. I wasn’t around to look, but the team was bad. Eichel did his best, but he was young and inexperienced and did not -- never did -- have captain’s blood in him; Ryan O’Reilly lost his love for the game.

The whispers of character issues start to come out. Jack Eichel is a “locker room cancer;” he’s selfish, stuck-up, quick-tempered. He’s caught in a cage where the only key is to be Connor, something which he never wanted to achieve in the first place, and never could have even if he did want it. The whole narrative was completely fabricated. He liked Connor well enough when they met.

I do imagine he has feelings about it, though, and feelings about Connor now. He didn’t know him, not enough to have an opinion on the boy, but the name followed him around long enough for him to think about it. Imagine it. You’re good in your field, great, even. You’re doing well enough to earn yourself a superstar contract, you’re an All-Star, and yet the only way you will get any recognition at all is when they say that you are worse than one of the greatest players ever to play the game. They lock you into a connection that you have never wanted, barring you from forging your own path. You exist permanently in that orange-and-blue shadow. I don’t blame Jack for being angry. I would be too.

Babcock

Auston Matthews was incredible from the jump. He was big, he was strong, his wrister is the stuff of legend. He won the Calder in his and Mitch’s rookie year, by a not insignificant margin, well ahead of Laine. He was a coach’s dream doll, unusual enough to be marketed and good enough to be useful. Unavoidably masculine even at nineteen.

Mitch less so. Mitch is still small, remember, and struggles to gain weight. I know I talk about his size a lot, but it’s genuinely important. Hockey and its fan culture has long been a group that prioritized size and raw power above all things. Mitch possessed neither of those things, and when he struggled with gaining muscle it was seen as an unwillingness to try. If you know anything about the ability of our bodies to gain or lose weight, you know that it is simply a genetic roll of the dice, a scale that puts a little bit of us into the “gains muscle mass easily” category and decides when to stop. Most hockey players actually aren’t very far up the muscle-gaining spectrum, especially when compared to American football or baseball players -- mass is strength, yes, but it’s also more to move around on ice -- but Mitch is especially low on the scale. Because of this, he is seen as unmanly, a dangerous thing to be.

The Leafs media market is a nightmare, and always has been. Because this is the Centre of the Universe, there are more eyes on the Leafs than on any other team. More eyes mean more writers, means you have to say weirder and wilder things to beg for clicks. Outrage is a good marketing tactic. Getting mad about one of the prize prospects seemingly not wanting to bulk up for the good of the team is a very easy thing to do.

What’s more, Mitch, after his entry-level contract had expired, had had a very difficult and long-drawn out contract negotiation, asking for a lot of money -- essentially the maximum that the Leafs could afford at the time. Because of the salary cap constraint, this was seen as kind of selfish. The angry clicks move. Mitch is sensitive, they say. Soft, selfish, weak.

It’s easy enough to dismiss out of hand when your uncle from Belleville does it, because what does he know. It’s different when it’s the head coach of the Leafs. Mike Babcock, is, at the time of hiring, the highest-paid coach in the NHL. He was signed before the 2015-16 season, and at that point had an eight-year contract, which would have carried him up until this year.

Mike Babcock sucked. Structurally, his teams were fine -- the Leafs made the playoffs in 2016-17, and haven’t missed it since, but he was awful, horribly mean to the boys under him, and especially, especially Mitch.

We should skip ahead a little bit. It’s the beginning of the 2019-20 season. The Leafs have made the playoffs three times already, and lost in the first round each time -- but this, too, is not yet a phrase that strikes worry into our hearts. They’re young, and they have plenty of time left.

Respected veteran Jason Spezza came home to the Leafs, having spent his career -- a player who might squeak the Hall of Fame, but is more likely just below its level -- in first Ottawa, where he was the captain of the Senators briefly and one of its most well-loved players, and then Dallas. Like the boys I talk about here, Jason Spezza is a former OHL player, a GTA boy, a Leafs fan. The Leafs’ season opener is against Ottawa, the team where Jason Spezza left most of his mark. There used to be a promotion with the Senators -- a local branch of some pizza chain would offer a free slice if the Sens scored more than five goals in a game. Spezza (and his linemates, Heatley and Alfredsson) were so good, they named his line the Pizza line. Mike Babcock makes Jason Spezza a healthy scratch on that day.

This is seen as disrespectful, but no more than a coach living up to his hardass reputation. You do what the coach tells you, don’t you? Lest you become a whiner, or worse, a locker room cancer. Scratching an extremely well-respected veteran on the opener against his former team is just something some guys do. A message, if you will. Stay the course, Babcock just wants his players to respect him.

And then news of the list leaks.

It happened when Mitch was a rookie, but they kept it hidden for three years. The Leafs went on a father-and-sons trip, one they do every season. They’re on a road trip, with only their fathers, isolated from their home.

(A brief aside to talk about Mitch’s dad; his name is Paul Marner, and he is the most stereotypical hardass hockey dad on the planet. A nitpicker, an armchair coach, a bully. I do not imagine Mitch felt particularly comforted by his and Babcock’s combined presence on this trip.)

Babcock approached Mitch and asked him to organize all of his teammates in a list. He wanted Mitch to arrange them in order of hardest workers to laziest; he thought Mitch was one of the lazy ones, and wanted to drive this point home by making him categorize his teammates like this. Mitch, as a rookie hockey player does in the presence of the Maple Leaf hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles, obliged. He was under the impression it would be a private affair, just an assignment from Babcock to teach him some sort of lesson. Whether it be out of fear or honesty, he placed himself last on the list.

Babcock told the others.

Specifically, two Leafs vets that Mitch had placed low on the list -- Nazem Kadri and Tyler Bozak. Imagine this: you are a decent centre on a bubble team, but nonetheless an established NHL veteran of about a decade, and your coach shows you a list a rookie made. He tells you that the rookie arranged everyone by work ethic, grinders to lazy shits. You are firmly on the “lazy shit” end.

How much does the coach have to suck, or how much does the rookie have to be loved, for Kadri and Bozak to react like they did? The rumour says they called for Babcock’s head on the spot. Mitch was in tears. I wouldn’t want to stay in Toronto if that happened to me. No wonder he and Auston signed for so much -- Babcock was barely halfway through his contract when they did. If I’d thought that I would have to deal with him for that long, I wouldn’t accept anything less than as much as they could possibly pay me.

In the end, in the beginning of December, 2019, Mitch got hurt and the Leafs went on a road trip. They were already losing by the time they’d left, and they kept losing. Normally, a team on a road trip doesn’t take the hurt players with them, but they took Mitch. The Leafs lost six in a row and finally fired Babcock, letting Sheldon Keefe take his place. Mitch’s presence was a comfort.

Go West

The Leafs make the playoffs first, and take Mitch with them. The Sabres are fighting a silent war with their star centre, but they are no closer to success.

Connor McDavid is named captain at nineteen, the youngest in the history of the NHL. He scrapes the team to a playoff spot, then to a second round loss. He wins the Art Ross and the Hart.

The year before his entry-level contract expires, when he is first eligible, he signs what is then the most expensive per-year contract in NHL history -- eight years, a hundred million dollars. He is looking forward to spending the rest of his prime as an Oiler. He wins the Art Ross the next year, comes very close the year after. The Oilers do not make the playoffs again until after Covid hits.

He gets hurt a lot, too -- he breaks his collarbone as a rookie, missing half the season, and at the very end of the 2018-19 year, crashes into the net irons and shatters his knee. There are rumours of the man who broke Connor’s collarbone doing it on purpose; Connor claims that he overheard the man bragging about it, and I am inclined to believe him. This guy gets traded to the Oilers not too long after that.

In the meantime, Dylan is struggling. The Coyotes stick him in Tucson, a team he is obviously too good for. His entry-level contract slides another season. He wiffles between Tucson and Arizona, not being considered good enough to stay up but being too good to stay down. In the end, on the last year of his entry-level contract, he is traded from the Coyotes to the Chicago Blackhawks, a similarly bad team with a few remnants of its Cup-winning days. Dylan, a feeble icon of Chicagoan hope for one last dance with the aging core, centres Patrick Kane.

In his first half-season with the Blackhawks, he scores 51 points in 58 games. There are hopeful flashes of what he can be, the touted prospect he once was.

Things wrap up on New Years like this: Connor is beyond a hundred-point pace; Dylan, although in no less danger, is at least out of the dust at the bottom of the barrel; Jack is caught in a cold war; the team loves Mitch.

John Tavares has a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Playoff Series

March of 2020 rolls around, and with it the coronavirus pandemic. The league is shut down before the season ends, and the playoffs re-formed in July, inside a bubble -- no one in, no one out until they are eliminated. The Sabres stay with their families, having once again missed the playoffs. The Leafs are set to play the Columbus Blue Jackets, and the Oilers are set to play the Blackhawks.

This, to date, is Dylan’s only playoff appearance, and he is set to face Connor.

Dylan wins.

The qualifying round -- functioning as the first round of the bubble playoffs -- is a best of five, not of seven, and the Blackhawks defeat the Oilers 3-1. They then proceed to lose in five games (this one is a best of seven) to Vegas, but Dylan’s job is done.

The Leafs lose in the first round again. The Leafs have made the playoffs since Auston and Mitch’s debut, every single year, but they lose each time; in six, to the Capitals, then in seven every year after that. Or, in this case, in five.

Covid had not stopped by the end of the 2020 season ( :/ ) and the NHL was rearranged for what would be ostensibly the 2020-2021 season, but ended up being played mostly in 2021. Because of border laws, the Canadian teams are sequestered into their own, North division. Dylan Strome signs a two-year contract extension with Chicago right before the season starts -- one that will carry him until the end of the 2021-2022 season.

If you’ve seen All or Nothing on Amazon Prime, it is this season that is covered. The Leafs tear through what is seen as a weaker North division, taking a comfortable first place spot. Connor McDavid cracks a hundred points in fifty-six games. Both Leafs and Oilers lose in the first round.

The Leafs do it perhaps most remarkably. They have drawn the Canadiens, a rather insubstantial team who are in their spot mostly because they have one of the best goaltenders in recent memory at their back.

I watched this game, live, before I was a serious Leafs fan. I can only imagine what it would be like if you were already invested at that point; I would not wish to live that horror on anyone. I tried to watch All or Nothing, later, but I stop here.

Corey Perry and John Tavares are both on the ice, in the race for the puck. Tavares catches an edge, as you sometimes do, and falls, and Perry’s knee is in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, and it catches Tavares in the side of the head. He falls to the ice, his limbs splaying unnaturally. He won’t move.

Medics come over, to try and raise him to his feet. He fights against them, blood streaming from a cut in his forehead, unable to tell if they are trying to hurt him or not. There is no one in the crowd, the stadium empty for the pandemic. The camera cuts to Kyle Dubas in the rafters, who has a phone in his hand and swiftly vanishes back into the halls of the arena. He is calling Tavares’ wife. We do not know what is going to happen. Everyone looks shaken -- the Habs have just watched a man nearly die, the Leafs have just lost their captain, perhaps forever. They lose, although the game feels like an afterthought. I do not want to watch hockey anymore.

They win the next three straight, though, even without him. Then they lose, twice, in overtime.

The Leafs, as they have done for the past four years up to this point, go to game seven.

Partway through the game, Mitch Marner panics in his defensive zone and puts the puck over the glass. This is a penalty, it is a penalty every time, and he knows that. He sits in the box, looking defeated already. He curls in on himself, and the camera flashes to the penalty box. He’s crying. He knows the game is lost.

The Leafs are eliminated again, and there is a target on his back now, not only for the puck going over the glass but for the tears. He’s soft, they say. As they have said since he was picked, because he doesn’t look like a hockey player should, because he doesn’t act like a hockey player should, because he doesn’t play hockey like a hockey player should. He makes too much and he disappears when it matters.

Thoughts on the Leafs’ playoff successes suddenly switch from the core is young, even if this is frustrating to they need to win before it’s too late. Already, in recent years, they have suffered historic game-seven chokes and drastic failures to launch. Whether they do it against teams like the President’s Trophy-winning Capitals or the barely-alive wild-card Canadiens is irrelevant. They cannot win a round, at all. The Leafs are already the team with the greatest Cup drought, and they are now gaining a long playoff round victory drought too. It should be time, at least, for them to look like they are a contender.

This is how the Leafs find themself stuck; a particularly frustrating timeloop, even though hockey itself is nothing but. Sports are cyclical by nature. A team is bad, then okay, then good, then declining, then bad again, and this repeats anew. Some teams try to get themselves out of this cycle by being good forever; I can assure you that this only really happens to the New York Yankees, who employ a cadre of evil wizards to keep everything on that hell team going well for them. Most other teams who try end up stuck like the Canucks are, right now: bad enough to miss the playoffs, but not good enough to get key picks for a rebuild. I can see next season play out, clear as day: they struggle out of the gate, one of their stars gets hurt right when it seems like they’re at the very, very start of gathering momentum, they’re bottom-10 by January and the team says everyone but Pettersson are on the table, they trade picks and low-grade players, they get blazing hot post-deadline and finish twenty-first.

There is, unfortunately, also a perception that pure talent is not what makes players playoff performers -- instead, some so-called “clutch gene” that exists, or not. The reality is somewhere in between. Clutch exists. There are always players who can score when no one else can even dream of it, but a greater problem is luck. President’s Trophy winners are not often Cup winners (even if higher seeds are most likely to win), because the regular season is a much, much bigger sample size and the playoffs can change the course of all of it by a goalie having a hot streak at the right time. The 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning, third-best team in NHL history, got swept in the first round by Sergei Bobrovsky going crazy. The 2022-23 Bruins lost in seven in the first round in much the same manner.

And no matter what, the Leafs are always on the wrong end of the luck. Bounces hit the post. The refs take back goals for reasons they would have ignored at any other time of year. John Tavares slips, and his head makes contact with a knee.

Mitch ends up the whipping boy. He is the Leafs’ most valuable player, and this is a team with Auston Matthews on it, but I’m serious. He was the Leafs’ leading playoff scorer in 2023, he’s one of the best penalty-killers in the league, he’s adored by everyone who’s ever once talked to him. He only ever wanted to be a Leaf, and now that he is here he is the sacrificial lamb for the anger at a curse that is not his fault.

I do blame the media. I will always blame the media, those who turn on him at a moment’s notice because they know picking on the skinny pretty unmanly one will get more clicks than anything else. I beg of you -- know that, of anything that it could be, it is not Mitch’s fault.

Jack Eichel has a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Neck Injury

It is 2021, and the Sabres aren’t going to make the playoffs. Jack Eichel has been captain for coming up on three years, and has been a Sabre for coming up on six, none of which have even slightly improved the team. He is widely disliked within the fanbase, and, rumouredly, within the locker room and organization.

Jack is frustrated, dragging a mediocre team along through a slog of the past six years, and he has never been the kindest man on the planet. He is about to get worse. The Sabres are on a losing streak when they head to Long Island, and Jack is hit the wrong way and slips a disk in his neck. The Sabres insist he’ll only be out a week and a half.

It is a great sin in hockey, to go against team. Anything that can be seen as selfish is demonized; shooting from a difficult angle when your teammate is wide open, not playing when you can muscle through the pain. Not trusting your coach or management is about as bad as you can get. If you’re a team guy, willing to sacrifice health and limb for the boys, you are held as saint, no matter how hurt you become in the end. This is a philosophy that has been drilled into these men since they were kids, as soon as they put their first skates on. You can stand any pain for the length of a hockey shift; you can play through anything for two minutes. It is a dangerous, dangerous school of thought, one of the most destructive parts of hockey culture. But it is, nonetheless, law.

Eichel is about to commit a sin so great they’ll kick him out of Heaven. I do think that, of the four of them, he is the only one with any semblance of genre awareness: when he was first scouted as a prospect and they were comparing him to McDavid, I think that he would be the only one to ignore the media’s spin on that as thoroughly as he did. He knows what he is, and he knows himself. Of course it comes off as bitchy and selfish, though -- that kind of pressure can’t be kind to anyone.

Before the week and a half is up, he visits a specialist doctor about his neck. This is where it all starts to go wrong.

The Sabres take issue with that for two reasons: one, that they hoped he’d be able to come back after the end of it. Keep in mind that he has herniated a disk in his neck, an injury typically so severe it’s impressive he’s walking -- slipping a cervical disk often causes nerve pain that radiates down through the entire spinal cord below that point, which is the whole body from how high up his is. Two, that the doctor he consults is an independent surgeon, one unaffiliated with the Sabres themselves.

The thing about belonging to a hockey team is that you are, because of the way your employment is linked to your physical health, essentially their property. They make your medical decisions for you, they feed you, they tell you how to move. Going to someone else is a breach of contract, and the already-tense connection between Jack and the Sabres gets more tense. The Sabres keep losing. They lose eighteen games in a row.

Jack’s doctor recommended a surgery that no NHL player has ever had; cervical disk replacement. The Sabres did not want this -- the surgery carries risks, yes, but they also wanted to control the way that Jack’s injury was handled, and going through with this surgery was Jack’s wish, not theirs. The Sabres do their own evaluation, and ask for a different, more common surgery: spinal fusion. This surgery carries less immediate risk, but the bones in Eichel’s neck will also be fused, and he doesn’t want that. Because the team has final control over a player’s health, not the player, they decline his disk replacement. Having reached a stalemate, they rule him out for the rest of the season, trying to win a war of attrition.

September 2021 rolls around, and the Sabres, along with thirty-one other teams, take training camp. At the beginning of training camp, players do a physical exam. Jack, because his herniated disk has not improved, because he needs a surgery that has been denied from him, because he is stubbornly and bravely willing to wait out the Sabres, fails his physical. As a result, the Sabres, fed up with him, strip the captain’s C from his chest.

Jack makes one final request to the team: either let him get the surgery or trade him. In the end, they trade him to the Vegas Golden Knights, a team that did not exist when he was drafted. The Golden Knights approve him for the disk replacement surgery the day they acquire him.

The surgery is a success; his rehab goes better than anyone expects, and he starts tearing it up when he comes back. I would argue that, if the Golden Knights win the Cup this year, he should get the Conn Smythe -- he has been an invaluable member of the team, even without a letter on his chest.

It is less important for him to win his million awards than it is for him to come in and out of this surgery in the first place, still able to play. He fought with the team that was supposed to have upheld him as their star for months over his right to do what he wanted with his own health; in the end, the only way to go was for him to change that team. He was the first to have this surgery, but after him there have already been hockey players who have undergone it -- much like Tommy John, the baseball player who got his ulnar ligament reconstructed and the surgery to do so named after him. He fought for the chance to control his own body and won.

And for that, he was demonized.

The Sabres missed the playoffs every year they had him; they missed the playoffs every year after he left. Because he was the captain and he had the audacity to go against the organization’s wishes, he was hated. In Buffalo, he is still hated. If you ask, they’ll tell you he was a locker room cancer, that he was undevoted to winning. If you look at him in Vegas, neither of those things are true.

Jack Eichel is a rare man -- he does have that “clutch” gene, or rather doesn’t have the choke instinct. He has always been unbothered by the spiral around him. He operates well in the mire, and when the pressure rises it doesn’t affect him (or maybe, even better, he feeds on it.) He has the right kind of mentality -- that fuck-you, I’m here and you can’t change that, you tried to control me and I wouldn’t bend mentality. He has only made the playoffs once, this year. Like Dylan, actually, his only appearance has involved defeating Connor McDavid. Go back and watch his highlights from the Vegas-Edmonton series if you can: he has a couple of pretty goals and more than a couple great defensive takeaways, but he doesn’t lose his cool, not once. He has earned his right to be here, and he knows it more than anyone else. I’m rooting for the Stars, but I hope he wins some day.

153

How do you talk about the Edmonton Oilers? I mean, without either excusing or demonizing them, although I admit I have Hater Instinct and trend towards the latter. They have the best player in the world; that grown-up incarnation of the wide-eyed boy on the Erie rink. They have the best playoff performer in the world; Leon Draisaitl, who I have not avoided mentioning until now on purpose, but whom I cannot continue without bringing up. They have been terribly cap-managed since the day McDavid was drafted, and are an unstable roster with blazing-hot offense and very little defence or goaltending at all.

For a brief moment, let’s not talk about the Oilers. Let’s only talk about Connor himself.

McDavid has 850 points in 569 career games. Not even Sid had that many points through that few games. If he stays healthy, Connor’s well on track to become the second player ever to hit two thousand for his career -- after a certain other Oiler, who need not be mentioned. He has won just about every award you can win, with the exception of the Selke… and the Cup.

If it’s possible, he has proven himself better than all of the hype at the draft saying he would become a great. To watch him, you can see the way he has changed his team, how even though they have all learned from him that he is still the best.

There is something that many Oilers do. When next your team plays them, pay attention to it: they cut into the offensive zone with possession on the outside, using tight little crossovers to gain speed, after which they’ll usually try to rush the net (if there are no defenders in the way). This is a move that McDavid has patented; he’ll use it, just as many of the others will, but he’ll probably be the one that scores. The depth all skate like him, really, fast and in wide arcs, trying to generate a rush chance.

Connor as a player is a tour de force, the best power-player in the world by a mile, no slouch at even strength, speedy enough to score even shorthanded. The boy’s got wheels. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which NHLers are fast and which are slow, but Connor’s just that tick above everyone else that you can see it without eye training at all.

Connor as a person is a bit less showy. He’s quiet by nature, shy and soft-voiced. Because he was hyped so much (franchise saviour, McJesus, Next One) he has been media trained into sterility, giving the same level answers as everyone else, hardly daring to express any opinion at all. His eyes are big, rounded, and one of them is lazy from a time when his brother tried to take it out as a child, and that combined with his heavy brow and stiff expression -- he’s never been a good smiler, smirks with one corner of his mouth and that’s mostly it -- give him a resting expression of something like concern, or maybe despair. When he laughs, he doesn’t really “laugh,” just kind of coughs, a one or two-syllable affair. He avoids eye contact with the camera, and often the reporters as well. There is no seething emotion under the surface, not like with Eichel, nor does he speak analytically like Dylan does. He moves through his life as if he is someone who does not want it to turn out quite like this.

I do not know if he wants to be in Edmonton. There are jokes about how he is desperate to leave, but I definitely don’t believe those; there’s a difference between not wanting to stay and wanting to go. I don’t think he hates it. He has been given a responsibility, the captain’s C -- and because, unlike Jack Eichel, he is a good Canadian boy who has been given a destiny, he accepts it. He loves his teammates, especially Draisaitl, whom he seems to derive all his confidence from.

I will also say that I don’t believe he’s stupid. Naive, perhaps; not stupid. There is no way out for him, even if he was sure he wanted to leave; he’s the best player in the world, far too expensive for any contender to afford in either trade or cap space, and if he asks for a trade he won’t let himself go to a team that isn’t already a contender. He will remain an Oiler at least until his contract is up, and I imagine that his staying afterwards depends on Draisaitl.

People talk about him leaving a lot, largely because of the team that has been assembled around him. The Oilers are not a well-created team, and I will say that plainly now and spend as little time technically deconstructing it as possible.

Beyond McDavid and Draisaitl, they have:

A rookie starting goaltender, whose success as we know it is based on a single-season sample size and a complete playoff collapse.

A five million dollar backup goaltender, who earned his contract by being carried by the Leafs, despite being utterly horrendous for a long enough stretch leading up to his free agency that anyone who looked beyond the win-loss numbers wouldn’t have signed him.

One genuine shutdown defender.

One young up-and-coming defender; by far one of the most promising Oiler (or otherwise) defensive prospects, beyond the usual suspects.

One netfront grinder who is great at playing wing to high-power setters, but cannot drive his own line.

One decent 2C.

Sarah Nurse’s cousin. Sarah’s better.

A supporting cast of bad defencemen and middling-at-best forwards.

Many charming characters, of course: Zach Hyman, the grinder, is a beloved ex-Leaf, and I’m personally a fan of Nugent-Hopkins, the 2C, but the vast majority of this is not the sort of thing a contending team is built upon. McDavid has missed the playoffs almost as often as he’s made them. The playoffs are a crapshoot, but in order to try your luck you have to at least be able to enter the lottery, and it takes a stunning amount of effort to be able to do that.

So, McDavid lingers, in this kind of limbo. It mirrors the Leafs, almost. (And yes. Because McDavid is an Ontario boy, and the Leafs are the Centre of the Universe, we have to mention them both in conversation. Not all stories revolve around the Leafs, but this one does.) One true contender, and one generational talent, both what we picture to be well overdue for their Cup run, but neither having yet done so.

The thing about the stories of the class of 2015 is that they intertwine, that they mimic and mirror each other. These boys have not simply gotten drafted in the same handful of picks in the same year and gone on their merry ways -- they layer, they parallel, they weave around each other. Connor is the captain of a team that cannot win, Jack is a captain, Mitch cannot win. Jack fought for the right to control his body and was demonized for it; Mitch negotiated for a contract that he determined to be a fair price for Babcock, and was demonized for it. Whatever pure saviour they figure Connor to be, Jack is the twisted inverse of that, falling from grace.

Connor has one of the best seasons in NHL history, one of only seventeen player-seasons with over a hundred and fifty points (Nine of those seasons belong to Gretzky. Another four belong to Lemieux.) He loses, in six games in the second round, to the Vegas Golden Knights. At the time that he’s eliminated, he leads the playoffs in points. Leon Draisaitl is tied for second place. Counting from the date Mitch Marner played his first game in the NHL, the Oilers and Leafs have almost exactly the same number of playoff game wins, with the Oilers having one more.

There’s No Place Like Strome

Before we can look to the future, there is one person I have been neglecting. Dylan, poor Dylan. I think it would be only half an unfair assessment to call him a draft bust. He’s talented, for sure, but not nearly the same calibre that the draftees around him are. Hardly a Marner, an Eichel, or even a Rantanen or a Meier.

His career has existed quietly in the shadows, so far from Connor McDavid that it only feels fair to mention them in the same conversation in this context. It has been eight years since they were best friends, Connor so close to Dylan he waited in the stadium in order to watch him get drafted. They didn’t look each other in the eye in the handshake line when Dylan won their series. Connor didn’t go to his wedding.

That being said: so far, he has found himself a knack for landing in the shadow of greatness. When he was an Erie Otter, it was Connor -- Dylan held the scoring title in their draft year, while Connor was out nursing his hand, but Connor was the chosen son and Dylan was the Coyotes’ consolation prize. When he was traded to the Blackhawks, he found himself centring Kane and Debrincat, but of course both of them were the offseason and trade deadline’s prizes, and not him.

And then he signed in Washington.

So now, we go back to Ovechkin. Alex Ovechkin is one of the greatest players of all time; his Capitals are on the decline now, but they contended for a long time while he was playing and may still contend as long as Ovi still skates. For a long time, the team relied on Ovechkin’s goalscoring, assisted mostly by his faithful centre, Nicklas Backstrom. They, too, are married; they have played a thousand games as teammates, been through a decade of heartbreak together before the Cup was theirs. During the 2021-2022 season, Backstrom took time off -- he needed hip surgery, something likely to end his career. Ovi was alone.

There is a fundamental difference, of course, between the expectations of wingers and centres. A winger, like Ovi, scores, or assists, at his own leisure, but it is the centre’s job to drive his line. Ovechkin is generational -- he will sink forty goals no matter what -- but he still needs someone to move him out of the defensive zone, someone to make his assist.

Enter Dylan -- a young centre, not especially fast on his feet but intelligent, and clearly experienced in the realm of managing high-calibre wingers (see: Debrincat, and the ghost of Patrick Kane.) He joins the Capitals on a one-year contract, desperate to prove himself. Chicago didn’t want him, and Arizona didn’t either. It takes barely until November before he is, once again, the necessary shadow of greatness.

Ovechkin, the team’s captain and centrepoint, clearly likes what he sees, and the management does, as well. The Capitals offer Strome a five-year extension.

Maybe it’s because he’s less of a superstar then the other three members of his draft class, but Dylan has a life outside of hockey -- a wife and young daughter. After being thrown away by other teams, and with his new family, I can only imagine that it was… peaceful, if anything, to be offered this contract.

Chicago, after rapidly getting rid of him, Debrincat, and then Kane, would go on to tank spectacularly, and win themselves the first overall pick. They will use it to draft another generational talent. His name is also Connor.

The Blue Wedding

So, here we stand, at the end of it all. Dylan finally has a home, a mother hen of a Russian bear that it has become his job to assist in record-breaking, and soon to be two daughters. Jack has a team that loves him, freedom from pain, and an ongoing potential Cup run. Connor has a sterile mansion, a best friend, and an unsteady team. Mitch’s life is up in the air.

Right as I’m writing this, the general manager of the Leafs has been unceremoniously kicked out. His tenure will end the day before Mitch’s no-move contract kicks in, but it is not known if Mitch’s time as a Leaf will survive that long. He is well on track to become one of the greatest Leafs of all time, and his tenure might be cut short in the prime of his career.

But let’s wrap up with this: Mitch will get married this summer. Because he’s Mitch, the darling of the league, everyone’s best friend, I imagine the wedding party to be extensive/ Packed to the brim of current and former Leafs, as well as people who have never been Leafs. I wonder if Dylan Strome will be there -- or even Connor McDavid, although McDavid never even attended Dylan’s wedding.

The stories, as they do, go on.

#asks #mitch marner #jack eichel #connor mcdavid #dylan strome #hope this helps and/or gives you brain poisoning #narrativeposting

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orphicdreamers-wp · 4 months

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Happiness— Jack Hughes

Summary: In which Jack and your marriage has run its course.

Content Warning; Angst without a happy ending, divorce, emotional distress, etc

Pairings: Fem Reader x Jack Hughes, Fem Reader x Nico Hischier

Inspired by ‘Happiness’ By Taylor Swift

All the years I’ve given is just shit we’re dividing up

You stared at Jack hopelessly. You and him had been together since you were 15 years old. Now you sat oceans away from each other. The lawyer cleared her throat, “So all we’re doing here today is dividing assets before we get further into the divorce.” There was less than ten feet separating you and your husband of 4 years. However you felt like you were standing on separate continents. Danielle, the lawyer continued, “Neither of you brought dependents into the marriage is that correct?” You cleared your throat, “Yes, neither of us has children.”

Danielle nodded, “So it seems all we really need to cover is the properties. There’s the skyrise apartment in New Jersey, the high rise loft in NYC, the condo in Tampa and the apartment in Toronto.” Jack spoke up, “I only want the apartment in Jersey and Toronto.” Danielle turned to you with an expecting look on her face. You looked at Jack and let out a defeated sigh, “That’s fine. I didn’t come here to fight.” Jack shook his head slightly and faced Danielle who went on to explain the regulations on divorce and ownership of properties.

I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool who takes me spot next to you.

This week had been really rough for you. You and Jack’s fifth anniversary would have been this week, and working so closely with Jack wasn’t helping. You had been cleaning your lens to your camera you’d used for tonight’s game when the players filed off the ice. Jack ending the line of players, and scoffing to himself as you smiled at him kindly. He walked past you and stopped when he he heard a feminine voice call out to him.

Out of habit you looked up to watch the scene unfold. A beautiful woman dressed in a long bright red furry coat and black leather pants with perfectly blown out black curls and bright red lipstick approached him and enveloped him into her embrace. You couldn’t make out the words that were being shared but the encounter ended with the woman kissing Jack warmly. You felt your heart drop into your stomach and you shoved your stuff into your bag and hurried to your office to upload the photos to your computer and hard drive.

No one teaches you what to do, when a good man hurts you and you know you hurt him too.

The holiday season crept up on you this year. You’d been too wrapped up in rebuilding your life and relationship with yourself am your divorce. You had been roped into doing a Secret Santa with the players and the other social media administrators. You were somewhat disappointed in the fact you pulled Jack’s name. The holidays had always been the best time of year for you two. This would be the first year you weren’t together.

Jack was officially cursed, his girlfriend, Tessa had just found out that she was pregnant and then he was roped into doing Secret Santa. And with his luck this year he drew your name. He hadn’t spoken to you in a higher capacity then, “Are we done here?” Or “Where should I stand?” since the divorce was made final. He’d always sneered in your direction whenever he noticed you lingering or trying to be friendly with him. He just wasn’t ready for it to be amicable yet. He figured he’d probably just get you a candle or a gift card or something. If you’d gotten him you’d do the same thing.

You’d known Jack had grown to dislike the holidays since he and his siblings were all split up for Christmas due to their hockey schedules. You also knew that the Devils didn’t play again until the weekend after New Year’s. So you decided to buy two first class tickets to Vancouver for Jack and Luke, admittedly you went over the budget but you had saved the money all year for you and Jack to go for Christmas anyways. So you put those in a cute envelope and wrote a small note and slipped it in the envelope before sealing it and writing Jack’s name in beautiful calligraphy.

You slipped it onto the table of gifts on your way to your office the morning of the exchange. You went to your office and got to work updating Instagram and Twitter accounts. Eventually you ventured out to go get a cup of coffee, you had to walk past the table of gifts so you figured you would check to see if your gift was there and it wasn’t so you assumed it may have been in the possession of your secret Santa still. You went to get your coffee and drank it before rinsing your mug and putting it in the dish drainer after. You returned to your office and got out your camera and went to get some practice shots.

Hours later after practice everyone was ready to do the gift exchange so you all filed into the conference room. The gifts were passed out and you watched quietly as Jack picked up his envelope and Nico commented on the pretty handwriting. Luke glanced over at you, recognizing the handwriting from a birthday card he’d received from you and Jack a few years earlier. Jack opened the envelope and immediately broke out into a huge grin, “Because I know you miss them. Go home(Take Luke too.) It’s two first class tickets to Vancouver.” Luke looked at you as Jack looked around the room, “Who got these?” Everyone stayed quiet and Tyler, a right winger ended the silence by opening his gift which turned out to be a pair of arthritis socks given to him by Ethan.

You went to open yours, hopeful since it was a decent sized box. Your smile flattened as you lifted the top of the box. Inside were a box of tissues, a bottle of 2 in 1 shampoo and conditioner conditioner, eye masks, concealer, some breath mints and some baby wipes. Tyler’s shit eating grin he’d been sporting the entire ordeal dropped as he caught a glimpse of the contents of the gift. He looked up, “You better be fucking around Hughes. You didn’t give her just that right? I mean how big of a douche can you be?” You waved it off, “It’s fine Ty. I don’t mind. There’s always a bad gift right?”

Nico shook his head spoke up, “No way sugar, there’s bad gifts like what I got and there’s unacceptable gifts.” Jack looked down at his feet, feeling internally bad upon seeing tears forming in your eyes as you defended probably the worst gift in the history of Secret Santa. Luke turned to his brother and spoke in a low tone, “You know she got you right? I mean you were her husband for 4 years you have to recognize her handwriting.” Jack froze as he looked at his brother who’d found a picture of a birthday card he’d received that had Jack’s name in the identical handwriting. He looked up to find you had left the room, leaving your gift on the table.

There’ll be happiness after you, but there was happiness because of you

It was the end of the season Devil’s banquet and you still had to shoot photos. You were sitting on the edge of the stage in a silk pale blue shimmery gown with a slit up the side and your hair pulled back and light lipstick adorning your otherwise makeup free face. You had your eye pressed against the viewfinder as you took pictures of the team and their significance others. Your eyes admittedly landing on Jack and his girlfriend more than they should. You were slightly startled when Nico sat down beside you, “So how’s my best girl doing tonight?”

You laughed, “Nico just because I’m your girlfriend doesn’t mean I have to be your best girl.” Nico smiled, “I know, but you’re still my best girl.” You smiled, “I’m alright Honey. You look nice.” Nico pressed a kiss against your cheek, “You look like Cinderella.” You giggled, “Does that make you Prince Charming?” Nico grinned, “Darling, I’d be Shrek if it made you happy.”

All you want from me now is the green light of forgiveness. You haven’t met the new me yet, and I think she’ll give you that.

You were straightening your office up before heading out for the weekend. You were logging out of your desktop when a knock on your door startled you. Jack smiled softly and held his hands up in surrender, “I shouldn’t have snuck up on you. I’m sorry.” You smiled as you scrawled a note for yourself to change your water filter next week, “You’re good Jack, what’s up? I’m on my way out now.” Jack rubbed his hands against his jeans, “I just want to apologize for everything, the divorce and all.”

You smiled, “Don’t worry about it Jack.” Jack shook his head in disagreement, “No way, I was royally shitty to you before, during and after the divorce was finalized. I’m sorry I treated you like that. I just guess I didn’t realize that my best friend was going through a divorce too not just me.” You smiled softly, “It’s okay Jack. It was your first time going through a divorce too. We just weren’t meant to be married anymore. I mean we got married like 5 seconds after we graduated high school. It wasn’t realistically going to work.” Jack laughed softly, “Are you sure we’re all good?”

You grinned as you crossed the room and engulfed him into a warm hug, “I’m going home to my boyfriend and your girlfriend is having a baby Hughie. We’re all good.” Jack smiled, “Thanks Y/n, I’ve missed being friends.” You smiled as you and him exited your office, “Me too. Drive safe Hughes, tell the boys I said hello and give your mom my love.” You walked away from Jack finally finding your inner happiness.

#fanfic #hockey #hockey player x reader #nhl fanfiction #nhl #jack hughes x reader #jack x reader #jack hughes #new jersey devils #nj devils #divorce

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writersdrug · 8 months

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Ghost x Reader x Konig: I Don't Need You (Ch. 4)

<- Previous - Next ->

Summary: You've been sold to a new group - again. KorTac just bought you off of the last team's hands, forcing you to uproot and settle a fifth time. Something feels different about this team, but you remain distant and cold from everyone. You figure in a few months, you'll be tossed onto the next bidder's plate, anyways. No sense in trying to bond with anyone now.

Additionally, Konig takes the first step at cracking through your outer shell.

Warnings: some distasteful jokes.

Notes: Nothing fancy here, just setting up the foundation for the upcoming events. This weekend should be more eventful! Thanks to everyone who's loved it so far, let me know if you'd like to be tagged in the next chapter! (Also, still working on some oneshots and a Price fic too)

A year had passed. It felt like ten. I had been traded between four different private military groups. It felt like forty.

Working with Jax’s group started out just fine. On the first mission, things couldn’t have gone more smoothly. I took down every single enemy that stood in between me, the team, and the hostile package we were saving. We were done in less than three hours. Apparently, that was a problem for the rest of the team. I was too good. So skillful, I was hurting their egos. Rather than think of how I was helping carry out missions successfully without any significant losses, the team complained that I wasn’t fitting in and was causing a problem among the members. “Like she did back at her old base.”

I hadn’t been causing problems at all, but I hadn’t been trying to fit in either. From the moment I walked onto the base, I felt like a reject. I minded my own business and kept to myself, only being a team player when we were briefing or when we were on the field. The rest of the team was just fine with that arrangement, until they thought my skill threatened their reputation. The results of the missions I attended with the group should have convinced Jax to ignore his soldiers’ requests to have me bumped, but as with Price, he had his favorites. And he chose to listen to them.

It was a similar talk as the one I had with Price. You’re good, but the team doesn’t like you. You’re not really causing issues but, indirectly, you are. So we’re selling you to another private group. Even though they were selling me off just as easily and quickly as Price had, this didn’t hurt as much. Because I never had anything here to root myself onto to begin with.

So there I was, back on the heli, squinting down at the complex as my hair whipped around my face. Some soldiers stared back at me, sneering. Some smug. I stared back, expressionless. I’d learned to grow a hard shell around my roots – if I couldn’t be planted anywhere, it wouldn’t hurt as much when I was torn out of the earth again.

The two soldiers in the front seat were quiet. They pulled the heli off of the landing pad, speaking to each other in a language I wasn’t familiar with. It sounded Swedish. I turned my attention to the file in my hands, gripping it tightly as the wind threatened to snatch it from me.

KORTAC

Majka/Ridgeback

CONTRACTUAL AGREEMENT

I signed, looking out at the clouds. Another initiation briefing, another ice-breaker, another couple of months of hell. I mentally prepared myself for the unwelcoming stares and the countless cold shoulders I would bump into trying to rub elbows with this new group. I wasn’t sure if I would ever find a place to land, or if I would keep hopping across teams like rocks in a river, until I was swallowed by the water and carried away. Hopefully that happens sooner rather than later.

-----

I stood in the corner of the dimly lit room, settled in the shadows behind Ridgeback’s desk. He sat there, scribbling his signature on my document. I noticed how often he muttered to himself as he worked, his brow consistently furrowed, as if everything he read was something troubling. Eventually, he flipped through the pages once more, before grunting in approval. “Just about finished here, I’ll just need one more signature from you. Then you’re officially a KorTac sergeant.”

Like hell I am.

He held out his pen in my direction. I took it, scribbling my signature at the bottom of the page. It was sloppy. He scoffed. “You ain’t gonna give it a once-over?” he asked.

“No sir, I already know what’s in my contract.” I replied dryly. Five years, stealth expert, marksman, sniper-as-needed, subject to termination at director’s discretion.

He smirked at my expression. “I have a feeling you’ll fit right in with the rest of us.”

I doubt it. “We’ll see, sir.”

After signing my contract, Ridgeback collect the papers and we shuffled out of his office. He made his way down the hall as I trailed behind. The compound that KorTac was based at was surprisingly the most decent-looking out of the previous compounds I had been at. From what I had bothered to look at in the file, they were pretty well off; they carried out missions for different eastern governments as easily as one would check something off their to do list. And they were paid handsomely. Something I had to look forward to. Maybe something that would coerce me into putting in an effort to stay with the team.

Ridgeback was one of their leaders, and was a sinister looking thing. His eyes were always filled with suspicion, his body was hulking and tense… He looked like he was either ready for me to stab him in the back, or that he was getting ready to do that to me himself. His steps echoed through the halls rhythmically, while mine were nearly inaudible.

Despite my hard outer-shell, I was on edge. Every time I was signed to a new team, there were jabs, insults, threats, and sometimes petty attempts to trip me up – mentally and physically. I had no reason to think that this compound would be any different. If I could, I would have grown spikes from my skin, keeping everyone and everything at a distance.

We entered a small room with a table, some chairs, and a rug. How much do the governments pay them to afford such a luxury? Several people stood throughout the room, mostly against the far wall. Ridgeback slapped his papers on the table, spreading them to his liking, while I pressed myself against the wall behind him. Just a few minutes of this, then I can leave. I prayed that the meeting would go by quickly so I could go to my room. I felt like a dog, snarling and hunched as I faced the pack of wolves, who stared at me dangerously. You’re in the wrong group.

Ridgeback cleared his throat. “I hope you all looked over the files this morning.”

No answer.

“As usual, I see…” he sighed. “We have a new team member. I’d like you to please welcome ‘Bonnie’.” He stepped aside and gestured to me with a tilt of his head.

I met everyone in the eyes with an ice-cold gaze. I wanted it to be known: Leave me alone. I’ll do my job, you do yours. Otherwise, fuck off.

A few stares, some rolling eyes, some groans, and the occasional indifferent glance. I was used to it: no one wanted me here. Give it a few months and I would be sold off to the next group. My skills couldn’t make up for the lack of chemistry with the team – I would be wasting no efforts to change that.

“What does she bring to the table?” one man asked.

“Better be a sandwich.” Someone answered, earning a few laughs.

“Chlamydia.” Another said. More laughter. A few glares towards the speaker.

I continued to stare at the wall behind them, unamused.

“I expect you to treat her with respect.” Ridgeback continued, purposefully directing his words towards certain people in the room. “We’ve needed another marksman for a while now, and she just so happens to bring other skills with her. She’s a decorated sergeant major that specializes in stealth extractions and attacks. We need her. You all know that, seeing as how these last few months you all have been lacking.”

More silence. Some people shifted uncomfortably.

“So please accept her as one of our own, because she’s here for a while.”

I groaned internally. We’ll see.

Ridgeback moved on to talk about other things. An upcoming hostage-rescue mission set to take place two weeks from now. I remained against the wall, listening close to the details: I would be one of the first people to strike, alongside Fender, O’Connor, Konig, and Horangi. Fender and O’Connor would work together on a checkpoint, while Konig, Horangi, and I would be alone to take out the other three. Zero, Roze, Juno, and Oni would be retrieving and extracting the hostage package, with Castillo and O’Connor covering them as snipers – once O’Connor and Fender had cleared their checkpoint. Mine wasn’t too far away from them, so I would be backup as needed.

Simple enough.

After the briefing, we were dismissed, and I trudged out of the room with everyone else. I broke off from the crowd and walked briskly down the hall. I heard a few disgruntled voices as I pushed past the bodies.

“Gone so soon?” a woman’s voice called out. I didn’t bother to turn around.

“Got shit I need to do.” I replied.

“Fair – we’ll be in the commons later, you should swing by. I’d be rude if you didn’t introduce yourself.”

I ignored her and continued down the hall. I pulled my keycard out of my pocket – this compound was nice. Most bases didn’t even have the luxury of locked doors, let alone private barrack rooms. I reached my door and hurriedly tapped the card on the lock, stepping inside and locking myself in.

I let out a tired sigh, leaning back against the door. I didn’t feel anxious, yet my shoulders couldn’t have been more tense. Having to adjust to a new team for the fifth time… the weight of it finally settled on my mind, and I groaned. Maybe I should just quit. Being a civilian would be boring, but at least it’s a consistent life.

My bags were still piled on the floor near my bed. I had the convenience of an in-unit shower and bathroom, as well as a desk and a short dresser. I grabbed one of the bags, dropping it onto my bed and rummaging through it. I pulled out a pair of cargo pants and a compression shirt – I desperately needed to change, as my current clothes were still covered in dust and dirt from the helicopter ride.

I quickly took a shower, leaving my hair in a braid and focusing on washing the dirt from my body. I dried off and pulled on the new set of clothes. I looked at myself in the mirror – my eyes had dark bags under them, and my mouth had a slight downturn in the corners. Something that had become permanent over the last year.

I walked back into my room. My bag was still on the bed, clothes strewn about, along with a couple of books and files. I sighed, pushing them all to the side and flopping down on the mattress. Damn, I might actually try to stay this time… I thought, sinking into the pillows. I closed my eyes, wondering if I would even go to the common area tonight. They’d be fine if I wasn’t there.

Suddenly, I heard a soft knock on my door. I tilted my head up, staring daggers into the door, hoping whoever it was would just go away. I’d had my fill of strangers for the day. I dropped my head back down onto the pillows. Another, sharper knock thrummed against the door.

“Busy.” I stated loudly.

“No you’re not.” An accented voice spoke through the door.

I scoffed, rolling out of bed and making my way to the door. Who the fuck-

I opened it annoyedly; my eyes were met with someone’s chest under their compression shirt. I looked upwards until I finally found their eyes, which were the only things visible under his sniper hood. I cocked my head to the side. “Yes?”

The man cleared his throat. “Bonnie?” he asked. There was a sense of professionalism in his voice, with an undertone of… nervousness? I couldn’t quite place it.

“That’d be me.” I said curtly. Unintentionally, my demeanor became cold and unwelcoming, as I had forced it to over the years when I had to interact with anyone. Alone, I was myself. Around other people, no one had the opportunity to know what I was like. I refused to let them.

“Konig.” He reached his hand down in front of me. I grasped it firmly and shook it, surprised at how strong his hold was.

“Cool.” I said.

“I’m your Colonel.” He spoke, and I noticed his Austrian accent.

“Cool.” I repeated.

“Since we’ll be working together,” he started, taking a step back so I didn’t have to crane my neck so hard to look at him, “I figured a proper introduction was in order.” He peered over my shoulder, glancing at the clothes strewn about my bed. I caught a flicker of annoyance in his glance, before he looked back at me. “What do you say we talk over dinner? You’ll get a chance to meet the rest of the team, and figure out how we work.”

“Actually, we won’t be working together.” I stated, crossing my arms over my chest. Konig looked confused. I continued: “Ridgeback said you’ll have your own checkpoint to clear, and I’ll have mine. I don’t need to ‘figure anything out’. I know how to do my job, thank you very much.”

Konig’s eyes narrowed in disgust. I saw his hands clenching into fists. “You’re a part of a team. You need to work with them, you know.”

“I don’t need anything.” I snapped. “Tell me what to do and I’ll get it done. That’s what I do.”

Konig huffed in frustration. He gave me one last glare before muttering something in German and storming off. I sneered behind his back, then closed my door behind me.

I started to curse at myself – I was given the perfect opportunity to bond with the team, and I had squashed it like a bug. But I told myself what I always did. It wouldn’t have worked out anyways. Just wait until after the first mission, you’ll be sold of to the next director that deems you useful. It’s only a matter of time – no use trying to find a sense of home here. I walked back over to my bed, dropping on it with a scowl.

My roots were hanging in the air, desperate to grab hold of something, anything – just to ground myself. My leaves were starting to fall off and float away, and my branches were tired. I was so tired. I wished I was back with the 141. I wished I had said something to Soap before I left. I should have begged Price to let me stay. I should have tried to talk it out with Ghost from the night that it first fell apart.

I groaned, cradling my head in my hands. I’m not going to the common area tonight.

-----

Taglist: @igotmajordaddyissues

#konig cod #konig x reader #call of duty #ghost cod #ghost x reader #ghost x reader smut #konig smut #cod #cod mw2 #cod x reader #konig x reader smut #simon riley x reader #simon riley #simon riley smut #konig #ghost smut #simon ghost riley smut #simon ghost riley x reader

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notebooks-and-laptops · 4 months

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Honestly Lord Livius Erimond of Vyrantium might be one of inquisitions biggest missteps. Which is kinda wild, because on the one hand he's a very fun, over the top villian, and his existence leads to one of my favourite Cole lines. But on another...

IDK man. The wardens have been characterised, repeatedly, as doing incredibly dodgy things throughout both DAO and DAI. They are heroes, yes, but they are also the type of people to kill those who want to back out of their joining ritual and build crazy secret bases where they lock up demons with blood magic they forced a mage to do on threat of him not seeing his wife or child ever again.

I think Inquisition tries to turn the wardens into something much more gallient than they are. It wants them to be on Corypheus side for plot reasons, yes, but it also wants them to have been tricked into doing so, so that the player can still be like 'yay i love the wardens'.

But this was unneccesary! We've already met wardens, well before all this, that were fighting on the side of getting to understand and possibly work for talking darkspawn. That's basically the plot of awakening and of the Legacy DLC. There are wardens who think that talking darkspawn need to be investigated and may even be worth siding with even if those talking darkspawn were responsible for the fifth blight. You, the player, may have made that decision in Awakening.

So like. Just cut Erimond. It would make the whole thing more morally grey and interesting. Clarel doesn't need to be tricked, she doesn't need to 'I will never serve the blight' about it. She can be working directly with Corphyeus because she wants to understand more about talking darkspawn or because he convinced her that darkspawn aren't the real evil but Orlais is, or because she thinks he ALSO wants to kill the old gods or for a million other reasons.

We can have some fucked up messy wardens AND some wardens who think this is stupid hiding out with Alistiar/Loghain or simply submitting to the calling. And we can have them both without some manipulative, over the top, campy villian prancing around and telling everyone how evil and clever he is up until the moment you kill him.

IDK i feel DAI really killed some of the talking darkspawn buildup by the way they wrote Corypheus and the way they had his minions act and they also kinda made the Grey Wardens appear way more put together just 'corrupted by Clarel' etc. when the wardens are historically a very corrupted, actually physically corrupted group who do batshit things to save the world and are basically only tolerated because they're effective at stopping the numerous almost-apocolypses that rear their head from time to time.

#dai #dragon age #da2 #dao

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rottenraccoons · 4 months

Note

HIIII I wanted to ask a more technical question related to the game. I know in another ask I think you mentioned that the ending you get in chaper 1 would determine where the story goes in chapter 2, but I was curious if individual/specific choices from chapter 1 would make a difference or effect anything like a bit of dialogue in chapter 2.

Like for example in Oleanders route you pick a trinket and that can effect a few lines of dialogue later. Will some choices like that carry on into other chapters? Tho I'd totally understand if not since it'd probably get too complicated to do stuff like that ^^

I really hope this isn't spoiler territory. I tried my best not to do that ><

The short answer is yes! Choices you make in chapter one can absolutely be referenced or have ongoing effects in later chapters. For anyone who has never programmed before, I'll explain a little about how choices work under the read more and show some examples of Obscura code, but the simple version is that it's only a little more work to include stuff like this: a line of code and then whatever the extra/alternative dialogue is.

So!! If you've never programmed before, the word you'll want to know is variable. A variable is basically just a box that contains information. In basically all visual novels any information the game needs to remember is stored in a variable. And in Ren'py games, it is very easy to make and use variables for a lot of stuff!

Your protagonist's name, for example, is put in a variable box labelled "Name", and so we can just type [Name] in dialogue and Ren'py knows that what we're asking for is the contents of the "Name" variable box, so it just shows that. You can see us doing just that in the first line of this code screencap! So when you enter your name at the beginning of a playthrough, you're telling the game what information goes into the "Name" variable box.

(You can also see how we set variables here, with the "trust_keir" variable remembering if you said yes or no to trusting him, and if you say no then he gets one point added to his affection score.)

Within a single playthrough/save file your variables stay the same until something in the code changes them, but starting a new game makes a new set of variables for that playthrough. That's why no matter how many new games you start and enter a different name into, your old saves will still have the name you entered there.

Since Chapter 2 is going to be a direct continuation of Chapter 1, you're still in the same save file and so all your variables just continue being used. And that means they're available for us to use for all sorts of things! Using variables can be complicated if there's a lot of them that interact in a lot of ways (ask me how a certain date scene is going!), but here's a pretty simple version.

There's two ways onto Keir's route: you can get kidnapped by him normally, or Vesper can accidentally find a way into Mouse Hole after leaving Cirrus' route. If you do leave Cirrus' route, the variable "cirrus_escape" is set to True. That means that later on, I can program dialogue that will only be shown if you left Cirrus' route, in this case mentioning him by name while passing his church. There's a different line for players who didn't leave Cirrus' route. And we can do that with basically any variable in the script!

(For those who want a total breakdown, the screenshot above works like this:

First line: everyone sees this.

Second line: the code that tells the game only to show anything "inside" it (below and indented) if the player left Cirrus' route

Third line: the piece of script that's shown to players who left Cirrus' route

Fourth line: the piece of code that says "anyone who didn't get to see the third line get to see anything inside this"

Fifth line: the piece of script that's shown to players who didn't leave Cirrus' route

Sixth line: everyone sees this.)

So yes, there will be references to previous things that happened where they're appropriate! We love weaving references to things that happened before into the script, it makes everything feel more alive and responsive to your choices, even if those responses are individually pretty small.

#obscura vn #rotten raccoons #asks #about us #(by which i mean our process)

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islerouxsims · 1 year

Photo

DIZZY ISY SAVE FILE VERSION 5

Hello!

Here is the fifth version of my Dizzy Isy Save File. I have fixed all the photos and painted animals. It took me forever which is why the French version is not finished. I just don’t have the energy to do it all again.

Moonwood Mill and Copperdale are now renovated, complete with new lots and families with their own storylines/relationships. Some of the new lots and sims can be seen below. In addition to the new residents, I tried to make sure that the students in Copperdale were populated with well-known teens from my previous versions.

♥ What do you get? ♥

VERSION 1 OF DIZZY ISY (STILL AVAILABLE HERE)

VERSION 2 OF DIZZY ISY (STILL AVAILABLE HERE)

VERSION 3 OF DIZZY ISY (STILL AVAILABLE HERE)

VERSION 4 OF DIZZY ISY (STILL AVAILABLE HERE)

…PLUS…

195 custom clubs and icons (+11 than v.4) with points/rivalries and custom activities.

Lots of details of custom books to find, interesting tombstones, photos with past histories and mysteries etc.

♥ When you enter the save♥

There are 2 empty lots.

There are 17 empty houses (10 starters, 6 under 100k, 1 under 120k).

There are 16 rentals in holiday destinations.

There are 2 free apartments.

Secret lots in Mt. Komerebi renovated.

Selvadorada and Strangerville adventure/mystery unplayed.

Conservation efforts not completed in Sulani.

Evergreen Harbor has many community project opportunities.

Neighbourhood Stories disactivated

___________________________________________________________

It is a busy save file with many lots filled to stop random spawning of townies but the empty lots will soon quickly fill up with townie families if you don’t use them.

The townies are clearly marked in the unplayed tab with the #townies so you know who is meant to have a lot and who isn’t.

___________________________________________________________

♥ What do you need? ♥

❥ ALL THE PACKS apart from Journey to Batuu

❥ Kits used: Fashion Street kit, Incheon Arrivals kit, Desert Luxe and Carnival Streetwear kit

-You can still download this save file without all these packs or kits but some items might be replaced by substitutes, and we all know how those pan out.

❥ 128 MB of free space for this save file.

❥ Zerbu’s More Club Icons Mod (PLEASE DOWNLOAD FIRST!)

(If unavailable to you please download from here)

❥ Rex’s Custom Club Activities Mod (PLEASE ALSO DOWNLOAD BEFORE THE SAVE!)

♥ Recommendations ♥

❥ MC Command Center by Deaderpool.

❥ No Random Townies by Zero.

❥ Assign NPCs Roles by Zero to reassign roles if necessary.

♥ How to install? ♥

Make a backup of your Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/Saves folder

Download the file, unzip, and place files in Electronic Arts/The Sims4/Saves.

Open your game, enter the save. It is named “Dizzy Isy Save File By Isleroux and you should see Averie Cromwell who is at high school and it is the beginning of summer.

Don’t worry, there is no chance of suffering or reliving painful high school memories as Averie is super popular, a cheerleader, loved up with a cute football player and rich. Like old money rich! She even has a bowling alley in her basement. Have fun! If you feel like taking smug little Averie down, feel free to play it that way too :)

___________________________________________________________

DOWNLOAD (SFS) or DOWNLOAD (MediaFire)

(REMEMBER TO DOWNLOAD THE CUSTOM CLUB MODS FIRST!!)

**Finally, please, if you enjoy the save and want to support me and future updates, please consider buying me a coffee ☕

I don’t put my save files behind any kind of paywall even though this is now YEARS of work. I hope to continue like that.

I really appreciate those who have already supported me. I see you. I know who you are. You are the kind of person who bothers to read this far down. So thank you.**

Happy simming! ~isy~ ツ

#isleroux #dizzy isy #dizzy isy save file #sims 4 #ts4 #sims 4 save file #ts4 save file #custom save file #reblog #isleroux sims

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lightvsdark18 · 6 months

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Overblot punishments

Since it is a big topic or pet peeve of everyone, I'll say why I believe what the consequences the boys faced.

Riddle: In the novel, it's stated he was almost expelled and dealt with his peers insulting him behind his back and isolating him for what happened.

Leona: The last time you talk to Leona in Book 2, it's explained he got his ass handed to him by the other players and had to go the infirmary because of it. But I know that's not good enough, so he was also almost expelled. His brother had to save his ass which adds salt to the wound.

Azul: Was yelled at by Crowley. He also faced expulsion, but this is Azul and Crowley, he payed the crow off to not do that. Therefore, his punishment was being isolated by his peers and getting a tearful, worried phone call by his mother.

Jamil: His dorm mates are ready to fight him for his vice dorm leader seat and has to rebuild his reputation by following behind Kalim. He probably also faced expulsion but Kalim payed off Crowley. However, Jamil still had to deal with his parents chewing him out for putting Kalim in danger.

Vil: Because only his SDC team saw/know what happened, the incident was swept under the rug by Crowley. He couldn't get expelled because (he's the fifth overblot at this time, so it seems pointless) no one knows what happened and expelling him without the actual reason will cause too trouble. However, the incident was eating away at Vil by him apologizing and showing regret to his SDC team in Book 6.

Idia: His mother dragged him by the ear and ordered him to clean and fix up the mess he made. In my canon, he was gone for two months before returning to the school. He spent the whole cleaning and repairing stuff he broke, rebuild Ortho and dealing with the process of repair to the school and remodeling of Ramshackle. He didn't face expulsion because Crowley kept quiet about five overblots, so didn't have a leg to stand on.

#twisted wonderland #riddle rosehearts #leona kingscholar #azul ashengrotto #jamil viper #vil schoenheit #idia shroud #twst headcanons

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bagopucks · 10 months

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Highlight Reels

The boys in Minecraft

Jack Hughes - He is definitely the one everybody yells at endlessly to get in bed. Everybody else is waiting, wasting their time, and Jack is doing whatever he pleases. If a group of the boys is in the living room, they’re all screaming at him to get his shit together and lay down. Jack will randomly hit people. It’s just his thing, but the issue is that he has a whole pack of dogs, and sometimes he forgets they’re not all seated. So Jack has his hitting privileges revoked in the world settings. When he and his brothers get into arguments, Jack takes his bed to another home. Usually Cole’s, and ignores them for a while. Unbeknownst to him, it helps Quinn and Luke get things done faster.

Quinn Hughes - The miner. He’s the one who collects the essentials and mines for ores everybody needs to make better items. He plays the game as one is technically supposed to, going to the nether then the end to defeat the dragon. Though, he’s patient if everybody wants to play for fun and do whatever. He likes making farms, and he likes having a dog. He won’t go outside at night, not wanting to risk whatever he has XP wise or in his item bar. He helps Luke when it comes to construing the house, giving his opinion on stairs and colors, and what materials would look cool. Their home doesn’t always look the best because of it, and Jake likes to whine about it, but Quinn never cares.

Luke Hughes - Luke loves building houses. He’s also one to do a little bit of everything. He helps Quinn mine sometimes, or collect wood. He likes to explore too, and is the only one who really knows how to use the coordinates if the boys don’t have maps. Which means he’s usually the one helping Quinn or Jack find their way home. He does not put up with Jack’s nonsense like Quinn, and before Jack couldn’t hit people, he was always killing Jack for every little thing. The Hughes boys all have horses, that Luke tamed, and he’s usually the one feeding them as well. He likes to save the apples from chopped down trees for them.

Trevor Zegras - He does whatever Jack does. He and Jamie share a house. Probably a tree house that Jamie built. They have separate bedrooms, but they’re always having sleepovers. Trevor has a dog, but he also has a lot of cats, and a parrot. He also has a random llama farm, and randomly talks to villagers through the screen when they come across a village. He pulls his weight by tending the crops after the fifth time Jamie asks him to. It’s a very tense household they share. Other than that, Trevor is a stay at home roommate. Practically useless for anything other than putting up large and annoying paintings.

Cole Caufield - Has his own home.. probably a fortress. Cole is the player to go silent for extended amounts of time, only to show back up with diamonds or a new extension to his house. He lives somewhere between the Zegras-Drysdale home, and the Hughes home. He’s the home they all visit when they need anything they didn’t think of stocking up on, though Cole usually makes them trade for it, or they owe him later. Trevor and Jack frequent Cole’s house for sleepovers as well. Cole has a good eye for aesthetics and decorating his house on the inside and the outside. And a weird fascination with the axolotls.

Nico Hischier - He’s still learning how to play. He has a room in the Hughes’ home, but he is barely on as it is. When Nico is on, he’s asking a million questions. Quinn has taken him under his wing. Nico knows not to visit Trevor, because Trevor likes to trade whatever Nico has for random useless things, and overall give him a hard time. Nico loves the animals, and likes to build little farms. He also loves putting out flowers, usually little roses because they’re Devils colors.

Jamie Drysdale - Jamie hates Trevor’s cats, because he can never get into his chests when said cats are on top of them. He has been known to make a cat or two disappear when Trevor is gone. Jamie contemplates shoving Trevor out of their treehouse balcony and killing him every chance he gets. Jamie is a labored man trying to enjoy a simple game. But he loves cooking the food, and making cakes, which in turn usually make him want a physical cake. He’s gotten to know the Hughes boys through the game, and he enjoys talking to Jack. Jamie is the one person Jack won’t torment. They have good conversations, and go on fun adventures together. Jamie helps Quinn mine sometimes when Luke won’t go, and always shares his items. He has one dog he named after Daisy -the team dog-, and it has a little yellow collar.

#nhl imagine #jack hughes #ella’s thoughts #trevor zegras #quinn hughes #nico hischier #cole caufield #jamie drysdale #luke hughes #hughes brothers #nhl fic #highlight reels #nhl x reader #ella’s updates #ella’s nonsense

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cellarspider · 2 months

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18/?? Alexa, play Despacito

(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

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And now, we return to Prometheus, which is trying to redeem the last two fifths of itself through blood sacrifice. Content warning for discussion of eyeball nastiness and death by immolation, Holloway.

Taking things slightly out of chronology this time, because there’s an excellent, quiet scene sandwiched in between lots of screaming: I'm sure they meant to put it in juxtaposition with this to heighten the emotion, but I refuse. We'll save that one for later. As a treat for me. And now, as a treat for me, Holloway is dying! Hurray!

So, turns out we’re spinning the wheel of Inconsistent, Ominous Black Goo effects again, and landed on “hangovers aren’t supposed to make your eyes grow tentacles”.

Holloway, apparently in denial, does not recall this fact until he’s gone out with what could generously be called a rescue party, to try and locate Millburn and Fifield. Janek belatedly and unwisely goes along to help, while David appears to go on a pleasant Sunday drive in his golf cart. He’s heading to a better scene, the lucky scamp.

Millburn is very dead–a rubber snake jumps out of his mouth, so you know he’s toast. Fifield’s body is nowhere to be found, and it will make an underwhelming return later.

Holloway collapses, covered in creeping black veins. Shaw finds this distressing. I would be fascinated to know if anybody in the audience agreed with her. I usually would, if only because certain kinds of screaming can kick me into sensory overload, but apparently there’s a psychological component to that response. And so I placidly watched Vickers meet them at the Prometheus vehicle bay with a flamethrower.

I appreciate her belated interest in quarantine and sanitation, but frankly, it’s a little late for that. I already had my rant on that earlier. At this point, things have gotten so bad that even Holloway realizes that the only solution is to go 40k on his ass.

youtube

[Video description: A 40k meme clipped from TheRussianBadger’s review of the game Space Hulk: Deathwing: A player says “BROTHER. GET THE FLAMER. THE HEAVY. FLAMER.” Sudden cut to almost incomprehensibly fiery gameplay, with a dramatic choral soundtrack and in-game voice lines “WE ARE THE ANGELS OF DEATH!” “MY FURY IS MADE MANIFEST!”, and ends right before a player yells “I WOULD LIKE TO REGISTER A COMPLAINT” and spins wildly around, spraying flames everywhere.]

Yes, Holloway burns to a crisp! I don’t know what the movie wants me to feel here, but whatever it is, I did not feel it. Did it want me to feel sad about this, because Shaw doesn’t want this to happen? Does it intend to raise the tension by having things spiral further out of control, demonstrating that a drop of the Ominous Black Goo is enough to kill a man in under a day? Am I supposed to take sick satisfaction in watching him die? All these are possible in bog standard horror movies.

However, this is a movie that wants to speak to something thematically. Holloway is positioned as a character we are not necessarily supposed to find sympathetic. As previously mentioned, the Engineers did not invite humanity to this planet. They were warning humans that if they continued to stray in their behavior, they would be killed by something that would come from here.

Perhaps we are thus supposed to be asking questions about this: why would the Engineers do this? Why create humanity and then threaten to destroy their creations? What was their justification? David has turned this weapon on Holloway, making the choice that at least one man deserves the fate the Engineers planned for all humanity. Does he deserve that? Does anyone?

I was not thinking any of those things in the theater. Because what I actually felt was a desire to return to the scene interwoven with this one, which we will get to next time. This is the danger of creating an unlikeable, expendable character: the audience may feel no pathos when they die, nor question the death’s necessity. If they’re not along for the ride, then they may simply shrug.

Particularly when the rest of the movie is such a mess. This is only their second day on the planet, does anyone else remember that? I mean, I’ve been here for what feels like eternity, but they behaved so stupid, so fast, that this feels less like the inevitable falling apart of dozens of smaller mistakes, and more like one gigantic katamari of mistakes that will not stop rolling until it has collected every mistake in the world, and is thus deemed worthy of becoming a star all on its own, to forever shine out how badly they fucked it all up.

Next time: one of the two good scenes people tend to remember.

(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

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Citations for alt-text rambles:

https://www.swtor.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSpFnDQr88xCZ80N-X7t0nQ

https://youtu.be/vy5fgDvb9-c HYEEh-HAA!

Overflow Ramble, because tumblr lets you put in more alt-text than it will actually display in-browser:

A wide shot of Holloway with his arms outstretched, walking toward the vehicle bay ramp. Is this pose supposed to be a crucifixion allusion? I hope not! That would be baffling. Though as these posts have proven, something being baffling doesn’t rule out Prometheus doing it. Shaw is on the ground behind them, restrained by Janek.

I’m trying to figure out if this was done on a studio stage, or on location. You’d think the latter wouldn’t be possible, but I’ve seen behind the scenes shots of them filming in the volcanic desert of Iceland, they definitely were in places that looked similar. But the background may still be fake after a certain point–outdoor green screens are a thing.

The lighting on Janek and Shaw doesn’t quite feel right. Part of it’s the shadows: they’re darker on the people than in the background, which is a common problem for CG elements.The visual fidelity of the gravel behind them kind of has a sudden shift about halfway up Shaw’s head, and I’m not sure if that’s just focus or what.

If it is a composite of real and CG, it makes sense that it looks a bit off, though: these are background elements that are not supposed to be your main focus, on a shot that’s not held for too long. There’s always been trade-offs like that in visual effects, they’ve just shifted over the years. Anyway, back to Charlize Theron with a flamethrower.

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(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

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#Prometheus 2012 #Prometheus (2012)#less serious analysis in this one because the movie failed to justify it #one could say that it generally does throughout its entire runtime #but that will not stop me #I have to get ALL these thoughts out of my system #and leave them as a monument to my obsession and a movie that could have been better #Youtube

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thenerdyindividual · 1 year

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Want stories featuring queer characters in fantasy, science fiction, or horror settings, where being queer is central to the character but not the only thing they have going on? Let me introduce you to my list of podcasts!

To start we have Welcome to Night Vale. You’ve likely heard of it thanks to the tumblr sexy man poll, or if you’re old school tumblr like I am. It’s a classic for a reason, it kicked off the fiction podcast renaissance and was queer from the jump.

Welcome to Night Vale is an episodic podcast taking the form of radio broadcasts from a strange desert town called Night Vale that appears to be in a parallel universe to ours. It follows the bizarre occurrences within the town and the oppressive government’s clumsy attempts to cover them up.

How is it queer? The show also follows the personal life of radio show host Cecil Palmer who met new-to-town scientist Carlos, and “fell in love instantly”. Not only are they now married, they’ve adopted a child together.

Alice Isn’t Dead

From the creators of Welcome to Night Vale, Alice Isn’t Dead is a horror fiction podcast that follows Keisha, a woman who became a long haul truck driver to go in search of the wife (Alice) she thought was dead, but discovered was alive. In the process she uncovers monsters lurking among us and a massive government conspiracy trying to hide the truth.

How is it queer? As stated, the inciting incident is that Keisha discovers that her wife is secretly alive.

Dimension 20: Fantasy High

A dungeons and dragons actual play show. This season is set in a 1980s John Hughes-esque fantasy high school called the Arthur Aguefort Adventuring Academy. It follows six high schoolers starting their first day of freshman year as they form their adventuring party and try to uncover the mystery of why girls at their school keep going missing.

How is it queer? Kristen Applebees is the cleric of the party, and most of her arc in the first season is based in the struggle between honoring her religious upbringing and the god that gave her her magic, and realizing she’s a lesbian. Fig Faeth (the bard of the group) does not have a romance arc in this season, however in season 2 she does end up in a romantic relationship with another woman, and much of her arc in that relationship is based around the insecurities hidden behind her rock and roll persona. Riz Gukgak (the rogue of the group) does not use the term asexual on screen, however it is clear in a conversation in season 2 where he discusses feeling awkward about not being horny when all his other friends are. He was later confirmed as asexual by dungeon master Brennan Lee Mulligan.

Dimension 20: The Unsleeping City

Another story with the same players as Fantasy High. This story takes place in a fantastical New York City where the waking world intersects with the world of dream and magic. The story follows six adventurers as they struggle to keep the two worlds in balance with each other, and prevent the big bad from ruining the world of dreams forever. It’s Brennan’s love letter to New York.

How is it queer? Pete Conlan (the sorcerer of the group) is a bit of a dirt bag drug dealer who is struggling to learn to take on the responsibility of being the voice for the dreams. He is also a trans man. His awakening into the magical New York occurs because his dad attempts to deadname him, and he uses his magic powers to fill his dad’s mouth with bubbles and blast him away.

Not Another D&D Podcast Campaign 1

This is another dungeons and dragons actual play set in a more traditional D&D world. It follows the story of three adventurers living in the shadows of the saviors of Bahumia that came before them. Only to realize one of those saviors might not have retired, and is up to no good. They will have to save Bahumia from one of its saviors.

How is it queer? Beverly Toegold The Fifth (Paladin of the group) is the fantasy equivalent of a Boy Scout and ends up in a romantic relationship with another boy from his troop. (They’re both meant to be 16 by the end of the campaign I believe.) Moonshine Cybin (the Druid of the group) is just generally horny for everyone and anyone that impresses her, but she does also spend her last night before the final battle hooking up with Hardwon’s (the third party member) sister in law.

Not Another D&D Podcast Campaign 2

This story is set in the world of Eldermourne which delves heavily into the aesthetic of gothic horror. It follows three adventurers as they go in search of a missing witch that will help them protect Eldermourne from the conflicting factions of gods and religious extremists each trying to take the world and remake it in the way that suits them.

How is it queer? A major thrust of the story is that Fia Boginya (the wizard and cleric multiclass of the group) once saved her dear friend Irina from execution, but they end up needing Irina’s magic to protect the world. The party goes in search of her, and Fia admits to having always been in love with Irina, even when they were just children.

The Adventure Zone: Balance

Another D&D actual play. This one is set in a fantasy world that draws heavily on both fantasy and other aesthetics. The three adventurers encounter an extremely powerful and destructive magical object, and manage to capture it. In doing so they are inducted into the organization called the Bureau of Balance, and are sent on missions to recover the other objects of power that have been scattered across the land. There is more to the characters than even they know.

How is it queer? Taako the Wizard (one of the adventurers) ends up in a romantic relationship with the Grim Reaper who in this world is a man. There is also a romantic relationship between two women who are also members of the Bureau of Balance that hangs out in the background of the story. A trans woman is also prevalent in the story, but explaining anything else about her reveals major spoilers for the campaign, but trust me she is narratively important.

The Adventure Zone: Amnesty

This is another actual play show, but it uses the Monster of the Week system that was created using shows like Scooby Doo, X-Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is set in the fictional town of Kepler, West Virginia and the Monongahela National Forest. Cryptids are real and they all hang out in Kepler. Three friends band together to stop monsters with ill intent from destroying the town, and learn more about the world that parallels theirs. It is Dungeon Master Griffin McElroy’s love letter to the West Virginia town he and his brothers grew up in.

How is it queer? Aubrey Little is the magic user of the group and identifies as bisexual. She ends up in a romantic relationship with a vampire girl in town.

Campaign Skyjacks

It is another role playing game actual play. I’m not entirely clear on what system they are using, as a lot of it is the creation of the game master. It is set in a fantasy world where crossing the oceans has become too treacherous, so pirates, privateers, and sailors alike have all taken to the sky in airships. The story follows four crew members of the ship the Uhuru as they try to make the ship profitable all while trying to hide from the rest of the crew that the captain has long since died and the doctor has been puppet-ing his corpse for weeks now.

How is it queer? I am still in the early stages of the podcast so there may be more queer characters later, but off the bat there is Gable who is the quarter master of the ship. Gable is non-binary.

These are not the only podcasts that fit the bill, but these are the ones I listen to. I’d also like to give a special mention to most other seasons of Dimension 20. There are a ton more, and you’re likely to get at least one queer character per season. However, I wanted to keep it to things you could find for free. Fantasy High and The Unsleeping City are both free on YouTube, but all other Dimension 20 seasons are on the streaming service dropout tv (which I do recommend getting because they do a lot of other good shows too.)

Feel free to add more shows in your reblogs!

#dimension 20 #fantasy high #welcome to night vale #the unsleeping city #tuc #wtnv #naddpod #bahumia #eldermourne #taz #the adventure zone #the adventure zone amnesty #taz amnesty #taz balance #skyjacks #the adventure zone balance #alice isn't dead

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