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fernweh-writes · 3 years

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Hi dear, I was wondering if you could do headcanon about slashers having s/o, who is really insecure, that she is not pretty enough, doubts herself and is afraid that she is not worthy of them.. So basically some comforting fluff? 👉👈

Some of these are kinda nsfw. Mostly just Jesse and Asa’s though.

-Fern🌿

Michael Meyers

Michael was a person who didn’t understand social cues and had no clue how to deal with people and their emotions. But he’s also a stalker who is good at observing people and you’re the love of his life.

He notices the way you look at yourself in the mirror. Your eyes so sad and also so filled with hate at the same time. Your eyes always focus on the same parts of you and it’s like he can almost hear the criticizing thoughts in your head.

Today as you stood in the mirror your hands squeezed your sides, wishing that your waist was small like all those models on TV and magazines. You wish you looked like the girls you noticed Michael always looking at, the kind of girls he always seemed to admire.

You were so busy glaring yourself down you hadn’t even noticed Michael walk up behind you until he was setting his hands on top of yours. His mask was still down over his face, so your eyes met the empty dark holes of it in the mirror. You had only ever seen him without it once before.

Spinning around in his arms, you turned to look up at him, “You’re being extra sneaky today, I didn’t even hear you unlock the door.” He didn’t look down at you, his head still tilted up, watching you in the mirror. The fact he didn’t acknowledge what you said made your heart drop.

That was until his hands left yours and crept up to his mask, slowly removing it. His blue eyes searched yours before tilting your chin up and placing a firm kiss to your lips. Without breaking the kiss he grabbed your hips and picked you up, wrapping your legs around his waist and carrying you over to the bed.

He planned on showing you just how much he appreciated you and your body.

Bo Sinclair

It was pretty common for Bo to make comments about your body. His sexual comments sometimes made you feel slightly better, like you were desirable. Other times it made you feel like a piece of meat, like all you were good for was a quick fuck.

Bo may be insensitive and he usually never thought twice about what he said, but he was also observant and good at picking up on people’s emotions. He noticed when his comments stopped making you laugh and shove his chest and you began to force a smile that looked more like a grimace. Still, he was Bo, and he figured that if it really mattered you would just tell him to shut his trap.

After some time though he figures it’s best to lay off the vulgar comments and switch on the southern charm. He can sweet talk anyone he wants but he especially loves the power he holds over you whenever he uses that charm against you. You’re so easy to fluster, you melt into him every time he compliments you.

He quickly decides that he enjoys praising you. After all, it seems to make you so needy for him. The fact you seek out his praise just fuels that big ego of his.

Comes up with plenty of pet names. His favorites are definitely darlin’ and pretty girl though. Calling you honey is one of his cheesier favorites. You can expect him to start saying “Honey, I’m home,” whenever he comes home in a good mood. If he doesn’t say it, it’s best to just hand him a beer and let him yell at whoever he decides to be upset with.

If you open up to him about your insecurities he really won’t say much. Bo has never been a big feelings person and he doesn’t know how to do a good job of comforting or relating to people. However, you’ll notice him being extra sweet and affectionate. Just don’t mention it or else he’ll feel the need to be an asshole. He’s gotta keep up hsi reputation after all.

Long story short, Bo isn’t all bad and he can be soft and sweet sometimes.

Vincent Sinclair

Vincent saw you as his muse, his goddess, his reason for living and he made sure to always show you exactly how much you meant to him.

He knew your body better than you ever could. His hands had traced every curve, every dip, every perfect imperfection of you and he could always find something new about you to admire.

Vincent knew the parts of you that he hated, so he always made sure to pay extra attention to those parts of your body just to show you how much he admired everything about you. Everything you thought was the worst part of you would quickly become his favorite.

He’s no stranger to insecurity, he grew up in a small town where people loved to talk and gossip. Talk and gossip isn’t much fun when you’re the kid with only half of a face who wears a mask everywhere he goes because his parents didn’t like to look at him. He would rather die than to ever let you feel that way about yourself.

He still has a favorite part of you though and that’s your eyes. They tell him everything he ever needs to know about what you’re thinking or feeling. He’s seen your eyes show how much you hated your reflection to the amount of love for him that was bottled up within you. Your eyes always gave away what you were thinking, which allowed him to be able to swoop in any time you were troubled.

You quickly become one of his favorite things to draw. He no longe needs a reference for you anymore either, he has your whole body memorized. He couldn’t forget anything about you no matter how hard he tried. Even then, why would he ever want to forget something as beautiful and perfect as you.

Brahms Heelshire

He completely understands feeling insecure. After all he had to hide in the walls and cover his face after the fire. He watched his parents love a doll more than they could ever love him. So he makes sure to tell you how beautiful he thinks you are even if you aren’t a blonde. But he doesn’t understand why you feel like you don’t deserve him.

Brahmsy thinks you’re the best person ever, he wouldn’t have kept you as his nanny if he didn’t think that you were perfect. After all you take care of him and handle everything your strange life throws at you.

He’s seen every part of you while hiding in those walls and there isn’t a single part of you that he isn’t mesmerized by.

There really isn’t ever anyone for you to feel lesser than in the manor. After all, it is just you, Brahms, and Malcolm. However, if anyone ever came along and made you feel inferior or undeserving Brahms wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of them. He can’t have you feeling upset.

He’s touched starved and handsy so he uses each and every single chance you give him to explore your body. There’s nothing he wants more than to touch every part of you. He’s in awe of you and he wants to show you just how much he needs you.

He makes sure to express to you that if either of you weren’t worthy of the other it would be him. After all, he got extra lucky for you to have stumbled into his grasp and there’s no way in hell he’s letting you escape.

Thomas Hewitt

There’s not a moment where he isn’t showing you just how much he loves you. Once he becomes comfortable with you, Thomas is surprisingly affectionate. He is not against PDA and the family never mentions it. After all Luda Mae wants grand babies and Hoyt knows better than to anger Tommy. Besides, Luda Mae thinks that the two of you are absolutely adorable.

Thomas is well aware of how it feels to hate the reflection in the mirror and he hates that you could ever feel that way about yourself. He does his best to show you that he sees you in a completely different light than you see yourself in. To him, you’re the sweetest most beautiful thing to ever walk the earth.

The fact you think you don’t deserve him leaves him feeling flustered. He never expected anyone to love him the way that you do. For you to say you’re not good enough for him blows his mind. He’s a murderer and he doesn’t see how you could ever find him attractive. He. Can’t even speak to tell you how much he adores you but there’s times where he really wishes he could.

Whenever you’re having days where you feel more self critical than usual he puts off his chores to take care of you. Hoyt can bitch all that he wants, Thomas is always going to put you first. Will spend all day in bed with you running his hands over your body and placing gentle kisses against your skin.

Listens to anything you have to say. Although he can’t contribute much to the conversation, Tommy is still a very expressive person. You can see the criticizing look he gives you anytime you say something negative about yourself. He’s not above huffing and rolling his eyes either, grumbling anytime you say something that he doesn’t like.

Billy Loomis

It’s no secret that Billy had plenty of people throwing themselves at him. Sure, he never really paid much attention to them, but that doesn’t change the fact that so many people wanted your boyfriend. So, it was easy for you to begin to think about how easy it would be for Billy to find someone better than you.

As soon as you open up to Billy about these things he’s quick to shut those thoughts down. After all, Billy rarely ever let’s people get as close to him as you have. In fact, the only other person that comes close is Stu. Billy wouldn’t have opened up to you if he didn’t think that you were permanent and he makes sure that you know that.

Begins to shut down all your self critical comments as well. Before he just thought you were joking, and in a way you still were, but he knew that you thought there was some truth to your words. He’s basically going to force you to be kinder to yourself whether you like it or not.

Billy can be an ass sometimes, he likes to pick fights, and he can be insensitive, but never would he use something he knows your insecure about as leverage against you. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he did.

Lots of heavy petting and make out sessions whenever your having days where you feel more self loathing than usual. You may not like the person in the mirror but he sure as hell does. He’s gonna make sure you know just how much he loves you and how much he loves your body as well.

Stu Macher

Simply cannot allow you to think that you are anything but the hottest and coolest person on the planet.

Before, it was pretty common for Stu to flirt with the girls at his parties, sometime he could even get kinda handsy. However, as soon as he finds out that you’re doubting yourself, he cuts it out quick. No one could be better than you and he feels bad that he even allowed you to think he could ever be interested in anyone else but you.

He enjoyed showing off but once he finds out your insecure he begins to flaunt the fact you’re his. Points out how many people wish could be him whenever he’s showing you off. He believes that if you see how many people want you but can’t have you, you’ll start to feel more confident.

Stu has always been very affectionate, which includes being physically affectionate. Don’t think that he would ever shy away from PDA either. You point out someone staring at him, jealous of you? Great, he’ll make sure to make out with you right in front of them to prove he’s off the market. Won’t hesitate to feel you up in front of people either cause he’s definitely a perverted little shit.

Lots of cuddling and compliments from him. Also enjoys spoiling you to show you just how much he loves you. Shopping sprees to find clothes you feel confident in become very common.

Jesse Cromeans

For you to not feel good enough for him insinuates the idea he has bad taste, and Jesse does not have bad taste. He will go to any length to prove that to you as well.

His favorite pet name for you is princess because to him you might as well be royalty. He wants you to know that your a treasure to him. Expect to be spoiled with the finest clothes, expensive jewelry, you’ll be living lavishly once your Jesse’s. He sees himself as your protector and provider, prides himself in that fact, so obviously you deserve nothing but the best there is.

Jesse understands what it’s like to be insecure, especially after what Gem did to his face, so he’s quick to shut down any negative comments. He knows how to say all the right things as well so you can expect plenty of messages from him that make you absolutely melt. This man can charm anyone, but he mainly focuses that charm on you.

Likes to dress you up in expensive lingerie and tell you how pretty you are before absolutely wrecking you. Jesse will make sure to praise you the entire time.

Feeling insecure about what his employees think of you? He’ll make you sit on his lap during his meetings just to show you off. If you’re blushing like crazy it just makes him feel more justified in caressing your body while his employees can do nothing but stare at the pretty little thing in his lap. Although, if they stare for to long they’ll no longer be an employee or alive.

Would most definitely fuck you in front of a mirror just to show you what he sees. Look at how pretty you are when he’s absolutely wrecking you, how could he not be in awe of you.

Asa Emory

Do you really think that you would be the most prized part of his collection if you weren’t the most beautiful creature he’d ever laid eyes on. You’re his favorite pet, he keeps you in his home, in his bed, you don’t get to feel unworthy. Although, the fact you feel like you don’t deserve him would fuel his god complex.

If you’re having a hard time with your insecurities his rough touch will turn into gentle caressing. It’s a rare occasion so make sure to savor the moment.

He notices when you’re feeling upset. Asa knows that being away from you so much gives your mind more time to run rampant. So whenever he’s been away longer than normal he makes sure to indulge you a little bit, even if he is busy. Expect him to let you sit in his lap while he works on grading papers and assignments that he’s gotten behind on. Occasionally he’ll rub your back as you snuggle against his chest. He’s allowed to be soft sometimes to.

Admires everything about your body and he makes sure you know it. Gently caresses and kisses every part of you, especially the parts you’re insecure about.

Much like Jesse, mirror sex is 100% on the table. Asa would love nothing more than for you to see just how beautifully you fall apart because of his touch. He knows your body better than you do and never fails to get exactly the reaction he wants from you.

Domestic Asa Domestic Asa Domestic Asa. If you’re having an extra hard time with your insecurities he would definitely make you breakfast in bed. For just one day you’ll be allowed to call the shots. Or at least you’ll believe you’re the one calling the shots.

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project-box · 4 years

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What would have been 04: Henry’s desk + collectibles

Please read this if you haven’t yet!!!

Searching the desk was the “minigames” in Project Box. During the day, when the animatronics would bury themselves underground again, Charlie would have a chance to search for anything to help her escape-- only she finds her father’s belongings instead.

Below contains scripted dialogue Charlie had for each collectible, as well as 2 diary entries from William Afton in the mid 80s.

In the books, Henry’s work is mysteriously cleaned out from his garage. In Project Box, Afton was the one who stole it all, along with Henry’s desk and placed it inside the game’s main room. Henry’s recordings would have a stack of work papers, with different passcodes being written each tape. By watching each tape you could unlock a different drawer from his desk.

The desk drawers

Tape 1 found on top of the desk contains the first mention the box, as well as the passcode to open the left drawer. The passcode for the left drawer would have been “1578” to reference the easter egg of what Baby repeats in a distorted voice in Sister Location.

Clicking the Box in the left drawer would have moved the box to the desk’s top. But I’ll talk about the box in another post.

The right top drawer has a passcode that references the distortion you hear when zapping Ballora on night 2 of Sister Location. In tape 2, the writing paper on Henry’s desk would read “P.H.A.S.E”, giving the order of buttons you would press to unlock the 2nd drawer.

The right bottom drawer would have the passcode be “RWQFSFASXC” in reference to shadow Bonny ( or in Project Box’s case, twisted Springtrap ). The keypad is supposed to look like the arrangement of the ‘QWER ASDF ZXCV’ keys on the English keyboard.

The collectibles

I’ll talk about the tapes in another post.

The photographs: The first photograph is Henry and Afton at the grand opening of the original Fredbear’s Family Diner. The logo was inspired by 80s logo of Pizza Time Theater. In both photos, Henry is wearing sweaters to reference Nolan Bushnell. Henry’s handwriting was changed from cursive to capitalized print to differ himself from Afton’s cursive. The smudges on the polaroid’s writings hint that Henry is left handed.

The blueprints and springlocks: These were to 1. hint that Fredbear and Spring Bonny’s springlocks were designed differently ( though it’s hard to tell here since Spring Bonny’s blueprint isn’t actually finished... sorry LOL ). The differences in their design would play into the story, which I’ll explain in another post. I had to research how springlocks actually worked, since the best description we get is in FNAF 3.

Afton’s diary entries: I’ll explain why Afton’s diary entries are in Henry’s desk in another post. These entries exist to lay the foundation of Project Box’s backstory: The history between Afton and Henry. They were inspired by the books mentioning the police finding entries written by Afton, and how they went from praising Henry to cursing him, and even showing Afton's paranoia.

Afton entry 1:

17th December, 1984:

Henry has done it again. When doubted because of his unusual designs, he manages to overcome that doubt and amaze me and our patrons with this constructions. His work could fool children with the way these machines move with the illusion of life. It makes me wonder.

Bones, veins, organs. Rods, wires, circuit boards. Humans, are we not just complex machines? What separates us from them? When a computer is dismantled, it no longer operates. There are many who think we do the same. That when a human dies, they cease to exist.

But I know better. I am well aware of the lingering “existences”. They watch me. They follow me. I can feel their glares on my neck even as I write this.

The machines I create are only that- machines. I’ve always envied Henry’s gift of the illusion of life. But perhaps, I can finally surpass him. The life I create can be authentic. So be it.

To the souls I give gifts, bodies once more. And to the machines, I give life.

Afton entry 2:

15th March, 1985:

I once entertained the thought of getting a tattoo or two. To draw a meaningful picture on my skin. To see a mirrored version when I look in the mirror. But now, as I stand before the glass, there’s only a symmetrical pattern of rings and lines stamped across my body. I’ve grown to adore them over the months. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real. I can recall that day as if I dreamed it last night.

Realization in Henry’s eyes as he caught me tucking a small, lifeless body into Chica’s torso. Blonde curls and a bow. I never asked for her name, I never cared. Reminiscences of my hands on her throat only moments ago were discarded by Henry’s hands suddenly on my own throat. The realization in his eyes burned into anger. I was wearing Spring Bonny that day. His fingers flexed, and I collapsed on the ground as the spring locks he warned me about so many times pierced into me. The last thing I saw before blacking out was him placing Chica’s mask back onto it’s shoulders, hiding the girl.

The anger in his eyes that day, however, is worth nothing to me compared to the horror that filled them days later when I returned to him unexpectedly. He thought he ended it for good. He was mistaken. I told him his son looked just like that girl with curls. It would be a shame if his daughter looked like that too.

He’s been quite cooperative since then. At least until recently. The look in his eyes now: Determination. He’s hiding something.

Charlie’s dialogue when collecting

Photograph ‘Grand Opening’: “The fact that my dad worked with him for so long…. Makes me sick.”

Photograph ‘Christmas ‘79’: “Mine and Sammy’s first Christmas. I guess sweaters were my Dad’s way of dressing formally.”

Fredbear’s blueprint: “Fredbear. I never knew he was his own character, separate from Freddy… I’m sorry you have to be trapped in that... cage, Michael.”

Spring Bonny’s blueprint: “The counterpart to Fredbear. How are they so... cursed? Both only… shadows of what they were supposed to be.”

Fredbear’s springlock: “A spring lock. Gotta be careful with this fella, he’s small but he packs a punch.”

Spring Bonny’s springlock: “This spring lock… the spring is rotating a different direction from the other one I found.”

Afton’s entry 1: “Is this… why he did it? What he did to those kids... to Michael?”

Afton’s entry 2: “This was what dad meant in his tape. This is how he found out. Dad... I’m so sorry.”

#updates #what would have been #concept art

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rockislandadultreads · 3 years

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A History of Witches: a non-fiction list

The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present by Ronald Hutton

Why have societies all across the world feared witchcraft? This book delves deeply into its context, beliefs, and origins in Europe’s history.

The witch came to prominence—and often a painful death—in early modern Europe, yet her origins are much more geographically diverse and historically deep. In this landmark book, Ronald Hutton traces witchcraft from the ancient world to the early-modern stake. This book sets the notorious European witch trials in the widest and deepest possible perspective and traces the major historiographical developments of witchcraft. Hutton, a renowned expert on ancient, medieval, and modern paganism and witchcraft beliefs, combines Anglo-American and continental scholarly approaches to examine attitudes on witchcraft and the treatment of suspected witches across the world, including in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, and North and South America, and from ancient pagan times to current interpretations. His fresh anthropological and ethnographical approach focuses on cultural inheritance and change while considering shamanism, folk religion, the range of witch trials, and how the fear of witchcraft might be eradicated.

Witchcraft: A Secret History by Michael Streeter

Witchcraft: A Secret History unravels the myth from the mystery, the facts from the legends. Meet all the witches of your imagination and discover the meanings of their rituals and rites, their lore, and their craft. Discover the significance of their sabbats and covens, their chalices and wands, their robes and their religion. Unlock the secrets of the legendary witches of mythology and folk tales and find out how these early stories influenced the persecutions and witch-hunts of the Middle Ages. Learn about the people who inspired the pagan revival and how their work in literature and magic rekindled the fires of the sabbats across Europe and the New World today.

A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience by Emerson W. Baker

Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers—mainly young women—suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck into their flesh and of being haunted by specters. Believing that they suffered from assaults by an invisible spirit, the community began a hunt to track down those responsible for the demonic work. The resulting Salem Witch Trials, culminating in the execution of 19 villagers, persists as one of the most mysterious and fascinating events in American history. Historians have speculated on a web of possible causes for the witchcraft that started in Salem and spread across the region—religious crisis, ergot poisoning, an encephalitis outbreak, frontier war hysteria—but most agree that there was no single factor. Rather, as Emerson Baker illustrates in this seminal new work, Salem was "a perfect storm": a unique convergence of conditions and events that produced something extraordinary throughout New England in 1692 and the following years, and which has haunted us ever since. Baker shows how a range of factors in the Bay colony in the 1690s, including a new charter and government, a lethal frontier war, and religious and political conflicts, set the stage for the dramatic events in Salem. Engaging a range of perspectives, he looks at the key players in the outbreak—the accused witches and the people they allegedly bewitched, as well as the judges and government officials who prosecuted them—and wrestles with questions about why the Salem tragedy unfolded as it did, and why it has become an enduring legacy.

Royal Witches: Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth-Century England by Gemma Hollman

Until the mass hysteria of the seventeenth century, accusations of witchcraft in England were rare. However, four royal women, related in family and in court ties—Joan of Navarre, Eleanor Cobham, Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Elizabeth Woodville—were accused of practicing witchcraft in order to kill or influence the king. Some of these women may have turned to the “dark arts” in order to divine the future or obtain healing potions, but the purpose of the accusations was purely political. Despite their status, these women were vulnerable because of their gender, as the men around them moved them like pawns for political gains. In Royal Witches, Gemma Hollman explores the lives and the cases of these so-called witches, placing them in the historical context of fifteenth-century England, a setting rife with political upheaval and war. In a time when the line between science and magic was blurred, these trials offer a tantalizing insight into how malicious magic would be used and would later cause such mass hysteria in centuries to come.

The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff

The panic began early in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's niece began to writhe and roar. It spread quickly, confounding the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, parents and children one another. It ended less than a year later, but not before nineteen men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. Speaking loudly and emphatically, adolescent girls stood at the center of the crisis. Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent's life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched--at a politically tumultuous time--on the edge of what a visitor termed a "remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness." With devastating clarity, the textures and tension of colonial life emerge; hidden patterns subtly, startlingly detach themselves from the darkness. Schiff brings early American anxieties to the fore to align them brilliantly with our own. In an era of religious provocations, crowdsourcing, and invisible enemies, this enthralling story makes more sense than ever.

The Occult, Witchcraft and Magic: An Illustrated History by Christopher Dell

From the days of the earliest Paleolithic cave rituals, magic has gripped the imagination. Magic and magicians appear in early Babylonian texts, the Bible, Judaism, and Islam. Secret words, spells, and incantations lie at the heart of nearly every mythological tradition. But for every genuine magus there is an impostor. During the Middle Ages, religion, science, and magic were difficult to set apart. The Middle Ages also saw the pursuit of alchemy—the magical transformation of base materials—which led to a fascination with the occult, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism. The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a return to earlier magical traditions, and today, magic means many things: contemporary Wicca is practiced widely as a modern pagan religion in Europe and the US; “magic” also stretches to include the nonspiritual, rapid-fire sleight of hand performed by slick stage magicians who fill vast arenas. The Occult, Witchcraft and Magic is packed with authoritative text and a huge and inspired selection of images, some chosen from unusual sources, including some of the best-known representations of magic and the occult from around the world spanning ancient to modern times.

#nonfiction #non-fiction #witchcraft #witchcraft books #the history of witchcraft #tbr #Reading Recs #book recs #recommended reading #to read #library #public library #history books #history

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ready-to-obeyme · 4 years

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[OM!] How I think Obey Me could end (Theory)

Whether this stays a shitpost or becomes a real prediction is up to time and the devs

This is a prediction made after finishing CH 22 and glancing at some dialogue from CH 23 (so there will be some spoilers of what I know from CH 23) and to PREFACE because this fandom has a lot of-- um, drama, this is my opinion and a fun theory so if you do not agree, please delete it from your mind ty!!

Also, this is just a theory, so honestly if this doesn’t happen in the game, I’m totally okay with it; I would never demand the game to cater to my will. If this DOES end up happening in the game………. lol that’s neato

Without further ado, this is my take on what’s going to go down in Obey Me and how Obey Me could end (among other theories and observations that come with it). did this end up as an essay? maybe

Taking into account:

the recurring (if not main) theme of family in Obey Me

the ambiguous nature of the Celestial War

the fact that many angels still look up to Lucifer (and the other brothers), including Michael, who in the Bible was said to have sent Lucifer down to hell

CH 23 that lets us into the Celestial Realm and do who knows what else (maybe meet Michael???)

and Diavolo’s main plan to unite the three realms together in harmony (also the main reason why you’re in Devildom in the first place)

I have no other choice but to conclude that the Obey Me! climax will occur after you fight god (maybe not literally but wouldn’t THAT be LIT) and choose a demon boy to marry/live your life out.

(And if you almost start Celestial War II and cause the apocalypse because of it-- I mean, all is fair in love n war.)

Asides from the fact that I simply would like to see a scene where MC literally confronts the creator of the world (or at least ⅔ of it)... Considering that your role as the MC has been to reconcile the relationships between the brothers and encourage open communication between them, I don’t think it’s that far of a stretch to imagine that your next task as a human ambassador and family therapist is to mend the relationship between the demon brothers and their angelic brothers and father (aka God).

Maybe adding God into the game as a possible character you speak to is forbidden territory considering… y’know, God, but in CH 23 Lucifer and the demon brothers still refer to God as their father, which is true to the story but also oddly humanizing. Whether this is just a title or not, it’s compelling to think that like all the other demons and angelic figures that are idolized in religious texts, God could be just another character-- the father-figure that you must confront so that the demon and angel brothers can have closure after the Celestial War and successfully fulfill Diavolo’s dreams to unite the three realms.

And this is why I think so:

Miscommunication and lack of communication have been a problems that MC has had to resolve among the brothers, and this relationship between the angels and demons as well as the angels with God is lookin’ to draw more and more parallels. Like, why are the angels so on the down-low about their concern for Lucifer and his brothers? Why is Lucifer so convinced that all the angels would rather have nothing to do with him (besides self-deprecation) but everyone else knows that angels like Michael still love him as much as he did before the war?

And most importantly, what HAPPENED during the Celestial War? Was it the angels’ choice to oppose Lucifer and his brothers? Do the angels know why Lucifer incited the rebellion in the first place-- and is that why they are reluctant to scorn their fallen brothers?

In various unlocked texts, Simeon considers Lucifer to be his brother still, as do many of the other angels who ask for Lucifer’s well being. Taking into account that this is FIVE THOUSAND YEARS (or so) after the Celestial War, the fact that Lucifer, their fallen brother, is still on their minds is not something to simply brush past. While I am unsure whether all angels still consider Lucifer their brother, the ambiguity of how the angels-- how the Celestial Realm as a whole feels about the Celestial War and its outcome is something that I hope we delve into and hopefully resolve as MC travels to the Celestial Realm and Diavolo pushes onward with his goals, using you as a conduit. I'm thinking the reason why the angels do not have a unified front on how they feel about the War is because their father isn't sure and has not decreed their fallen brothers to be particularly "bad." This helps with the success and good reception of the exchange program.

Coming to my last point, in order for Diavolo to unite the three realms in harmony, he must have assent from each of the worlds. I am assuming he’s taking your word for the human realm (lmao) and following that line of thought, someone high up in the celestial realm-- perhaps God even, has agreed to work towards the goal of unification and set up this exchange program. If that’s the case, then it seems like God IS willing to reconcile with his fallen sons, given the fact that the angels are still able to view Lucifer in a good light and the existence of this exchange program. (I correlate unification with equality, and being considered equals is the requirement for proper peace and harmony.)

Not that it’ll be EASY. You can’t just decide to give the green light for an exchange program in hopes of uniting the three realms because you want to repair your relationship with your sons whom YOU banished from your home and killed one of their sisters-- all very traumatizing experiences that have wounded the demons brothers and have never been truly addressed. A true apology must be said and amends must be made for the relationship to be set on a proper path of mending-- which is where MC will play the main role.

When the momentous and magnitude of gods, angels, and demons are condensed into family problems, MC is literally the One For the Job.

Is it blasphemous for a mortal to solve the problems of immortals? Maybe. Is it possible MC will die? Honestly, not their first time facing near death-- and if they haven’t died (permanently) yet, there’s a good chance they PROBABLY won’t die while confronting God and the angels. (Who knew family therapists could live a life of such danger?)

When tensions rise, when the MC has finally unlocked all the secrets, the traumatic memories, and the feelings of those involved, it is then when MC will finally be able to speak to God and basically be like “...bro you gotta just talk to them.” And when God asks you why you’re so determined to do something about this other worldly problem, you tell him simply because you’re in love with one of them (yay!).

Will their relationships be mended? It’ll take a lot of time-- time that you won’t be ALIVE for, but you will be the catalyst that will start the mending of their relationships--- which will allow for the unification of all the realms. :))

(This is also based off of no evidence whatsoever, but it would be nice if God knew Diavolo reincarnated Lilith as a human and thus grants the demon brother of your choice to be reincarnated as a human so he can live the rest of his life with you-- as mortals. Wouldn’t that just be absolutely romantic (and easier for God and the brothers to mend their relationship)? I’m REALLY hoping that MC doesn’t end up immortal, but it’d be nice to see that because the three realms are united it won’t matter whether MC ends up an angel or a demon after death because they’d still get to spend the rest of their eternity with the demon bro they love. And isn’t that just what we all want in the end??)

If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading!! I just enjoy the game and all the possibilities we can imagine using it as a foundation :)) Would love to know what you think of everything and this lowkey shitpost. <3

#obey me #obey me shitpost #shall we date? obey me!#obey me lucifer #obey me michael #obey me simeon #obey me mc #obey me prediction #obey me theories

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ahouseoflies · 3 years

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The Best Films of 2020

I can’t tell you anything novel or insightful about this year that has been stolen from our lives. I watched zero of these films in a theater, and I watched most of them half-asleep in moments that I stole from my children. Don’t worry, there are some jokes below.

GARBAGE

93. Capone (Josh Trank)- What is the point of this dinner theater trash? It takes place in the last year of Capone's life, when he was released from prison due to failing health and suffered a stroke in his Florida home. So it covers...none of the things that make Al Capone interesting? It's not historically accurate, which I have no problem with, but if you steer away from accuracy, then do something daring and exciting. Don't give me endless scenes of "Phonse"--as if the movie is running from the very person it's about--drawing bags of money that promise intrigue, then deliver nothing in return.

That being said, best "titular character shits himself" scene since The Judge.

92. Ammonite (Francis Lee)- I would say that this is the Antz to Portrait of a Lady on Fire's A Bug's Life, but it's actually more like the Cars 3 to Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Toy Story 1.

91. Ava (Tate Taylor)- Despite the mystery and inscrutability that usually surround assassins, what if we made a hitman movie but cared a lot about her personal life? Except neither the assassin stuff nor the family stuff is interesting?

90. Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins)- What a miscalculation of what audiences loved about the first and wanted from the sequel. WW84 is silly and weightless in all of the ways that the first was elegant and confident. If the return of Pine is just a sort of phantom representation of Diana's desires, then why can he fly a real plane? If he is taking over another man's soul, then, uh, what ends up happening to that guy? For that matter, why is it not 1984 enough for Ronald Reagan to be president, but it is 1984 enough for the president to have so many Ronald Reagan signifiers that it's confusing? Why not just make a decision?

On paper, the me-first values of the '80s lend themselves to the monkey's paw wish logic of this plot. You could actually do something with the Star Wars program or the oil crisis. But not if the setting is played for only laughs and the screenplay explains only what it feels like.

89. Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy)- In this type of movie, there has to be a period of the Ben Mendelsohn character looking around befuddled about the new arrangement and going, "What's this now--he's going to be...living with us? The guy who tried to steal our medication? This is crazy!" But that's usually ten minutes, and in this movie it's an hour. I was so worn out by the end.

88. You Should Have Left (David Koepp)- David Koepp wrote Jurassic Park, so he's never going to hell, but how dare he start caring about his own mystery at the hour mark. There's a forty-five minute version of this movie that could get an extra star from me, and there's a three-hour version of Amanda Seyfried walking around in athleisure that would get four stars from me. What we actually get? No thanks.

87. Black Is King (Beyonce, et al.)- End your association with The Lion King, Bey. It has resulted in zero bops.

ADMIRABLE FAILURES

86. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Cathy Yan)- There's nothing too dysfunctional in the storytelling or performances, but Birds of Prey also doesn't do a single thing well. I would prefer something alive and wild, even if it were flawed, to whatever tame belt-level formula this is.

85. The Turning (Floria Sigismondi)- This update of The Turn of the Screw pumps the age of Miles up to high school, which creates some horny creepiness that I liked. But the age of the character also prevents the ending of the novel from happening in favor of a truly terrible shrug. I began to think that all of the patience that the film showed earlier was just hesitance for its own awful ending.

I watched The Turning as a Mackenzie Davis Movie Star heat check, and while I'm not sure she has the magnetism I was looking for, she does have a great teacher voice, chastening but maternal.

84. Bloodshot (David Wilson)- A whole lot of Vin Diesel saying he's going to get revenge and kill a bunch of dudes; not a whole lot of Vin Diesel actually getting revenge and killing a bunch of dudes.

83. Downhill (Nat Faxon and Jim Rash)- I was an English major in college, which means I ended up locking myself into literary theories that, halfway through the writing of an essay, I realized were flawed. But rather than throw out the work that I had already proposed, I would just keep going and see if I could will the idea to success.

So let's say you have a theory that you can take Force Majeure by Ruben Ostlund, one of the best films of its year, and remake it so that its statement about familial anxiety could apply to Americans of the same age and class too...if it hadn't already. And maybe in the first paragraph you mess up by casting Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, people we are conditioned to laugh at, when maybe this isn't that kind of comedy at all. Well, don't throw it away. You can quote more--fill up the pages that way--take an exact shot or scene from the original. Does that help? Maybe you can make the writing more vigorous and distinctive by adding a character. Is that going to make this baby stand out? Maybe you could make it more personal by adding a conclusion that is slightly more clever than the rest of the paper?

Or perhaps this is one you're just not going to get an A on.

82. Hillbilly Elegy (Ron Howard)- I watched this melodrama at my mother's encouragement, and, though I have been trying to pin down her taste for decades, I think her idea of a successful film just boils down to "a lot of stuff happens." So in that way, Ron Howard's loss is my gain, I guess.

There is no such thing as a "neutral Terminator."

81. Relic (Natalie Erika James)- The star of the film is Vanessa Cerne's set decoration, but the inert music and slow pace cancel out a house that seems neglected slowly over decades.

80. Buffaloed (Tanya Wexler)- Despite a breathless pace, Buffaloed can't quite congeal. In trying to split the difference between local color hijinks and Moneyballed treatise on debt collection, it doesn't commit enough to either one.

Especially since Zoey Deutch produced this one in addition to starring, I'm getting kind of worried about boo's taste. Lot of Two If by Seas; not enough While You Were Sleepings.

79. Like a Boss (Miguel Arteta)- I chuckled a few times at a game supporting cast that is doing heavy lifting. But Like a Boss is contrived from the premise itself--Yeah, what if people in their thirties fell out of friendship? Do y'all need a creative consultant?--to the escalation of most scenes--Why did they have to hide on the roof? Why do they have to jump into the pool?

The movie is lean, but that brevity hurts just as much as it helps. The screenplay knows which scenes are crucial to the development of the friendship, but all of those feel perfunctory, in a different gear from the setpieces.

To pile on a bit: Studio comedies are so bare bones now that they look like Lifetime movies. Arteta brought Chuck & Buck to Sundance twenty years ago, and, shot on Mini-DV for $250,000, it was seen as a DIY call-to-bootstraps. I guarantee that has more setups and locations and shooting days than this.

78. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (David Dobkin)- Add Dan Stevens to the list of supporting players who have bodied Will Ferrell in his own movie--one that he cared enough to write himself.

Like Downhill, Ferrell's other 2020 release, this isn't exactly bad. It's just workmanlike and, aside from the joke about Demi Lovato's "uninformed" ghost, frustratingly conventional.

77. The Traitor (Marco Bellochio)- Played with weary commitment by Pierfrancesco Favino, Tomasso Buscetta is "credited" as the first informant of La Cosa Nostra. And that sounds like an interesting subject for a "based on a true story" crime epic, right? Especially when you find out that Buscetta became a rat out of principle: He believed that the mafia to which he had pledged his life had lost its code to the point that it was a different organization altogether.

At no point does Buscetta waver or even seem to struggle with his decision though, so what we get is less conflicted than that description might suggest. None of these Italian mob movies glorify the lifestyle, so I wasn't expecting that. But if the crime doesn't seem enticing, and snitching on the crime seems like forlorn duty, and everything is pitched with such underhanded matter-of-factness that you can't even be sure when Buscetta has flipped, then what are we left with? It was interesting seeing how Italian courts work, I guess?

76. Kajillionaire (Miranda July)- This is another movie so intent on building atmosphere and lore that it takes too long to declare what it is. When the protagonist hits a breaking point and has to act, she has only a third of a film to grow. So whispery too.

Gina Rodriguez is the one to inject life into it. As soon as her motormouth winds up, the film slips into a different gear. The atmosphere and lore that I mentioned reeks of artifice, but her character is believably specific. Beneath a basic exterior is someone who is authentically caring but still morally compromised, beholden to the world that the other characters are suspicious of.

75. Scoob! (Tony Cervone)- The first half is sometimes clever, but it hammers home the importance of friendship while separating the friends.

The second half has some positive messaging, but your kids' movie might have a problem with scale if it involves Alexander the Great unlocking the gates of the Underworld.

My daughter loved it.

74. The Lovebirds (Michael Showalter)- If I start talking too much about this perfectly fine movie, I end up in that unfair stance of reviewing the movie I wanted, not what is actually there.* As a fan of hang-out comedies, I kind of resent that any comedy being made now has to be rolled into something more "exciting," whether it's a wrongfully accused or mistaken identity thriller or some other genre. Such is the post-Game Night world. There's a purposefully anti-climactic note that I wish The Lovebirds had ended on, but of course we have another stretch of hiding behind boats and shooting guns. Nanjiani and Rae are really charming leads though.

*- As a New Orleanian, I was totally distracted by the fake aspects of the setting too. "Oh, they walked to Jefferson from downtown? Really?" You probably won't be bothered by the locations.

73. Sonic the Hedgehog (Jeff Fowler)- In some ways the storytelling is ambitious. (I'm speaking for only myself, but I'm fine with "He's a hedgehog, and he's really fast" instead of the owl mother, teleportation backstory. Not everything has to be Tolkien.) But that ambition doesn't match the lack of ambition in the comedy, which depends upon really hackneyed setups and structures. Guiding Jim Carrey to full alrighty-then mode was the best choice anyone made.

72. Malcolm & Marie (Sam Levinson)- The stars move through these long scenes with agility and charisma, but the degree of difficulty is just too high for this movie to reach what it's going for.

Levinson is trying to capture an epic fight between a couple, and he can harness the theatrical intensity of such a thing, but he sacrifices almost all of the nuance. In real life, these knock-down-drag-outs can be circular and indirect and sad in a way that this couple's manipulation rarely is. If that emotional truth is all this movie is trying to achieve, I feel okay about being harsh in my judgment of how well it does that.

71. Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov)- Elusive in how it refuses to declare itself, forthright in how punishing it is. The whole thing might be worth it for a late dinner scene, but I'm getting a bit old to put myself through this kind of misery.

70. The Burnt Orange Heresy (Giuseppe Capotondi)- Silly in good ways until it's silly in bad ways. Elizabeth Debicki remains 6'3".

69. Everybody’s Everything (Sebastian Jones and Ramez Silyan)- As a person who listened to Lil Peep's music, I can confidently say that this documentary is overstating his greatness. His death was a significant loss, as the interview subjects will all acknowledge, but the documentary is more useful as a portrait of a certain unfocused, rapacious segment of a generation that is high and online at all times.

68. The Witches (Robert Zemeckis)- Robert Zemeckis, Kenya Barris, and Guillermo Del Toro are the credited screenwriters, and in a fascinating way, you can see the imprint of each figure on the final product. Adapting a very European story to the old wives' tales of the American South is an interesting choice. Like the Nicolas Roeg try at this material, Zemeckis is not afraid to veer into the terrifying, and Octavia Spencer's pseudo witch doctor character only sells the supernatural. From a storytelling standpoint though, it seems as if the obstacles are overcome too easily, as if there's a whole leg of the film that has been excised. The framing device and the careful myth-making of the flashback make promises that the hotel half of the film, including the abrupt ending, can't live up to.

If nothing else, Anne Hathaway is a real contender for Most On-One Performance of the year.

67. Irresistible (Jon Stewart)- Despite a sort of imaginative ending, Jon Stewart's screenplay feels more like the declarative screenplay that would get you hired for a good movie, not a good screenplay itself. It's provocative enough, but it's clumsy in some basic ways and never evades the easy joke.

For example, the Topher Grace character is introduced as a sort of assistant, then is re-introduced an hour later as a polling expert, then is shown coaching the candidate on presentation a few scenes later. At some point, Stewart combined characters into one role, but nothing got smoothed out.

ENDEARING CURIOSITIES WITH BIG FLAWS

66. Yes, God, Yes (Karen Maine)- Most people who are Catholic, including me, are conflicted about it. Most people who make movies about being Catholic hate it and have an axe to grind. This film is capable of such knowing wit and nuance when it comes to the lived-in details of attending a high school retreat, but it's more concerned with taking aim at hypocrisy in the broad way that we've seen a million times. By the end, the film is surprisingly all-or-nothing when Christian teenagers actually contain multitudes.

Part of the problem is that Karen Maine's screenplay doesn't know how naive to make the Alice character. Sometimes she's reasonably naive for a high school senior in 2001; sometimes she's comically naive so that the plot can work; and sometimes she's stupid, which isn't the same as naive.

65. Bad Boys for Life (Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah)- This might be the first buddy cop movie in which the vets make peace with the tech-comm youngs who use new techniques. If that's the only novelty on display here--and it is--then maybe that's enough. I laughed maybe once. Not that the mistaken identity subplot of Bad Boys 1 is genius or anything, but this entry felt like it needed just one more layer to keep it from feeling as basic as it does. Speaking of layers though, it's almost impossible to watch any Will Smith movie now without viewing it through the meta-narrative of "What is Will Smith actually saying about his own status at this point in his career?" He's serving it up to us.

I derived an inordinate amount of pleasure from seeing the old school Simpson/Bruckheimer logo.

64. The Gentlemen (Guy Ritchie)- Look, I'm not going to be too negative on a movie whose crime slang is so byzantine that it has to be explained with subtitles. That's just me. I'm a simple man. But I can tell you that I tuned out pretty hard after seven or eight double-crosses.

The bloom is off the rose a bit for Ritchie, but he can still nail a music cue. I've been waiting for someone to hit "That's Entertainment" the way he does on the end credits.

63. Bad Hair (Justin Simien)- In Bad Hair, an African-American woman is told by her boss at a music video channel in 1989 that straightening her hair is the way to get ahead; however, her weave ends up having a murderous mind of its own. Compared to that charged, witty logline, the execution of the plot itself feels like a laborious, foregone conclusion. I'm glad that Simien, a genuinely talented writer, is making movies again though. Drop the skin-care routine, Van Der Beek!

62. Greyhound (Aaron Schneider)- "If this is the type of role that Tom Hanks writes for himself, then he understands his status as America's dad--'wise as the serpent, harmless as the dove'--even better than I thought." "America's Dad! Aye aye, sir!" "At least half of the dialogue is there for texture and authenticity, not there to be understood by the audience." "Fifty percent, Captain!" "The environment looks as fake as possible, but I eventually came around to the idea that the movie is completely devoid of subtext." "No subtext to be found, sir!"

61. Mank (David Fincher)- About ten years ago, the Creative Screenwriting podcast spent an hour or so with James Vanderbilt, the writer of Zodiac and nothing else that comes close, as he relayed the creative paces that David Fincher pushed him through. Hundreds of drafts and years of collaborative work eventuated in the blueprint for Fincher's most exacting, personal film, which he didn't get a writing credit on only because he didn't seek one.

Something tells me that Fincher didn't ask for rewrites from his dead father. No matter what visuals and performances the director can coax from the script--and, to be clear, these are the worst visuals and performances of his career--they are limited by the muddy lightweight pages. There are plenty of pleasures, like the slippery election night montage or the shakily platonic relationship between Mank and Marion. But Fincher hadn't made a film in six years, and he came back serving someone else's master.

60. Tesla (Michael Almereyda)- "You live inside your head." "Doesn't everybody?"

As usual, Almereyda's deconstructions are invigorating. (No other moment can match the first time Eve Hewson's Anne fact-checks something with her anachronistic laptop.) But they don't add up to anything satisfying because Tesla himself is such an opaque figure. Driven by the whims of his curiosity without a clear finish line, the character gives Hawke something enigmatic to play as he reaches deep into a baritone. But he's too inward to lend himself to drama. Tesla feels of a piece with Almereyda's The Experimenter, and that's the one I would recommend.

59. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)- I can't oversell how delicately beautiful this film is visually. There's a scene in which Vitalina lugs a lantern into a church, but we get several seconds of total darkness before that one light source carves through it and takes over part of the frame. Each composition is as intricate as it is overpowering, achieving a balance between stark and mannered.

That being said, most of the film is people entering or exiting doors. I felt very little of the haunting loss that I think I was supposed to.

58. The Rhythm Section (Reed Morano)- Call it the Timothy Hutton in The General's Daughter Corollary: If a name-actor isn't in the movie much but gets third billing, then, despite whom he sends the protagonist to kill, he is the Actual Bad Guy.

Even if the movie serves up a lot of cliche, the action and sound design are visceral. I would like to see more from Morano.

57. Red, White and Blue (Steve McQueen)- Well-made and heartfelt even if it goes step-for-step where you think it will.

Here's what I want to know though: In the academy training sequence, the police cadets have to subdue a "berserker"; that is, a wildman who swings at their riot gear with a sledgehammer. Then they get him under control, and he shakes their hands, like, "Good angle you took on me there, mate." Who is that guy and where is his movie? Is this full-time work? Is he a police officer or an independent contractor? What would happen if this exercise didn't go exactly as planned?

56. Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart)- The visuals have an unfinished quality that reminded me of The Tale of Princess Kaguya--the center of a flame is undrawn white, and fog is just negative space. There's an underlying symmetry to the film, and its color palette changes with mood.

Narratively, it's pro forma and drawn-out. Was Riley in Inside Out the last animated protagonist to get two parents? My daughter stuck with it, but she needed a lot of context for the religious atmosphere of 17th century Ireland.

55. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (Rob Garver)- The film does little more than one might expect; it's limited in the way that any visual medium is when trying to sum up a woman of letters. But as far as education for Kael's partnership with Warren Beatty or the idea of The New Yorker paying her for only six months out of the year, it was useful for me.

Although Garver isn't afraid to point to the work that made Kael divisive, it would have been nice to have one or two interview subjects who questioned her greatness, rather than the crew of Paulettes who, even when they do say something like, "Sometimes I radically disagreed with her," do it without being able to point to any specifics.

54. Beastie Boys Story (Spike Jonze)- As far as this Spike Jonze completist is concerned, this is more of a Powerpoint presentation than a movie, Beastie Boys Story still warmed my heart, making me want to fire up Paul's Boutique again and take more pictures of my buddies.

53. Tenet (Christopher Nolan)- Cool and cold, tantalizing and frustrating, loud and indistinct, Tenet comes close to Nolan self-parody, right down to the brutalist architecture and multiple characters styled like him. The setpieces grabbed me, I'll admit.

Nolan's previous film, which is maybe his best, was "about" a lot and just happened to play with time; Tenet is only about playing with time.

PRETTY GOOD MOVIES

52. Shithouse (Cooper Raiff)- "Death is ass."

There's such a thing as too naturalistic. If I wanted to hear how college freshmen really talked, I would hang out with college freshmen. But you have to take the good verisimilitude with the bad, and good verisimilitude is the mother's Pod Save America t-shirt.

There are some poignant moments (and a gonzo performance from Logan Miller) in this auspicious debut from Cooper Raiff, the writer/director/editor/star. But the second party sequence kills some of the momentum, and at a crucial point, the characters spell out some motivation that should have stayed implied.

51. Totally Under Control (Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, Suzanne Hillinger)- As dense and informative as any other Gibney documentary with the added flex of making it during the pandemic it is investigating.

But yeah, why am I watching this right now? I don't need more reasons to be angry with Trump, whom this film calmly eviscerates. The directors analyze Trump's narcissism first through his contradictions of medical expertise in order to protect the economy that could win him re-election. Then it takes aim at his hiring based on loyalty instead of experience. But you already knew that, which is the problem with the film, at least for now.

50. Happiest Season (Clea Duvall)- I was in the perfect mood to watch something this frothy and bouncy. Every secondary character receives a moment in the sun, and Daniel Levy gets a speech that kind of saves the film at a tipping point.

I must say though: I wanted to punch Harper in her stupid face. She is a terrible romantic partner, abandoning or betraying Abby throughout the film and dissembling her entire identity to everyone else in a way that seems absurd for a grown woman in 2020. Run away, Kristen. Perhaps with Aubrey Plaza, whom you have more chemistry with. But there I go shipping and aligning myself with characters, which only proves that this is an effective romantic comedy.

49. The Way Back (Gavin O’Connor)- Patient but misshapen, The Way Back does just enough to overcome the cliches that are sort of unavoidable considering the genre. (I can't get enough of the parent character who, for no good reason, doesn't take his son's success seriously. "Scholarship? What he's gotta do is put his nose in them books! That's why I don't go to his games. [continues moving boxes while not looking at the other character] Now if you'll excuse me while I wait four scenes before showing up at a game to prove that I'm proud of him after all...")

What the movie gets really right or really wrong in the details about coaching and addiction is a total crap-shoot. But maybe I've said too much already.

48. The Whistlers (Corneliu Porumboiu)- Porumboiu is a real artist who seems to be interpreting how much surveillance we're willing to acknowledge and accept, but I won't pretend to have understood much of the plot, the chapters or which are told out of order. Sometimes the structure works--the beguiling, contextless "high-class hooker" sequence--but I often wondered if the film was impenetrable in the way that Porumboiu wanted it to be or impenetrable in the way he didn't.

To tell you the truth, the experience kind of depressed me because I know that, in my younger days, this film is the type of thing that I would re-watch, possibly with the chronology righted, knowing that it is worth understanding fully. But I have two small children, and I'm exhausted all the time, and I kind of thought I should get some credit for still trying to catch up with Romanian crime movies in the first place.

47. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner)- I laughed too much to get overly critical, but the film is so episodic and contrived that it's kind of exhausting by the end--even though it's achieving most of its goals. Maybe Borat hasn't changed, but the way our citizens own their ugliness has.

46. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)- Despite how little happens in the first forty minutes, First Cow is a thoughtful capitalism parable. Even though it takes about forty minutes to get going, the friendship between Cookie and King-Lu is natural and incisive. Like Reichardt's other work, the film's modest premise unfolds quite gracefully, except for in the first forty minutes, which are uneventful.

45. Les Miserables (Ladj Ly)- I loved parts of the film--the disorienting, claustrophobic opening or the quick look at the police officers' home lives, for example. But I'm not sure that it does anything very well. The needle the film tries to thread between realism and theater didn't gel for me. The ending, which is ambiguous in all of the wrong ways, chooses the theatrical. (If I'm being honest, my expectations were built up by Les Miserables' Jury Prize at Cannes, and it's a bit superficial to be in that company.)

If nothing else, it's always helpful to see how another country's worst case scenario in law enforcement would look pretty good over here.

44. Bad Education (Cory Finley)- The film feels too locked-down and small at the beginning, so intent on developing the protagonist neutrally that even the audience isn't aware of his secrets. So when he faces consequences for those secrets, there's a disconnect. Part of tragedy is seeing the doom coming, right?

When it opens up, however, it's empathetic and subtle, full of a dry irony that Finley is already specializing in after only one other feature. Geraldine Viswanathan and Allison Janney get across a lot of interiority that is not on the page.

43. The Trip to Greece (Michael Winterbottom)- By the fourth installment, you know whether you're on board with the franchise. If you're asking "Is this all there is?" to Coogan and Brydon's bickering and impressions as they're served exotic food in picturesque settings, then this one won't sway you. If you're asking "Is this all there is?" about life, like they are, then I don't need to convince you.

I will say that The Trip to Spain seemed like an enervated inflection point, at which the squad could have packed it in. The Trip to Greece proves that they probably need to keep doing this until one of them dies, which has been the subtext all along.

42. Feels Good Man (Arthur Jones)- This documentary centers on innocent artist Matt Furie's helplessness as his Pepe the Frog character gets hijacked by the alt-right. It gets the hard things right. It's able to, quite comprehensively, trace a connection from 4Chan's use of Pepe the Frog to Donald Trump's near-assuming of Pepe's ironic deniability. Director Arthur Jones seems to understand the machinations of the alt-right, and he articulates them chillingly.

The easy thing, making us connect to Furie, is less successful. The film spends way too much time setting up his story, and it makes him look naive as it pits him against Alex Jones in the final third. Still, the film is a quick ninety-two minutes, and the highs are pretty high.

41. The Old Guard (Gina Prince-Bythewood)- Some of the world-building and backstory are handled quite elegantly. The relationships actually do feel centuries old through specific details, and the immortal conceit comes together for an innovative final action sequence.

Visually and musically though, the film feels flat in a way that Prince-Bythewood's other films do not. I blame Netflix specs. KiKi Layne, who tanked If Beale Street Could Talk for me, nearly ruins this too with the child-actory way that she stresses one word per line. Especially in relief with one of our more effortless actresses, Layne is distracting.

40. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin)- Whenever Sacha Baron Cohen's Abbie Hoffman opens his mouth, the other defendants brace themselves for his dismissive vulgarity. Even when it's going to hurt him, he can't help but shoot off at the mouth. Of course, he reveals his passionate and intelligent depths as the trial goes on. The character is the one that Sorkin's screenplay seems the most endeared to: In the same way that Hoffman can't help but be Hoffman, Sorkin can't help but be Sorkin. Maybe we don't need a speech there; maybe we don't have to stretch past two hours; maybe a bon mot diffuses the tension. But we know exactly what to expect by now. The film is relevant, astute, witty, benevolent, and, of course, in love with itself. There are a handful of scenes here that are perfect, so I feel bad for qualifying so much.

A smaller point: Daniel Pemberton has done great work in the past (Motherless Brooklyn, King Arthur, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), but the first sequence is especially marred by his sterile soft-rock approach.

GOOD MOVIES

39. Time (Garrett Bradley)- The key to Time is that it provides very little context. Why the patriarch of this family is serving sixty years in prison is sort of besides the point philosophically. His wife and sons have to move on without him, and the tragedy baked into that fact eclipses any notion of what he "deserved." Feeling the weight of time as we switch back and forth between a kid talking about his first day of kindergarten and that same kid graduating from dentistry school is all the context we need. Time's presentation can be quite sumptuous: The drone shot of Angola makes its buildings look like crosses. Or is it X's?

At the same time, I need some context. When director Garrett Bradley withholds the reason Robert's in prison, and when she really withholds that Fox took a plea and served twelve years, you start to see the strings a bit. You could argue that knowing so little about why, all of a sudden, Robert can be on parole puts you into the same confused shoes as the family, but it feels manipulative to me. The film is preaching to the choir as far as criminal justice goes, which is fine, but I want it to have the confidence to tell its story above board.

38. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV)- I have a barfly friend whom I see maybe once a year. When we first set up a time to meet, I kind of dread it and wonder what we'll have to talk about. Once we do get together, we trip on each other's words a bit, fumbling around with the rhythm of conversation that we mastered decades ago. He makes some kind of joke that could have been appropriate then but isn't now.

By the end of the day, hours later, we're hugging and maybe crying as we promise each other that we won't wait as long next time.

That's the exact same journey that I went on with this film.

37. Underwater (William Eubank)- Underwater is a story that you've seen before, but it's told with great confidence and economy. I looked up at twelve minutes and couldn't believe the whole table had been set. Kristen plays Ripley and projects a smart, benevolent poise.

36. The Lodge (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala)- I prefer the grounded, manicured first half to the more fantastic second half. The craziness of the latter is only possible through the hard work of the former though. As with Fiala and Franz's previous feature, the visual rhymes and motifs get incorporated into the soup so carefully that you don't realize it until they overwhelm you in their bleak glory.

Small note: Alicia Silverstone, the male lead's first wife, and Riley Keough, his new partner, look sort of similar. I always think that's a nice note: "I could see how he would go for her."

35. Miss Americana (Lana Wilson)- I liked it when I saw it as a portrait of a person whose life is largely decided for her but is trying to carve out personal spaces within that hamster wheel. I loved it when I realized that describes most successful people in their twenties.

34. Sound of Metal (Darius Marder)- Riz Ahmed is showing up on all of the best performances of the year lists, but Sound of Metal isn't in anyone's top ten films of the year. That's about right. Ahmed's is a quiet, stubborn performance that I wish was in service of more than the straight line that we've seen before.

In two big scenes, there's this trick that Ahmed does, a piecing together of consequences with his eyes, as if he's moving through a flow chart in real time. In both cases, the character seems locked out and a little slower than he should be, which is, of course, why he's facing the consequences in the first place. To be charitable to a film that was a bit of a grind, it did make me notice a thing a guy did with his eyes.

33. Pieces of a Woman (Kornel Mundruczo)- Usually when I leave acting showcases like this, I imagine the film without the Oscar-baiting speeches, but this is a movie that specializes in speeches. Pieces of a Woman is being judged, deservedly so, by the harrowing twenty-minute take that opens the film, which is as indulgent as it is necessary. But if the unbroken take provides the "what," then the speeches provide the "why."

This is a film about reclaiming one's body when it rebels against you and when other people seek ownership of it. Without the Ellen Burstyn "lift your head" speech or the Vanessa Kirby show-stopper in the courtroom, I'm not sure any of that comes across.

I do think the film lets us off the hook a bit with the LaBoeuf character, in the sense that it gives us reasons to dislike him when it would be more compelling if he had done nothing wrong. Does his half-remembering of the White Stripes count as a speech?

32. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe)- This is such a play, not only in the locked-down location but also through nearly every storytelling convention: "Where are the two most interesting characters? Oh, running late? They'll enter separately in animated fashion?" But, to use the type of phrase that the characters might, "Don't hate the player; hate the game."

Perhaps the most theatrical note in this treatise on the commodification of expression is the way that, two or three times, the proceedings stop in their tracks for the piece to declare loudly what it's about. In one of those clear-outs, Boseman, who looks distractingly sick, delivers an unforgettable monologue that transports the audience into his character's fragile, haunted mind. He and Viola Davis are so good that the film sort of buckles under their weight, unsure of how to transition out of those spotlight moments and pretend that the story can start back up. Whatever they're doing is more interesting than what's being achieved overall.

31. Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg)- It's definitely the film that Vinterberg wanted to make, but despite what I think is a quietly shattering performance from Mikkelsen, Another Round moves in a bit too much of a straight line to grab me fully. The joyous final minutes hint at where it could have gone, as do pockets of Vinterberg's filmography, which seems newly tethered to realism in a way that I don't like. The best sequences are the wildest ones, like the uproarious trip to the grocery store for fresh cod, so I don't know why so much of it takes place in tiny hallways at magic hour. I give the inevitable American remake* permission to use these notes.

*- Just spitballing here. Martin: Will Ferrell, Nikolaj (Nick): Ben Stiller, Tommy: Owen Wilson, Peter: Craig Robinson

30. The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell)- Exactly what I wanted. Exactly what I needed.

I think a less conclusive finale would have been better, but what a model of high-concept escalation. This is the movie people convinced me Whannell's Upgrade was.

29. On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola)- Slight until the Mexican sojourn, which expands the scope and makes the film even more psychosexual than before. At times it feels as if Coppola is actively simplifying, rather than diving into the race and privilege questions that the Murray character all but demands.

As for Murray, is the film 50% worse without him? 70%? I don't know if you can run in supporting categories if you're the whole reason the film exists.

28. Mangrove (Steve McQueen)- The first part of the film seemed repetitive and broad to me. But once it settled in as a courtroom drama, the characterization became more shaded, and the filmmaking itself seemed more fluid. I ended up being quite outraged and inspired.

27. Shirley (Josephine Decker)- Josephine Decker emerges as a real stylist here, changing her foggy, impressionistic approach not one bit with a little more budget. Period piece and established actors be damned--this is still as much of a reeling fever dream as Madeline's Madeline. Both pieces are a bit too repetitive and nasty for my taste, but I respect the technique.

Here's my mandatory "Elisabeth Moss is the best" paragraph. While watching her performance as Shirley Jackson, I thought about her most famous role as Peggy on Mad Men, whose inertia and need to prove herself tied her into confidence knots. Shirley is almost the opposite: paralyzed by her worldview, certain of her talent, rejecting any empathy. If Moss can inhabit both characters so convincingly, she can do anything.

26. An American Pickle (Brandon Trost)- An American Pickle is the rare comedy that could actually use five or ten extra minutes, but it's a surprisingly heartfelt and wholesome stretch for Rogen, who is earnest in the lead roles.

25. The King of Staten Island (Judd Apatow)- At two hours and fifteen minutes, The King of Staten Island is probably the first Judd Apatow film that feels like the exact right length. For example, the baggy date scene between a gracious Bill Burr and a faux-dowdy Marisa Tomei is essential, the sort of widening of perspective that something like Trainwreck was missing.

It's Pete Davidson's movie, however, and though he has never been my cup of tea, I think he's actually quite powerful in his quiet moments. The movie probes some rare territory--a mentally ill man's suspicion that he is unlovable, a family's strategic myth-making out of respect for the dead. And when Davidson shows up at the firehouse an hour and fifteen minutes in, it feels as if we've built to a last resort.

24. Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis)- The tricky part of this film is communicating Hunter's despair, letting her isolation mount, but still keeping her opaque. It takes a lot of visual discipline to do that, and Claudio Mirabella-Davis is up to the task. This ends up being a much more sympathetic, expressive movie than the plot description might suggest.

(In the tie dispute, Hunter and Richie are both wrong. That type of silk--I couldn't tell how pebbled it was, but it's probably a barathea weave-- shouldn't be ironed directly, but it doesn't have to be steamed. On a low setting, you could iron the back of the tie and be fine.)

23. The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson)- I wanted a bit more "there" there; The film goes exactly where I thought it would, and there isn't enough humor for my taste. (The predictability might be a feature, not a bug, since the film is positioned as an episode of a well-worn Twilight Zone-esque show.)

But from a directorial standpoint, this is quite a promising debut. Patterson knows when to lock down or use silence--he even cuts to black to force us to listen more closely to a monologue. But he also knows when to fill the silence. There's a minute or so when Everett is spooling tape, and he and Fay make small talk about their hopes for the future, developing the characters' personalities in what could have been just mechanics. It's also a refreshingly earnest film. No one is winking at the '50s setting.

I'm tempted to write, "If Andrew Patterson can make this with $1 million, just imagine what he can do with $30 million." But maybe people like Shane Carruth have taught us that Patterson is better off pinching pennies in Texas and following his own muse.

22. Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello)- At first this film, adapted from a picaresque novel by Jack London, seemed as if it was hitting the marks of the genre. "He's going from job to job and meeting dudes who are shaping his worldview now." But the film, shot in lustrous Super 16, won me over as it owned the trappings of this type of story, forming a character who is a product of his environment even as he transcends it. By the end, I really felt the weight of time.

You want to talk about something that works better in novels than films though? When a passionate, independent protagonist insists that a woman is the love of his life, despite the fact that she's whatever Italians call a wet blanket. She's rich, but Martin doesn't care about her money. He hates her family and friends, and she refuses to accept him or his life pursuits. She's pretty but not even as pretty as the waitress they discuss. Tell me what I'm missing here. There's archetype, and there's incoherence.

21. Bacurau (Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles)- Certain images from this adventurous film will stick with me, but I got worn out after the hard reset halfway through. As entranced as I was by the mystery of the first half, I think this blood-soaked ensemble is better at asking questions than it is at answering them.

20. Let Them All Talk (Steven Soderbergh)- The initial appeal of this movie might be "Look at these wonderful actresses in their seventies getting a movie all to themselves." And the film is an interesting portrait of ladies taking stock of relationships that have spanned decades. But Soderbergh and Eisenberg handle the twentysomething Lucas Hedges character with the same openness and empathy. His early reasoning for going on the trip is that he wants to learn from older women, and Hedges nails the puppy-dog quality of a young man who would believe that. Especially in the scenes of aspirational romance, he's sweet and earnest as he brushes his hair out of his face.

Streep plays Alice Hughes, a serious author of literary fiction, and she crosses paths with Kelvin Kranz, a grinder of airport thrillers. In all of the right ways, Let Them All Talk toes the line between those two stances as an entertaining, jaunty experiment that also shoulders subtextual weight. If nothing else, it's easy to see why a cruise ship's counterfeit opulence, its straight lines at a lean, would be visually engaging to Soderbergh. You can't have a return to form if your form is constantly evolving.

19. Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnson)- Understandably, I don't find the subject as interesting as his own daughter does, and large swaths of this film are unsure of what they're trying to say. But that's sort of the point, and the active wrestling that the film engages in with death ultimately pays off in a transcendent moment. The jaw-dropping ending is something that only non-fiction film can achieve, and Johnson's whole career is about the search for that sort of serendipity.

18. Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee)- Delroy Lindo is a live-wire, but his character is the only one of the principals who is examined with the psychological depth I was hoping for. The first half, with all of its present-tense flourishes, promises more than the gunfights of the second half can deliver. When the film is cooking though, it's chock full of surprises, provocations, and pride.

17. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittmann)- Very quickly, Eliza Hittmann has established herself as an astute, empathetic director with an eye for discovering new talent. I hope that she gets to make fifty more movies in which she objectively follows laconic young people. But I wanted to like this one more than I did. The approach is so neutral that it's almost flat to me, lacking the arc and catharsis of her previous film, Beach Rats. I still appreciate her restraint though.

GREAT MOVIES

16. Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne)- I don't think the Dardennes have made a bad movie yet, and I'm glad they turned away from the slight genre dipping of The Unknown Girl, the closest to bad that they got. Young Ahmed is a lean, daring return to form.

Instead of following an average person, as they normally do, the Dardenne Brothers follow an extremist, and the objectivity that usually generates pathos now serves to present ambiguity. Ahmed says that he is changing, that he regrets his actions, but we never know how much of his stance is a put-on. I found myself wanting him to reform, more involved than I usually am in these slices of life. Part of it is that Idir Ben Addi looks like such a normal, young kid, and the Ahmed character has most of the qualities that we say we want in young people: principles, commitment, self-worth, reflection. So it's that much more destructive when those qualities are used against him and against his fellow man.

15. World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (Don Hertzfeldt)- My dad, a man whom I love but will never understand, has dismissed modern music before by claiming that there are only so many combinations of chords. To him, it's almost impossible to do something new. Of course, this is the type of thing that an uncreative person would say--a person not only incapable of hearing the chords that combine notes but also unwilling to hear the space between the notes. (And obviously, that's the take of a person who doesn't understand that, originality be damned, some people just have to create.)

Anyway, that attitude creeps into my own thinking more than I would like, but then I watch something as wholly original as World of Tomorrow Episode Three. The series has always been a way to pile sci-fi ideas on top of each other to prove the essential truths of being and loving. And this one, even though it achieves less of a sense of yearning than its predecessor, offers even more devices to chew on. Take, for example, the idea that Emily sends her message from the future, so David's primitive technology can barely handle it. In order to move forward with its sophistication, he has to delete any extraneous skills for the sake of computer memory. So out of trust for this person who loves him, he has to weigh whether his own breathing or walking can be uninstalled as a sacrifice for her. I thought that we might have been done describing love, but there it is, a new metaphor. Mixing futurism with stick figures to get at the most pure drive possible gave us something new. It's called art, Dad.

14. On the Record (Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering)- We don't call subjects of documentaries "stars" for obvious reasons, but Drew Dixon kind of is one. Her honesty and wisdom tell a complete story of the #MeToo movement. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering take their time developing her background at first, not because we need to "gain sympathy" or "establish credibility" for a victim of sexual abuse, but because showing her talent and enthusiasm for hip-hop A&R makes it that much more tragic when her passion is extinguished. Hell, I just like the woman, so spending a half-hour on her rise was pleasurable in and of itself.

This is a gut-wrenching, fearless entry in what is becoming Dick and Ziering's raison d'etre, but its greatest quality is Dixon's composed reflection. She helped to establish a pattern of Russell Simmons's behavior, but she explains what happened to her in ways I had never heard before.

13. David Byrne’s American Utopia (Spike Lee)- I'm often impressed by the achievements that puzzle me: How did they pull that off? But I know exactly how David Byrne pulled off the impish but direct precision of American Utopia: a lot of hard work.

I can't blame Spike Lee for stealing a page from Demme's Stop Making Sense: He denies us a close-up of any audience members until two-thirds of the way through, when we get someone in absolute rapture.

12. One Night in Miami... (Regina King)- We've all cringed when a person of color is put into the position of speaking on behalf of his or her entire race. But the characters in One Night in Miami... live in that condition all the time and are constantly negotiating it. As Black public figures in 1964, they know that the consequences of their actions are different, bigger, than everyone else's. The charged conversations between Malcolm X and Sam Cooke are not about whether they can live normal lives. They're way past that. The stakes are closer to Sam Cooke arguing that his life's purpose aligns with the protection and elevation of African-Americans while Malcolm X argues that those pursuits should be the same thing. Late in the movie, Cassius Clay leaves the other men, a private conversation, to talk to reporters, a public conversation. But the film argues that everything these men do is always already public. They're the most powerful African-Americans in the country, but their lives are not their own. Or not only their own.

It's true that the first act has the clunkiness and artifice of a TV movie, but once the film settles into the motel room location and lets the characters feed off one another, it's gripping. It's kind of unfair for a movie to get this many scenes of Leslie Odom Jr. singing, but I'll take it.

11. Saint Frances (Alex Thompson)- Rilke wrote, "Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us." The characters' behavior in Saint Frances--all of these fully formed characters' behavior--made me think of that quotation. When they lash out at one another, even at their nastiest, the viewer has a window into how they're expressing pain they can't verbalize. The film is uneven in its subtlety, but it's a real showcase for screenwriter and star Kelly O'Sullivan, who is unflinching and dynamic in one of the best performances of the year. Somebody give her some of the attention we gave to Zach Braff for God's sake.

10. Boys State (Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine)- This documentary is kind of a miracle from a logistical standpoint. From casting interviews beforehand, lots of editing afterwards, or sly note-taking once the conference began, McBaine and Moss happened to select the four principals who mattered the most at the convention, then found them in rooms full of dudes wearing the same tucked-in t-shirt. By the way, all of the action took place over the course of one week, and by definition, the important events are carved in half.

To call Boys State a microcosm of American politics is incorrect. These guys are forming platforms and voting in elections. What they're doing is American politics, so when they make the same compromises and mistakes that active politicians do, it produces dread and disappointment. So many of the boys are mimicking the political theater that they see on TV, and that sweaty sort of performance is going to make a Billy Mitchell out of this kid Ben Feinstein, and we'll be forced to reckon with how much we allow him to evolve as a person. This film is so precise, but what it proves is undeniably messy. Luckily, some of these seventeen-year-olds usher in hope for us all.

If nothing else, the film reveals the level to which we're all speaking in code.

9. The Nest (Sean Durkin)- In the first ten minutes or so of The Nest, the only real happy minutes, father and son are playing soccer in their quaint backyard, and the father cheats to score on a children's net before sliding on the grass to rub in his victory. An hour later, the son kicks the ball around by himself near a regulation goal on the family's massive property. The contrast is stark and obvious, as is the symbolism of the dead horse, but that doesn't mean it's not visually powerful or resonant.

Like Sean Durkin's earlier film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, the whole of The Nest is told with detail of novelistic scope and an elevation of the moment. A snippet of radio that mentions Ronald Reagan sets the time period, rather than a dateline. One kid saying "Thanks, Dad" and another kid saying, "Thanks, Rory" establishes a stepchild more elegantly than any other exposition might.

But this is also a movie that does not hide what it means. Characters usually say exactly what is on their minds, and motivations are always clear. For example, Allison smokes like a chimney, so her daughter's way of acting out is leaving butts on the window sill for her mother to find. (And mother and daughter both definitely "act out" their feelings.) On the other hand, Ben, Rory's biological son, is the character least like him, so these relationships aren't too directly parallel. Regardless, Durkin uses these trajectories to cast a pall of familial doom.

8. Sorry We Missed You (Sean Durkin)- Another precisely calibrated empathy machine from Ken Loach. The overwhelmed matriarch, Abby, is a caretaker, and she has to break up a Saturday dinner to rescue one of her clients, who wet herself because no one came to help her to the bathroom. The lady is embarrassed, and Abby calms her down by saying, "You mean more to me than you know." We know enough about Abby's circumstances to realize that it's sort of a lie, but it's a beautiful lie, told by a person who cares deeply but is not cared for.

Loach's central point is that the health of a family, something we think of as immutable and timeless, is directly dependent upon the modern industry that we use to destroy ourselves. He doesn't have to be "proven" relevant, and he didn't plan for Covid-19 to point to the fragility of the gig economy, but when you're right, you're right.

7. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen)- swear to you I thought: "This is an impeccable depiction of a great house party. The only thing it's missing is the volatile dude who scares away all the girls." And then the volatile dude who scares away all the girls shows up.

In a year short on magic, there are two or three transcendent moments, but none of them can equal the whole crowd singing along to "Silly Games" way after the song has ended. Nothing else crystallizes the film's note of celebration: of music, of community, of safe spaces, of Black skin. I remember moments like that at house parties, and like all celebrations, they eventually make me sad.

6. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht)- I held off on this movie because I thought that I knew what it was. The setup was what I expected: A summer camp for the disabled in the late '60s takes on the spirit of the time and becomes a haven for people who have not felt agency, self-worth, or community anywhere else. But that's the right-place-right-time start of a story that takes these figures into the '80s as they fight for their rights.

If you're anything like my dumb ass, you know about 504 accommodations from the line on a college syllabus that promises equal treatment. If 2020 has taught us anything though, it's that rights are seized, not given, and this is the inspiring story of people who unified to demand what they deserved. Judy Heumann is a civil rights giant, but I'm ashamed to say I didn't know who she was before this film. If it were just a history lesson that wasn't taught in school, Crip Camp would still be valuable, but it's way more than that.

5. Palm Springs (Max Barbakow)- When explaining what is happening to them, Andy Samberg's Nyles twirls his hand at Cristin Milioti's Sara and says, "It's one of those infinite time-loop scenarios." Yeah, one of those. Armed with only a handful of fictional examples, she and the audience know exactly what he means, and the continually inventive screenplay by Andy Siara doesn't have to do any more explaining. In record time, the film accelerates into its premise, involves her, and sets up the conflict while avoiding the claustrophobia of even Groundhog Day. That economy is the strength that allows it to be as funny as it is. By being thrifty with the setup, the savings can go to, say, the couple crashing a plane into a fiery heap with no consequences.

In some accidental ways, this is, of course, a quarantine romance as well. Nyles and Sara frustratingly navigate the tedious wedding as if they are play-acting--which they sort of are--then they push through that sameness to grow for each other, realizing that dependency is not weakness. The best relationships are doing the same thing right now.

Although pointedly superficial--part of the point of why the couple is such a match--and secular--I think the notion of an afterlife would come up at least once--Palm Springs earns the sincerity that it gets around to. And for a movie ironic enough to have a character beg to be impaled so that he doesn't have to sit in traffic, that's no small feat.

4. The Assistant (Kitty Green)- A wonder of Bressonian objectivity and rich observation, The Assistant is the rare film that deals exclusively with emotional depth while not once explaining any emotions. One at a time, the scrape of the Kleenex box might not be so grating, the long hallway trek to the delivery guy might not be so tiring, but this movie gets at the details of how a job can destroy you in ways that add up until you can't even explain them.

3. Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell)- In her most incendiary and modern role, Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, which is short for Cassandra, that figure doomed to tell truths that no one else believes. The web-belted boogeyman who ruined her life is Al, short for Alexander, another Greek who is known for his conquests. The revenge story being told here--funny in its darkest moments, dark in its funniest moments--is tight on its surface levels, but it feels as if it's telling a story more archetypal and expansive than that too.

An exciting feature debut for its writer-director Emerald Fennell, the film goes wherever it dares. Its hero has a clear purpose, and it's not surprising that the script is willing to extinguish her anger halfway through. What is surprising is the way it renews and muddies her purpose as she comes into contact with half-a-dozen brilliant one- or two-scene performances. (Do you think Alfred Molina can pull off a lawyer who hates himself so much that he can't sleep? You would be right.)

Promising Young Woman delivers as an interrogation of double standards and rape culture, but in quiet ways it's also about our outsized trust in professionals and the notion that some trauma cannot be overcome.

INSTANT CLASSICS

2. Soul (Pete Docter)- When Pete Docter's Up came out, it represented a sort of coronation for Pixar: This was the one that adults could like unabashedly. The one with wordless sequences and dead children and Ed Asner in the lead. But watching it again this week with my daughter, I was surprised by how high-concept and cloying it could be. We choose not to remember the middle part with the goofy dog stuff.

Soul is what Up was supposed to be: honest, mature, stirring. And I don't mean to imply that a family film shouldn't make any concessions to children. But Soul, down to the title, never compromises its own ambition. Besides Coco, it's probably the most credible character study that Pixar has ever made, with all of Joe's growth earned the hard way. Besides Inside Out, it's probably the wittiest comedy that Pixar has ever made, bursting with unforced energy.

There's a twitter fascination going around about Dez, the pigeon-figured barber character whose scene has people gushing, "Crush my windpipe, king" or whatever. Maybe that's what twitter does now, but no one fantasized about any characters in Up. And I count that as progress.

1. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman)- After hearing that our name-shifting protagonist moonlights as an artist, a no-nonsense David Thewlis offers, "I hope you're not an abstract artist." He prefers "paintings that look like photographs" over non-representational mumbo-jumbo. And as Jessie Buckley squirms to try to think of a polite way to talk back, you can tell that Charlie Kaufman has been in the crosshairs of this same conversation. This morose, scary, inscrutable, expressionist rumination is not what the Netflix description says it is at all, and it's going to bother nice people looking for a fun night in. Thank God.

The story goes that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, when constructing Raiders of the Lost Ark, sought to craft a movie that was "only the good parts" with little of the clunky setup that distracted from action. What we have here is a Charlie Kaufman movie with only the Charlie Kaufman moments, less interested than ever before at holding one's hand. The biting humor is here, sometimes aimed at philistines like the David Thewlis character above, sometimes at the niceties that we insist upon. The lonely horror of everyday life is here, in the form of missed calls from oneself or the interruption of an inner monologue. Of course, communicating the overwhelming crush of time, both unknowable and familiar, is the raison d'etre.

A new pet motif seems to be the way that we don't even own our own knowledge. The Young Woman recites "Bonedog" by Eva H.D., which she claims/thinks she wrote, only to find Jake's book open to that page, next to a Pauline Kael book that contains a Woman Under the Influence review that she seems to have internalized later. When Jake muses about Wordsworth's "Lucy Poems," it starts as a way to pass the time, then it becomes a way to lord his education over her, then it becomes a compliment because the subject resembles her, then it becomes a way to let her know that, in the grand scheme of things, she isn't that special at all. This film jerks the viewer through a similar wintry cycle and leaves him with his own thoughts. It's not a pretty picture, but it doesn't look like anything else.

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allsassnoclass · 4 years

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you could bring down my level of concern

Michael is having a bad night. Ashton picks him up for ice cream

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It’s just after one in the morning, and Michael doesn’t trust his ability to keep it together. He’s felt like his skin has been pressed too tightly the entire day, and that was before he realized that there’s an entire book he was supposed to read for his contemporary literature class, sitting untouched on his dresser. He’s got so many tabs open on his computer of assignments that he needs to finish, and he keeps forgetting that he has to email the financial aid office or he’s going to get a late fee on his bills but he can’t exactly email them now at one in the morning because they’re going to think he can’t get his life together on top of being an idiot for forgetting for so long. He’s been restlessly switching between different social media platforms and opening up Netflix only to close it again when nothing seems to fit, steadfastly ignoring the book, the articles he’s supposed to read with it, and all of the other homework for his music classes.

Shit. He didn’t practice today, and his professor is going to be able to tell when he has his lesson tomorrow.

Michael shifts and unlocks his phone again, but nothing has changed in the three seconds he’s been gone. He stares at his home screen for a moment, a picture of him and Ashton from before they got back to campus this year, smiles wide and tucked close together.

He saw Ashton two days ago, but he hasn’t really seen him for at least two weeks. With the new university policies, they’re not allowed to hang out in Ashton’s dorm room or Michael’s apartment anymore, nor be outside together without masks. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if they both were off campus and could sneak around, but Ashton is an RA. He’ll get immediately fired if they get caught, and if he somehow does manage to get the virus his entire floor will be put into official quarantine. It’s not just them who are at risk, and Ashton is too much of a bleeding heart to put all of his residents through that.

As such, Michael has eaten lunch outside with Ashton and facetimed him and spent a lot of time cuddled up to Calum to make up for the fact that he’s technically not allowed to touch Ashton (although no one has noticed them holding hands across the table, or a quick hug before they part for classes).

It’s getting chillier. When snow starts to fall, Ashton is going to need to concede to hanging out in Michael and Calum’s apartment, because they’re both going to go crazy without it.

Michael already feels like he’s going crazy. He has assignments and his dishes are dirty and he has no money and everything absolutely sucks and he misses his boyfriend, so he pulls out his phone and sends can you pick me up.

After a moment, he adds please.

Ashton could be asleep already, because he’s been trying really hard to seem well-adjusted for his senior year, and the thought makes panic bubble uncomfortably in Michael’s gut. He can’t get himself to start his tasks, and he can’t stop picking at his cuticles, a bad habit that everyone has been trying to help him break, and he’s been missing Ashton vaguely since they got back on campus but thinks he’s going to cry if he doesn’t get to see him tonight.

What if Ashton doesn’t want to see him?

Ashton wants you around, Michael says to himself, trying to remember everything his therapist has told him for when he feels like this. Just because outside circumstances are making it difficult doesn’t mean that he suddenly hates you.

His internal voice doesn’t sound very convincing. With the way everything has been going lately, Michael wouldn’t be surprised if Ashton suddenly dumped him and Calum moved out and Luke and the girls stopped talking to him so he was miserable and alone. That’s just about the only way things could get even worse, right?

He doesn’t want to jinx it.

His phone buzzes in his hand, and Michael glances down to see Ashton’s name pop up with the message be there in 5.

Everything snaps into focus when Ashton is near. This strange crawling sensation under his skin might not fully go away, but maybe it’ll lessen, and maybe Michael will be able to think about school without wanting to throw up.

He slips on a hoodie, shoves on some shoes, and barely remembers to grab his wallet and keys before he’s slipping on a mask and out the door, rushing down the stairs to get out of the apartment building. The night air does nothing to sooth him, feeling dense and muggy through his mask rather than light and crisp like he wants. Still, he looks up at the sky and tries to let the slight breeze he can feel against his forehead calm him a little, just enough to hold him over until he can get in Ashton’s car and hopefully breathe properly again.

He’s still trying in vain to find a star that hasn’t been drowned out by light pollution or clouds when Ashton’s car arrives, engine squeaking in a familiar way when he pulls up to the curb a bit too fast, as always. Michael makes his way to the passenger door and gets in.

“Hey, stranger. Need a ride?” Ashton quips, and Michael crumples. Ashton looks soft, wearing pajama pants and a large sweatshirt, hair messy and eyes tired but smile intact. Michael wants to cry, but instead he just feels uncomfortable, like Ashton is a stranger again and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do.

“Hey,” Ashton says gently, “what’s wrong?”

Michael shrugs.

“Okay,” Ashton says. “Do you want to take off your mask?”

He does, putting it in the pocket of his hoodie, and Ashton smiles.

“There he is,” he says, bringing a hand up to Michael’s cheek, and Michael leans into it, chasing the feeling of Ashton’s hands on his skin.

He’s missed this. Ashton seems to understand, shifting so he can thread his fingers through the hair at the back of Michael’s neck, then drawing him forward into a kiss. Michael’s hands come up to grip Ashton’s sweatshirt at the first brush of lips, pressing into it like he’s been drowning and Ashton is his first breath of fresh hair. Ashton makes a startled noise in the back of his throat, but responds in kind, opening his mouth when prompted and licking into Michael’s, taking control in the way they both like best. When they part for air a minute later, they don’t go far, pressing their foreheads together while Michael tries to make his fingers loosen their grip.

“Is there anything I can do?” Ashton asks eventually.

“No,” Michael says. “I don’t know. You’re doing it, I guess.”

He starts to pull away, and Ashton pecks him quickly on the lips again before he lets him.

“Where do you want to go?” Ashton asks.

“Away from campus,” Michael says.

“Ice cream?”

Michael nods, and Ashton starts the car.

The drive is quiet. Michael makes no move to turn on the radio or get the aux cord, and Ashton lets it be. Michael stares out the window, letting the houses and street lights pass by on the familiar route. There’s a Baskin Robbins attached to a Dunkin with 24-hour drive through, and they’ve made a lot of midnight runs there since they started dating. Some of Michael’s favorite memories from last year include sitting in the parking lot together, talking and laughing and sharing bites of ice cream when one of them got an unusual flavor. They managed to fit in two trips during the first weeks of the semester, but haven’t been able to go recently due to the campus lockdown.

About halfway there, Ashton reaches over and takes Michael’s hand, thumb rubbing soothing circles on it. Michael tries to focus on that, rather than the stretched-out feeling still present under his skin.

They pull up to the drive through and Ashton shifts the car into park. Despite the place not being busy at all, it has astoundingly slow service this late at night.

“Do you want your usual?” Ashton asks, and Michael nods. When they do eventually order, Ashton gets one scoop of cherry and one scoop of vanilla, and he gets Michael the chocolatiest thing on the menu. Ashton pays, and once they get their items he pulls into their usual parking space in the corner and turns the car off.

“So,” Ashton says when they’re a few bites in, “I really think you should tell me what’s wrong.”

Michael takes another bite of his ice cream and considers if he knows who to articulate this.

“I feel… bad,” he starts. “Just--like my skin is too tight, or something, and I can’t focus on anything but I also can’t not focus on anything. I’m tired but can’t sleep, the world is basically fucking ending and I’m somehow expected to read an entire book by tomorrow. I have so much I’m supposed to do and can’t make myself do any of it, and it’s not even that I don’t have the time, because nothing is happening! I hate trying to do music classes online, I can’t fucking see my friends, and I miss--”

He stops. Ashton waits patiently, letting the silence stretch out until Michael is ready to break it again.

“I miss you. I know we’re doing our best with what we can right now, but it still sucks.”

Ashton reaches out again, gentle hand landing on his arm. That makes Michael feel the closest he has to crying all night, but it’s still not quite enough. He wishes this were the type of upset that could be solved with a long hug and a cathartic cry, but it’s not. This discomfort is the type that gets into his bones and stays for a while.

Michael wishes the gear shift wasn’t in the way, so he could tuck himself against Ashton and hide there until this entire thing is over.

“Going to school right now fucking sucks, and I’m proud of you for handling it as well as you have been,” Ashton says. It’s a nice thing to say, but it’s useless right now. Michael knows that going to school right now sucks, and Ashton is always proud of him for doing the bare minimum. He hums anyway, because Ashton’s trying to help.

“Let’s eat our ice cream and make a plan for the rest of tonight and tomorrow,” Ashton says. “We’ll figure out the homework stuff, at least, and get to spend time together properly.”

“Can we sit on the hood?” he asks, and thankfully Ashton nods. The night air is crisper without his mask, or maybe it’s because they’re a bit further from the heart of the city. Either way, Michael presses close, not willing to forfeit time spent touching Ashton.

Luke is the clingiest out of all of them, but Michael hadn’t realized just how much he enjoyed touch until the virus hit and it was taken away from him. He was craving Ashton’s long before he wasn’t allowed to have it, and if he didn’t know that Ashton needs the money being an RA provides he would have begged him to quit and move in with him and Calum.

They talk about easy things as they eat, like the shift to Michael’s favorite type of weather that had happened recently and Ashton’s floor programs that he’s planning. Michael tells him about how Calum almost burnt the apartment down and they just barely avoided having the alarms go off, and Ashton gives an anecdote about residents trying to smuggle two of the campus lawn chairs into their rooms while he was on security.

“They’re just so stupid sometimes,” he says. “It really is not hard to get away with stuff like that if you put your mind to it, but they obviously didn’t.” He turns the story into an entire bit, complete with a funny imitation of their bad excuses when he caught them, and it makes Michael laugh. Some of the weird feeling dissipates.

Ashton gets out his notes app when they finish eating, and Michael leans his head on his shoulder to watch him type up the plan.

Michael will do his music theory homework tonight, but he’s going to stop once it hits three in the morning to go to bed regardless of how much is or is not done. Ashton will type up a detailed summary of the book he was supposed to read, since apparently it was his favorite when he took the class last semester as part of his major requirement, and have it emailed to Michael by the time his alarm goes off at 8 the next morning. Hopefully that will be enough for Michael to do the forum posts he’s supposed to, and he should still have time to do his ear training before class. They can meet up for lunch, then Michael can go to his other two classes, take a break until dinner, spend a bit of time in the practice room, and do his homework for the next day in the evening.

Calum has a study group then, and Michael likes working in the living room while he zooms the others. It’s easier to stay focused when Calum is, as well, and they’ve gotten into a routine of playing two rounds of Fifa, Smash, or MarioKart during well-timed breaks.

Marked out like this, the tasks look less overwhelming.

“Can you write that I need to email the student fees office during lunch?” he asks. Ashton nods and adds it to the list. “And dishes after dinner.”

It’s not too bad when it’s notated like this, and if he doesn’t get his theory homework done tonight he won’t completely fail the class as long as he does all of the other work, although he knows that letting himself slip with one assignment always makes it easier to neglect them in the future, to near-disastrous results. His lesson might be less-than-stellar tomorrow, but at least Dr. O is nice about it. He’ll be disappointed, and Michael might cry because he hates falling short of his expectations, but he won’t be mean.

“Doable?” Ashton asks. Michael nods. Ashton takes a screenshot of the note and texts it to Michael, then grabs his hand as they sit in silence for a few more minutes.

“We should get back,” Michael says eventually.

“We can stay a bit longer,” Ashton says. He tightens his grip on Michael’s hand, and maybe

Ashton has been missing him just as much. Michael presses a kiss to his shoulder.

“I have to do my theory homework, and you’re ready for bed,” he says.

“Wait,” Ashton says as he starts to shift away. Michael pauses, and Ashton’s hands shift to his waist, leaning in for a deep kiss. He melts into it, toes curling at the single-minded focus Ashton dedicates to it. They shift for a better angle, Ashton leaning against the windshield and Michael following him down, and it takes all of Michael’s self-control to pull away before things become too heated.

“I don’t want to give the Baskin Robbins employee a free show,” he says. Ashton’s fingers dip under his hoodie and shirt, chilly from either the ice cream or the fall air. Michael shivers at the light brush at the small of his back, and Ashton gives him a lopsided smile.

“It’d be the most interesting thing they’ll see tonight,” he says.

“It’ll also get the police called on us for public indecency,” Michael says. “Can’t believe I’m having to be the responsible one about this, Mr. I-Am-A-Mature-Resident-Advisor-Who-Will-Do-No-Wrong.”

“You make me feel adventurous,” Ashton says. Michael hums and kisses him again, and Ashton doesn’t try to escalate it.

“Okay,” Ashton says. “Let’s go back.”

They get in the car, and Michael pulls up a gentle playlist for the ride back. Ashton hums along to the first song, and something else in Michael’s gut dissipates. He still feels a bit weird, but he thinks it’s manageable now. He has a plan, and he has Ashton, and if previous experience is any indicator he should feel okay by the time he wakes up tomorrow morning.

Michael watches Ashton tap out an easy beat on the steering wheel with his thumbs, and takes another deep breath.

Things are kind of fucked now, but it won’t be like this forever. He’ll be okay.

#my writing #mashton #5sos fanfic #this is genuinely just. so much projection #so much #also though as I was writing this I fell in love with the universe so #maybe college mashton will be what I work on when nothing else works

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Doctor Who Series 13: Jodie Whittaker Leaving Rumours, the Next Doctor, and the Future

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Jodie Whittaker is fast approaching that three-season milestone at which most Doctors pull the inter-dimensional rip-cord and eject themselves from the TARDIS. Speculation has swirled around her, as it does for most Doctors, from the very start of her tenure, and now, more than ever, there’s the strong scent of Regeneration in the wind. So, will Whittaker leave at the close of series 13? And if so, will any of her companions remain to bridge the gap between eras? Might showrunner Chris Chibnall also hang up his sonic-shaped pen? The BBC is playing its cards characteristically close to its chest, so divining the answers to these questions is not unlike trying to unlock the mystery of the Doctor’s real name.

There was an ample reminder of the BBC’s zeal for secrecy when Who-newcomer and beloved Liverpudlian John Bishop – cast last year as companion Dan – was rebuked for revealing during an online Q&A that his character, too, would be Liverpudlian. If the BBC don’t want you to know that a Liverpudlian might be playing a Liverpudlian, then this is going to be a bumpy ride. But let’s strap in, brace for impact, and see what’s (or Who’s) out there…

Jodie Whittaker on leaving

Everyone has their favourite Doctors, and not-so favourite Doctors. Jodie Whittaker is not alone in having had love and scorn heaped upon her in equal measure, a phenomenon that has touched most actors to have taken on the role, with the possible exception of Tom Baker and David Tennant, who stand as almost deified in their respective eras.

It’s clear, though, that Jodie Whittaker has loved every moment of being the Doctor, and of being embraced by the show’s fandom, telling the Telegraph in November 2020: “If you bump into a Whovian, it genuinely makes both of your days. There’s something emotional, poetic and very humbling about being in the show, because you’re a little tiny jigsaw piece of something that is so precious to so many people.” It’s perhaps understandable, then, that her response to the speculation around her departure was to say: “To even question an end point would be too upsetting.”

Or, to parrot one of her predecessors: “I don’t want to go.”

Where’s the evidence?

Over the last eighteen months, rumours that Jodie Whittaker will be leaving after season 13 have been endlessly shared and repeated. These rumours were reported as fact by some media outlets earlier in the year, though the BBC has steadfastly refused either to confirm or deny them. It does, however, seem more likely than not that 13 will be 13’s last; a supposition based upon the ‘Who Rule of Three’ and the unignorable sound of drums gathering pitch and pace across the internet.

In the hunt for ‘evidence’, dead-ends and red-herrings abound. IMDb currently reveals no projects rumoured or in pre-production for Jodie Whittaker beyond her TARDIS tenure, but, then, actors keeping contractual secrets would be fools to release their schedules onto one of the most comprehensive entertainment databases ever to have existed. So no help there.

The Mirror newspaper recently reported that the front-cover of the 2022 Doctor Who annual would be Doctor-less for the first time in its 57-year-history. Could this be a clue? Not likely. The people at Penguin Random House – the annual’s publishers – made it clear that the thirteenth Doctor will feature heavily throughout the publication. So whether the new cover is simply a radical redesign, a yielding to the purchasing power of this era of the show’s vocal detractors; or a shrewd marketing move designed to have the product promoted for free in the press, it doesn’t actually tell us very much about the likelihood of the 13th Doctor’s exit.

Peter Capaldi’s Trouser Clue

We might, however, be looking for clues in all the wrong places. Peter Capaldi deduced that he’d be handing over the TARDIS keys to a woman a few days before the BBC officially broke the news to him: thanks to his tailor.

At a New York Comic Con panel in 2017, Capaldi told the audience: “I went into Paul Smiths, which is a very wonderful clothes shop in London where I buy my suits, and everybody knows me in there. And they said, ‘We just got a call,’ they said, ‘from the Doctor Who office saying, ‘Can we have a pair of [Peter’s] trousers, but with a waist size thirty?’ … And I thought, ‘Well, that can’t really be a man with a thirty-inch waist. That must be a lady then’.”

Staking out Jodie’s tailor probably won’t prove fruitful, though. Knowing the BBC, they’ve probably plugged that potential leak by sub-contracting Jodie’s wardrobe out to a mute grandma living alone in a fortress atop the Himalayas.

Doctor Who: the behind-the-scenes causes of regeneration

By Mark Harrison

Doctor Who: Which New Doctors Are Now Canon?

By Chris Farnell

Will the Doctor Regenerate in 2022?

Series 13 will consist of eight episodes, set to begin airing later this year. The Mirror reports that there will be two specials in 2022, although it isn’t clear whether these will be in addition to this year’s 8, or whether we’ll see a split of 6 episodes in 2021 with the 2 specials being held over for 2022. A special – Christmas Day, New Year’s Day or otherwise – has become the traditional arena for regeneration, so if Whittaker is leaving, it’s likely that her final scene will come at the end of that rumoured second special.

Many think that the greatest evidence for Whittaker remaining as the Doctor until at least 2023 is our proximity to Doctor Who‘s upcoming 60th anniversary. After all, it would seem a shame to bow out before a big milestone, and it could be daunting to saddle a new Doctor with spearheading such a significant celebration. Still, the timey-wimeyness of it all means that even should Whittaker leave in 2022 there’s no reason she couldn’t make an appearance in an anniversary episode, perhaps alongside a few other previous incarnations. And 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of the BBC itself, so it’s hard to imagine that the show won’t be doing something extra special to mark that, given that it owes its very existence and longevity to the broadcaster (Michael Grade notwithstanding). Whenever she leaves, 13 could easily have her cake and eat it.

Will Chris Chibnall leave after Series 13?

When Bradley Walsh and Tosin Cole left at the end of ‘Revolution of the Daleks‘, Mandip Gill’s Yaz stayed behind. Yaz has been one of the new era’s most underdeveloped characters, so it made sense that she would get her chance to shine and grow in a less crowded environment, sharing companion duties only with John Bishop’s newly teased Dan. But as her character and her story seems so intrinsically linked to the Doctor herself, with the promise of more in-depth exploration to come in series 13, when/if the Doctor leaves, will Yaz’s story also draw to a close? Will only Dan remain with a foot in two TARDISes? All speculation at this point, and it very much hinges on which direction the writers take Yaz in this next clutch of episodes.

Showrunner Chris Chibnall – a lifelong fan of the show and, prior to his appointment as big chief, a long-standing writer for both Doctor Who and Torchwood – has been at least as divisive a figure in Who fandom as 80s helmsman Jonathan Nathan-Turner. Rumours regarding his possible departure have circulated with just as much frequency as those surrounding Whittaker. When asked about series 13, Chris Chibnall told the Radio Times: “I do know I’m coming back for a third season. Yeah, absolutely.” Within those words, if you look hard enough, exists the implied absence of certainty around future seasons, but perhaps that’s getting rather too Da Vinci Code about the whole thing.

While the stewardships of previous showrunners Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat spanned two Doctors each, this doesn’t mean that Chris Chibnall is guaranteed a crack at the 14th Doctor. Should Chibnall leave after season 13, among the writing team perhaps only Pete McTighe – who wrote ‘Kerblam!‘ And co-wrote ‘Praxeus‘ – has the experience to take over as showrunner, given his stint over-seeing the award-winning Australian prison-drama Wentworth.

How might 13’s Regeneration Happen?

Each of the modern Doctors has met their end in the service of some great sacrifice, either to protect a companion or to save if not the universe then at least a world within it. It’s unlikely that 13’s exit will be any different. It’s simply a question of against whom or what she’ll be fighting when her time comes.

Though it may be too soon for the Master to be directly responsible for the undoing of yet another Doctor so soon after 12’s John-Simm-shaped downfall, it’s likely that the Master will at the very least influence the direction of 13’s regeneration. Sacha Dhawan has expressed enthusiasm at the idea of returning, though nothing, as you would expect, has yet been confirmed. Or denied.

The revelations in ‘The Timeless Children‘, controversial though they proved for some fans, are perhaps too epoch-shaking and era-defining not to play a part in 13’s swansong, and it may well be that the shadowy Division – the Time Lord’s very own version of Starfleet’s Section 31 – will be complicit in the Doctor’s fall.

Another question presents itself: now that the Doctor knows she has infinite regenerations, might it make her more reckless? Might she start to see her body more like an easily changeable suit than a thing of flesh and blood? Might she regenerate multiple times before becoming the 14th Doctor, a la The Curse of Fatal Death, and what on earth would we call the 14th Doctor – who wouldn’t really be the 14th Doctor at all – if that happened?

Who’s in the running for the next Doctor?

Many of the same actors tipped as possible replacements near the end of Capaldi’s run have reappeared in the Regeneration rumour mill, including firm favourites Michaela Coel, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Michael Sheen, David Harewood, Richard Ayoade and the indefatigable Kris Marshall. Joining them this time are Line of Duty alumni Kelly MacDonald and Vicky McClure, and It’s a Sin front-man Olly Alexander. It could be that one of them, or none of them get the call. The next Doctor could just as easily be Jo Martin’s fugitive Doctor, who’s been hiding in plain sight all along.

Really though, as with all things connected with the show at this stage of its cycle: Who knows?

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Doctor Who Series 13 will air on BBC One later this year.

The post Doctor Who Series 13: Jodie Whittaker Leaving Rumours, the Next Doctor, and the Future appeared first on Den of Geek.

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alexandermanes · 3 years

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ghost whisperer - rnm fic

hey so here’s the ghost malex au/human au fic wrote but didn’t post on halloween week bc i was unmotivated

hope you like it :)

ao3

Chapter One - Ghosts

“First, you need a location”, declared the man, Tom, also known as MythCatcher on Youtube

Michael nodded then furiously scribbled down in his scrawny handwriting “Location”

“Then, you need to do research- Research is a very important part of paranormal investigation. You need to fact-check myths, learn about history of the place you’re looking for poltergeists”, he informs Michael via the small screen of his phone, “Learn about the deceased’s, their name, their story”

He stops the video to write “Research” on the notebook, underneath “Location”, obviously.

“After that: planning. What kind of gear are you planning on taking? Camera? Infrared night vision goggles? An Ouija board to facilitate communication? What kind of questions will you ask, with or without the board? What time are you going? What time are you going to visiting the haunting site? What are the alleged time of the apparition’s sighting?”

Those are too many points, Michael observes and writes “Planning” as a third bullet point in his “How to ghost hunt” list. Tom (MythCatcher) doesn’t appreciate the term “ghost hunter”, he thinks it’s demeaning since people don’t take ghosts seriously. The paranormal, though, that they fear and believe in. Idiot, he muttered as he pressed play on the video again. He does not care about Tom’s sensitivities.

Michael isn’t delusional, he knows most paranormal investigators are as genuine as his will to admit when Max’s right, which is non-existent. But, amongst the sea of “myth catchers”, Tom is the one that makes the most sensible points, despite the fact that he earns money by making Youtube videos in his 40s and advertises for “high-end ghost hunting gear”. Needless to say, he takes Tom’s points with a grain of salt.

“Once you have a list of equipment to take with you and a scripted way to approach the site, the hows and when, then you’re ready for the next step: Communication”, Tom states, “Now, this is a crucial step. To communicate with the paranormal, you must be respectful”

Michael isn’t sure what constitutes as being respectful amongst investigators of the paranormal but invading their space, often the site where they died in, and demanding their participation in whatever nonsensical conversation they have planned doesn’t seem like very cordial behavior.

“No mocking, no inviting dangerous entities to that space, address them by name and be polite. Also you must be protected, always be straightforward about the kind of entity you allow to be in your vicinity. If there’s any funny business going on, send it away immediately. Bring your salt with you. ParanormalActivityStore has a ten percent discount if you use my code for a personalized-“, he is interrupted by Michael closing the app

“That’s enough dead brain cells for a single afternoon”, he reminds himself., after that he scribbles “Communication” as a final bullet point in his list.

Michael Sanders isn’t sure when his obsession with ghosts started, although he doesn’t appreciate his interest and curiosity being labeled and an obsession, thank you very much, despite what everyone else has voiced in the past; that’s why he keeps it to himself these days. No, in fact, he actually knows when this journey began, he can pinpoint it.

See, Michael is a man of rational thinking and little faith, a man of science and not religion which is why he believes in ghosts. Every night for a year he sees his mom, not in dreams, and with no previous history of mental illness, not in delusions. Every night religiously for a year his mom has visited him. When it started he believed himself to be dreaming but that wasn’t the case. She never says much, kneels by his bedside, cradles his face with one hand, caresses his cheek and smiles at him, teary-eyed and whispers. “Manes Residence”, those words haunt him but with a foreign intent. Though it’s a balm to his soul seeing his mother smile at him even when her eyes are so woeful, even proffering such ominous words.

It is a mystery to him as to why, ten years after her death, a brain aneurysm that took her unexpectedly from his arms, she began to visit him during the night and why she whispers those words. He has exhausted every method he’s ever heard of: Ouija boards, calling out to her, lucid dreaming, leaving candles and objects for her to communicate through, he even considered hiring a psychic but that somehow seemed too extreme. He tried praying and still prays at any given time during the day but that doesn’t seem to have been successful. At first he assumed he wasn’t doing it correctly, but then again, at the ripe age of eleven years old, in one of the foster homes he inhabited lived a family of religious fanatics, so he doubts he’s doing prayers incorrectly. Especially when hesitating or stuttering during prayers resulted in punishment. This situation is a big enigma to him and it pesters him on a daily basis. He needs answers. If this was any ordinary mystery he wouldn’t have bothered this much but he has bone-deep certainty that this, whatever it is, is very important. So keeps trying to contact his mom. He tries unrelentingly.

Until one day. He makes his way to the Crashdown, Isobel and Max by his side. After a long day of school (he was thankful it was his senior year), they all decided they needed a well-deserved milkshake with a side portion of french-fries. As they entered the diner and the small bell rang overhead, they noticed an unusual amount of patrons for a Thursday afternoon. Oh, well, he thought. They sauntered towards the counter and waited in line, a single person in front of them, a truly serendipitous event. In the indistinct chatter he picks up two words: Manes Residence.

“Sorry?”, he says loudly, turning towards the person who emitted them

Rosa Ortecho asses him with an unimpressed, and frankly disgusted, expression and continues talking to Liz, disregarding him as if he were a vexing fly.

“So anyways. Lydia told me that now the house is haunted. Sargent Psycho took off with hs ten kids or whatever to nowhere land during the nightly hours. Not a soul saw them ever again”, she points out, “dude murdered his wife after she tried to leave him, buried her than grabbed his five sons and fucked off”

“It’s just a rumor, Rosa!”, Liz replied, laughing purely out of amusement and disbelief

“So this Manes House”, Michael chimed in, “where is it?”

“Michael, stop barging in in people’s conversation”, Max reprehended him, an honest to God blush creeping in

“I’m sorry”, Michael looked from Liz to Rosa, “He isn’t usually this rude”

Michael gave him an eye-roll that screamed Fuck off, Max. Rosa just mimicked him while Liz smiled, a bright and toothy smile.

“It used to be Master-Sargent’s Jesse Manes residence, he lived there with his wife and four sons. Then one day they disappeared off of the map and the house was put up for sale. No one ever saw them since, I think, the fourth of July fair last year”, she informed him, “The house was never sold, probably because of rumors that it is haunted. I can give you the address, me and Rosa used to be best friends with one of his kids, Alex”

“Yeah, right up until the moment the left and just like poof, never called or texted”, Rosa supplied

“He probably just didn’t find the time or-“, Liz tried to explain

“For a year, Liz?”, she replied with a very irritated tone, “Either he is ignoring us, completely forgot us or is dead”

Liz gave her a good-natured eye-roll and simply told her she was being dramatic.

“Can you give me an address?”, Michael asked suddenly feeling anxious

Liz acquiesced then ripped a sheet of paper from her notepad and wrote the address.

“You’re one weird little dude”, Rosa told him, though Michael completely disregarded her

He thanked Liz and almost forgot about the shake and fries, the original reason for his appearance at the Crashdown. As they waited, Max and Isobel engaged in conversation but Michael was far too distracted to hear any of their words, instead, his mind raced, making plans about when to visit the residence. Something akin to energy traveled through his veins, similar to electricity, his heart sped-up, he felt restless and suddenly very aware of his surroundings. The movement of brown paper bags being set on the counter snapped him out of his gaze. He immediately took one, knowing they order essentially the same dish, and strode to the door.

“Michael!”, Isobel called out, drawing heads to her, “where are you going?”

“Sorry. Forgot I had something to do at- um, the junkyard. Talk later”, he immediately turned his back on his friends and exited the diner.

He scrambled for his keys inside his pocket, growing more frustrated by the second, until the skin-warm metal found his finger tips and at last, picked up his keys. He unlocked his baby blue beat-up truck and tossed his food on the passenger seat, subsequently starting the engine. He felt possessed, moving by this ominous force, an urgent feeling, but regardless of his feelings amongst other things, he was hell-bent on finding the Manes residence at that very instant.

#roswell new mexico #rnm fic #malex #michael guerin #alex manes #liz ortecho #rosa ortecho #max evans #isobel evans #tw death #ghost fic

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icyharrington · 5 years

Text

Is It Wrong?- Part 5 (Michael Langdon X Reader)

i hope y’all like this part. a lot of this was based off some anons i received (a LOT of people wanted cockwarming) so hopefully this doesn’t disappoint lmao. this part has a lot of teen angst so just be warned lmao

plot: michael langdon is a picture-perfect fuckboy, and, lucky for you, he’s also your stepbrother. how will you survive?

warnings: inappropriate relationships, fuckboy michael, fem!Reader, high school au, teen angst, slight violence, hate sex, degradation, fingering, choking, sexual intercourse, cockwarming, praise kink (kind of?)

word count: 7.8k

tags: @alicecooper19, @blackfyrez, @bbyduncan, @sloppy-little-witch-bitch26, @satansapostle, @trelaney, @kissydevil, @alexa-is-on-fire, @langdonalien, @langdonsdemon, @sloppy-wrist, @michael-langdon-appreciation, @wroteclassicaly, @langdonsinferno, @ccodyfern, @starwlkers, @xtheinevitableprophecyx, @americanhorrorstudies, @sodanova, @cocosfern, @sojournmichael, @avesatanormalpeoplescareme, @divinelangdon, @maso-xchrist, @space-princesssss, @lxngdonscoven, @ahslangdon101, @isabellaserpentiawesson, @stupidocupido, @bademliimagnum, @pastelstozier, @nana15774, @langdonswhoreprobably, @urlocalgothb, @hexqueensupreme, @gold-dragon-slayer, @pr1ncessd1e (idk why some of the tags aren’t working, i’m sorry!!)

The car ride back from Applebee’s was a silent one.

After your father and Miriam had departed, heading off to continue their date at a local bar, you’d retreated to Michael’s car without another word. Throughout the car ride, he continued to throw sidelong glances at you, mouth quirking up at the corners at the way you scowled, arms crossed protectively over your chest. You could tell it was taking everything in him not to say something stupid.

Mentally, you scolded yourself for expecting anything more from a boy like Michael Langdon. You could hardly even feel sorry for yourself; this was your fault for being so naive.

You couldn’t help it, though. There was something inside you that made it impossible to hate Michael like you knew you should, something that compelled you to give him his way, even when you knew he didn’t deserve it. For christ’s sake, you’d even allowed him to finger you under the table while your parents were sitting right there!

What the hell was wrong with you?

You’d been asking yourself that question nonstop ever since things had gotten complicated between the two of you. At one point in your life, you’d had a good head on your shoulders. Now, thanks to Michael, you were nothing more than a mess of poor decisions and teen angst.

Michael pulled into the driveway and you got out of the car, slamming the door with an unintentionally large amount of force.

“Hey, don’t slam the door,” said Michael as he stepped out, and you scoffed.

“I’ll slam the door all I fucking want,” you shot back, storming up the porch steps and tapping your foot impatiently as you waited for Michael to catch up with you and unlock the door.

“Jeez, what’s your problem?” he said, heading onto the porch once he’d locked the car. You felt a surge of anger bubble up from your stomach, and you swallowed the compulsion to start screaming at him right there in public.

Instead you shut your eyes and let out a shaky sigh, digging your fingernails into your palms hard enough to draw blood.

He opened the door and you pushed past him to go inside, grateful to no longer worry about the prospect of being labeled a crazy bitch by some eavesdropping spectator. You were alone with Michael now, and you were free to do as you pleased.

Michael shut the door behind him, but you were quick to block the stairway, cocking your head to one side and planting your hands on your hips. You hadn’t even realized how upset you were until right now; your body was trembling, and your throat narrowed slightly as angry tears stung your eyes. “You wanna know what my problem is?”

Michael gave you a puzzled look, clearly caught off guard by this. And of course he was caught off guard- you were sure that in his mind, he’d done absolutely nothing wrong.

You decided not to wait any longer for him to respond. “My problem, Michael, is that you keep making me believe that you’re going to change, but you never do. You claim that you like me, that you want to spend time with me, that I’m so different from all the other girls you’ve fucked, but you’ve done nothing but treat me like shit. And then when I get upset about it, you act like you don’t even know what I’m fucking talking about.”

You’d let it all out in one breath, and by the time you were finished, you were winded. There was a pregnant pause as Michael gathered his bearings, and you stared at him expectantly.

“Look, (y/n), I don’t know what you want from me. I was high when I said those things. Sure, you’re fun and everything, but-“ he rubbed the back of his neck, eyes darting away from yours to look at the floor.

“-But what? So you were just making it all up? You just asked me on a date for- for what, Michael? Shits and giggles? So you could shove your fingers inside me in public? What, did you just ask me out because you were bored or some shit? Help me understand, Michael.”

Whatever you do, do NOT fucking cry, you told yourself. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t fucking cry.

You took in a shaky breath, averting your gaze up to the ceiling. You knew if you looked at Michael for too long, at those beautiful blue eyes that you’d found yourself getting lost in too many times to count, you wouldn’t be able to hold back the tears anymore.

To your dismay, you heard him chuckle. “You didn’t really seem to mind me shoving my fingers inside you when it was happening.”

There he went again, taking absolutely nothing seriously and intentionally ignoring your main point. You groaned in frustration, looking back to Michael, who’d taken to leaning up against the front door.

“That isn’t the fucking point, asshole,” you snapped. “The point is that you keep fucking with my head and I can’t take it anymore.”

Michael blinked. Would you ever be able to get anything through his head? Was it even worth the effort?

“If you wanted to get swept off your feet like every other fucking teenage girl, you came to the wrong person,” he said. “But I thought you were smarter than expecting that shit from me.”

You narrowed your eyes, pulse quickening as something like rage began to build up in your throat. How dare he try to frame you as some sort of stupid, desperate girl, pining for romance from an uncaring boy? How dare he try to make you feel crazy?

“Really, Michael? That’s the game you’re gonna play? You’re the one who asked me out on a date. You’re the one who said all that stupid lovey-dovey shit to me.” You’d drawn in closer to him now, your mind clouded and dizzy, senses numbed. He didn’t move, looking down at you with raised eyebrows, infuriatingly calm as always. “But of course you’re pinning it all on me. Because you’re perfect little Michael Langdon who never takes any responsibility for his actions.”

He smirked, and you nearly lost your cool right then.

“I’m so sick of your selfish, egotistical bullshit. I wish my dad never met Miriam. You’re the worst thing to ever fucking happen to me. I hate you, Michael. Don’t come near me ever again.”

In that moment, every word out of your mouth was pure, unyielding fact. You did wish that your father hadn’t ever met Miriam, and Michael was the worst thing to ever happen to you. So how come you felt almost guilty saying such things out loud?

“Oh, believe me. I’ll have no problem staying away from you. You’re the one who always ends up crawling back.” He leaned in, face mere inches away from yours, and you could smell that god forsaken cinnamon gum on his breath. “‘Cause let’s face it, (y/n). You just can’t resist being split on my cock.”

For a moment, you only stared at him. And then, without thinking, you slapped him across the face with as much force as you could muster.

You both stood there in stunned silence for a moment, and it was only when he lifted his hand to wrap firmly around your wrist that you realized how much of a mistake you’d made. His eyes were dark, lips no longer curved mischievously upwards; he looked utterly unpredictable, which was what frightened you the most.

“So that’s how you wanna do this, huh?” His voice was low, face still dangerously close to yours. Your breath hitched as you anticipated his next move, lips curling nervously into your mouth.

“Michael, I-“

He whirled you around before you could finish, pushing you up against the front door and trapping you there with his chest. You whimpered as his hand made its way up your inner thigh and ghosted over your clothed core, your hips bucking forward inadvertently as he did so.

You really fucking hated yourself right now.

“You hate me, huh?” His silky waves tickled your cheek as he moved his head to whisper in your ear, dragging his fingertips along the length of your lace-covered slit.

“Yeah, I do fucking hate you.”

You were hit with a sudden intoxicating mixture of lust and fury, and hungrily, impulsively, you pulled his head back by his hair and kissed him.

His teeth clashed noisily against yours as your lips moved together, his tongue wasting no time before entering your mouth and roughly kneading against yours. Between your parted thighs, he continued rubbing your pussy, already dripping from his touch, and you whined against his mouth; when you felt him laugh, you bit his lower lip, hard, hoping that you’d jolt him with the unexpected pain.

“If you hate me that much, why are you so wet?” he breathed before pressing his lips back against yours, swiftly moving aside the thin fabric of your panties to slip a finger inside you. You moaned, loud and unadulterated, grasping at the front of Michael’s shirt as he began thrusting into you, hard and fast.

“Just because I like fucking you doesn’t mean I can’t- fuck- think you’re a narcissistic, entitled piece of sh-shit!”

He sank a second finger inside, fucking you with such intensity that you weren’t sure you’d be able to walk right tomorrow, your head falling back to rest against the door. “Huh. Then it’s pretty pathetic of you to let someone you think is an entitled narcissist finger fuck you against the wall, don’t you think?”

“J-just shut the fuck up, Michael.” You reached down between his legs, palming at the massive protrusion in the front of his jeans before working down the zipper, eager to get this shit over with.

“I have half a mind to put you on your knees and shut you up, you little bitch,” he spat; he sounded so genuine that it startled you.

“You try that shit and I’ll bite your fucking dick off.” Truthfully, you wouldn’t exactly mind having his cock in your mouth (when did you ever?) but you certainly didn’t think he deserved it after tonight.

He slammed his fingers inside you again so deep that you saw stars, your jaw unhinging as he continued to work you open, your shaking hands making quick work of freeing his cock from its confines. Once you pulled it out, you ran your thumb over the leaking slit, spreading the bead of precum across his flushed head.

“I’m gonna fucking wreck your little cunt,” he mumbled, breath hot on your neck, removing his fingers from your heat and wiping your wetness across your inner thighs. Lifting your skirt up further, he yanked your panties down to your knees before moving his hand up to wrap around your neck; you took the momentary lapse to align the head of his cock with your slick entrance.

“Yeah? I’d love to see you try. None of that pussy shit you usually give me,” you retorted breathlessly. Of course, you weren’t being honest; oftentimes, you could still feel him for days after he fucked you. You were speaking out of anger, though, intentionally riling him up.

At this, his grip tightened on your throat, and he pushed inside you, all the way to the hilt, without warning.

“Oh fuck,” you cried out, your moans growing louder and more frantic as he quickened his pace, the door nearly rattling in its hinges as he railed you against it.

“Is this enough for you, bitch? Or is this still too pussy for you?” His hips slammed against yours hard enough to bruise, causing tears to spring to your eyes, but you refused to let him win.

“Y-you’re pra-practically putting me to- oh fuck- sleep.”

You doubted he believed you, what with all the noise you were making and the way you could hardly keep yourself together, but Michael Langdon was never one to turn down a challenge.

“Oh yeah? I’m putting you to sleep?” He grabbed your leg and pulled it up so you could hook it around his waist, letting his cock make sharp contact with your cervix as he slammed into you even harder and deeper than before; you snaked your arms around his hips to dig your nails into the sensitive skin of his ass, intending to leave half-moon imprints there, marking him like he’d marked you so many times before.

“You falling asleep now? Huh? Is this enough for you, you greedy fucking slut?”

He actually sounded pissed.

Good.

As much as you wanted to come back with a biting response, you couldn’t; the wind was knocked out of you with each ruthless thrust of his cock into your heat, and you gasped for air as your eyes rolled back into your head.

“Oh my god, oh fuck-“

His torso, still covered by the black t-shirt he hadn’t bothered to take off, made friction against your clit as he moved his body in time with yours, the sensation bringing you dangerously close to the edge. The gravelly whines leaving your throat were so weak that you were sure only Michael could hear them, his own animalistic groans prominent in your ear.

You could kill him right now, you really could. You despised him, despised every last beautiful fiber of his being, despised the way that he’d broken you down and made you so goddamn weak.

Worst of all, you despised the fact that even now, as hatred and hurt and anger coursed like hot adrenaline through your veins, there was still a tiny part of you that cared about him, more than you’d ever cared for anyone else in your life.

Right now, though, all you could focus on was the mind-blowing ecstasy taking over your body, blending seamlessly with the pain of his brutal thrusting.

Pressing his chest flush against yours, he began impaling you with sharp upwards motions, his cock reaching the deepest parts of you that your own fingers never could. Your jaw unhinged as his firm stomach rubbed ruthlessly against your clit, almost to the point where it was too much, and with a sort of vengeance you craned your neck forward and sank your teeth into his shoulder.

“Fuck- I’m-“ you choked out, just as the coil in your stomach abruptly snapped. You came, perhaps harder than you’d ever cum before, swollen lips parted wide despite no noise coming out. You fell forward limply, laying your cheek against the sweat-soaked fabric covering his shoulder, barely breathing as he continued fucking into you with little mercy.

The pads of his fingers clutched your throat with added pressure and you felt his cock twitch; with a grunt, he came, spilling his hot, sticky load deep inside.

“It must feel pathetic knowing that the one person who can make you cum the hardest is the one person you hate the most,” he said as he pulled out, stepping back to see the way his cum dribbled crudely down your inner thighs.

He dipped his fingertips into the cum, smearing it around to the front of your leg, lips twitching mockingly as he further defiled you. Pussy aching as you fought to catch your breath, you watched him with sunken, empty eyes.

“Just so we’re clear,” he sneered, lifting his unforgiving eyes to meet yours. “This is all you ever meant to me.”

His words felt like a punch to your gut, but there was no way you could let him see the way they’d affected you. You bent down to pick up your underwear before pushing Michael to the side, walking around his towering frame to start up the stairs. Then, as if his words were a mere afterthought to you, you paused mid-step, turning over your shoulder in a manner that you hoped seemed nonchalant.

“Good. I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

ii.

It was the first time you and Michael had managed to avoid each other for an extended period of time, and although you missed the feel of his hot lips on your skin, missed his low voice in your ear as he whispered vulgar words that made you blush, missed his large, calloused hands wandering over your body like it was his very own territory to explore and conquer, you certainly didn’t miss all the other baggage that came with it.

During the obligatory family dinners, you and Michael would pretend that nothing had changed between the two of you, but the shift was impossible to ignore. Michael had ceased his usual playful teasing as he sat across from you, and his preferred means of communicating with you, if he absolutely had to, became grunting at varying octaves.

Your parents had definitely noticed, their concerned expressions far from discreet, but they were wise enough not to mention it to either of you.

You supposed things were better off this way. It was unrealistic to go through life fucking around (and going out on shitty Applebee’s dates) with your stepbrother. There was no way that it could have ever worked out anyway.

It’s better off this way, you’d think to yourself, sitting in your bedroom and staring the ceiling as you’d listen, against your better judgment, to Michael giggling with random girls across the hall.

It never would’ve worked, you’d reminded yourself sternly as you returned Michael’s sweet-smelling sweatshirts to his bedroom when he was out one night.

It never meant anything anyway, you’d tell yourself, headphones flooding with the psychedelic chords of Pink Floyd, molars working at a wad of cinnamon gum. I was nothing to him. He said it himself.

But Michael Langdon said a lot of things.

You tried your best to move on with your Michael-less life, and soon enough, as surprising as it was to you, you wound up finding yourself a boyfriend- a cute jock who sat behind you in your math class. The best part was that he wasn’t friends with Michael, despite his modest popularity; Michael had always been vocal about his hatred towards jocks (Fucking circle-jerking dickheads, he’d call them), and so he’d never bothered to associate with his crowd.

Michael had been less than welcoming to him the first night you’d brought him home to meet your family, shooting him an unfriendly, thin-lipped smile from across the dinner table.

“So you play football?” Miriam had asked conversationally over a forkful of baked potato.

“Yep! Receiver,” he said. You nodded encouragingly, even though you had no idea what that meant.

“So you like playing with balls?” said Michael suddenly, eyes widened as a cruel smirk stretched across his lips.

Your father nearly choked on his water.

“Michael,” you hissed. Your boyfriend let out a nervous laugh, clearing his throat as he lifted his glass of water to his mouth. Michael blinked at you innocently, moving his food around on his plate with his fork as he leaned forward to rest his elbow on the table.

This was probably the most eye contact you’d had with him all month.

Later that night, after your boyfriend left, Michael made an appearance in your doorway for the first time since his awkward post-party apology. You couldn’t believe how long ago it all felt, even though it’d only been a couple of months. Things were just so different now.

“Hey, (y/n),” he said with a bit too much nonchalance for somebody who’d been ignoring your existence up until that very moment.

“Um… hey?”

“Congrats on getting a boyfriend and everything. Didn’t think I’d ever see the day,” he mused, leaning his broad shoulder against the doorway and jutting out his hip. Now that you were in a relationship, it was imperative that you didn’t check out other guys (especially when ‘other guys’ referred to your stepbrother), so you tried your hardest not to look anywhere but Michael’s glinting blue eyes.

You cocked an eyebrow. “So… you’re here to make fun of me? Is that it?”

“No. I’m actually being serious. I mean, the dude’s a fucking dork, but if my little sis is happy, I’m happy.” He shrugged casually, flashing his teeth in a cool half-smile.

What the fuck was going on right now? What were you even supposed to say to that?

“Okay?” you said undecidedly after a brief pause.

He cleared his throat, and you could tell there was something else he wanted to say lingering at the back of his tongue. Maybe he hadn’t come here merely to poke fun at you, after all.

“So. Um…why are you here?” You leaned forward, drumming your fingers on your bent knees, the bedsprings squeaking beneath you as you shifted.

“Well, I just thought- I mean, I don’t know,” he said, his tone no longer mocking, but rather low and earnest. “I just want you to know that you deserve a lot better than me. So I just hope this guy makes you happy, even though he’s a circle-jerking jock.”

You blinked, waiting for the punchline, before you realized that there was none. He was being serious. He was being fucking serious.

As much as you knew that Michael had a track record of saying nice things before immediately reverting back to his asshole tendencies, the sentiment made your heart swell.

Michael was looking at the floor now, chewing the inside of his cheek anxiously, his body fidgeting slightly as he awaited your response. Part of you wanted to tell him to fuck off and leave you alone, knowing that this probably all was bullshit, that there was no way he really meant any of this. Michael had made it pretty fucking clear that he’d never given a shit about you, and that he never would.

Hadn’t he?

The other part of you- the naive, stupid, foolish part that always managed to ignore all logic- said otherwise. Somewhere, deep down inside, you were still hanging onto the feeble thread of hope that maybe he really did care about you, and that maybe he always had.

Maybe, in some twisted way, he’d been trying, by treating you poorly, to protect himself.

You looked at your hands. It was probably all just wishful thinking.

“Thanks, Michael. I appreciate it,” you said, attempting to keep your voice as steady as possible.

You were hit with a sudden wave of melancholy, and all at once you wanted nothing more than to fall into Michael’s arms, feel yourself get swallowed up in his warmth. God, if only things had been different. If only he’d been different.

“I don’t really expect you to believe me or anything, but I thought I should tell you anyway.” He met your gaze, an unreadable expression fixed on his perfect face, and as much as you wanted to, you couldn’t look away. “Anyway… g’night, (y/n).”

You took in a shuddery breath.

“Good night, Michael.”

iii.

It only took a couple more weeks to find out that your boyfriend had been cheating on you for the entirety of your short-lived relationship, and it was safe to say that you were not pleased.

You felt completely humiliated; at least with Michael, he’d never made any attempt to disguise his fuckboy ways. Your (now ex) boyfriend, though, had gone out of his way to make you believe that he was a nice guy.

And stupidly, you’d allowed him to fool you.

The relationship hadn’t been anything special, but you’d gotten along fine, and you’d liked him enough. Maybe that’d been the problem in the first place: sure, you liked him, in noncommittal half-shrug sort of way, but there hadn’t been any intensity there, no passion.

It’d come to the surface early on that neither of you had much in common, either, and he wasn’t exactly the most interesting person to talk to. Still, you’d stayed, thinking that maybe this was just what all high school relationships were like, and that at least he wasn’t as much of an asshole as Michael.

Well, at least Michael hadn’t lied to your face, making empty commitments before fucking some other girl’s brains out behind your back.

It wasn’t even the relationship you were mourning the loss of; it was your dignity.

You recalled all the times he’d roll off of you after a ten-minute-long session of halfhearted missionary sex, turning onto his side to check his phone with his back to you. Had he been texting other girls then? While you laid there naked and unsatisfied, but loyal, withholding yourself from other boys because you’d been under the impression that the two of you were exclusive?

You felt pathetic, you felt stupid, you felt used. You supposed that maybe you should’ve felt the same way with Michael, but somehow, in your mind, the situations just didn’t compare.

And god, you didn’t even want to think about Michael. He’d never let you hear the end of this, you were sure.

After the peculiar encounter with him weeks earlier, things had become quite amicable between the two of you: there was undoubtedly a great deal of tension there, but it was obvious that Michael was putting in an effort to be nice, or at least civil to you.

Still, he had his moments. He was not very good at hiding his distaste for your boyfriend, cracking the occasional joke (usually football-related: your boyfriend really likes being tackled by other men, huh? was one of his favorites) whenever his name was brought up.

That hadn’t really bothered you much, though. You were just glad that things weren’t quite as bad as they had been before, and it wasn’t long before your anger from the night of the Applebee’s date had begun to fade away.

You knew damn well, though, that he was going to be delighted at the news that you’d broken up; you could already hear his inevitable mocking ringing in the back of your mind.

And perhaps you deserved to be mocked. Sometimes you were astounded by your own foolishness and naivety.

You’d be okay- this was a part of life, a growing experience. But goddamn did it suck, being fucked over; you were damn near close to swearing off all men for good.

Well, maybe not all men…you found yourself thinking, as images of a certain blue-eyed fuckboy danced in your vision.

NO. Shut up, (y/n), you absolute fucking idiot, was your following thought.

Jesus fucking Christ- you’d said it a hundred million times before, and you’d say it again: what the fuck was wrong with you?

You were starting to think you’d never learn.

iv.

“Hey, dickhead!”

The unexpected shout startled your lunch table, sending everyone’s attention to the source of the noise across the cafeteria. It had been precisely forty-eight hours since your breakup, and you were already starting to feel somewhat better about it.

You craned your neck as commotion began to stir somewhere in the enormous fluorescent-lit room, curious to see what exactly was going on; when you saw who had spoken, however, your heart almost stopped dead in your chest.

“Isn’t that your brother, (y/n)?” said one of your friends without looking over to you.

And indeed it was; a small crowd had formed around him as he approached your ex-boyfriend, who was holding a lunch tray in front of him, face laced with confusion and slight fear. Michael’s stance was imposing, jaw clenched and hands balled into fists, and you could tell that things were not about to turn out well for your ex.

Holy fucking shit.

“And isn’t that-“ said another one of your friends, clearly invested with the scene that was currently unfolding. Just from a quick glance around the room, it was evident that the rest of the crowded cafeteria was pretty interested, too.

“Oh my god…” you muttered, lifting your hand to your mouth in disbelief.

You hadn’t expected this from Michael. When you’d finally, reluctantly, broken the news to him about your breakup, he’d almost seemed unaffected, offering you a weak-at-best consolation consisting of an awkward pat on your back.

Apparently, he wasn’t as apathetic to the situation as he’d let on.

“You think you can fuck with my little sister?” Michael demanded, lunging forward to grip onto the front of your ex’s shirt. The entire room had gone mostly silent at this point, amplifying Michael’s voice, and you felt your face grow warm with embarrassment.

On one hand, you knew the appropriate response was to jump to your feet and insert yourself between them, insisting that violence wouldn’t solve anything- that’s what would happen if this was a teen movie, at least.

On the other hand, though… the thought of Michael pummeling your scumbag ex in front of the whole school wasn’t exactly a bad one.

“W-what are you talking about, man?” stuttered your ex-boyfriend, his face going bright red as Michael leaned in to get up in his face. Michael had several inches on the boy, and he looked absolutely, dangerously livid, so you couldn’t blame him for being intimidated.

“You know what the fuck I’m talking about, dipshit.” Michael pulled forcibly at the fabric in his fist, jerking the shorter boy upwards and almost causing him to drop his tray.

“Woah, woah, take it easy, man-“

“-Shut the fuck up.” He let go of the boy’s shirt, dropping his hands so they were positioned under his tray. Then, without warning, he thrust the tray upwards, coating the front of your ex’s shirt in school-lunch spaghetti and steaming hot soup. There was an eruption of laughter from a group of boys you recognized as Michael’s friends, and he smirked.

“You ever come near her again and I’ll make your life a living hell, you understand me?”

Holy fuck, was Michael scary when he wanted to be. Your ex was practically trembling, his shirt ruined. “Y-yes, I understand you.”

“Good. Now get the fuck out of my face.” He gave your ex-boyfriend a hard shove for good measure, sending him stumbling backwards, before returning to his friends and walking off as if nothing had happened.

Once your friends were sure that the show was over, they turned back to you. “Oh my god. You didn’t tell us he was the protective type,” said one.

“I didn’t think he was,” you said softly, still dumbfounded by what you’d just witnessed.

“That was like…kind of hot,” another one of your friends said, to which the group nodded in unanimous agreement. “Has anyone ever told you that your brother is, like, really hot?”

“Step brother,” you corrected.

It was a little past 8:30 that night when you made your way across the hall to Michael’s room, preparing to thank him for doing what he’d done earlier in the day. It was only appropriate, you thought.

You had no idea why he’d done it, but then again, when did you ever know why Michael did the things he did? By now, you’d simply have to accept that Michael Langdon was one big walking mystery, and that you’d never truly understand him.

Knocking on the door timidly, you waited for the faint come in before you went in, your eyes instantly bombarded by the ever-changing colors of his lamp. Michael sat at his desk, laptop opened in front of him as he sat fixated on some computer game (you assumed it was fortnite, though you honestly couldn’t tell the difference between any of the games he played), enormous headphones pulled over his ears. He didn’t turn as you approached, your eyes darting throughout the room as you considered what you were going to say.

“Hey, Michael,” you said shyly. Why the hell were you so nervous?

He still didn’t move, eyes locked on the bright screen of his laptop, fingers jabbing erratically at his keyboard. “What’s up?”

“Could you, like, pause that or whatever? Just for a second?” you said, tone pitching in annoyance at his lack of interest. You’d come close enough that you could see the side of his face, illuminated by his game, and he rolled his eyes.

“You can’t just pause a fortnite game, (y/n),” he said irritably, as if this were the most well-known fact in the world. “But I just died anyway, so. Go ahead.”

He pulled his headphones down so they could rest around his neck, twisting around in his seat to look at you. He looked unbelievably handsome right now, even in the dim light, and you couldn’t help but take a moment to admire him.

“You know, uh, you didn’t have to do all that today,” you started, rocking back onto your heels. “But thank you.”

Your words were met with a blank stare. “Do what?”

Oh, for the love of god. He couldn’t be serious, could he?

“Like, confront my ex and everything. I mean, I really couldn’t believe it. But I thought it was really sweet of you.”

His expression hardly shifted, but you noticed his lips curling up ever-so-slightly at one corner. “Oh, that? I mean, it wasn’t really a big deal or anything. He sort of had it coming anyway. Fuckin’ circle-jerker.”

You laughed. That response was so typically Michael, and you loved it.

“I’ve really been feeling like shit about the breakup, and that honestly made me feel a lot better.”

“Aw, c’mon. Don’t sit around feeling bad about that dork,” said Michael with a grin. You saw something in his eyes sparkle, and then he was leaning forward, a familiar, mischievous look crossing his face.

Oh, how you’d missed that look.

“You wanna c’mere and talk about it with your big bro?” he said, patting his knees. You bit your lip, unsure of what exactly he was planning, but more than eager to find out. You came closer, watching him push his desk chair a few inches back so there was more room for you, and slowly, you settled yourself down on his lap.

The instant you made contact with his warm body, you were flooded with arousal, which was only intensified when he positioned his veined hands on your hips. He pulled you back so your ass was directly on top of his crotch, spine up against his firm chest, and you shivered at the feeling of his erection pressing into you through his sweatpants.

“Mm,” he hummed, wrapping his strong arms around your torso, loose waves softly caressing your neck when he settled his chin on your shoulder. “My baby sis is so pretty.”

He pressed his lips against your neck, fingertips trailing up your inner thighs, bare under the skirt you wore. You whimpered softly when he reached your clothed cunt, rubbing soft circles over your clit as he continued to plant kisses up and down the side of your neck.

“Let me help you forget allll about him,” he breathed, and you could smell the cigarettes and cinnamon gum on his breath, just like always. You rolled your hips back against his cock, one of his large hands lifting to grope your breast through your shirt. “I bet he didn’t touch you like I do.”

“H-he didn’t,” you murmured, eyes fluttering blissfully as his large hands wandered aimlessly over your body, claiming you. You jumped slightly when he administered a particularly hard squeeze to your breast, making him chuckle lowly against your skin.

“Take these off,” he said, pulling the waistband of your underwear back and letting it snap against your pelvis.

You raised your eyebrows but complied, standing momentarily so you could work your panties down your legs and kick them haphazardly to the side.

As you did this, Michael reached down to pull his hard cock from his sweatpants, applying a few strokes to the thick length as he waited for you to return. Your mouth watered at the sight of him; you’d almost forgotten how big he was, and after consistently fucking a boy who was significantly smaller for the past few months, you feared that being penetrated by Michael again would be painful.

“You miss this, baby?” asked Michael, rubbing his thumb over his leaking slit. You nodded quickly, hurrying back over to Michael’s lap. He took hold of his headphones, and you furrowed your brows inquisitively as he secured them back over his ears.

“What are you-“

“-Shhh, baby. Just c’mere.” Taking your wrist, he guided you back into your previous position, and you parted your thighs to straddle his lap. Grabbing onto your hips lightly, he eased you back so that the head of his cock nestled just barely against your slick opening, your heart rate increasing at the sensation. “Just want you to sit here with me while I play my game. Do you think you can do that for me, hm?”

In that moment, you probably would’ve agreed to do anything for him.

Michael pulled you down, impaling you slowly with his thick length, your mouth falling open as you felt his cock stretching out your tight walls. A throaty moan spilled from your throat as he glided deeper into your wet heat, continuing until he was seated all the way inside; you wiggled in slight discomfort, but you were calmed down when Michael placed his chin on your shoulder.

“It’s okay, baby. I know you haven’t been stretched like this in a while. But I’ll take care of you, I promise,” he cooed into your ear, his disposition so much more tender than you were used to. He kissed your neck again, scooting the chair closer to the computer screen, in turn stirring you and making you whine.

“Just stay still, okay, baby? Can you do that for me?”

“M-mhm,” you rasped, your chest rising and falling as you tried to get yourself situated.

“Good girl.”

Your cunt clenched instinctively at this praise, earning a barely-audible hiss from Michael; he reached around your body to get to his keyboard, starting a new game and subtly rocking his hips from side to side in anticipation as he waited for it to load. At this, your hand flew to your mouth to stifle your gasp.

Shutting your eyes, you focused on doing as Michael had instructed. It wasn’t easy, your cunt spasming around his thick length, clit throbbing, desperate for relief that he wasn’t yet granting you.

Of course he knew exactly what he was doing. Even as he played his game, tongue poking out from the corner of his plump lips in concentration, you could hear low growls from the back of his throat, just from the feeling of your tight walls wrapped snugly around him.

To Michael, it was too easy to simply give you what you wanted, even when he wanted it just as much as you did. He lived to see you desperate, to see you willing to be entirely at his mercy.

He leaned forward, his chest warm against your back, blond curls caressing your cheek. He chewed on his lower lip, the game reflecting in his shining eyes, so entranced that it almost seemed like he’d forgotten about you altogether.

“Fuck,” he exclaimed as a pixelated character began shooting at him, his hips jerking upwards as his fingers worked tirelessly at his keyboard, “fucking asshole.”

You whimpered, biting the inside of your cheek to silence yourself, but Michael had already noticed; instead of scolding you, like you’d half expected, he kissed your neck softly, eyes never leaving his screen. “Shh, shh. It’s okay.”

Your muscles relaxed almost embarrassingly quickly at the soothing sound of Michael’s voice, eyes falling closed as he placed another open-mouthed kiss right by your jugular.

“Such a good girl. So obedient for me. You’ll do anything to make your big brother happy, hm?”

The almost condescending nature of his words aroused you far more than you cared to admit, and you squirmed again, aching for something- anything more.

“Hm?” he repeated, pushing his hips up under you with enough force to make you squeal.

“Y-yes, Michael,” you whispered, wrapping your fingers around Michael’s forearm, which was extended to his laptop. This was getting to be too much. “Please.”

“I know, baby. Just hang on a little longer. I know it’s a lot. Just stay still and try to keep quiet for me, ‘kay? You’re doing so good.” His voice was deep and intoxicatingly sweet, vibrating against your skin from his close proximity.

You bobbed your head up and down, sure that at this point you must be leaking all over Michael’s cock, but he didn’t seem to care. His chin still on your shoulder, the fresh scent of his shampoo invading your senses, he continued to play his game with squinted eyes; you sighed, wishing that some other player would just come and kill him already so he could revert his attention back to you.

This kept on for several minutes, your desperation increasing until it was almost unbearable, tears stinging the backs of your eyes with each small movement of Michael’s body.

God, his cock was so deep inside you, filling you up completely; there wasn’t even an inch of space between the two of you, and yet still you wanted more, wanted him to consume you. You were going insane right now, unable to think of anything but how badly you needed to be pounded, fucked into a state of mindless bliss, and it was all thanks to the gorgeous blond-haired boy beneath you.

Fucking dick, you thought affectionately, rolling your hips back with a lengthy moan.

“Stop moving,” he warned, tilting his head to tug at your earlobe with his teeth.

“Please, Mikey…”

He scoffed at the nickname, but you could tell he was slowly losing his control, his own lust starting to sway him. You inhaled sharply, the muscles of your core contracting to squeeze even tighter around Michael’s length; from the corner of your eye, you saw his jaw clench. Ever-so-slightly, you lifted up your hips, before sliding all the way back down with ease.

“Did I not just tell you to stay still?” he demanded hoarsely. He was losing his patience now, along with his self-control, and you couldn’t help but smirk.

“I didn’t move,” you said.

“Yes, you fucking did,” he said through grit teeth, abandoning his previous, kinder attitude. This was more of the Michael you were used to, but you’d be lying if you said you hadn’t enjoyed his praise from earlier.

“I’m sorry, Mikey. I just can’t resist getting split on your cock.”

Where this had come from, you had no idea; you’d simply been trying to provoke him, catch his attention. And, from the way he turned his head sharply to look at you, mouth pulled taut into a thin line, you could see that referencing his words from months earlier had done the job.

It was obvious, then, that he no longer gave a shit about his game.

Lunging forward, his cock still buried inside you, he slammed his laptop shut before jerking you to your feet, pulling himself from you in the process. He pushed you forward, bending you over his desk with such aggression that several objects were knocked over with a loud clatter, and excitedly you propped yourself up on your elbows.

Holding up your skirt with one hand, he lined the head of his cock up with your dripping entrance with haste; mewling softly, you bucked your hips impatiently towards him, eager to finally, finally get what you’d been craving.

“Fucking brat,” he mumbled, pushing into your heat until his balls slapped against your thighs. “I bet this was all you could think about every time you let him put his dick inside you.”

He pulled his hips back before forcefully slamming back into your wet cunt, fingers clutching your hips with a bruising, vice-like hold. He decided upon an intense, ruthless rhythm to fuck you with, the vulgar sound of slapping skin obscured only by your broken cries.

“Oh god— fuck—please…more.”

Your arousal was dripping down your inner thighs, so abundant that Michael was able to pound in and out of you with stunning ease, your stomach cutting into the blunt edge of the desk with each thrust.

“Always take my cock so fucking well,” he grunted, fucking you for all he was worth, hips sloppily snapping back and forth as he worked your pussy open. You weren’t going to last long- he’d already gotten you worked up, and now you were merely chasing your release; by the gruff, fucked-out noises passing Michael’s spit-glossed lips, it was clear that he wasn’t going to last long, either. “God, I fucking missed you.”

Had you not been halfway to an orgasm, you probably would’ve perked up at his words; he’d missed you? Michael Langdon was admitting that he’d missed you?

The words had come out all at once, like he’d blurted them without thought in the midst of his mind-numbing pleasure; you were sure he was kicking himself for having allowed himself to say something so vulnerable to you, but it was too late- he couldn’t swallow his words back up, as much as you were sure he wanted to.

You smiled a heavy-lidded, lust-drunk smile. Michael Langdon had missed you.

Hooking his arm underneath you, he began forming tight circles over your swollen bud with his fingertips, and within seconds you were nearing your climax. Only Michael could touch you like this, make you euphoric like this. Only Michael could make you give yourself over, body and mind and soul, over and over again until the end of time.

“Oh fuck, Michael, please—“ you panted, and his fingers sped up against your clit, forming shapes over the bundle of nerves until your legs grew weak.

He gave one final thrust into your heat, slamming against your cervix and making contact with your sensitive inner walls, and then you were cumming, hard, his thick load spilling inside you at the same time, making you his.

His. You were his.

“Did you really miss me, Michael?” you asked between ragged breaths, voice small, not worrying whether or not you sounded needy or pathetic.

He leaned down, his upper body flat against your back, brushing your (h/c) hair away from your shoulder and pressing his lips against your jaw. “Yeah. I really did.”

“Good, because I missed you too,” you said, giggling weakly. He turned you around, allowing you to partially lie back on his desk as he met his bitten-red lips with yours, the salt of his sweat ripe on your tastebuds. The kiss was short-lived, but passionate, and you found yourself pouting when he pulled away, a silvery string of saliva stretching crudely between your flushed faces.

You swore you could see stars in his eyes as he surveyed your face, twinkling brightly in the pink lighting of his bedroom.

“I’m never gonna let you slip away from me again,” he said. “I promise.”

#michael langdon #michael langdon fanfic #michael langdon x reader #michael langdon imagine #michael langdon smut #american horror story #ahs apocalypse #apocalypse #cody fern #duncan shepherd #mine #ahs smut #ahs fanfic #ahs imagines

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myemergence · 4 years

Text

Lean on Me

Summary: After they don’t get the results that they hoped for with radiation, Michael starts to consider brain surgery to treat his cancer. The aftermath leaves May struggling, afraid to lose her dad. Buck is worried, determined to make May see that she’s not alone.

Or, the one where Buck is a big brother to May.

Author’s note: I was scrolling through tumblr the other day and saw this gifset of Bobby/Buck after Bobby’s scare in 3a, and then Michael/May in 3b - it inspired me to write this. I hope you enjoy it.

BIG thanks to Nicole for the beta!

Check me out on AO3

“Hey, Chim, do you mind if I take home some of this birthday cake for Harry and May?” Bobby asks. He closes the lid to the box that contains the rest of Chimney’s cake from the crew’s small birthday celebration at the firehouse.

“Sure,” Chim says unenthusiastically, pushing the cake around with his fork in disinterest, “knock yourself out.”

“How are they doing?” Buck looks up from his plate, his gaze settles on Bobby, a look of concern softening his features. “How’s Michael?”

“Uh,” Bobby hesitates, “he’s upbeat, he’s fighting. Radiation was supposed to be his best shot, now we’re all grappling with putting our hopes on his next best shot, surgery.”

“How are the kids handling it?” Eddie asks from where he sits beside Chimney at the table, turning his attention to their captain.

“I think Harry’s doing okay, it’s May I’m worried about. She’s got a better understanding of what’s going on,” Bobby explains.

“She’s the oldest sibling,” Chim interjects, “older siblings don’t get to be blissfully ignorant, they have to be the realists.” They continue to talk as they clear the rest of the mess, and Hen joins everyone at the table.

Buck purses his lips, and he hesitates briefly. In every way that matters, the one-eighteen has become his family over the last few years. Aside from his family at the firehouse, Maddie is all he has. So the blood that courses through his veins is one-eighteen strong. That also means that his concern for the youngest members of the one-eighteen family runs deep. “Is there anything we can do? I mean if there is anything you can think of that might help, just name it.”

“Thanks, Buck, I appreciate that- I just don’t even know what is the best thing for them right now. If I think of anything, I’ll let you know.”

Buck pauses, then nods his head. “Sounds good, Cap.”

Buck thinks about how he can help the Grant children from the moment the conversation shifts to Karen and Hen fostering. He tries to think of some elaborate way to let May know she’s not alone, that he’s been there. That’s how Buck finds himself standing outside of Bobby and Athena’s home, knocking on their door a few days later.

Bobby pulls open the front door, a look of surprise on his face when he sees Buck. “Hey, Bobby, sorry to drop over unannounced.”

Bobby shakes his head, “Come in.” Buck steps into the house, and Bobby closes the door behind him.

“So, you’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

“The thought did cross my mind,” Bobby says with a light laugh. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, I’m good,” Buck glances around, sees May sitting at the dining room table and, despite the fact that she has earbuds in, talks in a loud whisper to Bobby. “I, uh, I actually came to see May.”

“Oh, wh-” Bobby begins to ask what he has to talk to May about, but stops when Buck looks at him more closely, his intent clear. Bobby leads the way to the dining room and Buck follows. May seems wrapped up in her Instagram feed, and Bobby attempts to draw her attention. “Hey, May? Look who stopped by.”

May forces a tight smile, pulling one of the earbuds out. “Hey,” She moves, as though to put the earbud back in place.

“May,” Buck starts, “I actually came to ask you a favor.” May stops, setting the earbud down on the table, and takes the other one out, before turning her attention to Buck.

“A favor?” She looks at Buck quizzically.

Buck pulls out his cell phone. “I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a cat for weeks, and I just can’t decide which one I want. The shelter has quite a few.” He swipes through the photos and shows them to May.

A small smile tugs at the corner of May’s mouth, “That one is cute.” She motions towards his phone, looking at a gray short-haired kitten.

Buck scratches the back of his head. “Are you busy for the next few hours? Maybe you could come with me? I’m terrible at making decisions.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Buck, I need to do some cleaning before my mom gets back.”

“Go ahead, May. Harry and I have you covered,” Bobby promises as he steps out of the dining room and into the kitchen.

Buck flashes a smile, “So, what do you say?” He looks at May hopefully. He really wants her to come out with him. Being a teenager is not easy, and being a teenager with an ill family member is even harder. He thinks back to what Chim said earlier, about older siblings having to face the truth and not be blissfully ignorant. Although Chim was referencing his current situation with Albert, he knows that what was said earlier wasn’t untrue either.

May is silent for a minute, and he is sure that she’s going to say no. “Alright, I guess a couple of hours couldn’t hurt. I’m just going to go grab my purse.” Buck beams.

Buck stops in the kitchen where Bobby pretends to be cleaning. Buck rests a light hand on his shoulder. “She’s gonna be alright, Bobby,” he promises.

Bobby breathes out and turns to look at Buck. He looks like he’s searching for the right words, then finally settles on, “Thank you.”

“Of course,” Buck says, “she’s family.” He steps out of the kitchen so that he can wait at the door for May.

A few minutes later, Buck’s Jeep pulls out of the driveway and onto the road as they head in the direction of the animal shelter. “I appreciate you helping me out.”

May locks the screen on her phone and lets out a small sigh at his words. “You don’t have to pretend this is me helping you out with something, Buck.” She levels him with a serious look, which he catches out of the corner of his eye. Buck almost chuckles because it is so clear at that moment that she is Athena’s daughter.

“I’m not pretending anything.”

May sighs. “So you’re telling me that Bobby didn’t put you up to this? Or my mom?”

“No, they didn’t,” Buck says honestly, then adds, “but they are worried about you.”

“I’m not going to break. You didn’t need to take me out just to make sure that I’m okay.” May says with a roll of her eyes, glancing out the passenger window.

“Not just to make sure you’re okay,” Buck says and then chuckles, “I really need someone to help me with this.” He reminds her, laughing lightly as he pulls the Jeep into the parking lot.

May looks down at her phone, fidgets with the edge of her phone case. “They told us a few days ago that the radiation didn’t work. Not like they were hoping for.” Buck remains silent and now that he’s parked, he turns his attention fully to May. “He’s going to have brain surgery, and they don’t even know if it’s going to help,” May’s voice wavers, “what if it doesn’t?”

“You can’t think like that, May. You can’t immediately settle on the worst-case scenario. I know you’re scared. I-I understand,” Buck stumbles with his words for a brief moment. “If you are all convinced that he can’t do this, then he won’t,” Buck says gently. “But, if you are all convinced that he can, then there is still hope.”

May swallows, moves her hand to dab at her tears. “How could you understand?”

The silence is heavy for a moment and then, “My grandpa, he died from brain cancer when I was a kid. It was really hard to watch him go through that. The hardest part was when he gave up on himself.”

“He died anyway,” May says stricken.

“Things were different then, they didn’t have the advancements that they do now, May. But when we stopped believing that he could fight it, so did he. Maybe he would have died anyway, but I wonder how much longer he would have had if he saw us believe in him instead.” Buck reaches over and places his hand on top of May’s, giving her hand a gentle squeeze.

May forces a smile, “I don’t want him to give up. I want him to fight.”

“Good,” Buck smiles, “now are you ready to help me pick out the perfect furry creature to destroy my place?”

May spends too much time researching on the internet. She knows that looking at the statistics and worst-case scenarios aren’t going to do much in the way of calming her fears. She knocks, then unlocks the door and steps into her dad’s apartment.

“Hey, this is a surprise. What are you doing here?” Michael asks.

May frowns. “I didn’t think I needed a reason.”

“Yeah,” Michael draws out, “but you usually have one.” He begins shuffling around some papers on the table, but May still sees his living will lying on the top, before he’s able to shuffle it under some nondescript papers.

“I knew it. I knew you were lying,” May says as she shakes her head in disbelief.

“May,” Michael starts, “this isn’t-”

“You’re updating your will. People do that when they’re dying.” She says plainly, hurt and worry evident on her face. Was it even worse than she thought?

“And they also do it when they have two children and are about to undergo major surgery.”

“A risky surgery,” May says from where she is still standing in front of the doorway. “I looked it up.”

“Okay, uh, you’re right,” Michael stands upright, walks around the table and stands in front of his daughter. He pauses briefly once in front of her before motioning to the two chairs that are in front of him. “Okay, let’s sit down.” He sighs, waiting for May to sit in front of him. She does after a moment and as she looks at him, all she can think is that this is her dad and this surgery is risky. There are so many possible scenarios. What if he doesn’t come out of it?

“It is risky,” Michael admits, “and I don’t know what’s going to happen. There are no guarantees here, but without it…” He breathes out slow, steadies himself for his next words as he looks at May. “I could be dead in a year.”

May closes her eyes, lets the words sink in. When she opens them, she looks at her dad distraught, eyes red-rimmed and her lips pressing into a straight line. “So then why didn’t you tell us? Why did you lie to me and Harry?”

Michael shakes his head, a pained look across his features. “I didn’t want to scare you,” He admits.

“Aren’t you scared?” Michael lowers his eyes, eyes wet as he considers her question.

“Yeah.” His voice is barely above a whisper, his nod infinitesimal. Michael looks around helplessly before his eyes settle on May. “I’m scared of dying. I’m scared of living and being worse off than I am now. And most of all, I am terrified of not seeing you and Harry. That’s why-that’s why I’m doing this, it’s to make sure that you two are taken care of-”

May thinks of her conversation with Buck in his Jeep earlier that day. She remembers him talking about his family losing hope and how his grandfather gave up too. He declined so quickly after that. She doesn’t want the same thing for her dad. She needs him to still hope.

“Stop,” May says sternly. “Stop doing that. Planning for your death, you can’t think like that. You still have options, and as long as you still have options and have us, there’s still hope.” Her eyes settle on Michael.

“When did you grow up on me?” He asks with a deep laugh, looking at her in awe. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” She says softly as Michael embraces her in a tight hug, and she closes her eyes in the embrace.

Buck hears a knock on the door and shifts from where he is lounging on the couch. “That was quick,” he says as he pulls open the door for their takeout order. “May.”

May shifts under his gaze, “I-I hope this is okay?” She starts, pressing her lips together tightly, her eyes wet with unshed tears. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

“Oh, May. Of course it’s okay,” Buck says, and in an instant his arms are around her slim frame, drawing her to him in a comforting hug. He lets out an even breath and kisses the top of her head. “Let’s get you inside.”

Buck leads her into his apartment, and she sits down on the couch next to him. Buck remains silent, knowing that May will say something when she’s ready. “This is all my fault,” she cries, folding into herself as her body shakes.

“Woah, woah, woah…” Buck reaches an arm out and pulls her over until she is pressed against his side. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s not.”

“It is,” May says through tears, allowing herself to lean into Buck for comfort. Gently, he brushes the hair away from her face so that he can see her face more clearly.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“After you dropped me off at home the other day I want to see my dad,” May says. “He was updating his will. I told him that I’d been reading up on his surgery and that I knew how risky it was. But I thought about what you said, about your grandfather. So I encouraged him to fight. I told him that as long as he still has options, as long as he still has us that he still has hope.”

“There is still hope,” Buck agrees.

“He-he’s not going to get the surgery. And radiation didn’t work. So he’s going to die and it’s going to be my fault, Buck!”

“Hey,” Buck’s forehead creases as he looks down at May, this girl that he has come to look at like she’s his little sister. She is coming apart at the thought of losing her dad, and Buck can’t say that he blames her. He thinks back to Bobby’s scare not that many months ago. He remembers the fear well.

“This isn’t your fault, none of this is.” Buck continues and draws her snugly against his chest, then kisses the top of her head. “And just because Michael chooses not to get the surgery, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have options. Did he say why he didn’t want the surgery?” His voice is gentle as he looks down at May, who has visibly calmed down.

“He thinks the surgery is too risky. He said he doesn’t want to focus on his death anymore, he wants to focus on living, however long he has. ”

“It is risky. The good news is that there are trials and other options to look at. Maybe he’ll be able to get into one of those. And either way, we aren’t going to lose hope.” May breathes evenly as her eyes close.

“I just panicked,” She whispers. “I don’t want him to die.”

“The good news is neither does he.” Buck smiles gently, hearing movement up in the loft. “Hey babe?” He calls out. “Can you bring Sadie down?”

Buck feels May sit upright before he feels scrutinizing eyes on him. “Babe?” Her brow raises. She leans forward, and a grin breaks out on her face as Eddie makes his way down the stairs. “Oh hey, Eddie .” She turns to Buck and smacks him gently across his chest with the back of her hand, then practically hisses. “I knew it!”

“Oh, please. You did not,” Buck says with a roll of his eyes as Eddie chuckles, carrying the kitten over to May who happily scoops her up. There is a knock on the door and Eddie answers, getting their takeout food and setting it on the counter.

“Hey, May,” Eddie calls as he glances up, “we’d love it if you’d stay for dinner.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive,” Eddie says as he grabs plates from the cupboard, and it’s not lost on May how easily Eddie navigates Buck’s kitchen, how comfortable he seems in Buck’s space. “You are family and you’re welcome anytime.” Buck and May make their way out to the kitchen with May still snuggling the kitten to her chest.

“So,” Buck motions to the spread of Chinese takeout that Eddie has spread out over the counter, “what do you want?”

“I want to know when the two of you are going to tell everyone that you’re a couple,” May says with her first genuine smile of the night.

Buck stutters and glances at Eddie who just shrugs his shoulders, smiling in amusement. “When we’re ready,” Buck says carefully.

“That doesn’t sound like an actual time.” May bends down, setting the kitten on the floor before she walks to the sink to wash her hands.

“You’re right, it doesn’t sound like an actual time,” Eddie teases.

“I’m not telling you what to do,” May says as she dries her hands and turns to look at Buck and Eddie. “I’m just saying that life’s too short to not be happy. And life’s too short to not let people be happy for you.”

“She does have a point,” Eddie says, turning his gaze to Buck.

“That she does,” Buck whispers, dipping his head down and placing a quick kiss against his lips before he turns back to May. “We’ll tell them the next time that we see them.” Eddie finds Buck’s hand and interlaces their fingers.

Buck looks at May as she smiles warmly and he wonders if he actually helped her tonight, or if she helped him. One thing they all need to remember is that life is short, and you can never predict what is going to happen tomorrow. Even in the face of tomorrow’s uncertainty, Buck knows that he can face whatever is thrown his way as long as he has his family by his side.

#fanfic #evan buckley #may grant #michael grant #eddie diaz #911 #911 3x11

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nln4 · 5 years

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bloodsport

Or the story of how you get your little therapy pet. a headcanon fic about my sidestep from @fallenhero-rebirth

Word Count: 2829

Rating: M for cursing, blood, violence, animal abuse. TW: animal abuse

0200.

While many are comfortable in their beds at the moment, you are on the roof of a supposedly abandoned building in the warehouse district, peering through a grimy skylight at a sight down below. The glass is covered with filth from years of exposure to Los Diablos smog but the filters in your helmet artificially sharpen the camera feed enough for you to make out details.

Yellow fluorescent lights illuminate a crowd of about thirty people, giving everything a sickly glow. They’re all cheering and screaming behind the safety of a chain link fence while watching the main attraction: two dogs viciously snapping at each other.

Each are covered in open wounds and scratches, blood matting their fur. Fangs bared, they lunge at each other’s throats while the crowd roars. You’re glad you have your shields up to dull out the bloodlust of these people. It’s a low thrum at the back of your skull and you push it far, far away.

Above the crowd on a mezzanine, (because this is a super classy event that deserves box seats, you think) is your target - a middle aged man in a cheap polyester suit, puffing away at the cigar in his mouth. He’s slouched in a rolling chair like it’s a throne, a glass of brown liquor in his hand, laughing. And in this moment, you know. You don’t even need to scan through his thoughts to know.

He thinks he has it all. Money. Comfort. Power.

Your original objective was for information on Hollow Ground. Surprisingly, this idiot has ties with someone who knows someone. But then again, in the criminal world, everybody knows everybody and you suppose that he was chosen for a very specific reason.

Disposability.

A snap and a whine draws your attention down to the enclosed circle once more; one dog collapses in the dirt, convulsing while the other is foaming at the mouth, its barks and growls muted by the crowd. The dogs look like they’ve been pushed to their limits. The crowd begins to riot as someone announces the winner of the fight.

A handler shoves a cattle prod through the links of the fence, intent on reaching the growling hound. It backs away and stumbles, falling against the other dog. It doesn’t get up.

That does it.

“Sound off,” you spit into your mic, teeth gritted.

“Red one, here.”

“Red two, here.” The responses come from Pelayo and Ward; you had Nehal sit back with Boris because the job required some heavy muscle. She appeared more than happy enough to remain on call within the van.

A moment of silence. “Red three, do you copy?”

Nothing.

Motherfucker. You really need to have that talk with ZaZa about commitment to teamwork.

A crackle of static before - “Yeah, sorry, boss, I was just watching the fight, did you see--”

You groan internally. “All right, change of plans. One and Two, secure the exits. Three, you’re with me on the balcony. Two and Three, collar handoff. Flashbang in five.”

“Wait, wha-?” ZaZa’s voice is indignant before you cut off his channel. You’ll listen to his complaints later. If you care enough.

The mezzanine is close enough to the skylight that someone would notice glass breaking so you place your hand on the grimy plastic paneling of the skylight window and let your nanovores eat a hole wide enough for you to hop through. But before you make your entrance, you pull a grenade from your belt, pull the pin and drop it. It makes a hard thud on the ground, emitting a rising whine and drawing the crowd’s curiosity before -

A white-hot flash of light followed by a deafening BANG!

People in the crowd screech as their retinas are temporarily burned, falling over each other. It’s complete chaos as they try to flee for the exit. But as they reach the metal doors, they double over, coughing and gasping for air before slumping onto the ground, completely incapacitated, all in a matter of minutes. The canisters - some, CS gas, the other a sufentanil derivative - hiss as they release the remains of their contents.

Pelayo and Ward’s part of the job, done. You’ve had them prepped with gas masks, for both protection and anonymity. They now guard the doors, just in case someone comes skulking around.

You drop down from the skylight onto the metal mezzanine, right in front of the man in the chair who’s currently hunched over, scratching furiously at his eyes and retching. At the sound of your arrival, he struggles to sit up and locate where you are. He’s still disoriented as he tries to focus. You give him a once over and the helmet scanners alert you that he’s armed with a pistol in his pocket.

But between his current state of mind and your armor, he doesn’t stand a chance.

“Who- who are you?” His thoughts are tinged with confusion and fear as he takes in his surroundings, watching the crowd beneath him fall unconscious.

“That’s not important, Mr. Thomas Michael Johnston, age 47.” The vocal distorters in your helmet makes it sound like a purr.

He looks like he’s going to be sick to his stomach.

Truth be told, you’ve been tailing this fucker for about two weeks. Single. Likes to watch football at dingy bars. Cuts the heroin he sells with fentanyl. The dog fighting you didn’t know about, but it’s just the cherry on top of this shitstain sundae. You can’t imagine how he got in with someone with ties with Hollow Ground, but it seems like he’s a loose thread about to be trimmed off anyways.

You step closer, grinding his forgotten cigar underneath your boot.

“I have a question for you, Mr. Johnston. And we don’t have to make this encounter difficult. You went to Joes the other day and you received an envelope from a contact. What was in it?”

He gets to his feet unsteadily, fumbling in his pocket for the gun and shakily draws it, leveling it at your face. His eyes are wild as he glances about and you push his frazzled mind to focus on the reflection of his face on your mirrored helmet. To remind him of the ugly little man that he is. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Really?” Behind your helmet, you roll your eyes.

“Who the fuck told you about me? How did you know about this place?” His thumb flips at the safety of the gun, prepared to shoot.

“Hey, c’mon. I’m the one asking the questions here.” And faster than he can react, you dive forward and twist his wrist, relieving him of his gun, which you promptly toss over the railing of the mezzanine. You don’t need weapons to hurt anyone anyways.

He screams and clutches his wrist in pain. “Fuck you, man, I ain’t talkin.”

“Okay.” You do your best to sound resigned. “We’ll do this the difficult way.”

You kick him square in the chest so hard that he’s knocked off balance into the chair. The force of the kick rolls the chair back into the waiting arms of ZaZa - who’s finally in position on the balcony with you. ZaZa has a gun drawn, pointed directly to the man’s temple.

“So, Mr. Johnston, I’m gonna be honest with you. I already know what’s in the envelope. It’s a hard drive with schematics for a very important event that will happen soon.”

“How did you-” he wheezes.

“I also happen to know that you keep it in a biometric safe that only you can open.”

He takes a moment to recover from being kicked but recognition finally dawns in his eyes. “You’re that guy - on the news - that Sidestep guy.”

“So you do know who I am.”

He laughs, wheezy from pain, blood staining his teeth. “And I know you don’t fucking kill people either. You just like to scare them. So why don’t you fuck off?”

All this attitude, plus the dogs. You suppose your next move is fitting. Poetic justice, even. “Collar him.”

He starts but ZaZa shoves the struggling man back into the chair, forcing a metallic collar on him. A magnetic closure snaps with a satisfying click. His hands scrabble at the collar as the metal digs into his neck. “What - what the fuck is this?”

You roll your eyes again. “What do you think? It’s a collar. It’s also a collar fitted with an explosive device should you not go along with my requests because you somehow think I don’t have the balls to kill anybody but you know...semantics.”

The fear is finally getting to him. The understanding that he might not get out of this situation in one piece. “All right, what do you want? Money? Drugs? What?”

“The drive, of course.”

“If you know about the drive,” he gasps, “then you know about the people behind the drive. And if I talk, there’s no way I’m getting out of this alive.”

“Which is why I’m proposing you a solution, Mr. Johnston.”

“Which is?” He looks at you like you might be insane. And the possibility of you trying to defend against Hollow Ground, you might just be.

“You give me the drive, I’ll unlock the collar and I’ll get you on a ship set sail for Guam in a couple hours with enough money for you to survive.You can live out the rest of your miserable life there.”

His eyes narrow. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch. Just a regular business transaction. Your other choice is that the collar blows your head off and I take the safe anyways. I’m sure I can figure out how to open it.”

He gives it a moment of consideration. “What’s stopping you from killing me anyways?”

You lean down and draw level with his face. “See, you were right earlier- I do just scare people. But you were also a little wrong. It’s not that I don’t kill people, it’s that I don’t like killing people. Unless I really have to. So give me a chance not to kill you, Mr. Johnston.”

Of course, with your powers, you could just take over his mind and make him open the safe for you. In fact, it was your original plan. No wonder why ZaZa was confused. You really don’t go for the collar for something so trivial.

But those dogs. They did nothing wrong.

You consider the violence your own sick brand of justice. Some villains have standards.

“All right, deal,” he spits.

“Lead the way.” You gesture towards the metal stairs for him to take point. “And just in case you have any funny business in mind, I need your hands up where I can see them.”

You nod at ZaZa to follow him, gun pointed at the man’s back. He leads you to a unlocked office and turns on the light.The sight that greets you makes your stomach turn. Walls lined with kennels, some empty, some with dogs in them. They don’t move, even with the lights turning on.

In the corner of the office is a desk with a singular lamp and a laptop. Next to it, a huge two door safe. The right door has a panel with a keypad on it.

“Go on,” you prompt. ZaZa still has the gun pointed to the man, but even he’s looking around at the cages with a frown.

“How long have you been in the dog business?” ZaZa asks.

The man gives a low laugh. “Years. Why? You thinking of taking up the ring when I’m gone?”

“Just open the safe,” you snarl.

The man keys in the passcode and the metal panel slides up to reveal a fingerprint and retinal scanner which he also completes. You’re impressed that he hasn’t tried anything suspicious and a quick look through his head shows that he’s being truthful. Of course, he can’t risk alerting authorities to what’s going on and you suppose he has a sense of self-preservation to be going along with you so far. But you’re surprised that throwing him a couple bones would get you so far.

Metallic whirring indicate that the tumblers inside the safe are unlocking and the doors open with a pneumatic hiss. Inside are wads of cash, wrapped bundles of what are probably drugs, and enough SEMTEX and C4 to decimate the entire building to rubble.

The man rummages around to reveal an even further hidden panel and tosses out a couple individual plastic bags of whatever drug and a diamond ring (which raises one of your eyebrows but you don’t care enough to dig the story out of his mind at the moment) to draw out a sleek hard drive.

“Here.” His hands are trembling as he hands it over. One quick reach into his head and he is still - surprisingly - being honest. Although he was probably not smart enough to care and make a duplicate. Or was instructed not to, which is the more likely choice.

“Well.” Behind the helmet, you smirk. “Mr. Johnston, you’ve exceeded my expectations.” You study the drive carefully. It appears to be just a commonplace hard drive but you know it probably has so much more behind the metallic housing. Once you get home to your base, there will be some work to do. Knowing Hollow Ground, decrypting it will not be easy.

“I did what you asked,” he says, the anger turning his face red. “Now let me go.”

“One last thing though. How do you release the kennels?”

“Huh? There’s a buzzer under the desk, you g--” Whatever he is about to say next never makes it out of his mouth as ZaZa knocks him out with the butt of his pistol.

“Move him to the boat,” you instruct ZaZa and he nods. “Tell the others to come in and clear out the safe.” Even ZaZa looks glad to be rid of this scum. You make for the desk and find the button to open the kennels. The gates release with a buzz and you move through to study what’s in them.

It hurts to look at them. The unmoving bodies, thin enough that you can see their ribs. Covered in horrible scars, and worse - mutated beyond belief from what you think might be the Boost drug. You feel your breathing worsen, silenced only by your helmet.

You send out a small wave towards their mind, searching for something, any sort of activity.

And to your relief, one comes charging right at you. It growls and snaps at you, gnaws at your boot. It’s so little. Hasn’t even grown into its floppy ears yet. You reach out with both your gloved hand and your mind and it bites at your hand with a doleful look.

Once you return to the van, Boris asks about your little souvenir and you shrug.”Spoils of war,” you say.

---

“You...got a puppy.” Ortega’s grin grows wide despite his confusion. He crouches down beside you as you sit in the grass at the park. It’s a typical sunny Los Diablos day and despite everything else happening with you right now, you feel almost...normal.

“Yup.” The puppy playfully bites at your hand as you scritch at its ears.

“Is that why you asked to meet me at the park? To see the puppy?”

You look at him, still absentmindedly giving the puppy belly rubs. “What? Yeah. I guess.”

“By the way, did you hear about that boat explosion down by the docks?” he asks, as he holds a hand out for the puppy to sniff. It growls, a little wary but Ortega still gives it a scratch on the hindquarters which slowly turns into a happy thumping of its tail.

You nod. “It was all over the news. I wonder what happened.”

“Rangers inside scoop says the boat belonged to some drug dealer.” Ortega’s eyes twinkle conspiratorially. You look at him. Does he suspect something?

He studies you in turn. “So about the dog. Why?”

“What?”

“I never took you for a dog person.”

“Well, I never was a people person either until you.”

He chuckles, tossing a tennis ball you brought with you a little distance away. The puppy immediately gives chase after it. “And I worked hard for that too. But this little guy, just all of a sudden…”

“Look, some guy from work decided he couldn’t take care of it anymore. So I volunteered.” It’s technically the truth, you think.

The puppy returns, drops the ball in your lap and looks up at you expectantly. And you smile. This sort of loyalty, you can’t find anywhere else other than dogs. Maybe it was a dumb choice taking the puppy but it was the right one, you decide.

You reward it with a good scritch behind the ears. “Good boy, Charge.”

Beside you, Ortega chokes and you can see the color rising in his cheeks. “Excuse me, what?”

#fallen hero: rebirth #fallen hero rebirth #tw: animal abuse #my writing #IDK if any of these is story compliant but still

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

Text

The Many App Stores Before the App Store

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

How much credit does Apple deserve for introducing its App Store concept to mainstream consumers? I mean, how obvious is the idea, anyway?

This is a question that seems worth asking as modern app development has become so centered around building applications that exist in digital storefronts like Apple’s App Store, the Google Play Store, Steam, and numerous others. What about app stores that existed when the proverbial dodo was still around? There are more than you think.

“A trip back in time reveals at least one popular one-click store which predates Apple’s attempt by at least 5 years. I know because I built it.”

— Michael Robertson, the software developer best known for his creation of MP3.com, in a blog post discussing his work on “Click-N-Run,” an early attempt at creating a digital download store along the lines of the App Store in the early 2000s. Click-N-Run (CNR), which was an aspect of the commercial Windows-like Linux distribution Linspire that Robertson helped build, was a commercial GUI-style interface for Debian’s apt package manager. It was eventually made available to other distros to much interest, though the results were reportedly a mixed bag. While no longer made, Linspire’s work on CNR (one of a few stabs at the GUI-based software distribution interface in Linux) likely inspired the graphical package managers now commonly offered with many Linux distributions, which largely work the same way.

The question around what an app store actually is probably starts with shareware

Let’s play a game: If you were to access a piece of shareware circa 1991 and wanted to unlock the full version of that application with your computer alone, how would you do it?

No web. Perhaps no Windows. (Perhaps GeoWorks.)

Sure, there were probably lots of ways to download an application, if you had the tools to do so—as in, a modem. Perhaps you might grab it on a BBS, or through a service like Compuserve. Maybe Usenet binary groups were your preferred strategy.

But still, you’d be stuck with a nag screen. Your copy of WinZip would just be annoying you every time you started it.

See, the issue with the distribution of software via computer was never about the download part—that part was figured out relatively quickly. It was the paying part that proved difficult.

Think about how it might work compared to a store: You choose a physical object of interest, you give a physical object of value (i.e. money) in exchange, an intermediary (i.e. a cashier) confirms you bought it (by scanning a barcode), and you walk out, without an object of value but with an object of interest.

Which is why every time you read a story about some shareware pioneer, like the developer of Paint Shop Pro or Tim Sweeney’s efforts to sell folks ZZT, it’s always paired with a story about these developers literally taking checks in the mail, despite the fact that it was entirely possible to purchase things fully electronically with a credit card by this point.

Without the retail element, people were kind of stuck distributing software without a way to easily purchase it. (What’s the big deal, the open-source folks say.) There was no way to secure the process, so therefore, fraud was prevalent. And if people are distributing through multiple systems, the experience of downloading becomes annoying, because it feels wildly inconsistent.

This is the problem a few entrepreneurs worked to solve starting in the mid-to-late 1990s, with varying levels of success.

1993

The year that Tucows, a well-known repository of downloadable software, first went online. The repository was built by Scott Swedorski, a technology enthusiast in Flint, Michigan, who spotted a need for a central resource for basic internet software. Swedorski’s work, while not initially intended to be commercial, proved the basis of a long-running company that came to prove an essential part of the early internet. After all, we needed software to get on the internet, right?

An example of the Electronic AppWrapper, a program for NeXT computers that could be used to distribute software digitally. Image: JohnWayneTheThird/Wikimedia Commons

The first “app store” on a Steve Jobs-operated platform involved a CD-ROM and an email-sending mechanism

The app store that generally gets the nod for being first dates to the early 1990s, on a platform that was responsible for a lot of software firsts. I’m, of course, talking about NeXT, the platform on which the World Wide Web came to life and whose object-oriented approach to programming became a big part of what has made iOS so successful.

That software is called the Electronic AppWrapper. (See, it had “app” in the name way back in 1993!)

It did not exactly have the same kind of distribution method that one might expect for a modern app store, however. Really, what it did that is incredibly clever was that it took the shareware CD-ROM and made it into something that allowed for trials.

NeXT was a good platform for this in part because of its initial target audience—since the NeXT Cube tended to focus on educational and research settings, those settings were often networked well before PC and Mac equivalents, so people were able to purchase software online before other markets.

In fact, Electronic AppWrapper developer Paget Systems, which initially built a print version of the AppWrapper, made this very point in a 1992 article first proposing the idea:

The NeXT community is a perfect testbed for electronic distribution. The market is still small; we know where almost all of the computer owners are, and the community is more fluent with networking than most. And we have more than our share of creative people willing to tackle problems in new ways.

Also helping matters: Since NeXT systems were rare, users of this platform didn’t really have the advantage of being able to go to Radio Shack to purchase software, so it was either do everything through the mail, or go electronic.

Paget Systems’ great gift to the app store concept was the process it enabled. A 1993 issue of NeXTWORLD described the benefits of the tool like this: “To order by e-mail, just click a button; the application automatically displays an order form, asks for your credit-card number, and sends an encrypted message to Paget.”

That sounds pretty simple, right? It was, and it's not all that dissimilar to how we do things today.

(Side note: Jesse Tayler, who helped develop Electronic AppWrapper, has put up an informative documentary website highlighting the history of NeXT and the innovations the company helped to enable—including this. A highlight is Tayler’s discussion of successfully demoing the Electronic AppWrapper to Steve Jobs.)

“Since virtual shelf space is much cheaper than a storefront, Online can represent thousands of products. We can carry Microsoft Word and hundreds of related add-on products, while traditional re-sellers can barely find shelf space for mainstream software.”

— Tim Choate, the president of the firm Online Interactive, discussing the company’s atOnce online software store, which was one of the first examples of a traditional app store for Windows computers. As NetworkWorld explained in 1996, the atOnce software store was something of a test, complete with Microsoft’s blessing, to see if application distribution of commercial software over network mediums was even possible. The process required a more secure approach, at Microsoft’s behest. It should be noted that atOnce provides an interesting case—as it was effectively the app store for the AOL era (along with a very early web presence), though it quickly went away.

The Digital River website, as it appeared in 1998. Image: Internet Archive

The guy who realized that downloadable apps were going to be a really big deal in 1994

Joel Ronning probably doesn’t get the credit he deserves in the grand scheme of things, but he is a figure in this discussion that matters.

In the 1980s, he spent time focused on the Macintosh market, selling software and distributing white-label accessories as well. This gave him an understanding of the digital market, so he could see all the flaws of the retail approach up close.

Around 1993 or so, he had a revelation that proved prescient: downloadable commercial software was going to be big. Really big. Big enough that he should spend the next few years developing processes for making the ideas around secure downloadable software workable, and patenting them. And building a company around them. And turning them into something that other companies would likely want to use.

Ronning’s work led to the creation a dozen patents—and a company called Digital River that could handle the encryption and distribution of applications. Not that anyone knew how to properly contextualize the idea at that early stage. In a 1997 profile with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, columnist Dick Youngblood tried, and came up with this:

What Digital River has created is an enormous virtual warehouse containing tens of thousands of software products offered by hundreds of developers and retailers through their individual Web sites.

In simple terms, the system gives customers the ability to download their software choices with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of security for the credit card numbers and other personal data required for the transaction. I like to think of the operation as sort of the Supervalu of electronic software wholesaling.

Imagine having to describe something that people do over the internet on a daily basis without being able to use the terms “app store” or “cloud,” nor the frame of references that come with those terms, and that’s probably what you might come up with.

A patent drawing by Digital River that showed an early example of its digital-distribution technology, which included encryption functionality. Ronning has a lot of patent filings to his name. Image: Google Patents

The approach Digital River took in this early stage is actually quite similar to what we think of as an app store today—including the idea that the middleman is going to take a cut. (Digital River took just 20 percent, rather than Apple’s infamous 30 percent cut.)

But one difference is that the company represented a provider of purchasing services—i.e., it built the tools for individual companies to create their own storefronts, rather than becoming an app-store player itself. This model worked for them. By the year 2002, Digital River (a still-active company!) had more than 32,000 customers according to NetworkWorld, with roughly a third of those representing three quarters of Digital River’s sales.

“Year over year we continue to see more products purchased digitally.” Ronning said in a NetworkWorldinterview. “People are getting more comfortable with getting a digital file than they were one, two or six years ago. That’s good news because it allows us to deliver a product halfway around the world in a matter of seconds.”

And hey, because the company was in a position to provide the technical know-how of running an app store, there was at least one case where Digital River was tapped to manage someone else’s app store—the creation of Research in Motion’s Blackberry App World in 2009.

Download Warehouse, a.k.a. what app stores would look like if we made no changes to our approach between physical and digital distribution. Fun fact: This is what the atOnce website evolved into. Image: Internet Archive

Not every site was a winner, of course: When looking for info about app stores, I ran across this website on the Internet Archive that literally sold digital software as if it was still in a shrink-wrapped box, which made me crack up so hard. The backend? Digital River.

In many ways, the success of the app store was just as much about the packaging—i.e., the way consumers were pitched about the idea, rather than the shrink wrap—as the commerce itself.

1996

The year StarCode Software, a developer of software for the BeOS operating system, was formed. The company built PackageBuilder and SoftwareValet, which combined together to become one of the first graphical package managers purpose-built for an operating system—and one Be acquired in 1998 and integrated into the operating system.

Stardock Central, a digital distribution service produced by the customization-focused company Stardock. Image: via the Stardock website

Five mainstream examples of app stores that predated the Apple App Store

Steam. The digital distribution service started by Valve in 2003 was effectively the app store that proved the model to the world in a big way. There’s a reason why Steam remains so dominant in the PC gaming space, and it’s because they nailed it the first time—to the point where many of its competitors directly mimic the service.

Windows Marketplace. This circa-2004 online store, targeted at consumers, was an attempt by Microsoft to centralize the often-confusing app distribution options for Windows software. It wasn’t successful, but it helped set the stage for later digital storefront successes for Microsoft.

Club Nokia. This online store for Nokia’s early mobile phones provides a really interesting example of a service that was essentially a direct analogue to the modern iOS App Store, but in a situation where the carriers, rather than the phone-maker, holds all the power. This service, founded in 1997, became controversial as ringtones became more popular, and Nokia eventually folded to pressure from mobile carriers and scaled back its service in favor of the mobile providers’ options. Could you imagine Verizon and AT&T doing this to Apple today?

Xbox Live Arcade. Launched in 2004, this represented an important formative effort in the attempts to bring digital download services to a large group of people. One secret to the success of Xbox Live Arcade was its piggybacking upon what Microsoft was doing elsewhere; it leveraged the existing Xbox Live service to sell people more simplistic games. (Apple later replicated this by using its mechanisms for the iTunes Store to sell apps.) It later proved the starting point for the company’s Xbox Live Marketplace, which could distribute full shrink-wrapped games to consumers.

Stardock Central. I’ve mentioned them in Tedium before, but Stardock is an interesting company historically because of the fact that it was early to a number of important trends that have become even more essential today. One of those trends was customization; another was digital distribution, which it first dipped its toes into with Stardock Central, an app-distribution service from circa 2001. It worked particularly well for Stardock in part because it offered apps in a variety of verticals, including games.

The NTT DoCoMo NEC N904i, a phone that supports the formative i-mode network, is considered the first mobile app store ecosystem. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The turning point of the app store concept, honestly, is the mobile phone

Thinking less about the maker of the phone itself or its general functionality, the mobile phone represents something about technology that a regular desktop computer doesn’t—it is intended as a full package, one that is hermetically sealed and managed by its maker and distributor.

Because it started from a different place, the expectation is different. That expectation creates tension for power users who wish that their phones or tablets worked a little more like their laptops, but on the other hand, the devices aim broader for a reason.

And one can point to the reason for the expectation that applications would be managed by the provider. After all, the first mobile app store that feels like what we got with the modern App Store or Play Store came from a mobile company—Japan’s NTT DoCoMo released i-mode, a service that offered access to digital services through their phones. It worked particularly well in Japan because home internet was rare at the time when i-mode was first released in 1999, meaning i-mode was many Japanese users’ first experience with an internet-style service.

As The Japan Times noted in 2011, the reason i-mode succeeded (and spawned many imitators) was the tight integration of payments and software:

For those of you who may not know, i-mode is the mobile Internet-access service built into cell phones from Japanese communication giant NTT Docomo. It costs ¥315 per month to use and includes the i-mode network, which is Docomo’s closed system, separate from the Internet at large. Within this network there are “official” i-mode sites, which are only accessible from an i-mode enabled cell phone. On sites such as these, users can purchase goods and services and have the payment appear on their cell phone bill. This cell phone-integrated-payment is what makes the i-mode system so special.

Other companies tried to do this same thing during the early 2000s, including firms like Nokia, to mixed levels of success, but the connective tissue was that the phone was treated like an integrated experience of purchasing, distribution, and usage, rather than a vessel for applications.

Perhaps this integration explains, in the present day, why Apple has ramped up attacks against sideloading (or allowing the installation of external applications outside of an App Store experience), something that nearly other mobile platform (including Android) has long allowed. As it wrote in a white paper it recently released:

Allowing sideloading would degrade the security of the iOS platform and expose users to serious security risks not only on third-party app stores, but also on the App Store. Because of the large size of the iPhone user base and the sensitive data stored on their phones—photos, location data, health and financial information—allowing sideloading would spur a flood of new investment into attacks on the platform.

Mobile phones have been built with this expectation that the whole experience is seamless and managed by the hardware developer—and at one point, the mobile provider even played a significant role. In some cases, it still does.

But one wonders how strong Apple’s case against sideloading will actually be, given that, y’know, it also sells desktop computers that allow sideloading … or as we call it over that way, downloading and installing apps from the Web.

It’s long been said that Apple, when it released the iPhone, launched a device so compelling that it made people forget that there was years of prior art that predated the moment.

In many ways, the App Store made people forget about app stores. It was such a brilliant concept, idea, and execution that when Steve Jobs announced it in 2008, people basically ignored the nearly two decades of prior art that wasn’t even particularly well-hidden.

In some ways, the move to centralization was arguably disappointing, because it wasn’t perfect, and it put a middleman in control. Apple’s approach to the digital storefront had flaws—most notably the size of its cut (which companies like Microsoft are now explicitly counterprogramming against) and the weirdness of putting a single company’s moral compass in charge of the apps that people downloaded.

But we can look at the positives of their approach as well, and sort of the element that they nailed that few others were able to in quite the same way. The integration of the App Store into the operating system made both better; the integration of commerce into the App Store using a common system solved the problem of having to give a credit card number out every time you wanted to download an app; and the integration of a development strategy that worked in tandem with the App Store gave (and still gives) Apple a reason to constantly improve its programming interfaces so they remain at the top of their class.

No developer of a prior app storefront had been able to nail down quite this mix (with Steam possibly getting the closest), which explains why it was so effective when Apple did it.

But prior art is prior art, and one hopes that the technology industry takes a step back to learn the lessons from both the Apple App Store’s strengths and weaknesses going forward. After all, so many others got there first.

The Many App Stores Before the App Store syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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pantheonofdiscord · 6 years

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They Say You’ll Hear Your Own Bones Crack - 13x08 coda, 1.2k, T

There was a time, many years ago, when Castiel was captured by Hell’s forces.

The order had come down from Heaven – rumour was, direct from Michael himself – for Castiel’s garrison to storm the keep of a demon named Belial. There were whispers that this demon knew the location of a powerful artefact, one that could potentially turn the tide of the war. Castiel and a handful of others went in first, a whirlwind of white light and holy terror. But it was all a trap, laid by Belial’s minions, and they were easily defeated, then taken as prisoners of war. Castiel and his four brothers and sisters languished for years in cells made of bone and lit by red fire. They were tortured, interrogated, and forced to listen to the screams of other prisoners. So it was, day after endless day, until finally, Anna broke through Belial’s ranks and tore their cages asunder.

Hell has changed much in the intervening centuries.

“Seven little girls, sittin’ in the back seat, kissin’ and a huggin’ with Fred.”

Somehow, it’s gotten worse.

“C’mon, Castiel. All together now, one, two, three…”

“Do you never get tired of the sound of your own voice?” Castiel says, repeatedly thumping the back of his head against the wall of his cell, and wishing desperately it was possible to knock himself out.

He’s beginning to appreciate how The Empty must have felt.

Lucifer encircles his hands around the bars that separate their cells, pressing his face against them enough that they warp his features. “I know you know this one, Cas. Can’t you sing along? I mean, what else are you gonna do? Sit around and mope?”

“I’m thinking,” Castiel says.

“Oh, well, don’t hurt yourself.”

Castiel ignores him, shutting his eyes and reaching out with his mind. There had been a wave of… of something from Dean a short while ago. It’s faded now, but Castiel can’t help but try to seek him out again.

“You think he knows?” Lucifer asks.

Again, Castiel doesn’t respond, not wanting to take the bait.

“Caaaassss. I said, do you think he knows?”

Irritation getting the better of him, Castiel opens his eyes enough to glare. “What are you talking about?”

“Dean. Little Deanie-Weenie. Captain Sadsack. Think he knows how loud he’s being?”

Uneasiness trickles through Castiel. “Loud?”

“Mmm, yeah. The longing.” He over-enunciates the word, his lips sticking all the way through the bars. “I mean, I didn’t always notice, but in here, nothing to do but listen – man, he sure wants you, Castiel.”

Heat floods Castiel’s face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lucifer snorts. “Good one. Very convincing. But seriously, how do you put up with this? I mean, I’m just picking up the spill-over here, and I still want to smite myself. But you – you’re getting it full-force. Is he always like this? So…” He pauses, shuddering. “So needy? How have you not stabbed yourself in the face by now?”

“Instead of eavesdropping, or singing, why don’t you try devoting some energy to finding a way out of here?”

“You know, I can’t figure you two out,” Lucifer says, disregarding Castiel’s attempted deflection. “If he wants to be touched by an angel so badly, how come he hasn’t shown up to bust you out yet? I mean, say what you want about them, but he and my little Sammy can definitely swing a daring rescue. Especially when there’s only Prince Zeppo out there to deal with,” he adds, jerking his head toward the cell door. “Where’s your boyfriend, Castiel?”

“He’ll be here,” Castiel says softly, before he can stop himself.

“Aww, that was so sweet,” Lucifer says, before grimacing. “I kinda want to puke, actually.”

Castiel rolls his eyes, but before he can reply a commotion down the hall draws his attention.

Lucifer looks out too, backing away from the bars. “Well, speak of the plaid-clad devil.”

Heart leaping to his throat, Castiel scrambles to his feet and moves toward the bars, craning his neck to try and see down the hall. There are raised voices and the sounds of fighting, and then silence.

“Cas!”

Dean’s urgent voice sounds from out of sight, and Castiel can’t help his grin. “Dean, down here!”

Footsteps pound, and then a moment later Dean is there, breathless and beaming through the bars. “Somebody order a jailbreak?”

Lucifer rattles the bars of his cage. “Oh Dean. I knew you’d come,” he simpers.

“Oh, I’m leaving your ass here,” Dean says, barely sparing him a glance.

“Hey!”

Castiel ignores him. “How did you get here?” he asks, staring at Dean in wonder.

“I’m a hell of a guy,” Dean says, winking cheekily. He produces a large iron key and quickly unlocks the door.

Castiel makes to step out, but before he can cross the threshold Dean pushes him backwards – and back and back until he slams against the wall. Castiel doesn’t get out more than a confused and startled gasp, then Dean is crashing his mouth down onto his.

It takes a stunned few seconds, but then Castiel is kissing him back. It doesn’t matter that they’re still trapped in Hell, and demons are likely on their way down, and Lucifer is one cell over and making noises of disgust. Dean Winchester is kissing him. Finally.

Kissing him deeply, in fact, his tongue pushing into Castiel’s mouth and his teeth sinking into his lip. It’s making him dizzy. Castiel lets himself drown in it until Dean starts working a thigh between his legs.

He forces himself to pull away. “Dean, shouldn’t, um –” Dean pushes harder with his thigh, and Castiel sucks in a breath. “Shouldn’t we be getting out of here?”

“C’mon, Cas,” Dean purrs, low and rough. “We’ve waited long enough, haven’t we?” He drags his lips down Castiel’s neck.

Despite himself, Castiel lets his eyes flutter closed. He pushes reason and rational thought away and focuses on the feel of Dean against him. He reaches out with his mind again, hoping to connect with Dean like that too –

His eyes snap open. Something isn’t right. The ever-present longing from Dean hasn’t disappeared, hasn’t changed at all. “Dean?”

Dean leans up and meets his eyes. They’re light and teasing, and behind them there’s… nothing.

Castiel’s blood runs cold. “You’re not Dean.”

The air ripples. By the time he’s moved away, Asmodeus looks like himself again. “Now that was fun.”

“What,” Castiel spits, “was the point of that.” He wants to vomit. He wants his blade back.

Asmodeus smirks. “What can I say. I have my hobbies. And you are just so easy.”

Castiel glares with all the fury he can muster.

“I must say though, you caught on quick. Dean still hasn’t.”

Ice grips Castiel’s heart. “What have you done?”

“Nothin’ yet, don’t you worry your pretty little halo,” Asmodeus says. “I’m just keeping him from lookin’ for you. Can’t have those Winchester boys bargin’ in on me. It would ruin all my fun.” He winks, then turns and strides out of the cell. Castiel is still too sickened to move. “See you later, fellas,” he says, then strides back up the hall.

An iron door clanks shut a moment later, and Castiel slumps back against the wall.

Lucifer presses his face into the bars again. “That was. Hilarious.”

#destiel coda #13x08 coda #destiel fic #13x08 #spn spoilers #spn #hufflepuffdean #panfic #look i hate lucifer as much as the next rational person #but this idea wouldn't leave me alone all week #destiel #castiel #lucifer

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nintendoduo · 6 years

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34 Cool WiiWare Games That Are Going Away FOREVER*

*Unless Nintendo decides to sell them again when the Switch U 4DS VR comes out in 2025.

As you might have heard, starting next Monday Nintendo is taking away the ability to add funds to the Wii Shop, which will close down for good in early 2019. That means a whole bunch of great games won’t be able to be purchased anymore. In order to raise awareness of this, the most important issue of our times (after all the other issues), we spent the winter playing as many WiiWare games as we could over on our YouTube channel. Here’s a summary of the gems we encountered:

1. 3D Pixel Racing

A pretty challenging motion control racing game with Minecraft-esque graphics. Pro tip: use a regular old Wiimote, not a Wiimote Plus. Trust us, the Plus is too sensitive for this game and you’ll end up falling off the track every two seconds. Despite the difficulty, this one gets a recommendation because of the cool look and for giving us an excuse to use the Mario Kart Wii wheel again.

2. And Yet It Moves

Using the Wiimote’s gyroscope, this game has you move the world around you (rather than vice versa) to navigate the levels. One of those “easy to learn, difficult to master” type of games that defined many of the best on the platform.

3. Bit.Trip Runner

Originally a WiiWare exclusive, although you can now play it on 3DS, PC, Mac, Linux, and probably some Japanese toilets. You run from left to right and jump, slide, kick and... jump again to the music. A tribute to the platforming classics that deservedly became a classic itself (and the sequel, available on Wii U, is even better).

4. BurgerTime: World Tour

You know, BurgerTime! If you don’t know, this is a good excuse to get acquainted with this ‘80s arcade title. Like in the original, you attempt to assemble giant hamburgers on a series of platforms whilst dodging humanoid food monsters, only this time the graphics are in 3D and it’s all happening in space, for some reason. NOTE: Ironically, this fast-food themed game can’t be bought in North America right now, only Europe.

5. Chrono Twins DX

Originally designed for the DS, the gimmick is that the main character is fighting enemies in two different time periods at once. For the DS this used each screen for the different time zones, but with WiiWare you get a simple split-screen. It’s quite unique and challenging as you’re basically playing two sidescrollers at once.

6. Contra Rebirth

Remember when dudes with rippling muscles and mullets got to be badass gunfighters and nobody complained they were toxic? Contra sure does. Konami gave “Rebirth” to three of their classic franchises on WiiWare (CastleVania and Gradius were the other two) but this was probably the best of the bunch.

7. Dracula: Undead Awakening

If you never get tired of mowing down undead enemies then this will scratch that itch. Basically you get a bunch of different cool weapons and use them against a bunch of different cool monsters for as long as you wish, or at least as long as you survive. The challenge is so high that even lasting ten minutes on your first playthrough has the game calling you “noob.”

8. Eduardo the Samurai Toaster

A simple run n’ gun game (think Metal Slug) starring a sentient toaster facing off against flying onions, spear-toting carrots, and what appears to be an army of angry playing cards. It’s not clear what the plot of the game is, and there’s not a whole lot of depth to the gameplay, but it’s still a fun way to waste an hour (or more, depending on the difficulty). It’s supposed to be even more fun with 4 players, if you can find three other Wii-loving weirdos.

9. Excitebike World Rally

Motorcycle races. Simplicity works sometimes, and just like the original Excitebike this one proves it once more. Just like the original you get a cool level creator, only this time you can share it with anyone and not just whoever you give your cartridge to.

10. Frogger: Hyper Arcade Edition

Lots of different modes that still capture the appeal of the original arcade classic. The overall look is kinda coked-up, which captures the ‘80s arcade scene reasonably well.

11. Frogger Returns

Only the one mode this time, but it serves as a reminder of the timeless quality and endearing appeal of the core gameplay.

12. Gnomz

A chaotic 4-player party game starring sock-obsessed gnomes. You go around a single screen collecting socks and stomping other players to kill them; it’s like life itself. (Or, as many have pointed out, like the Super Mario War fan game, but less illegal.) There are three modes and a variety of scenarios. Like with Eduardo the Samurai Toaster, the more players the better, but the single player mode ain’t bad (and that way, you don’t ruin any friendships).

13. Gyrostarr

A pseudo-3D shoot ‘em up where the main difficulty is that you can actually shoot the power ups away, and you kinda need those to finish the stages -- if you don’t collect enough energy, the portal at the end of the level closes on your face. The difficulty ramps up slowly but surely across 50 levels. Another difficulty is not getting an LSD flashback on those trippy bonus stages.

14. HoopWorld

A basketball/fighting game that makes surprisingly good use of the Wii’s motion controls. This definitely falls in the “easy to pick up, difficult to master” category, since there’s a pretty wide range of ball throws and kung-fu moves you can perform by shaking your Wiimote and nunchuck in different ways. Or you can just wave your arms randomly and hope you win. The game is currently unlisted in North America, which we’re hoping is a sign that they’re planning to re-release it in modern platforms (with online multiplayer, hopefully).

15. Horizon Riders

A futuristic on-rails shooting game that you play with the Wii balance board. If you have the Wii Zapper accessory, even better (and you’ll look even sillier), but it’s not necessary to play. You aim and shoot with your Wiimote while leaning on your balance board to move from side to side. Definitely a good reason to dig that thing out of your closet. Be warned, though, that the game crashed on us in the middle of a stage, as seen at the end of our gameplay video.

16. Jam City Rollergirls

Roller derby has never been as popular to watch as it is for people to randomly talk about every few years for the novelty, usually accompanied by a movie that flops at the box office. The last time the mainstream tried to make this sport happen it resulted in this game, though, so there’s at least that. You play as characters with hilarious names roller blading through others with random power-ups and combat moves.

17. Jett Rocket

It’s a lofty ambition to offer gamers something that will remind them of Super Mario Galaxy, and it might seem foolish to do so on an indie dev’s budget. But Shin’en managed to deliver with an uncommon 3D platformer collectathon with good amounts of action sprinkled in.

18. LostWinds

When a developer approached a title with motion controls in mind, it always stood out more than other games that tried to crowbar motion controls into the scenery in the hopes of a shortcut to Wii success. LostWinds is in the former camp, making you use the pointer to create gusts of wind to elevate the main character onto platforms and knock around enemies. In fact it’d be more accurate to say you’re playing as the wind spirit rather than the story’s protagonist. Fun game with a beautiful art style.

19. Maboshi's Arcade

Nintendo knows how to make simple games that present difficulty when you don’t expect it. In the three modes of this puzzler you play as generic shapes but the controls are difficult to master. It kind of has to be seen to be believed.

20. Magnetica Twist

A connect-three type of game where you fire marbles and stuff. What ends up twisted the most are your wrists whilst trying to aim your shots with any sort of precision.

21. Max and the Magic Marker

There are plenty of side-scrolling platformers that use childhood visuals and hobbies to appeal to the player, and yet they never really get old do they? In this one you use a marker via motion controls to create platforms and defeat enemies. You also can go in and out of Max’s childhood drawings.

22. Monsteca Corral

This is a weird one. A bunch of monsters vaguely shaped like Doshin the Giant are gathered together by an unseen god-ish alien to fight robots that said alien had created earlier, but they turned against him. That’s the plot as we can best make out, anyways. There’s also dinosaurs. Recommended for those who like their fun to be completely unlike the other fun they’ve had with games.

23. Pearl Harbor Trilogy – 1941: Red Sun Rising

Old-school dogfighting in a new-school 3D game. Well, it was new when it released. Anyways you shoot down enemy planes, defend your base, attack naval fleets and get commendations you don’t deserve. Sometimes you see the action from the POV of the bombs you drop, and it works much better here than in Michael Bay’s version of Pearl Harbor.

24. Pole's Big Adventure

Chindōchū!! Pole no Daibōken is bizarre Japan-only SEGA title made to parody the crappy platform games that came out during the 8-bit era. Despite being full of intentional design flaws, like power ups that kill you or background objects that suddenly cut your head off, the game is pretty easy -- until you unlock hard mode, where the boss fights are actually challenging. Still, you’ll be playing this one mostly to laugh at the dozens of Easter eggs.

25. PictureBook Games: Pop Up Pursuit

Not many board games made it to WiiWare, but this was easily the best. It’s largely straightforward “run to the end of the board” contests, with plenty of opportunities to ruin friendships. The art style is the main hook, looking like a pop-up book, like the title indicates.

26. Rage of the Gladiator

You fight for your life against larger-than-life mythological creatures, like ogres and minotaurs and senseis. The game got compared frequently to Punch-Out!! and with good reason, but the combat is actually a more creative and the dialogue is more humorous. A blast to play through the first time, and a blast to replay.

27. Snowpack Park

Unlike most of the games on this list, there’s no combat in this one and your blood pressure won’t ever raise. There’s plenty to do but it’s fun stuff, mostly involving playing with penguins. It works great as a sort of palette cleanser to the violent action-packed games primarily showcased in this list.

28. Sonic the Hedgehog 4

The 16-bit Sonic games still hold up today as all-time greats. Sonic 4 didn’t live up to those expectations but it did get SEGA to think about their past a little more seriously, and helped lead to Sonic Mania. Episode I is on WiiWare, but you’ll have to find Episode II elsewhere.

29. Space Invaders Get Even

Another sequel to another arcade classic, but with the novel twist of playing the game from the enemies’ point of view. Word of warning: this is possibly the only WIiWare game that has DLC. The initial purchase of 500 points will escalate up to 2′000 points if you’re enjoying yourself.

30. Star Soldier R

Top-down arcade-style shooter, and if you know the type you know the drill. The amount of content is pretty bare-bones, as it’s basically just time attacks. But the replayability is rewarding if you’re a fan of the genre.

31. Tetris Party

We hope you know Tetris. This is a Tetris that has good multiplayer, interesting variants where you do things like create platforms for some guy to climb to the top of the screen or use the tetrinos to make exact shapes like that of an apple. There’s also a balance board mode, and as stated earlier it’s good to have an excuse to pull out the balance board.

32. Vampire Crystals

Vampires used to live peacefully with zombies but now they don’t, and it becomes your problem. Thankfully you get plenty of guns, some so powerful that you end up creating a bullet hell where you’re the one firing them rather than dodging them. It looks simple but the game actually is quite tough. It’s not Cuphead-level but you will fail many times over. With plenty of content and being one of the last WiiWare releases, this title approached the platform’s fullest potential.

33. WarioWare DIY

What sets this apart from the 87 other WarioWare games? The fact that players could make their own minigames, leading to an avalanche of creative, insane, and even NSFW games. Unfortunately the servers are no longer online, but you can still find thousands of fan games online if you look hard enough. The included games are pretty fun too, and if you have the DS version, you can make your own and send them over to your Wii.

34. Zombie Panic in Wonderland

Shooting galleries are perfect for motion controls, but gamers don’t get as many as we deserve. Thankfully this one helps rectify that, with an interesting story and cool comic-book art sequences that keep things moving between all the gunning down of zombies and various giant monsters.

#wiiware #wii #nintendo #luigi

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