#there are so many missing threads that are supposed to connect everyone to everyone

[caramelberzatto]

and there was somethin' bout you // c. berzatto

good evening, my fellow tumblr users. it's been forever. since i've last been active, my whole life has shifted. drastically. the cafe i worked at for the past two years, where i met my two best friends, and where i felt most at home, closed down permanently. i booked a trip halfway across the world, that's coming up in september. i worked on healing myself after a heartbreak that left me untethered and scared and lonely. but it's been a while, and i've found my way back to light and warmth and appreciation of the person that i am. and the urge to write, to create, has sparked within me again. i hope you're still with me. i've missed you all. - clarke xx

a soft carmy ramble below the cut <3

Carmen Berzatto had never been able to forget you, despite the many years it had been since he’d last seen you, heard your voice, felt the warmth of your hand in his. And he’d cursed himself for it sometimes, for living would’ve been so much easier if he didn’t feel so lost, always reaching for someone he knew wasn’t there. But at the same time, there was a certain torturous comfort in falling back on the traces of you when he was spiralling. 

You were just kids; stupid teenagers with big feelings that you felt too young to carry for each other. And the stumble and stutter of words meant everything got lost in translation anyway. It was growing into your bodies and leaning into one another, without ever admitting to the closeness. 

You’d never really had friends, too exhausted by the thought of interacting with others, of putting on a face and playing pretend for the sake of being a part of a crowd. And Carmen’s friends were just extensions of his brother, Michael; the high-and-mighty, infectiously exuberant Michael. But you… you were something new; something he held close to his heart. For him, you’d propped open a door. You’d let him in without really meaning to. But when being in his company felt like floating, what else were you supposed to do? When someone came along and showed you what it was like to breathe without fearing everyone else would notice the rise and fall of your chest, it’s not like you were going to let that go. 

And so began the most meaningful connection you’d ever had. When you spent a summer at camp, he was the one you sent the most letters home to. When he got stuck on an assignment, he’d call you up, and you’d be halfway to the local library with cookies before he could finish what he was saying. And when you’d been each other's firsts, nervous hands fumbling for each other on a cold, autumn afternoon in senior year… Neither of you had spoken of it again, but it had meant everything. To the both of you. But things went on, and that spark, that flare, was never explored; the curse of being a teenager, awkward and not-quite you yet, and unsure of how to communicate.

And, as most things do, high school came to an end. Chances were missed. Threads of connection slipped through fumbling fingers. Carmy landed himself in New York, and you landed yourself in a shitty apartment four blocks from your childhood home. 

Though the memories of the two of you lingered all around. They must’ve lingered because the world knew you’d find your way back to each other.

And you had. Two years ago, at a market by the water. You’d been on the phone to your sister at the time, tugged along by your rambunctious niece while you were trying to pick a good watermelon, and he’d just… been there. Over by a stand selling fresh berries and mangoes, the same stall your niece was headed for.

Wearing a faded navy shirt, the logo for his brother’s sandwich joint on the front, his hair unruly and soft, he’d looked exactly as you’d remembered. But a little older now, grown. Every memory had come rushing back, glueing you to the spot, and you’d muttered an apology as you hung up on your sister, promising to have her daughter home in time for her afternoon nap. 

He turned, then, spotting you, and it was a bit like the movies you’d roped him into watching with you in high school, late at night, after you’d been studying all afternoon. It felt like everything stopped, his breath caught in his throat, and nothing could’ve stopped the smile that bloomed on your face.

And now, two years later, perched on the kitchen counter in your shared apartment, your hands tangled in his hair, he was smiling at you in a very similar way. 

“Okay, okay,” you murmured between gentle kisses that tasted of coffee and maple syrup and love. “Carm, we’ve gotta go or we’ll be late.”

“Don’t want to,” he grumbled, kissing you again, his hand cradling the back of your head. The warmth of him as he stood between your knees radiated through you, and you wanted to curl up in bed with him and never leave. But there was a very excitable eight year-old waiting on you.

“If I’m late to my niece’s birthday, you know my sister will probably murder me, right?”

Carmen huffed out a laugh, finally pulling away, and despite every instinct in your body screaming at you to hold onto him, to keep kissing him, you let him go. He held up his hands in mock retreat, turning away to grab his jacket off the back of one of the dining chairs. “Come on, then.”

He patted your ass as you passed him, grabbing the keys from the dish on the counter. Then his hand was on your wrist, tugging you close, and his lips found yours again. And you were instantly drunk on the sweet, honeyed words of ‘I love you’ that drifted from his mouth. 

Such an easy thing for him to say now, even if only to you, for it had taken almost a decade of wanting to confess it.

#the bear #the bear fx #carmen berzatto #carmy berzatto #jeremy allen white #carmen berzatto x reader #carmy berzatto x reader #carmen berzatto x you #carmy berzatto x you

[boxboxlewis]

for the talented genius @powerful-owl... a wise woman once prompted "Bodyswap but it’s just dick swap! 😈😈😈 You have to figure out the owner of your temporary dick. Also, it responds to its usual owner's brain!" cw for size difference & small dick max

Max wakes up slowly at first, and then all at once: because although his body is heavy and warm under covers, as usual, something isn’t right. Something is different, is differentnewstrangegood—new but juuuuust right—he’s grinding his dick against the mattress, he’s feeling the unfamilar length of it pressed against his stomach, the strange tug of something in the tip that must be a piercing—

He bolts immediately awake, panting, and flips onto his back. And then he lies still for a moment, staring at the ceiling, before curling back on his side and willing himself back into sleep, on the grounds that maybe everything will be back to normal when he wakes up again.

Yeah, it isn’t.

He decides to ignore the situation, for the time being. He gets dressed and walks over to the fridge to get himself a premixed protein shake without thinking any thoughts at all, without even noticing—anything. There’s nothing to see here. And definitely nothing to feel.

He drinks the shake, which takes about two minutes, and then figures he should probably try to man up. Deal with the situation. He gets out his phone and scrolls to his text thread with Daniel, because Daniel is, he’s pretty sure, the only person he knows with a dick piercing. 

Daniel, it turns out, has texted. Many times.

Hey max, how’s things, little out of the blue here but like

Anything weird going on with you, today? Pants-wise?

Hello

Maaaaaaaaaax

[missed call from Daniel Teammate]

Answer me motherfucker

Hey you know it’s really fucking annoying that you never have notifs turned on?

I THINK I HAVE YOUR FUCKING DICK MAX

[missed call from Daniel Teammate]

I know you’re overthinking this cmon just call me

Otherwise I’m going to take drastic measures

Max mentally rolls his eyes. Drastic measures like what, text some dick pics to the press with the caption “Hey anything look different?”? He texts Daniel back, Please calm down you’re embarrassing me. And then, This happens sometimes, right? He thinks about saying more—how it happens between people with a strong emotional connection, how some people say it’s a soulmate thing—but that feels way too mortifying to type out. Also, Daniel probably already knows. Instead he writes KMag and Charles, everyone says, before they got married. Although that maybe is a rumour. He’s about to keep listing grid dickswap incidents—there have been quite a few, more than you’d expect, really—when Daniel calls again. 

Max picks up this time. “Hello, Daniel.”

Daniel is breathing heavily, as if he’s just come back from a run. “Fuck you. How are you so calm about this? You should be the one freaking out and I should be calm. This is bullshit. How has this fucking happened? I want my dick back, Max!”

Max feels a small bloom of hurt in his chest, which he tries to ignore. Of course Daniel wants his dick back. First of all, it’s his dick, the one he’s used to. Secondly, it’s—Max shakes his head to clear it. “Look, Daniel, I of course do not want your stupid dick. So. Come back to Monaco so we can jerk each other off.”

“I—what?”

“So we can jerk each other off,” Max repeats patiently. “That’s how you reverse this, everyone knows that.”

“I guess I’m just a little confused about how we’re supposed to go from teammates and friends to mutual masturbators, but if that’s the solution then sure, let’s go!” Daniel says. He sounds slightly hysterical. “I’ll just get me and my Max Verstappen junk on a plane and get myself over to your boudoir.” He says “boudoir” sarcastically, as if he’s assuming Max’s bedroom is some spare, utilitarian space with no personality. Which is very rude, because actually Max has some of his most important helmets on display there.

“We can wait, if you want,” Max says. “We can see if it just goes away naturally. Only Pierre and Esteban, they are trying this, and they have been waiting now for seven years.” 

“Pierre and Esteban,” Daniel scoffs. “They’re fucking idiots.”

Max leaves a significant pause. Eventually, Daniel says “Fine, I’ll get on a plane.”

While Max is waiting for Daniel, he goes for a run. Running has never really cleared his mind or whatever it’s meant to do, but it’s nice, feeling tired afterwards, feeling his leg muscles aching virtuously. 

It’s in the shower that it happens. Max is very assiduously not looking down—he is staring, in fact, at the fucking ceiling—and he’s not venturing anywhere near the region of his junk. Daniel’s junk. Whatever. But then he feels himself getting hard, and it’s not just—he can feel the pressure of a hand on his dick. The pressure keeps on going, gliding and squeezing, and it’s like getting a handjob from a ghost, except the ghost is Max’s teammate who has Max’s dick. Max shoves his fist as far into his mouth as he can and screams a little bit, and then reaches down and cautiously wraps a hand around himself. He still can’t look, but the feel of it shocks him, fills his mind and sets it buzzing. Daniel’s dick is big, as Max had suspected, but feeling it with his own hand is different than suspecting it. The piercing at the end, right through the tip, that feels different too. When Max tugs it gently his eyes roll back, partly from the feeling and partly from knowing that Daniel is feeling it too, that Daniel, wherever he is, is responding to Max's hand—

Max comes so hard his vision blacks out; when he can see again, he’s still staring at the ceiling.

Once he’s dried off and dressed he texts Daniel. Was that really necessary? Daniel responds with a middle finger emoji. Then Max realises that while he was in the shower Daniel sent a photo. Max stares at the photo with his head swimming, and quickly makes the executive decision that he needs to be sitting down in a non-bathroom environment in order to really appreciate it and make sure that he’s seeing what he thinks he’s seeing. He makes it to the couch on numb legs and sinks into the cushions. 

And when he looks at his phone again, there it is—there’s fucking proof positive of everything Max was trying not to think about. Max’s dick, pink and erect, gripped in Daniel’s hand, the tip barely peeking out. He can feel himself starting to get turned on again, thinking about Daniel touching himself, Daniel’s hand on Max’s dick: except the dick on his body doesn’t respond. Which means Daniel must be getting hard right now, with Max’s dick.

You’re sick, he texts. Daniel replies right away: Yeah yeah c’mon, give me a picture. So Max does, reluctantly, heading back to the bathroom where the biggest mirror is, feeling stupid the whole time. The mirror is still kind of steamy from his shower, which lends a softcore kind of vibe to the scene that Daniel will hopefully think is funny. Max rucks his shirt up, over his nipples, and gets his other hand on Daniel’s dick, at the base. He's hard again, can feel the ghost-strokes of Daniel touching himself, and he looks—he looks pretty good, he thinks. Then he realises that his pose leaves him without a hand to take the photo. He takes his shirt off and tries again, and sends the pic to Daniel before he can think too much about it. Daniel responds with a row of flame emojis, which should maybe be off-putting but just makes Max crack up.

They jerk off two more times before Daniel gets to the apartment, and Max is starting to feel familiar with the shape of Daniel’s dick, the heft of it, where it’s sensitive, what to do with the piercing. When the man himself arrives Max feels ready. “Daniel! Come in,” he says, and can hear how oddly formal he sounds, as if the undoing of a dickswap is some grand social occasion. 

He leads Daniel into the living room, and then before he can chicken out, he asks the question that’s been nagging at him since the morning. “Daniel, why did you straightaway think it was my dick?”

Daniel gets the mildly electrocuted expression he gets sometimes when he thinks a situation is about to get awkward. “Did I?” he says. “Think that?”

Max flicks him in the ribs. “You texted me about eight hundred times,” he says. “I assume you did not also send those messages to anyone else on the grid, but I don’t know your life. Maybe you did.”

“Ah, no, you got me,” Daniel says. “I guess I just, uh. Suspected, maybe?” He clears his throat. “Because of, just, like. Uh. And like, people say it’s always like someone you’re close to, right, so like—”

Max cuts him off. It’s embarrassing for Daniel, hearing him dance around trying not to say I thought you had a small dick, so when I woke up with a small dick I assumed it was yours. “Okay, enough,” Max says. “Thank you Daniel, that is a great explanation that definitely is very plausible.” Daniel makes a protesting noise, but Max powers on. “Before we swap back I anyway have something I want to ask you. You do not have to say yes, it is not—I will not mind, if you say no. I will understand.”

He looks at Daniel, to make sure Daniel is listening. Daniel doesn’t look electrocuted anymore: he’s half-smiling, eyes warm, so. That’s good. “Yeah, Maxy, I got you. What’s your question?”

Max takes a deep breath, and says, “Before we swap back, can I fuck someone with your dick?”

huge thank you to @lights-out-go for a) organising this and b) helping me take this ficlet from "pile o' words" to "pile o' words i can post on tumblr" 💖

DON'T MISS: previously, on emfest! @officialmood's soulmates masterpiece and @onadarklingplain's scholarship in the key of alpha toto/omega george!

#emfest2023 #my fic #rbr era #maxiel #mv33 #dr3

[syrahbat]

Knowledge of Another : Chapter One

Here's the first chapter of my Gale/Tav fanfic, Knowledge of Another! It's my very first fanfic ever, so it's been quite the exciting journey. It's getting close to the end now, so I thought I'd share an excerpt, in case you too are a Bard who is in love with Gale and wished for so many more delicious smutty romantic interludes during the main plot of BG3.

I hope so very much that you enjoy! You can read the rest of the fic here!!! 🔮💜✨

____________________________________________________________

It had to be perfect.

The Wizard of Waterdeep was setting up his tent under the fading sun, the commotion of everyone chattering, building fires and making friends filling the air around him. It hadn’t been long since a delicate pair of hands had soothed the arcane portal and pulled him back into Faerûn, nor long since the owner of that delicate pair of hands had connected their minds, flooding him with the knowledge of another so intimate and full that he could scarcely remember the last time a book or story had immersed him so.��

The knowledge of another, he thought, his brow furrowing as he continued dancing his hands in front of him, spectrals of Weave pouring from his fingers and brushing against the bits of his tent like the glistening threads of spider’s web. It disconcerted him, left him shaken. Not because he felt that it was an invasion of his privacy, but merely because it was a feeling so foreign to him that it upset the balance of his reality.

She had not given him the knowledge of another. He knew that now. He supposed he knew it then, but what is a young man to do; how can he miss what he has no concept of. He didn’t know to feel its absence, and after all these years, all this time desperately trying to fill a void he had no clue was there, seeking something he didn’t know she wasn’t giving him, he finally understood what exactly The Orb had found purchase on within his soul. 

The Orb merely took place of the void of knowledge he already had, unbeknownst to him. Though it hungered for magic just as he had done his entire life, Gale was beginning to craft a framework of thought that deeply unsettled him.

How full he felt, after experiencing the knowledge of another. 

“I think it’s a tent,” Tav said jokingly, sidling in next to him. “A very fine tent. The best tent here.” 

Gale turned to look at her, drinking her in without a thought, and smiled brightly. She returned the smile, a crease at her eyes, shining with mischief.

“In fact,” she continued, pushing her elbow against his arm playfully, “I might just be forced to write a ballad about how perfect this tent is.” 

Perfect. Curious, he thought. Curious word choice.

“Ah, well you see, a Wizard is only as good as his lodging.” Gale mused, finally releasing the power of the Weave and watching the effervescent shape of the tent become plain in even this beautiful sun’s glow. His shoulders dropped slightly. 

She was giving him a studying look when he turned to her, placing his hands behind his back and taking a step away. 

“If you ever desire to sleep under a better structure than whatever…” He gestured to her tent, slightly lopsided and clearly raised in a rush, “that is; I am ever at your service.” He bowed sardonically. 

She brought a hand to her heart dramatically, her mouth dropping open with shock. “Wizard, you wound me. I worked very hard on that structure, and not everyone can be as talented and brilliant as you. My talents simply lie elsewhere.” 

He couldn’t help the grin that took over his face, knowing his eyes were dancing with a light he was unable to hide.

“Mmm, yes, I’ve heard the mockeries you level at poor unsuspecting Goblins. Who knew one could perish from embarrassment alone.” 

“I’m sure you are well aware that words can be as much a weapon as fire or blade.” She raised her head in a display of pride that made something burn within him. 

“Remind me to never get on whatever side you deign to be deserving of such viciousness.” He said pointedly, turning back to look at the tent he had tried to perfect. “I suppose this will do.” 

“My Gods, Gale,” her tone was warm with familiarity, “it’s just a tent.” 

She placed a hand on his shoulder beaming a grin, before heading back to the fire and the chattering of their other companions. He heard a cork pop on a wine bottle as he turned back to the tent, hands clasped behind him tightly. He took a breath, and bent under the flap as he stepped inside. 

It was, as she said, just a tent. He climbed in, fluffed and stacked his simple pillows on the bedroll, and began to remove his travelling robes. He knew it was silly, meaningless, stupid, to care so much about it. He supposed he chalked it up to being a recluse, missing the luxuries of his home in Waterdeep, missing Tara and her company. He felt the loneliness bitterly here, the discomfort of a bedroll on the cold ground and only books Tav had found on the journey so far to keep him entertained. How many times could a man read On Death and Resurrection before lapsing into an academic atrophy? 

He suspected it was eight.

Lowering himself onto the bedroll, he put his arms behind his head and gazed up at the low roof of his home for the night, and for the foreseeable future. Raising his hand, he whispered lowly and gestured wide, as a sparkling veil of a starry night inked itself across the ceiling. It was no Waterdeep harbour, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

And though it was a night sky, stars burning in an ever living universe, the beauty he regarded only served to remind him of her eyes, her delicate hands, and her vicious mockery.

#gale of waterdeep #gale dekarios #fanfiction #ao3 fanfic #gale bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #bg3 fanfiction #gale fanfic #gale of waterdeep fanfic #fluff and smut and angst #two dorks falling in love #bard tav #baldurs gate tav #wizard / bard

[casanovawrites]

FROM season 1 sentence starters

you're like a poem. you know that? you make everything around you beautiful. 

we can't take any chances.

this, unfortunately, is going to be the worst conversation of your life.

do you believe in monsters?

if you climb high enough, even a nightmare can look like a dream.

i can’t find any more bodies. i just can’t.

let me go first. it doesn’t have to be you.

they know there’s only so many places we can go.

i feel like i’m hanging on by a thread here.

what are you looking at?

denial is a major part of our family tree.

i wish you had the luxury of grief, but you don’t.

people are scared. the edges are starting to fray.

you need to be the one to tell them it’ll be okay.

you need to use me as a punching bag? need a place to put all that anger, that regret? fine.

i don’t just sit around accepting the world as it is.

you’re gonna be the hero.

this is how we go home.

if you’re in that much of a hurry to fucking die, you should just go and do it.

you have no idea what it’s like being smarter than everyone you know.

you’re connected to this place in a way no one else here is.

it’s about celebrating survival. reminds me that anything is possible.

you need to get over it and be the scary hard ass we all know you to be.

the second we stop looking for answers, that’s when we lose. 

get the fuck out of here before people start thinking we’re friends.

i’m gonna say something to you that might make you hate me, and if it does, that’s okay.

i found something. something i think is going to help us.

there’s no way you could’ve survived out there. not if it was real.

it’s time to wake up. it’s time to wake everybody up.

i’ve been trying to find the courage to say something.

can you kiss me?

we could’ve died. there’s no way we could’ve survived that.

i’ve just been so angry for a really long time.

it wasn’t your fault.

i’m sorry. i’m so sorry. i’m sorry.

i just didn’t want you to leave without saying goodbye.

this is not goodbye, okay? you hear me? this is not goodbye.

just come back.

we’re in a tight spot. no one is going to pretend otherwise.

the least we can do is keep ourselves together.

we’re a community, so we can do this together.

how do we go back now? after the things we’ve seen, the things we’ve done?

how do we go home? we’re not the same people anymore.

this is the only place we’ve ever known together.

i’ll go find a sharper knife. this one’s just taking forever.

how do you know we won’t just walk and walk and walk back to where we started?

i’ve seen this town make good people do bad things.

let’s just keep moving.

when we get home, i’m gonna call my friends. i’m just gonna call them.

when we get home, i want to just be happy.  

we’re all going home, right? we don’t need this place anymore.

it’s not a home anymore. it’s a fucking tomb.

if we push too hard, then something will push back.

i can hear them! i can hear them!

this isn’t some grade school softball game where everyone gets a participation medal.

you wanna know what i’m grieving? i’m grieving the loss of what we almost made this place.

this place almost felt like something that could work.

you can’t see what this place is gonna become when you fail.

what are we supposed to do? sit here and not try to go home?

at least here, the monsters have the decency to show you what they are.

it was more than that. it was special.

all those people from different places, different lives, living together. there was something. there was joy. 

you have to be prepared for the fallout if it doesn’t work.

i think you’re gonna find there’s more to miss about this place than you thought.

that kinda day, huh?

she knows how to wield an ax. i’ll give her that.

i’m not gonna stand here and pretend that it was a great day.

i just need you to promise me, if it falls apart, if you fall apart, just promise me, you’ll come to me.

you have no idea how much pressure it is to be the one everyone assumes can just fix an unfixable problem.

you’re a pretty bad liar.

what’s got you feeling so optimistic?

what if we were supposed to come here?

back home, we never talked anymore. now we’re together again. like, we’re really together. 

i wasn’t sure you’d wake up.

there are things out here that are worse than the monsters.

i’m sure you would’ve figured it out eventually.

where do you think we are?

i don’t even remember anymore who i was before i saw you.

i don’t wanna find out who i am without you.

you are the love of my life. and we could be anywhere, i mean we could be here, we could be there, we could be anywhere in the world, but it would not matter, because you are my home. and i would really like to be yours.

you brought me out here because you thought i could help. look where we are.

doing this is our part.

there is no way out. is there? 

this fucking place! fucking makes you think that you’re doing the right thing, it gives you hope, then it takes it away like it’s feeding on your pain.

you want my pain? you want my fucking pain? come on, get it.

we have to keep moving. towards the light. we have to get towards the lights.

the voice you heard in your head is right, we’re gonna die out here.

i know how offensive you find my proclivities! 

i don't know what to do. and that really freaks me out.

i don’t feel guilty.

we’re going in the right direction. we just need to keep going.

if you don’t go, we are both going to die.

this place is angry now.

#* #sentence starters #sentence prompts #rp sentence prompts #rp ask meme #ask meme #ask memes #meme #open sentence starters #from sentence starters

[tarisilmarwen]

Rebels Rewatch: “Droids In Distress”

Wacky droid hijinks and nostalgia abound, let’s get into it.

Now, this is an episode that for a different show would have been used as the pilot.  It’s got all the earmarks of a weekly serial testing out its tone and character dynamics, while acting with confidence like those are already established.

Note that this isn’t a bad thing.  It reminds me most of Teen Titans’s early Season One, there’s a certain kind of charm and innocence and an earnest attempt at convincing you, “Don’t worry, this will be a FUN show! :D”

Frankly starting off lighter eases you better into the world and characters so when things do get more serious and dramatic later you’re more invested because you’ve had more time to get endeared to the characters.

See also, Star Trek: Lower Decks, which had the audacity to end its Season Two on a cliffhanger, YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE MY SILLY COMFORT SHOW, YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE STAKES!

Anyway we open rather appropriately In Media Res with the notes of the TIE Fighter Attack track from A New Hope, which auditorily puts us right into that OT headspace. :)

Once again the tight writing very quickly establishes the situation: The Ghost is on the run from the Empire, in need of cash flow and supplies, they have to occasionally run weapons for someone shady, Ezra is Force Sensitive, and--perhaps most importantly for the later story arc--Kanan has been avoiding training him.

Boy I miss concise exposition like this.  So much story is already set up in some densely-worded dialogue.  (Not just Kanan’s reluctance to teach Ezra but also Zeb’s misgivings with working for Vizago given the uncertain nature of the weapons he deals in.)

Also don’t think I missed Ezra being most concerned with the fact that they are running out of food.

RIGHT SO I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW GIDDY I WAS THE FIRST TIME I WATCHED THIS BECAUSE ICKLE MINI TARI LOVED THE STAR TOURS RIDE AT DISNEYWORLD.  Seriously it was one of my top favorites.  Never rode the updated version (haven’t been back to DW in years) but the classic version was iconic for me.

And this is a cameo/Easter Egg that actually works in context because you don’t need to know anything about this droid pilot, he works organically in the story as he is without any background knowledge required.

Unlike many of the other cameos we could name in certain other Star Wars shows *COUGH*.

Threepio and Artoo on the flipside... Okay, I’m not quite sure how to articulate that it still works better than in aforementioned other shows but it does.  Again Imma chalk it up to, they just fit more organically into the plot and around these characters and also advance the bigger plot by introducing a thread that suggests the crew is going to be connected to the larger Rebellion, which pays off this Season Finale... instead of being a sideshow diversion disconnected from the main characters that may or may not make another appearance down the line sometime.  Maybe.

Side note of appreciation for Chopper gleefully taking right to his role of Public Nuisance Annoying Everyone (But Especially Ezra).  I don’t think there was much acting involved for either of them lol.

XD

Still love how bouncy and dynamic the character animation was these early episodes.

Has that fun kid-friendly feel that lures you into a false sense of security lol.

Our first hint at Sabine’s backstory, cleverly hidden as part of her cover story.

I kinda like that Garel is close enough to Lothal that a very small shuttle is able to just ferry people back and forth in like twenty minutes.

Lol Zeb whapping Sabine because she’s laying it on too much.

One of the nice things about having low-stakes plots in the beginning is it allows room for lovely little breathing scenes like this one with Ezra leaping across the rooftops.  It’s not plot necessary, we could have easily just cut to him arriving at the other hanger, but it’s just... pleasant.

There’s some nice mood music (a very slowed down mellow Main Titles theme), some very mild action, and we feel a satisfied little thrill along with Ezra seeing just what he’s capable of already just knowing that he’s Force Sensitive.  This is the first time he’s consciously tapped into the Force and it’s just a little bit exciting.

Just look at his face gkjhgkjh I’m so proud of him and all he did was some parkour.

Subtle animation detail appreciation: Zeb visibly shudders backing away from the crates.

I love Threepio throwing some indignant shade Sabine’s way with his “[...] if she is an amateur.” line.

We know Zeb is the muscle  of the group, that’s already established, but it’s still obvious in the voice acting and Zeb’s intense tossing of the Stormtroopers that he’s more agitated than normal.

Threepio being oblivious and fussy as per usual.

Please enjoy the Fridge Horror of knowing that the Empire was planning to mass-produce T7 ion disruptors and probably not for their starship-crippling properties. :)

Ezra immediately backing off the hostility once he knows why Zeb’s upset. <333  He’s such an empath I love him.

See this is why I don’t understand people who hate Ezra.  Was he a little bratty this episode?  Sure, but also see how he lets that drop out of compassion once he understands the situation.

Also Ahsoka came onto the stage waaaaaaaaay brattier and a smug know-it-all to boot, just admit y’all hate the kid-appeal characters and refuse to let them be stupid and dumb in order to have some character growth.

Hera’s frustration when she hears that Kanan hasn’t been training Ezra. <333

Lol and love how there’s an immediate follow-up in the next scene.  I want to see the beginning of that conversation.

Pryce gets name-dropped here for the first time.  Predictably Threepio is making a muck of things.  See, this is why no one tells you anything or trusts you with the mission Threepio.

Ezra has clearly dealt with underworld figures like Vizago before lol.

I do wonder if all of this is just a massive Batman Gambit by Artoo, because he seems to be completely unfazed by anything that’s happening.

The AT-DPs get quite a bit of focus in this series and I think their ubiquitous presence in the first season preps us mentally for the heavy upgrade that is the AT-ATs.

Love this shot tracking Hera as she shoots at the AT-DP, very frenetic with the blocking and the camera movements.

The duel between Kallus and Zeb is honestly better than some of the lightsaber fights don’t @ me you know it’s true.

This music cue when they launch the disruptors is a unique one, particular to only this moment I think, but I like it.

Aaaaaaand the first of many times Kallus gets yeeted with the Force.  Lol.

See Sequel Trilogy, this is the general powerset of someone who only just learned they were Force Sensitive and hasn’t had any training. /salt

Kanan seems very surprised and amazed by what Ezra can already do without any formal guidance.  This’ll play into his insecurities later, his whole thing about how Ezra’s powers are growing faster than he can teach.

I think it’s safe to assume Ezra had a lot of latent natural talent that he’d been unconsciously using this whole time that just needed a tiny push to begin manifesting in earnest.

Again, though, Sequel Trilogy, all we unlock is basic shit like Force Sense, Force Jump, and Force Push.

Not surprising Kanan went to fetch Zeb, he’s about the only one even close to Zeb’s height lol.

Kanan looks so proud of Ezra, aww.

More lovely work with the subtle expressions; Kanan’s smile fades and his eyes drop a bit.  Like he realizes, “Oh boy, now I gotta face all my inadequacies and problems.”  Love it.  Love that it’s episode two and we’ve already established so many of the upcoming character arcs.

Hi Bail!

Luke’s theme closing us out once again, apropos given where we are and who we’re with.

For our first “official” non-pilot episode, this is a solid entry.  As I said, establishes a whole bunch about the characters and their relationship dynamics and upcoming arcs and plot points.  It’s also very fun, sets the general early tone of “Adventure and excitement but not too much... yet.” and the animation continues to impress in small ways, mostly the dynamic shot choices, camera angles and movements and the subtlety of emotion displayed on faces.

Coming back to this one always just leaves me with a warm feeling like, “Aahhh yes, back when everything was innocent.”  It definitely plays up the nostalgic feeling of the OT, which was always one of Rebels’ strengths as a show.

Next time, one of the many “filler” episodes that come back in an important and unexpected way in the finale.  You’d think, given the number of Avatar: The Last Airbender alums on the project, fandom would know better than to discount the seemingly light-hearted low-stakes disconnected episodes. XD

#star wars #star wars rebels #rebels rewatch #liveblog #ezra bridger #space dad and his precious pumpkin child #agent kallus #soundtracks #music

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Oops! All linkdump!

Tonight (May 2) I’ll be in Portland at the Cedar Hills Powell’s with Andy Baio for my new novel, Red Team Blues.

On May 5, I’ll be at the Books, Inc in Mountain View with Mitch Kapor; and on May 6/7, I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest.

In 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term “web-log” to describe his website “Robot Wisdom,” where he logged his journeys around this exciting new digital space called “the web.” Two years later, Peter Merholz shortened “web-blog” to “blog”:

https://peterme.com/archives/00000205.html

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this dump to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/02/wunderkammer/#jubillee

Two years after that, I started blogging, when Mark Frauenfelder made me a guest-editor on Boing Boing:

https://boingboing.net/2001/01/13/hey-mark-made-me-a.html

I’ve now been blogging for 23 years, nearly half my life, a near-daily discipline that forms the spine of my writing practice. I take everything that seems important, and, in summarizing it for strangers, embed it in my own mind, and then find connections that turn into essays, speeches, stories and novels:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46

For the past 3+ years, I’ve been blogging solo on my Pluralistic.net project. It started off as a “link-blog,” in the Robot Wisdom vein — short hits summarizing interesting things:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/

But over the months and years, it’s turned into a place where I write long essays, sometimes six or seven per week, trying to pull on all those threads that I’ve cataloged over the decades, weaving them together into big, thoughtful pieces, often to great and gratifying notice and even a little fanfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

But I miss the linkblogging! For the past 14 months, Pluralistic has featured a little section called “Hey look at this,” where I post three short links, bare-bones pointers to interesting stuff online:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#linkdump

These links pile up in my todo.txt file, ebbing and flowing. Some days, I’ve got nothing for the section. Some days, I’ve got a backlog. These days, I’ve got a massive backlog — enough links for many, many editions. I am drowning in linkblog debt, and the interest is compounding. It’s time for a jubilee:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Here, then, is the first-ever Pluralistic Jubilee Linkdump Backlog Bankruptcy!

First up:

“The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small,” Kelsey McKinney’s crie-de-coeur for Defector:

https://defector.com/the-internet-isnt-meant-to-be-so-small

This is part of the enshittification canon that includes Cat Valente’s unmissable “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

McKinney’s money-shot:

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing — a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.

This doesn’t just make me want to stand up and salute — it makes me want to build a barricade (or a guillotine).

On to “Reddit Data API Update: Changes to Pushshift Access,” a Reddit thread where the volunteer mods are discussing another enshittification move: Reddit’s pre-IPO API shut-down that has broken all the mod tools that volunteers use to shovel out Reddit’s Augean Stables, getting rid of spam and catfishing and fraud:

https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/

This isn’t just “stop talking to each other and start buying things” — this is “stop doing billions of dollars in volunteer labor keeping our users safe, and start paying us for the privilege.” Good luck with that, Reddit.

Hey! The Hollywood writers are back on strike! The Guild is a shitkicking, take-no-prisoners, radical union with massive solidarity:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/2/23707813/wga-hollywood-writers-strike-2023-streaming-ai-wages-contract

It’s what let them trounce the talent agencies — hyper-concentrated to just four companies, two owned by private equity ghouls — over a 22 month strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#monopsony

The talent agencies had rigged the system so that instead of getting a 10% commission on the writers’ earnings, they were taking as much as 90% out of every dollar — and were about to make it worse, building their own studios, so they could negotiate with themselves on behalf of their clients. In the same week, 7,000 writers — even the ones who weren’t getting screwed — fired their agents, and demanded a return to the 90/10 split and a ban on agencies owning studios. The agencies say nfw. The writers stayed on the picket line.

There’s a whole chapter on this in Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin’s and my book on creative labor markets and monopoly. One of our sources was David Goodman, who led the strike:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

David hosted our LA launch, where he told us, “We thought the agencies had all the power. We learned that they only had as much power as we gave them. You can make a movie without an agent. You can’t make one without a writer.”

The new strike is about the same thing as the old strike: shifting money from labor to capital. The studios have figured out how to use streaming to avoid paying writers, using gimmicks like shorter seasons and running their own streaming services to dodge the wages the writers are owed. As the union says, the studios “created a gig economy inside a union workforce.”

I live in Burbank, where many of these studios are located. I’ll see you on the picket line.

Sticking with labor for a moment: the Biden administration is investigating the use of bossware — the spyware your boss uses to monitor your driving, keystrokes, web usage, location, hand-movements, facial expressions, even your eyeballs:

https://gizmodo.com/remote-work-surveillance-software-workers-rights-1850392911

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Request for Information solicits your experiences with bossware:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/050123_OSTP_RFI_PREPUBLISH_.pdf

They want to know:

Workers’ firsthand experiences with surveillance technologies;

Details from employers, technology developers, and vendors on how they develop, sell, and use these technologies;

Best practices for mitigating risks to workers;

Relevant data and research; and

Ideas for how the federal government should respond to any relevant risks and opportunities.

If you’re living under bossware’s yoke — say, if your boss has transformed “work from home” into “live at work,” then you know what to do: melt the switchboard!

One more labor story: a reminder that labor rights are a marathon, not a sprint. A group of Amazon drivers won a $30/hour contract through their union, the Teamsters. Even more importantly, the contract lets them refuse to work under unsafe conditions (it’s never just about money):

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/27/23667968/amazon-contractor-delivery-union-teamsters

But there’s a catch: these are Amazon drivers, but they don’t work for Amazon. They drive Amazon-branded vans, specced down to the last rivet by Amazon. They wear Amazon vests. They deliver Amazon packages. But they work for “Delivery Service Partners,” a kind of pyramid scheme created by Amazon that tricks workers into thinking that paying Amazon for the privilege of working for a trillion-dollar company makes them “entrepreneurs.”

Instead, they’re “chickenized reverse centaurs.” “Chickenized” because — like poultry farmers — they are totally controlled by a monopoly buyer that dictates every part of their business to them, dribbling out just enough money to roll over their loans and go deeper into debt. “reverse-centaurs,” because they’re the inverse of the AI theorists’ idea of a “centaur,” that is, a computer-assisted human. Instead, they are human-assisted computers, with their every last move scripted to the finest degree by bossware that they have to pay for:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

Amazon now has the luxury of terminating its contract with the union’s employer — the cutout that allows Amazon to maintain the worker misclassification pretext that these drivers in Amazon vans wearing Amazon uniforms delivering Amazon packages don’t work for Amazon.

Amazon hates unions in ways that are hard for everyday people to grasp. One of the organizers of the union drive has been illegally terminated in retaliation for his labor activism:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/amazon-delivery-owner-says-he-was-punished-for-supporting-union

This fuckery doesn’t mean that union organizing is dead. As Jane McAlevy writes in “A Collective Bargain,” her superb memoir of her union-organizing career, unions started winning the class war when labor organizing was illegal, fighting in the teeth of a rigged legal system. We won then, we’ll win again:

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe

Seeing defeat (seemingly) snatched from the jaws of victory is a major bummer, but a better world is possible. It’s not even complicated — it’s just hard. If you are in precarious housing, or homeless, or if you experience the moral injury of living in a city where your neighbors lack the foundational human right to a home, it’s easy to feel despondent.

But solving homelessness isn’t complicated, it’s just hard. In Finland, they solved homelessness through the simple expedient of giving everyone a home. This didn’t just address the problem of not having a home — it also made incredible progress on the comorbidities of homelessness, like mental health problems and addiction. Turns out, getting sober or getting treatment is a lot easier when you’re not freezing to death on a sidewalk. Whoathunk?

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/how-finland-solved-homelessness

There are many ways to improve our cities. You can (and should) fight for better local government, but there’s always the tantalizing option of taking matters into your own hands. That’s what the Crosswalk Vigilantes do. They research the intersections where cars are killing their neighbors, then they put on hi-viz vests, set out traffic-cones, and install crosswalks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x33yLuJ5slI

If you’re wondering how the forces of bossware, homelessness, and other enshittifying factors came to rule, it’s actually pretty straightforward. 40 years ago, we installed a software patch called neoliberalism (in some regions, this patch was had localized names like Thatcherism or Reaganomics).

40 years later, the patch is an unequivocal failure and now it’s our job to roll it back, despite all the broken dependencies this will trigger. Most of us can see this is true, but not The Economist, which Brad DeLong calls “Neoliberalism’s Final Stronghold” in his Project Syndicate article:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economist-writers-last-true-believers-in-neoliberalism-by-j-bradford-delong-2023-04

De Long’s catalog of the recent bizarre, delusional work in The Economist embodies Upton Sinclair’s maxim, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Every Naomi Kritzer story is a fucking delight and “Better Living Through Algorithms,” just published in Clarkesworld, is no exception:

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/

Few writers are better at inhabiting the uncomfortable space between recognizing the delights of the internet without flinching away from its horrors. This one is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.

If you’re just discovering Kritzer, check out “So Much Cooking,” an eerily prophetic 2015 story in the form of a series of perky cooking-blog posts amidst a global pandemic. It got a much-deserved second life during lockdown’s peak sourdough moment:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/17/pack-of-knaves/#so-much-cooking

And then try her at book length! “Catfishing on Catnet” is Kritzer’s book-length adaptation of her Hugo-winning short story “Cat Pictures Please.” It’s an AI caper about cat memes, community, and the anti-enshittification underground:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/19/naomi-kritzers-catfishing-on-the-catnet-an-ai-caper-about-the-true-nature-of-online-friendship/

Speaking of science fiction: I’ve got a new novel out. Red Team Blues is an anti-finance finance thriller, a heist book about cryptocurrency and forensic accounting with a 67-year-old hero, Marty Hench:

http://redteamblues.com/

The book came out last week and I am still in the nailbiting interregnum where its fate is unknowable — will it be another bestseller, or fizzle? Thankfully, the reviews have been stunning. Mitch Wagner calls it “the most exciting technothriller about a 67-year-old accountant you’ll read this year”:

https://mitchw.blog/2023/04/25/warning-cory-doctorows.html

Mitch ruminates some on the distinctive way I’m handling Hench’s aging process in this book and its two (at least sequels). Reading other peoples’ insights into one’s own work is a wild experience. I mean, it’s nice when a reader notices something you worked hard to put in there, and frustrating when a reader imagines something that definitely isn’t there.

But the best thing is when a reader notices something that you didn’t consciously put in there, but which is undeniably there, and also very cool. In his Locus review, Paul DiFilippo homes in on the way that Marty Hench is totally reliant on his friends and comrades to get out of hot water:

https://locusmag.com/2023/04/paul-di-filippo-reviews-red-team-blues-by-cory-doctorow/

 Marty is besieged and almost helpless without the aid of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. He is no go-it-alone superman, but rather an individual tied into a network of humanity, relying on the goodness and altruism of his fellows for survival.

This is so right. Marty is no great man of history — he is part of a polity, a collective of people from all walks of life who try hard to help each other. Call it solidaritypunk. Also, Paul opens his review with “I can’t possibly say enough good things about Cory Doctorow’s new novel.” I mean, who can complain about that?

I was also very gratified by Henry Farrell’s Crookedtimber review, which says some very nice things about the way I work in technical detail, and suggests that this technique is one that all kinds of technical experts, policy wonks and scientists could learn from:

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/04/27/red-team-blues-and-the-as-you-know-bob-problem/

Which makes Matt Green’s review, where the eminent cryptographer digs into the cryptographic technical details of the book, especially delicious. Green is a brilliant scientist and science communicator, and he says I get it right, and do it well:

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2023/04/24/book-review-red-team-blues/

One of the first reviews to hit the web came from Matt Haughey, AKA “Metafilter Matt,” who called it “a ‘ripped from the headlines’ romp”:

https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2023/04/25/red-team-blues-is-a-fun-ripped-from-the-headlines-romp/

Matt’s fellow PDXer and olde timey blogger, Andy Baio, called it “a wild ride”:

https://waxy.org/2023/04/cory-doctorows-red-team-blues-is-out-now/

Andy is my host at tonight’s book signing in PDX, at the Powell’s in Cedar Hills:

https://www.powells.com/book/red-team-blues-martin-hench-1-9781250865847?partnerid=33241

As I type these words, I am sitting in a window-seat on Alaska Air, en route to Portland for that event. I am wearing slip-off shoes, a jacket with pockets of sufficient volume to store my watch, wallet and belt, and socks that I don’t mind exposing to a dirty airport floor. As I shuffled through the TSA checkpoint an hour ago, I found myself looking on the beleaguered “officers” who were patting people down with pity and even a little sympathy.

The TSA is an abomination. A boondoggle that doesn’t make aviation safer, lights billions on fire in lost productivity, wages and capital equipment. Its legion of underpaid, miserable workers invade the privacy and even sexually assault millions of Americans every day, and have been at it for decades without any sign of stopping or even slowing down.

The agency is now 20 years old, and it just keeps getting worse, finding new ways to make America hate it. Reading “The Humiliating History of the TSA,” Darryl Campbell’s giant reckoning in The Verge was a wild ride, and a reminder that while most of us only interact with the TSA’s awful, inexcusable policies a couple times a year, TSA workers live with it every day:

https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-security-theater-homeland

Before I close, please let us have a moment to acknowledge the passing of Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian music legend, who has just died at 84. He will be missed:

https://www.joeydevilla.com/2023/05/01/r-i-p-gordon-lightfoot/

All right, it’s time to hit publish on this linkdump, but before I go, a couple of absolutely lovely little webtoys and grace-notes for you to take away:

Womprat (the font you’re looking for) is the world’s greatest Star Wars font collection:

http://womprat.xyz/

And finally, Tumblr, now owned by WordPress parent company Automattic, is striving mightily to reverse decades of enshittification from Yahoo and Verizon. They’re leaving very heavily into listening to their users, paving the desire-paths and putting the community ahead of any other priority.

One place where that is paying unexpected dividends is their deeply weird little merch store, where you can buy up to 24 blue checkmarks to appear on your posts (they sell in pairs at $8). Even better: they’re now selling a 3D printed, light-up, Tumblr-themed Dumpster-Fire:

https://shop.tumblr.com/product/tumblr-dumpster-fire-3d-print/

The dumpster-fire was hoisted from a community member, who made their own, sent it to management, and struck a bargain to sell them through the store. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you make sarsaparilla when life gives you SARS.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A page of comic book 'small ads.']

#pluralistic #hey look at this #web-log #linky linky #bricolage #linkdump #linkblogging

[constantvariations]

V9C8

I cannot believe I’m awake when the episode drops holy shit. I’m also drunk af bc it’s my weekend off so I might not be as sharp as I’m usually am (not) but guess we’ll see lol. Also the devil works hard but pirates work harder. Bless them yardee hars yo ho

Post Ep: uhh I genuintely dunno what to say here :/ MKEK fucked over literally the only aspect of v9 i liked so i guess imma rot or smth idk

Genuinely funny (by which I mean what the absolute fuck) that the warning does not, in fact, warn the viewer of fucking anything. Reminds me of the conversation in Criminal Minds where the unit receives a bomb threat and have to wait for it to explode because sending out a general bomb alert would halt the entirety of the country in a panic. Wasn’t there a tiktok about this exact thing? One that went liek “TRIGGER WARNIGN! TRIGGER WARNING!“ but never told you wh at the warning was? Feels like this shit

Back at it again with this pov shit? With the hentai panting? Why is it always with the hentai panting???

“Why did you shout at everyone like that?” Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Little is supposed to be like... a child? I guess? in the Wonderland spectrum of things, so them not knowing what a mental breakdown looks like is both in character and entirely unhelpful in the narrative, considering how easily Ruby brushes off the inquiry

This is probably the most tolerant Ruby’s voice acting has been in the last many seasons. It’s not high and nasally enough to scrape my skull!

Not gonna lie, having Ruby finally break down against the shittiest of tree textures is so fucking funny I can’t take this seriously. It looks like she’s wailing into a painted wall

“If you’re going to stay with me, you’re going to end up dead, too.” Ruby, the only dead people that you supposedly gave a shit about are Penny and Pyrrha. You don’t know about Clover or Ironwood, you definitely didn’t give a shit about that Forrest guy from V7, and it’s still up in the air if you know about Penny 2.0. You haven’t even mentioned Qrow, your father, or the rest of ORNJ, so what the fuck are you referencing here? Your mother, whom you only started being compromised about 2 seasons ago? Big fuckety whoop, no one cares

Ohhhh noooo not the shithead mouse character being saddddd and left behinddddd whateverr shall we doooooo

Aight what’s with the butterfly thing. If it’s supposed to symbolize Summer Rose in some way, it was never foreshadowed and only the barest of threads (butterflies being pollinators of flowers) would connect this shit. There’s a difference between subtlety and bullshit

Uhhhh did Ruby stumble into a casino house of Neo? Is this Neo backstory we’re getting into? Honestly, that’s way more intriguing than anything our heroes have going on

OH SO NOW RUBY CAN USE HER FUCKING SCYTHE WITHOUT GETTIN TRIGGERED

Why did they have to drag Roman into Maya? Didn’t they do him dirty enough by having him be eaten by a stupid grimm? Is this even the same voice actor? It’s not as... sultry

WHY YOU GOTTA DO PYRRHA DIRTY LIKE THIS WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH HER MOUTH THERE’S NO TEXTURE ON HER CLOTHES WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK

Holy shit the animation of Roman jumpin on the table is sending me into the fuckign statosphere fucking hlep

Can’t even have a normal transformation animation between scythe to snipe it’s gotta be a spinny bullshit thing ugh. Take me back to episode 1 I miss that shit

Who is voicing Roman there’s no way this is the original VA Imma strnagle this bithc

“But we all remember how that ended.” Is this based on actual events or what Neo has interpreted? This entire scene has been nothing but bullshit so far, and not even the fun kind that Roman used to produce

“You still blame me for what happened to Torchwick?” Bitch what the absolute fuck makes you think that? What clues could you possibly have that Neo blames you specifically when there are so many random people at this table? It’s not like you’ve ever claimed to be responsible for any of these peoples’ deaths, so why is this the fucking conclusion you make? Other than having writer’s clairvoyance of course

Okay, despite not knowing at the moment what it means, I do like the detail of Roman not stepping on the teacup before but once shit gets real he demolishes it. Still don’t like how ugly he is though. Leave my dead gay son alone

I don’t know if I’ve said it before but I fucking HATE the eyeshadow on the character in Maya. Why is Neo’s fucking mint green? She’s NEO-FUCKING-POLITIAN WHY IS THERE FUCKING GREEN IN HER GODDAMN COLOR PALLETE WHEN IT’S FUCKIN WHITE BROWN AND PINK

“I’m going to enjoy watching you break.” Does Neo not have any sort of contact via her clones or whatever? Did she not see how helpless Ruby was last episode to her Jabber? Because it was very heavily implied she knew when that one turned into her before shattering. Neo didn’t have to do shit to make Ruby break, her so called friends were doing that better than Neo ever could Also, the smiles on everyone’s faces as they say this is 100% me when I write my characters going through some fucked up shit. Neo should’ve gone into theater and literally none of this would have happened lmao

It’s uhhhhhh kinda telling that Yang is the first to stop and bitch about Ruby’s behavior. “How could she jsut run off like that?” damn it’s like your sister knew you ddidn’t give hafl a flying fuck about her and dipped Yang OHMYGOD YANG BEING PISSED THAT RUBY DIDN’T TALK TO THEM I’M FUCKING WHEEZING Girl you were so busy being buried in the pussy you didn’t notice your own sister having a full ass breakdown. I do not feel sorry for you “She could’ve just talked to us” like you talked to her after you lost your arm? Oh, wait, YOU DIDN’T FUCKING DO THAT YANG. You literally told her to LEAVE YOU ALONE. Ain’t that a bitch, huh

“We say things like ‘we believe and you’ and ‘we can count on you’” holy shit this is smth I would expect from the yt exercise gurus I watch after work shifts not from my close personal friends this is so fuckign funny

“It’s not like we’re asking her to be perfect” well mf did you ever, idk, COMMUNICATE THAT. Because, lmee tell you as someone who WAS expected to be perfect at all times, that shit be damaging as fuck. I can’t even let typos happen in funny instances without a voice in my head screaming to fix them

Oh great we get the generic meandering vocals during a pvp platform fight. Do they write these lines knowing they’ll be translated into a game soon? There’s no way “I was the best and brightest Beacon had to offer” comes off naturally otherwise

Ruby literally clambered onto the only structure in the room for defense? Girl at this point you are asking to die lmao

AND HER AURA SHATTERS AT THAT MEASLY DROP I AM FUCKING SOBBING JUST KILL THE BITCH AND BE DONE WITH IT

“Just like you were too late to save me at the Vytal festival.” Bitch that literally didn’t matter shit since you came back in V7. You’re literally wearing your V7/8 outfit. Shut the absolute fuck up you fucking waste of potential and hair space goddamn

“Can you imagine what it’s like to be failed time and time again by someone who meant the world to you” oh like Oz? The guy you demonized for the last few seasons? The guy who was roasted alive by his wife after she butchered their FOUR FUCKIGN CHILDREN?

Also Ruby does not use her FUCKIGN SEMBLANCE BITHC ARE YOU WANTING TO FUDCKIGN DIE THEN DIE ALREADY GODDAMMIT

Okay I can’t put my finger on it, but the animation of Pyrrha going around her staff to kick Ruby is really fucking weird. Maybe because it seems like her spear is merely resting on the ground instead of impaling it? (My current MC had a similar move so this is important to me lmao)

While I do appreciate the line of “have you stopped to consider if you’re doing more harm than good” coming from Ironwood, it’s not really Ironwood saying it, is it? How the absolute FUCK would Neo know this? Was she witness to what was happening, did she figure it out with context clues, or is this another case of writer clairvoyance?

While I guess it is within canon rights to have Neo know that Oscar is Oz’s new host, I’m very much confused about this particular course of action [turning Ozpin into Oscar] from Neo. When it was her vs Cinder,  Neo just tried to annihilate her, but with Ruby she wants to be Jigsaw??? MKEK learn character consistency I am BEGGING

Listen... I know Ruby is in an emotionally compromised state, and that in any other scenario this would be intensely heart-breaking, but with how contrived this entire scene is, I cannot give half a flying fuck about Ruby’s mental state because it’s too damn funny how easily she falls into Neo’s lap. You walked into this giant ass casino, can’t you just walk out? We ain’t seen you try yet, so either you (and the writers) are too stupid to think of it, or it was shuffled off screen, neither of which are a good look babe. Especially when that damned mouse is in the wings for SOME goddamn reason. Probably the next fucking deus ex mouse

RUBY’S HICCUPS SOUND EXACTLY LIKE MY PRINTER IM FUCKIGN WHEEZING

Okay, so Neo offering the tea makes it seem like that’s a path to the Ascension that everyone’s so gung-ho about, which makes me question why the paper pleasers needed to have a whole ass suicide dam-break to ascend if all they needed was some leaf-tea. I also think I’m putting more thought into this than the fucking writers, which, honestly, is par for the course

WAIT WHOA HOLD UP that was some geometric shit hitting Neo into the fucking next generation. Everything in Wonderland is ~whimsy and frolic~ not Square (tm) so wtf is going on

Goddammit again with this pov shit? Whoever suggested it in the group orgy should be drug out to the street and shot

CURIOUS!!! THE ONLY BITCH THAT MATTERS TO ME even if he is ugly as sin

“(Ruby) I don’t want to be me anymore” well aint that just more gasoline to my theory that Ruby’s gonna try to sacrifice herself to the tree No joke, if RT (and for any dumbass who needs clarification, CRWBY is 100% RT property) tries to imply in any goddamn way that sacrifice is the only way to achieve happiness (especially when it comes to other people’s happiness) I will come to each of their houses and shred their shoes, their paintings, and dismantle their ovens

Altho, no joke, I would much rather prefer Curious as our MC instead simply because they are curious and would potentially be able to ask questions about the world that our actual mains would take for granted, like idk wtf is dust and where does it come from? (Mainly stemming from my hc that dust is the remains of human souls that grimm devour but can’t actually process. Like... how else are you gonna reconcile the dust that made Adam ((the original biblical man)) with the dust of Remnant?)

Oh wow so we’re actually going for the take that the cat was evil the whole time? Is that what we’re doing? No nuance about a creature merely curious about a world outside its own? We’re going full fucking body snatcher?

I absolutely HATE this take on the Curious Cat. MKEK. Give me your addresses so I can beat your asses in the nearest Dennys parking lot. I think you sorely need some lessons in humility. Suck my entire asshole

Is Little really fucking hurt by being slung .2 feet from a tail whip? Fucking really?

And now Neo and Curious are fighting over Ruby’s fate. Someone bring back the forced love triangle of Hunger Games (which was forced by the publishers NOT the writer btw) instead of this shit before I throw myself into a lava pit because honesty it this is far shittier than HG

Wtf are Ruby’s fingers bloodied from? Wielding Crescent Rose for .2 seconds? Girl you have been handling this weapon for fucking years, but spinning it around a couple of times makes her bleed? Bitch play Paganini’s 24 Caprices then say how your fingers feel (For clarification purposes, I only know this because I’m writing characters who know how to play the violin, not because I know violin myself despite how much I fucking want to. V from DMC5 has me in a fucking chokehold lemme tell you-*dies*)

“I have been trying to wear you down for so long” BITCH FUCKING WHERE. WHERE THE ABSOLUTE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN WEARING RUBY DOWN MORE THAN HER TEAMMATES OR GENERAL FUCKING LIFE HAS ALREADY BEEN. BITHC FUCKING WEHRE

“I need to know why my makers left me here.” This makes me think that the Wonderland was structured by the shitheel gods of light and dark. Perhaps the cat was one of their compromises, which is why they’re such a wildcard? But that would make so many questions about the purpose of Wonderland itself and we all know that MKEK can’t be bothered with things like worldbuilding or nuance or anything remotely resembling intelligence (also I read once that black scelera ((the white part of the eye)) is a sign of pure truth/desire so honestly this is incredibly intriguing even though I know it won’t end in anything satisfactory)

NEO STEPS ON LITTLE BEST CHARACTER EVER 10/10

The cup sliding into frame after Ruby’s frantic eyes is literally so fucking funny how do they expect to take me seriously when the framing has the subtlety of a drunk elephant?

Ohmygod the way JWBY ran into the room like PS2 characters I’m fucking wheeazing

Ohmygod this is literally the most flaccid way to force a person into your perspective. Like... Ruby got kicked around a little bit after venturing into an OBVIOUSLY NOT GOOD PLACE and then decides to drink the airport jungle juice right as she’s about to be rescued and not ONE FUCKING CHARACTER WITH RANGED ARSENAL SHOOTS THE MUG OUT OF HER HAND

Honestly there are times where it really hits me how RWBY is a show about plot that isn’t plot instead of characters, and it’s moments like these where I’m like “damn, these people are acting to the script instead of their character huh” Like... it would’ve been something profound if the tea drinking had happened moments prior to their arrival instead of “hey watch me drink this fuckin tea while I reflect in your stupid eyeball instead of you doing literally anything about it despite that the supposed fact that you fucking raised me YANG, so watch me drop into this fuckkin hole I guess”

At the very least I guess the writers realized that Neo’s sole purpose was offing Ruby because... Roman was in her vicinity when he died???

OHMYGOD THE FACT THAT THE PERSON WHO REACTS TEH MOST TO RUBY DRINKGING THE FUCKIGN JUICCE IS CURIOUS IS FINEING SENDING ME

SHES A FUCKING CORN COB BSBE IM FUCNG CRYIGN

Okay, Curious fixating on Neo is one BILLION percent more interesting than anything jrwby has going on. Once again, fuck this main storyline bullshit and give Curious their own damn show

Also, nlg, the facct that Curious is Geometric rather than Organic in terms of design (squares vs spirals for the at home group) is super fucking cool and I desperately need an entire goddamn story abt them pronto. I would absolutely love to see how they interact with Remnant and if they’d be able to have their weird ass powers in the dimension of mortals. That is so much more interesting than literally anything our main crew has proposed in literally years, especially since these dumb mfs aint ever talked about whether or not its okay to kill a whole ass human being for their cause (and faunus are human beings. Fuck off if you think that some shtity tail or ears makes you not a whole ass person)

These mfs cannot let the bee train go for a single second can they? These bitches gotta be hit inot the sam efukcin wall while Weiss gets left all alone. Yknow. Like her family let her be for th emost part. Glad to see that RT’s priority is rainbow capitialism instead of genuine storytelling

Well that is a hentai trope I did not expert to see today. Though the fact that it’s Neo does not surprises me at fuckign all. Mmmm love me some fcking body possession. Great job Rt on making on your female characters be absolutely consumed by a foreign entity that surely isn’t a fucking metaphor for antyhign yknow the fucking facehuggers were’nt a metaphor for shit didnt yha know????

May I say to MKEK, absolutely fuck you for makign the cat an undeniable villain. Can you guys not handle even an iota of moral greyness? Can you not conceive of the idea of a situation that is not merely good vs evil? I ask you to look at the world today, and tell me that evil arises merely because it can rather than as a symptom of a society that refuses to care for all its citizens. Can you not idealize a person who, when pressed to their absolute brink, will take upon violence to ensure that the seeds they sow will bring sustenance to those who come later? For fuck’s sake I’ll take a person who idealizes themselves for morally grey reasons other than what the fuck ever these dipshits are trying to sell to me

Wow aint it so spectaculaar that Curious invaded the one person who wasn’t important to the writers plot adn now our heroes can now kill her without any iota of guilt? Aint that fucking nifty? Aint that fuckign grand? And not even a fucking thought extended to teh idea tha Crurius wanted to see the outside world. THat was their main reason for helping the siblings right? Because Alyx promised them that she would bring him to Remnant? But taht whole plotline is gone because it’s jsut TOO SPICY FOLKS. Can’t have anything interesting in our show about FAIRTYTALES whene we’re in a FAIRTYTALE LAND

Honestly, fuck you MKEK, fuck you RT, fuck you any god that ever alloweed existence to happen. THis is fucking bullshit

It was only through looking up the info on the internet that I learned that Roman Torchwick’s og VA died of colon cancer prior to this volume (2022). Mr Kametz, I hope you rest well and know that your expertise was greatly appreciated. May you know peace in the beyond

#rwde #soorry that i'm like suer fuckign drukn for thos shit but works been albsoulte hell this fuckign weeek #i was like half as drunk whe writing the main shit than the tags so hopefully it all makes sense #either way its a shit fucking episdoe #why the fuck would anyone green lite this hit i have no fucking clue #rt must have no fuckign standards bc if my drun k as shti ass can still laught at your 'emotional scenes' then you got a fuckign problem #my dumb as can cry at jsut about antyhging #i cred at that shthead snape findign lily's body in harry terfly pottery #so if i dont cry at your bullshti then you fucked up in ways that not even god can correct

[ultramori]

What is RTOF?

Ah yes.

Tbh I've been kind of holding off on telling ppl bc I was planning on writing it into a proper fanfiction but tbh I think that idea is far behind me now so I'll just tell you. Huddle around, children! Warning, Basil attacks Sunny multiple times throughout.

RTOF is short for Red Thread Of Fate. In the AU (almost) every person is born with a "thread" that connects them to one other person. These threads aren't physical, but you can see them when you're with your significant or insignificant other. Basically there are two versions of the threads that the universe has accepted; soulmate threads that guide you to your future lover, or enemy threads that guide you to the person you hate the most. Of course the threads don't dictate everything, one could still hate their soulmate or love their enemy. So in the AU, Hero and Mari share a soulmate thread, Aubrey and Kel share an enemy thread, and Basil and Sunny share a thread. What kind of thread you may ask? It's complicated between them because Basil has a crush on Sunny and Sunny doesn't reciprocate said feelings. But Basil is too shy to confess to Sunny and Sunny is to awkward to hang out with him at all so they just never really decide on whether the thread is a good thing or bad thing. Over time they both get obsessed with their ideas, Basil getting more and more in love with Sunny and Sunny getting more and more fed up with his bullshit, that they both fully believe that their opinion on what the thread means is the right one.

Basil eventually realizes that Sunny is becoming a little more distant each day and panics because he feels like Sunny doesn't love him anymore. Basil starts getting tormented with awful nightmares and he starts feeling wary of Hero and Mari. One night Basil freaks the fuck out because all he wants is Sunny to comfort him when he's pulling their relationship apart. Basil gets up and decides he wants to talk with Sunny that night, and goes over to his house in the middle of the night with garden shears just in case a dog tries to attack him or something. Bad choice. When he comes in, Sunny catches him, panics because it looks like Basil broke into his house to harm him, Basil instinctively lies and tells Sunny he was looking for his missing camera — which Sunny was using as a temporary flashlight — and they start fighting over it. During their battle Basil accidentally admits the fact that he's fed up with Sunny not loving him back and Sunny thinks badly of him for it. After some more fistfighting, Basil winds up to stab Sunny with his shears as a defense mechanism, and Sunny quickly takes a photo of him doing so. Sunny threatens to tell their friends that Basil tried to kill him with the photo as evidence and Basil has no choice but to back away in defeat.

The next morning everyone spends some time at Mari and Hero's new house! They eat breakfast, chat together, and it's even pleasant for Sunny because Basil decided not to show up! Hooray, I guess? But then after a while Basil does eventually come, and Sunny is not happy about it. Sunny tries to deliberately avoid Basil, and the latter realizes this. Basil tries to get near Sunny one too many times and Sunny starts shouting at him to go away. Basil tries to play dumb, but he knows exactly why Sunny is acting like this, it couldn't be more obvious. They get into a small argument, Basil threatens Sunny's life on accident again, Aubrey overhears and calls over Hero and Mari, and the three of them ask Basil and Sunny what's wrong. Sunny decides this is the perfect time to show them the photo and so he does, much to Basil's dismay. Basil tries to explain the photo, but his brain is so caught up in the fact that Sunny, his supposed soulmate, just put him in a really bad spot. Mari and Hero were unsure of what they should do, and Aubrey decided that it was best if she kept an eye on Basil.

Later that day Kel comes to the house and hangs out with Sunny, completely oblivious as to what happened while he was gone. Aubrey has to explain it for him, and feels very..... Anxious about what Basil would do to Sunny if the latter didn't try to apologize. It didn't take a genius to figure that Basil's trust in Sunny would be shattered by now, and that would make more reason for Basil to potentially attack Sunny again. Everyone tries to cheer Sunny on to go have a non-violent talk with Basil like a normal person, and Kel decides to come with Sunny just in case shit hits the fan. When they reach Basil's room, he tries to get Kel to leave so that it's only him and Sunny. Kel only goes for a little bit to go talk with his brother, and promises Sunny he'll be right back. While Kel is gone, Basil locks the door with two locks and makes sure he doesn't come back. Huh, I wonder why he did that. Basil and Sunny try to make themselves look as innocent as possible, and Sunny calls Basil out and accuses him of threatening his life multiple times entirely on purpose with an entire thought process behind it. Basil tries to make Sunny understand, but it doesn't work. Sunny hates him and he makes sure he knows. Basil tries to get over his prior accidents, but old habits die hard and he's once again fighting with Sunny.

Kel hears this and quickly grabs the key for the room, but he doesn't have the other one, so he runs downstairs to ask if Mari has the other one. Meanwhile, Sunny punches Basil in the gut so hard that Basil is immediately put into "he's trying to kill me so I gotta kill him first" mode. Basil grabs a clay pot of tansies off of the nearby shelf and smashes it over Sunny's head, making him black out instantly. Kel and Hero bust their way into Basil's room, but it's already too late. Kel flips out, thinking that all of this is his fault, and Hero nearly faints at the sight of a potentially dead Sunny. Everyone else comes and Mari calls an ambulance immediately, while Aubrey drags Basil out of there as fast as possible.

When the ambulance arrives, Mari, Hero, and Kel hop aboard with Sunny. Sunny almost wakes up but then slips back into his coma. Aubrey brought Basil to his house with Polly, and they both reassure him that he isn't completely at fault. Basil 100% wouldn't have done that if he was thinking straight, but everything, the threads, Sunny's judgment, the years of wanting to be with Sunny blurring into some far off dream, got to him and he panicked. It took Sunny a really long time to fully heal, but his friends made sure to visit him frequently. Especially Kel. Kel felt very, VERY bad about that day, solely because he made the mistake of leaving Sunny alone. He wants to forgive Basil for what he did, too, but seeing Sunny in a constant coma really hurt his heart.

Basil one day visited Sunny with the full intention of apologizing for being such a fucking idiot (his words, not mine). But, when Sunny wakes up, he's already forgiven the Basil from his dreams. Sunny just accepts that Basil probably did something he didn't want to, and it took a lot to get past his resentment towards him. And the rest is history! Kind of. Idk I didn't plan that far ahead. Yeah, I know, pretty basic story, but hey! It's the best I can do! Thanks to whoever read all this shit.

#rtof au #long post #anon ask #omori au

[backhurtyy]

penny for your thoughts on stranger things season 4 (specifically volume 2)?

alright i wrote out an entire essay last night and tumblr deleted it, so i’m going to try this again and hope it actually works 😭

spoilers and rambling under the cut!

so for the most part i really enjoyed volume two. i loved the cinematography, particularly the part when nancy was shooting vecna and hop was fighting the demogorgon while the remix of running up that hill played. i also loved how it showed the three groups managing to come together, even as spread out as they all were. like! theres my bad ass crew of characters that i love so much, finding ways to win even from three different places!!! and of course we FINALLY got the jopper kiss…. i have been thinking about ‘use your imagination’ ‘who needs imagination?’ for two days straight. no one is doing it like them. just so many little interactions and moments that i loved— el and hopper reunion, lucas and max talking on their pads, lucas holding maxs body 😭, dustin and eddie’s relationship, eddie’s guitar solo, all the robin and steve bestie moments, the way the threads of the story all came together, the little jokes and beats of humor, el piggybacking and saving max… there was a lot i liked.

however. the things that i didn’t like were kind of big sticking points to me, and made it so that i didn’t enjoy it as much as i’d hoped to.

first of all, the episodes were simply too long. like for a complicated storyline, with so many moving parts, the episodes were just…. really dense. during episode nine i kept going ‘is it done yet? is it done yet? is it done yet?’ because i got overstimulated and tired. and i suppose i could have just paused it, but i find stopping in the middle of an episode very difficult. id have rather them be shorter episodes that i could pause at the end of and come back to when i was ready. and that’s kind of sad because like. i KNOW i missed things, but it’s such a big task to go back and rewatch it all that idk if i will anytime soon.

second of all…. eddie. stranger things has such a problem with introducing side characters just to kill then off, and eddie is just another in a long line (robin, murray, and erica being the main exceptions). which is interesting to me, because everyone was talking about how there was going to be this huge emotional character death this season, and like… i sobbed like a baby when he died, because i loved him, but it was almost expected. it would have been much more shocking and devastating if it was nancy or steve (who i thought was going to die). the fact that they did kill of eddie was also just so painful because 1) he was so loveable and i would have loved to see him grow and become part of the group, looking after the kids with nancy and steve and robin and jonathan, and also getting to have that sense of family when he’d only ever had his dad before. 2) the dialogue with dustin…. god that was heart wrenching. that was the one part of his death that i liked. i was sobbing i was shaking i was a fucking mess over it. 3) i can’t help but see eddie as a gay man— his entire story with being a freak, an outsider, unwelcome, and unknown by anyone but hated by everyone was very reminiscent of the gay experience to me. and so the fact that he died…. it was like okay yeah of course the queer coded side character died. of course he did.

and finally… will. i don’t even know where to start. they did him so dirty. this main character, around whom the entire over arching plot of the show has revolved, was treated like a side character. will, who has a connection to the upside down unlike anyone else, barely had any screen time that wasn’t him just setting up mike and el. literally without him there wouldn’t BE stranger things, and yet they just. tossed him aside. the only times he was around was when his own pain and suffering and feelings were used to deepen mike and el’s relationship— which had already had three prior seasons to develop!!! it just felt awful to have this character— who is clearly gay, clearly in love with his best friend, clearly already feeling like an outsider— tossed aside and disregarded. like not a single person except jonathan seemed to notice or care about him the entire season, and it’s like…. it’s just frustrating. like i wish they weren’t using his pain and love and feelings to elevate the heterosexual ship. idk.

so overall, it was good, but those are really big things that i didn’t like and so i don’t feel like i enjoyed it as much as i wanted to.

#hopefully this makes sense!!! #i know i didn’t touch on everything and this may not be clear but i’m so irritated that i had to rewrite it all 😭 #answered #anonymous asks #stranger things spoilers #just in case!

[nickgerlich]

Aiming Higher

“Show me a company trying to be all things to all people, and I’ll show you a company that is nothing to everyone.”

That’s one of my many maxims for daily living and business. I’m sure that if you looked hard enough, you might just find an exception to the rule. Generally speaking, though, it is very true, and it all boils down to the tenets of target marketing. Once you start using a shotgun approach, you have lots of misses among the hits, and often at great expense.

But that doesn’t stop companies from trying anyway, the latest of which is Walmart in its umpteenth attempt to lure higher income customers into the rest of the store. Walmart has been trying for years to do this, with clothing as well as electronics, all with less than admirable results. Maybe in buying Vizio they may the able to lure the wealthy with upscale TVs and other electronics, but we shall see.

Inflation may have found wealthier people flocking to Walmart to buy their groceries, and this has motivated Walmart to try again. At least this time the people they desire are already in the building. All they have to do now is get them to step across the aisle into non-grocery merchandise.

To bolster this effort, Walmart is remodeling 800 of its stores, improving lighting, constructing little boutique and highlighted areas, and even using mannequins. Oddly, at a time when Walmart has been making significant gains—finally—in its e-commerce business, it is investing in BAM. This is even more intriguing when you hear them say that they’re actually targeting wealthier Gen-Zers. And we already know where Gen-Zers are likely to shop. Online.

Wait a minute. Gen-Z didn’t start until 1997, meaning the oldest are turning 27 this year, and the youngest are 14. There can’t be all that many wealthy in this age bracket, not yet at least. Maybe they meant Millennials.

Regardless, it’s full steam ahead as Walmart adds on-trend clothing, higher class cosmetics, along with more esoteric food items. Basically, Walmart is trying to be something it never has been. And I have to wonder if, in the process of doing so, they might alienate their core clientele, the people they have been serving ever since Sam Walton opened his first store in 1962.

Walmart learned this lesson painfully not many years ago when it bought online high-fashion brands Bonobos, Moosejaw, and Modcloth. They were in over their heads, though, and wound up selling all of them. Although few people knew the connection to Walmart, that didn’t stop Walmart from fumbling the ball repeatedly.

As much as I agree with Walmart’s plans to freshen up some of its stores—many of their stores built in the 90s are looking pretty long in the tooth—I have my doubts that the ending will be any better this time. It’s kind of like searching for gold in a silver mine. The silver may not be worth as much, but in volume, it can—and does—serve as a good revenue source.

And as much as I agree that Walmart has completely nailed it by aiming at middle America and lower, I had to laugh when I read of the firm’s “history of studying consumer behavior to better grasp what luxury shoppers actually want.” I am pretty sure that what luxury shoppers want is a place to do so without the riff-raff nearby.

I suppose I fit the demo that Walmart seeks—upper-middle class—but I just don’t see myself buying clothes there. Well, OK. I confess to buying a pair of Wrangler casual pants last winter, after I read on a hiking page on Facebook that one particular line of pants was actually very good for hiking, and at about one-third the price of what you’d find at REI. But I only wear them on cool hikes, definitely not to the office. I will buy another pair or two, but as the people on that thread pointed out, they see this more as a shopping hack, not a fashion statement.

Good luck with this, Walmart. You’re really good at what you’ve been doing all along, but grasping at straws is not a good look when what you really need to do is sip from the cup of your prior success.

Dr “Sticking To Groceries” Gerlich

Audio Blog

#marketing #Walmart #wealthy #luxury

[burniingup]

1-5

1. how do you feel about reblog karma?

I get it! I don't have anything in my rules about it because I don't think it's too big of a deal. But it's definitely disappointing to see a notification and it's just someone reblogging a meme from you. I always just reblog from the source anyways, and I definitely try to always send something in if I think it works for our muses or something!

2. is it hard for you to write with characters you don’t know/don’t know well?

A little bit I suppose but not so hard that it matters much. If it's my first time interacting with a character, it's my muses first time too so it's not like there's a ton of pressure to know them. I always pour over people's about (and rules) pages when I'm writing replies anyways to make sure I don't mess anything up.

3. whose writing has impacted your writing style the most? (you can choose anyone! famous writer or not.)

Probably just fellow writers here over the years. I can think of two specific people off the top of my head, but neither are active anymore and neither would know this blog of mine anyways. STILL I always just wanted to make sure my replies were of the same quality as my partners'! So thanks to people who were nice enough to give me a chance when I was new and learning I pushed myself a lot to be able to write better!

4. which muse of yours is your all time favorite? if you stopped writing them: why?

Blue over on @absolut-blue has been fun for me, so he's definitely a close contender. I'm unfortunately very connected to him so I find writing for him a bit easier than most other muses, which is nice. BUT really out of everyone I've played here for forever??

*points*

I have this old old ancient OC that I really treasure, Mandy. I used to play her for years over on @mandythereaper (this blog is old and not very pretty ;;) and it was the most fun I've ever had on the internet like ever. I learned to write on that blog and made so many friends. I am sitting on so much gift art from friends and rp partners from those days. A lot of what I did there was just silly little things and interactions as opposed to actual serious threads. But it was so much fun.

I miss her and I'd like to bring her back maybe one day. I originally stopped writing for her because I thought I would be better off writing for an OC that was more human and less of a fantasy kind of creature. Now I don't write for her because I know her blog will never be what it used to be and that makes me sad. ALSO she's just a really old OC you know? I made her like 11 years ago, her story is over like from beginning to end, I just never think about her anymore. I consider her kind of retired.

5. is there a muse you really want to try? if yes: what’s stopping you?

Literally any canon character for BSD lol. I'm so into the series right now and it's what I really want to write for. Particularly I would like to write for any of the DOA trio. Unfortunately I don't do well writing characters who; are smarter than me, are complex enough that some of their intricacies are lost on me, or whose backstory I don't know well. All of them fall into at least one if not more of those categories.

There's definitely OC's I'd like to add to this blog as well but I'd rather not start adding more to this blog until I have more regular interactions and friends and such. I'm not sure why, that's just what I feel like I should do.

#this got long im sorry i love talking #thank you so much i love these!! #moonhund #OOC #answers

[kinetic-elaboration]

January 27: Halloween (2018)

Didn't start as early as I wanted to but I did finally watch Halloween (2018). I enjoyed it overall but I also have somewhat mixed feelings.

I was really digging it in the beginning. I felt like I was watching a pretty serious horror movie that was also intent on being just a generally good movie. It was visually interesting, it was moving along at a good pace, it had a certain amount of dread, and I was very interested in all of the new information it was giving me: where Michael is now, where Laurie is now, what her family is like, etc.

But as it went on, I felt... like it was trying to be many different things at once. There's Michael's new killing spree. There's Laurie the recluse and her family drama. There's all the little teen drama and other shenanigans. There's the podcasters, for at least a short time. I guess they were sort of the Marion Crane of Halloween 2018. There are some attempts at Deeper Meaning and the weird little twist with the "new Loomis."

It’s not that I disliked any one of these story threads by itself, but there were a lot of them, and at some point I just started to feel tired. In some ways, it reminded me more of, say, Halloween IV than the original Halloween. Yet again, I’m reminded of just how genius that film was, how deceptively simple it was, to a degree that nothing else has been able to match.

I had mixed feelings about the podcasters. I know that their reasons for being in the film were, first, exposition, and second the misdirection of thinking the story is going to be way more about them than it is. I found them extremely annoying and so I didn’t miss them when they were gone. But I did feel a certain… sense of time wasted with them? Like, I sat through all that and they’re not going to be important? There isn’t going to be like a true crime/podcast exploitation angle to this? Okay then.

I’m also not sure I fully bought this version of Laurie. I liked her more in Halloween H20, and if they had tried to connect those two characterizations more—not include the canon of H20 specifically but more the outlines of the character—I think that would be better. I could see more of 1978 Laurie in H20 than here. Also… I just find it hard to believe that Laurie, or anyone, could maintain this level of reclusive paranoia for 40 years. She built this house, she put a trap in the basement—must have done that early because Karen remembers/knew all this—and then she just, what, shot mannequins for another 30 years? I just don’t think this is sustainable. Forty years is a long time. I feel sort of awkward saying this as if I were some kind of expert on trauma but I just think that humans generally do have a pretty amazing ability to pick up and move on. In one sense, we’re so fragile, and many things less traumatic than being the survivor of a killing spree can definitely mess you up and leave their indelible marks. But in another sense, we’re so strong. We keep getting up in the morning and going on with life even after terrible, terrible things. Not everyone, I do get that, but Laurie is lucid and controlled enough to basically take care of herself, and yet damaged enough to have done literally nothing at all for a solid four decades. I just don’t get that. (Oh and also she got married twice somehow and those people left no mark at all I suppose.)

Which is what I mean about combining the characterization with H20. Like, I don’t hate recluse!Laurie. But what if she’d devolved that way over time? Maybe that wouldn’t seem realistic since in this universe she’s only met Michael once and there haven’t been new triggers since then, but…maybe there were? I just like the idea of her being pretty normal, on the outside, for a while, but maybe always having this cabin in the woods, just in case, and then she spends more and more time there, and develops it more and more, and feels increasingly comfortable there…

I though the parallels between Laurie and Michael were cool, or rather, the places where she stood in for him in the parallel to 1978, like when she appears outside the school or when she falls from the roof but miraculously survives. But, I’ve never been fond of this faux-deep idea that the final girl is, like, in some way morally equivalent to the killer, or this Batman-morality logic that what the final girl does to survive makes her a sort of villain or monster herself. Laurie is a damaged person because of what she went through but she’s not a bad person, let alone the Epitome of Evil because of it.

I did like that the three generations of Strode women were the final girls. I mean I did see it coming but I liked it a lot too and it was satisfying. I liked that they included a moment for Allyson to injure Michael, and that Karen contributed to saving the day by remembering the things she’d been taught as kid.

I actually did like the teens, the humor they brought to the movie, and their little dramas and things. They felt like more realistic teens than those in the Rob Zombie films. A part of me… almost wishes they’d gotten more of the run time? Like Vicky and the kid she was babysitting were really cute! I also found it somewhat weird and unsatisfying that all this time was spent on Cameron just for him to be forgotten at the dance. Not even killed off. I know the point was that he ruins Allyson’s phone when they fight and so her family and the police can’t contact her, but it still felt like a loose-ish end to me. Anyway, I hesitate to say ‘this should have just been about the kids’ because I LOVE Laurie and Jamie Lee Curtis is the GOAT but… it might have been more compact?

The movie was definitely very clever in its callbacks. It got the big ones like the laundry but I’m also pretty sure I saw some Shamrock masks in there!

I think my favorite scene was when the police officer discovered Vicky’s body, because the tableau of the figure under the ghost sheet (another parallel!) sitting next to the pumpkin in the fish tank, all lit by the unexpected colorful lights of the kid’s room, was so spooky.

All in all, I did really like it! But I don’t think I would rank it above H20 and of course not above 1978.

#the year 2023 #2023: fandom thoughts #2023: movies

[adamwatchesmovies]

Mortal Kombat: Legacy (2011)

While I didn't enjoy this film, that doesn't mean you won't. No matter what I say, the people involved in this project did it: they actually made a movie. That's something to be applauded. With that established...

If Mortal Kombat: Legacy writer, director and producer Kevin Tancharoen sees my score for this movie, he'd surely object. “Come on, Adam! This isn’t a movie; it’s a YouTube series meant to lead into a game! It doesn’t belong on your movie blog!” He'd be partially right. This has no business calling itself a “movie”, but nobody told the distributors. I did not find this… anthology (?) film online. I found it on Blu-ray, packaged together with Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Annihiliation. How was I supposed to know that my next 90 or so minutes would be spent with a “story” that has no protagonist, plot or resolution?

Serving as a prequel to the 1992 arcade classic, Mortal Kombat: Legacy follows Sonya (Jeri Ryan), Kano (Darren Shahlavi), Raiden (Ryan Robbins), Johnny Cage (Matt Mullins), Scorpion (Ian Anthony Dale), Shao Khan (Aleks Paunovic), Kitana (Samantha Jo), her twin Mileena (Jolene Tran), Cyrax (Shane Warren Jones), Sektor (Peter Shinkoda) and others on their way to Mortal Kombat, a tournament that will decide the fate of our world.

Some of the criticisms I had as the picture began I’m going to declare moot. The special effects are so-so but considering this is a YouTube film, they’re impressive. While the camerawork in the first two segments make the action look phony, that’s the exception. Overall, the cinematography is well done and the action easy to follow and engaging. For those who know the Mortal Kombat lore and have always wanted more, this is what you’ve been wanting for. Sorta. I’ve never played the games but I have seen the other films. I thought this would be enough. I was wrong. Kitana has a twin sister, who’s actually her clone, but it’s half the same species as her, and half demon and then Kitana’s mother committed suicide so she could transplant her soul into her daughter. It doesn’t make much sense to me. More than once, backstories are needlessly convoluted. Almost as if these characters were just concepts thrown into a game with a thin story and were never meant to be developed further…

Some of the segments nevertheless work alright as mini stories. Others, not so much. The story of Jax, Sony & Kano is nothing but a barrage of action clichés, while the single animated segment, the story of Kitana and Mileena sticks out like a sore thumb. Then there’s the Raiden segment, which is preceeded by a message from Tancharoen. He explains why this story isn’t part of the normal continuity of Mortal Kombat. If they were worried fans would go ballistic over a tweaking of their beloved characters, why tweak it? Actually, I think it’s one of the best stories, as it feels genuinely inspired instead of a fanboy’s rendition like so many of the others do.

Things get real nutty, the mythology is this soup of random threads and the performances vary in quality. Matt Mullins as Johnny Cage entertains thoroughly. His story is the one that has a genuine – and welcome – sense of humor about itself. Ultimately, however, this is a big letdown because you have 9 episodes… which lead to NOTHING. I know there’s a second season, but what kind of series doesn’t have a climax? It sows seeds which never grow and, since none of the non-two parter stories connect with each other, it doesn’t matter in what order you watch these or even if you miss half of them.

I wouldn’t be as harsh but I watched Mortal Kombat: Legacy on Blu-ray with no warning. I know not everyone will have the same reaction as me, but I'm sure many will be just as stunned as I when Mortal Kombat: Legacy abruptly ends. Hopefully if this does interest you, your experience with it is better than mine. (On Blu-ray, October 6, 2018)

#Mortal Kombat: Legacy #Mortal Kombat #movies #films #movie reviews #film reviews #Kevin Tancharoen #Todd Helbing #Aaron Helbing #Josh Baizer #Marshall Johnson #2011 movies #2011 films

[pyrrh]

abuse based trauma is so cruel in the ways that it utterly annihilates every sense of normalcy. things are either Perfect or they are Horrible, the nuance and middle ground entirely impossible, leaving so many of us convinced that nothing we do is right enough or good enough so why the fuck should we even try, right, what's the goddamned point? and so we don't and we hide, secluding ourselves rather than face the horrible alternative of an existence where everyone hates you because you are awful and hopeless and OBVIOUSLY just THE WORST PERSON IN ALL EXISTENCE. and the idea that this is a thing that is *not true*, a thing that was **forcibly wired into your brain** that you can **relearn** with enough effort and time and the right kind of support and guidance - well that can't be true and why would you make such a cruel joke, why would you say it's all a lie our brains are telling us, why, Why, WHY!

but you are desperate, deep down, for something to change, and so one day you secretly decide to try the thing. after all, they promised was true if you would just trust and believe and try, if you would just throw away your carefully constructed safety for a while - a clear indicator that it is a trick! - but maybe you've been wrong all this time and you won't know if you don't try and you feel like there's nothing to lose this time so you just... try it. and it doesn't go well. you find out you DO have more to lose, you can't stand to get hurt anymore ever again. i mean, you left people and community and all of it behind because it was all untrue and unsafe, and you feel so stupid for trying to rewire your brain even a single time, you KNEW it was too good to be true, knew it couldn't work. so with your suspicions confirmed you tighten your defenses and lock yourself up tighter, alone, alone, alone, don't let them in don't let them near don't open yourself to the risks, the tradeoff is never worth it

and you keep missing out on connections, care, love, intimacy that could have been yours, could have been shared with you, that people were hoping to share with you, because the suspicion and fear and hypervigilance that threads through everything you do now is stronger than any temptation or hope. again and again, you close off your heart and ignore any twinge of loneliness and sadness because company? closeness? those are things that were never meant for you anyway, YOU are supposed to be alone forever and independent after all.

it was literally beaten into you.

#cw trauma #cw abuse #writing #traumaposting #stream of consciousness

[americanegg]

Me fighting Lothric and Lorian vs Me post-game reading about their lore:

#so ive been #dialoguing and theorizing for like 3 days with a friend and i feel like im not even close to an answer #oceiros gwynevere lothric lorian ocelotte gertrude emma Dancer #there are so many missing threads that are supposed to connect everyone to everyone #like i genuinely feel like i need a board some yarn and thumbtacks because theres literally #too many lines that connect everyone to someone or something #if i die not solving this puzzle im comibg back as a ghost to solve this puzzle #ds3 #lothric and lorian #dark souls #egg screams about dark souls #A HYPERFIXATION OF MINE. IF YOU WILL

[nctsjiho]

Kicked Out

warnings: strong language

era: Fall 2021

❀ JiHo finally finds out the reason for her departure from NCT 127 and sudden return to it, she decides to confide in Taeyong 

“You can’t put a plus two on a plus four!” Renjun’s voice resonated through the room as soon as he watched Doyoung place down another card on the stack that was already piling high in front of him. “Yes I can!” “Not when there were already plus two’s underneath!” The younger of the two was insistent on standing his ground. “Yup hyung, go ahead and take…” Haechan started flipping through the cards, counting just how many Doyoung would have to take. “14 cards!” Haechan announced, sharing amused grins with Jeno and Renjun who sat next to him.

“Oppa?” Both Taeyong and Doyoung turned towards the door when they heard JiHo’s voice calling for either one of them. “Just a second, I have to deal with this real quick.” Immediately Doyoung turned back towards the three younger members to argue about the rules of the game. He even missed JiHo’s silent “but-” before he was back to yelling at the boys. “I’m not taking cards if I can just put a plus two down.” “Oppa-” Once again JiHo was cut off. “That’s against the rules!”

“Did you know I was supposed to get kicked out from the group?”

Soon enough all the cards were dropped out of everyone’s hands as they looked up at JiHo, bewildered. She had come closer to the group, but had given up on making eye contact. “What are you talking-” Before Renjun could finish his question, Taeyong had already stood up. “You guys continue playing, I’ll be with JiHo.” Grabbing the girl’s arm, he led her towards another room where they could speak in private.

JiHo dared not to look at the leader as he situated her in front of him on a couch - Taeyong grabbed a chair so he could sit in front of her directly. “What’s this about?”

Suddenly the fabric of her thin cardigan was way more interesting. Just a few minutes earlier she had eagerly walked to the room she knew Taeyong and Doyoung were at, so she could rant about her new discovery, but the second JiHo got confronted about it she froze. The hem of the shirt was already torn by playing with it so much, loose threads stuck out from it and JiHo knew her stylist would ask her about it some day - the clothing item was borrowed.

“JiHo, please talk to me…” Taeyong took a deep sigh and leaned forward to place his hands on the girl’s knees. “Earlier… The staff- I-'' Taeyong watched as the gears in JiHo’s head turned at a great speed, before clanging together and ultimately getting stuck. “Easy now. Take your time.”

JiHo nodded, trying to get her story straight, but she could only hear what the lady she saw earlier said to her.

“You shouldn’t be complaining! Your fans have been sending emails and so many goddamn messages asking why you left and if you would return! You know how many threats I get on the daily because of your pathetic little act? So suck it up if your foot is hurting or if you are tired! I don’t fucking care! Nobody here would’ve complained if you just stayed in China! It was a mistake to put you in NCT in the first place, they should’ve just removed you from the group entirely, like they planned to do anyway!”

She had simply gone up to the staff member she was directed to, to ask her for ice for the ankle she thought she might have slightly sprained that morning. The lady must’ve had a bad day, or maybe she just didn't like JiHo, but was that really an excuse to blow up on the idol like that?

The worst part was that pretty much everyone in the hallway and some of the rooms connected to it, had heard the commotion. It being embarrassing was an understatement, but everything came with a silver lining, because the person in charge of the staff member gave the woman a big lecture and put her on coffee and errand duty.

“JiHo you shouldn’t have heard that-” “So it’s true?” The memory was still fresh in her mind. The look of being caught and absolute guilt of one of the staff, that she saw on a very regular basis, was ingrained in her mind. “Not exactly.”

“So what did he say?” Taeyong listened carefully to every single word JiHo recounted. Trying his best to not show the confusion and, if he was completely honest, sadness and even anger he was feeling, Taeyong just let his thumbs press patterns on JiHo’s legs as a way to comfort her and tell her he was listening.

“Some people wanted me from the group because I caused the company too much financial damage or something…” Taeyong shook his head disapprovingly, knowing that that wasn’t exactly true.

“SM owes JiHo so much money that they don’t want to pay her. They’ll find a way to get her to sign something so she’d forgive them their debt. It’s not even that much considering how much money they have, but they’re just that petty.” The manager told Taeyong while at dinner. “Does JiHo know?” “I’m sure she knows SM owes her, but I’m also sure that her mind isn’t focused on that right now.” Taeyong nodded, glancing down at his plate of steak. Somehow his appetite was dwindling. “They would really go out of their way to cancel their debts like that? They’re not going to trick her right?” Taeyong inquired, poking at his food to act as if he wasn’t too bothered, but in fact he was worried sick. “JiHo’s a smart girl, Taeyong, and she has Yebin and Sihyun with her. Those two hard headed women won’t let anyone mess with JiHo. But don’t tell them I called them that. Okay?” The manager laughed, causing Taeyong to chuckle as well. At last he felt a bit more at ease.

The memory of the conversation Taeyong had with the manager a few weeks - maybe even months at this point - suddenly popped back into his head. “You didn’t sign anything right?” JiHo looked confused, but shook her head ‘no’. “Good.”

“But… Mister Lee Soo Man and a big part of the team still wanted me to stay.” A smile found its way onto Taeyong’s features. “That’s good right?” He knew JiHo had many fans, even in her own company.

Lee Soo Man had seen great potential in JiHo back when she was a trainee, even risking it to put her in a boy group; so knowing that he and many other staff still believed in JiHo felt like a relief. “They had to compromise though.”

JiHo sat in front of the staff, listening to his every word, but not really sure if she was comprehending what he was telling her. “The plan was to send you to China and have your solo career take off there.” “Why China?” JiHo asked with furrowed brows. “Because your fan base is very big there.” Though it sounded rational, JiHo wasn’t buying it and the staff seemed to notice. “Okay well… Maybe it was also a way to keep you away from the boys. It would’ve been a great excuse as to why you weren’t able to have activities with NCT and-” “Eventually they’d remove me from the group?”

The staff member let out a big sigh before nodding. “I would’ve loved to tell you that with the compromise your career with NCT would be guaranteed, but eventually the people who prioritise their money have a bigger say.” “I don’t get it.” The pout on JiHo’s lips continued to become more prominent. “Sir Lee Soo Man agreed to keep you busy with solo activities outside Korea until the commotion died down and you made a name for yourself. Eventually, when they would announce your departure, fans wouldn’t be as surprised that you’d be leaving and you would start your solo career under Esteem. SM wouldn’t be under as much fire, because your long hiatus from the group would lessen the blow and the other higher up would be happy since you’d be gone from the company.”

Taeyong looked as confused as JiHo when she first heard what SM had planned for her. “How would that help them with the money though?” He asked. “Since I wouldn’t have participated in any activities for the year, they could make it look like I personally prioritised my solo career and neglected the group and so I’d break my contract or something and their debts would be taken care of.” JiHo explained; though not sure what it exactly meant, she was just repeating what the staff told her.

“And that’s legal?” With a shrug of her shoulders JiHo answered with an “I guess”.

The two sat in silence for a couple of minutes, just to let all the information marinate in their heads for a second. Even the creaking of the door wasn’t enough to bring them out of their thoughts. It was only when Jeno’s voice cut through the tense silence that JiHo and Taeyong snapped out of their focused state. “But you’re brought back early, right? So they can’t make you leave now.”

“You’re staying, right?” Renjun tried to confirm. “Because the fans sent a lot of demanding messages, I guess they didn’t have a choice but to bring me back.” JiHo sighed. “Those are your fans JiHo. People who know that you belong here with us and want the best for you. Don’t think that you don’t deserve to be here.” It was Doyoung who said that, as he walked in with his three younger friends - previously rivals in their heated game of Uno - following him closely.

No response came from JiHo for a few seconds, causing the boys to be a bit worried. JiHo had been a lot more sensitive lately, not shy though embarrassed to cry in front of the boys. So seeing her being her usual, unreadable self was both relieving as worrying. It was hard to know what she was thinking when her expression stayed completely blank like that. Was she beating herself up? Was she silently cursing someone out? Was she sad? Or angry?

Soon enough the boys’ questions were answered when a single tear ran down her cheek and she sighed. “Good, because I don’t ever want to go solo. It’s either NCT or nothing.” She mumbled. And though Taeyong’s heart broke a little, he couldn’t help but feel immense relief wash over him and he pulled the girl up and into his embrace. The other four joined the hug, patting JiHo’s head and back in a comforting manner.

“The only people you should listen to are those who believe in you JiHo.” Taeyong said. “Letting you go would be their biggest mistake. If SM lets you go, I’m coming with you.” Haechan stated firmly, to which JiHo opened her eyes in shock, surprisingly meeting Haechan’s eyes first as he was right next to her. “You can’t do that-” “I’d leave too.” Renjun added, and the other three followed suit. “You’d be idiots if you did that.” “They’d be idiots to let one of their best idol choreographers and lyricists go.” Doyoung countered. “Should we remind them of everything you’ve done for the company?” “I’m sure they don’t care about that.”

With a shake of his head, Taeyong took a small step back. “The fans would notice though, you’re a bigger impact on the group than you think.” He explained. “Hey listen.” Doyoung caught everyone’s attention, causing them all to look at him. “Now we know what went on, let’s try to move on from it and focus on NCT 2021 and our tour, okay? Let’s leave it all in the past. If you want we will tell the others about it, but for now let’s just forget about it and be happy. Hmm? How does that sound?” All five boys watched JiHo expectantly, sighing in relief when she nodded at Doyoung with a soft smile.

“Good! Now let’s go play Uno together!” Haechan squealed right into JiHo and Jeno’s ears, much to their dismay - Jeno had yet to detach himself from JiHo’s waist, pressing himself against her back and Haechan was still wrapped around JiHo’s arm. “I’m not playing with you anymore.” Doyoung glared at Haechan who pouted. “Ah, hyung~” He whined. “Only if we set the rules from the start and actually follow them!” “But you were the only one who didn’t follow them.” Renjun mumbled, earning an offended gasp from Doyoung and stifled laughter from the others.

Renjun, Haechan and Doyoung had already made it out of the room, leaving JiHo and the other two boys.

“It’s also NCT or nothing for me JiHo.” Taeyong started, gaining the girl’s full attention. “And you’re NCT too, so without you it’s not fully NCT anymore.” Jeno nodded against her shoulder, agreeing with Taeyong. “Now let’s go kick Haechan’s butt in some Uno, okay?” JiHo snickered at that, but agreed enthusiastically before answering. “Let’s have him sit between two of us, and we’ll continuously hit him with some plus four’s, how about that?” 

#jiho.writings #nct 24th member #nct addition #nct female member #nct imagines #nct extra member #nct additional member #nct additions #nct female addition #kpop!addition #kpop!oc