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#why wasn’t there more diversity in the movies
suguruplsr · 6 months
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All you know..
✰ ✰ ✰ “are we dating? are we fuckin’? are we best friends? are we something in between that?” — heartbeat , childish gambino
જ⁀➴ i fucking love this. idk what it is tho <3
,, fuckboy! suguru x fem!reader , situation-ship , toxic (both kinda) , reader is mentioned to hook up a bit (w/ boys n’ girls) , slight angst , smut , sex at a party , mirror sex , mean! suguru , degradation , choking , slapping , brat taming ? , idk i wrote this at 4 am
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fuckboy! suguru who you met at some party your friend took you to, hosted by his best friend, gojo satoru. surprisingly enough, suguru was the exact opposite of satoru, sure he had the sexual appeal that he definitely used to his advantage, but he was more respectful and quiet. rather than hitting up on girls like his counterpart, the girls were lured to him with just looks alone. his dark eyes and low voice wrapping them tightly into his web until he’s asking them to get out of his bed at 6 am in the morning, needing to clean his room and air out the stench of sex.
— but he never told you to leave, in fact, he let you stay in bed while he cleaned, gathering up your clothes to wash them and leaving out some of his for you to put on when you woke up. suguru wondered if he was just pussy whipped or just too tired to deal with a person that early in the morning. but he was in fact whipped when he found you fixing up his bed after waking up. actually making small talk with him, something he wasn’t fond of, but after your conversation drifted off from the topic last night, he found himself talking with you for hours on his couch, eventually watching a movie and all.
fuckboy! suguru who you see more, from random calls of ‘needing him’ to late night drives to get ice cream. or smoking a thick blunt at 8 am while you two watch some rom-com you picked out. getting picked up straight after work to go to his house and get your feet rubbed, loved on with small praises murmured into your thighs. sometimes he’s taking you to the club or to fancy dinners. you like it, the diversity of being.. well, something, with him. which leads to what you don’t like, not having a name for what you two are.
— two months. it took you two months of good dick, soft moments, fun dates, and getting spoiled for you to question everything. you almost felt guilty, but you were too headstrong for that, you know any other girl in your place would never complain or demand an answer as to what relationship you two have formed. but you know that’s probably why he likes you, so stubborn and always knowing what you want. the first time it came to mind, you asked him straight up.
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“suguru?” you finish cutting your steak, before answering his small “hm?” , “what are we?” your voice was probably softer then you wanted it to be, confidence faltering as he stayed silent. perhaps this wasn't the best time? well yea, no shit, you think. you two were at some well known restaurant downtown, both of you dressed up and eating delicious food that suguru was paying for. you didn’t know where his money came from, but you knew better than to press when he gave an indirect answer the first time you asked, guys like that usually do some shady shit. and you have enough experience to know to just accept you found a man with good money and go about your business.
“how about you just eat mama? we’ll talk later.” and later never came, just subject changes and avoidance that had you rethinking this whole thing you had with him. it’s not like he has eyes for other girls, obviously committed to this growing.. situationship.. you two have going on. he turns down girls in a heartbeat, and nearly yelled at satoru when he found out his best friend was giving out his number to shy admirers. he was very clear that he wanted you. just not clear enough. and it’s not like you’re looking for others, but you can’t help but just want something more, wanting to be in an actual relationship rather than walk on this thread of string that you could tip over at any moment.
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fuckboy! suguru that you have an argument with for the first time after 3 months of knowing each other. annoyed by your nonstop questioning that he’s been desperately trying to not answer. and he goes off, making it painfully clear that no matter what you two do, you guys aren’t even completely serious, meaning that those moments of vulnerability, kisses that were way more than just the ‘heat of the moment’, the drives to walmart at 2 am for snacks, everything that made you fall in love, was just nothing. and that he doesn’t owe you an explanation as to why it’s nothing, as to why those soft touches that explored your body in a language different from just sex, was nothing. the tiny shifts in your dynamic together was just nothing. there was never something, and you were just friends with benefits. nothing more.
— finding your answer, you decide that perhaps it was best to leave nothing and to find something. not talking to him for weeks and responding to those guys who ask for your number, which leads to very few that you see outside of your bed. maybe you were desensitized after him? only knowing the name of geto suguru, a taste on your lips that was oh so sour. yet a taste on your lips that never leaves, no one fills the lost warmth when they hold you, it’s not the same as his, they may be a good kisser, but it’s not the same as his, they could throw dick down good, but it wasn’t the same as his. you only knew geto suguru.
— and you fucking hate yourself for that. you hate that he suddenly appears outside your door after 5 weeks and 4 days since your argument. you hate that you let him in and fuck you in such an intimate way that it doesn’t feel like fucking, you hate that you swear up and down you’ll set it straight with him in the morning only to be greeted by his lazy smile, making you breakfast and apologizing for everything except for not giving you a simple answer. you hate that you let him walk back into your life so casually. and it happens, you ask after two weeks of ‘normalcy’, in which he doesn’t answer. and you try to make it clear you won’t be seeing him again. but it happens again, again, and again. because no one can love you in the way geto suguru does. and you only knew geto suguru.
fuckboy! suguru who makes you fall into a swirl of emotions you hate. 6 months. you don’t ask anymore. that cute guy at starbucks? you had three dates with him. the hot tattoo artist down the street? yea you two fucked after she finished her work on your back. the same one suguru kissed all over after it finished healing. gojo satoru? he’s been in your bed a few times. that makes you confident in knowing that suguru isn’t oblivious to the fact that you’ve been seeing others without a care in the world. but you also know he won’t do anything, because according to his logic, you two weren’t anything serious. so he has no right to judge you, no matter how well he treats you. it was nothing in his eyes right?
— maybe that’s why you have to try breaking his patience again, one last time. maybe he’ll finally cut you off and let you move on or he’ll give you an answer you can take and hold onto, without hesitation. you’re going to a halloween costume themed party, everyone in their typical final girl outfits, or wearing iconic outfits of killers you’ve all grown to know. you wear a skimpy killer nurse costume, painting fake blood in places that forces eyes to linger for too long. i mean, if it made geto suguru, of all people, to stop and give you a look that may have been a warning for you to keep your act together, then was it really a defective plan?
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“man, this mansion is fucking creepy.” your friend groans, taking in another sip of her ‘blood’ (wine), after you two walk over the creaking wood. you two were on the 2nd floor, watching the dancing that happened below you two. mainly coming up here after you two realized this is where mostly everyone looking for a quick fuck went to. but your friend only gave you a sigh when your eyes stayed on some broad guy at the end of the hall. “you serious about this? what about that guy you came here with?” she raised an eyebrow, nudging your side as you rolled your eyes.
“and he’s precisely why i’m doing this babe.” you grin, finishing off your drink and getting up once you see the familiar cloak of suguru’s classic ghost face costume from the corner of your eyes. he was finally taking the bait and coming up stairs. you only knew it was him from the gray glowing paint at the ends of it, something he did when he found out a lot of people were going to dress up as the famous killer. but you also knew from how his eyes stayed on you, they may be covered by the creepy mask, but the slow turn of his head from downstairs when he had first seen you walking up the stairs said enough.
you strut over to the guy with a ditzy smile, his eyes quickly finding themselves falling to your busty breasts as you rub a hand along his chest, making it ‘apparent’ to him that you wanted to take him to some random room and have him fuck your brains out. which wasn’t really the case to be honest. sure he had a good figure, but from his constant stuttering and nervous body language, you knew wasn’t your type. he was lost, definitely a virgin. maybe you’ll hit him up when he gets some experience under his belt? well, probably after you delete the one number that always stays pinned in your messages.
you almost have the poor guy falling for your slutty act when a gloved hand grips your wrist tightly, the masked figure pulling you away with no words. “suguru? fuck are you doing? hey—“ you tried playing dumb, almost tripping when he slams the door of some guest room and pins you to it harshly. you stay silent, almost holding your breath at the sounds of his heavy one, the white mocking mask staring at you eerily. “i tried to be patient with you.” suguru’s voice was filled with bitterness that made you scared for a moment, his hands moving your body. “i even tried to fucking ignore whatever stupid shit you got going on, since you wanna fuck everything that exists.” he sneers, gripping your throat and ignoring your whimper of his name, acrylic nails scratching his gloved hand, which he swats away. “i even let you get away with having my best friends dick down your throat.” he chuckles darkly, pulling you off the wall and pushing you to the bed, his hands letting go.
“wait— suguru i—“ you nearly choke on your words, your eyes watery as he keeps walking towards you, boots dangerously clacking against the wood floor as you fall to the bed, cornered. he pulls the mask up to his nose, strands of his bang showing and you can hear his words clearly, panties pooling in fear, “i want your ass naked and face in the fuckin’ sheets when i come back.” is all he says, you scramble after he closes the door, rolling off the two piece outfit and feeling humiliated at the sight of your cum stained panties.
but nothing is more embarrassing than the possibility of someone walking in, considering his orders weren’t for you to lock the door, or to even look in that direction. you were forced to wait, face deep in the blanket, scared of hearing that door opening and not hearing the dark tone of suguru’s voice. sure it had you aching in dread, but you’ll take whatever sick punishment suguru has for you than someone seeing you in such a state. did you really take it too far this time? but it’s not really your fault.. he’s the one pent up on you seeing other people when you two aren’t even dating.
fortunately, you’re smart enough to know not to even say any of that when you hear the door open, quickly slammed closed and locked. your hands grip the blanket tighter at the sound of his boots. those fucking boots, why do they have to be so loud? it feels like you’re about to be killed or somethin’..
and killed you were. your pussy at least..
“fuck are you cryin’ for huh? this what you do on the daily, nothin’ new right?” suguru chuckles with a hand wrapping around your neck, and pulling your teary ruined face back towards him. he was taking you from behind, cock filling you to the hilt and making you feel him even more as you leaned back to him. you weren’t sure how many times you came on him. time doesn’t even feel real anymore.. what were you even doing before this? it didn’t matter.
you try to talk, words mushing into gibberish as he tightens his grip, making a sound of disappointment before pushing your face back into the sheets, slapping your ass and fucking into your sloppy pussy with thrusts that had you thinking of nothing. only able to just take it, moaning loudly with dark spots forming in your vision, the music downstairs hopefully drowning you two out. suguru’s mask was long gone, most of his hair pulled into a ponytail with his bangs falling. he looked so hot when you two were getting ready, and he still does, your face twisted to the mirror across the room, your blurry eyes watching him put you in your place.
“you’re droolin’ princess, gonna leave a stain for satoru to see later.” suguru smiles, you weren’t even shy about how the thought turned you on, clenching around him so tightly it was almost hard for him to drag his cock through your walls. “oh you like thaaat. let him know this pussy’s mine kay? bet you want him to see you like this.. always slutting yourself out with everyone, only to keep comin’ back to me.” you knew that was an underline for something you never forget. no one’s as good as him. no one will ever fuck you as good as him. and no one will love you as good as him. no one gets to keep playing with your heart like he does, taking you home at 5 am and staying in your life like it was nothing. no one tastes like geto suguru.
that’s all you knew.
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youngveinsworld · 3 months
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the young veins interview at the beat kitchen in chicago, 10 april 2010
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Ryan, Andy and Nick M of the Young Veins interviewed by Natalie Kuchik for the Estrella Online blog, 10 April 2010:
Can you please state your name and what you do in the band? Ryan: My name is Ryan Ross and I am the James Dean of the group. Andy: I am Andy Soukal and I play the thumping bass. Slapping the bass. Nick: My name is Nick Murray and I play the drums.
The first tour as The Young Veins, how has it been going and what’s the crowd reaction been like? Ryan: Seems like it is getting better and better. Nick: The tour seems to be picking up steam. Ryan: More and more people are coming I feel like than the first shows, so that’s really nice. Andy: We have such a diverse line-up. We have a hip-hop band, a crazy Freddie Mercury style band and then a throw back band and the crowd has been really receptive to all of it.
How did you guys get on this tour with Foxy Shazam? Ryan: We are managed by the same people. It was kind of tough to get on a tour when you don’t have any music out or any records, so I think they did us a favor. Or maybe we are doing them a favor.
What is it like going back to more smaller intimate venues? Ryan: It is more interesting every night, you never know what you are going to walk into. Some of these stages are, I question the craftsmanship in a lot of these clubs because I can’t figure out what they were thinking but it makes it a lot of fun. Being so close to the crowd again, I forgot how that was and it makes the show have more energy I think.
Do these venue sizes make you guys more hands on? Do you go out and sign merch afterwords? Ryan: Yeah, pretty much every night. If you need to come see me, I am petty much around. It has been really nice to actually be able to talk to the kids it has been awhile since that has been possible. Nick: Especially, since we don’t have any music out or released we are building a really close relationship with what fan-base we do have is really important. Being as close as possible, building friendships and meeting people around the country is good.
What kind of comments are you guys getting from fans? Andy: It ranges all over the place. Ryan: Yeah, where do we begin. Well, I guess about the music it has been cool to have kids say, “I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this or not”, “I’ve only heard two songs but I’m really excited about the album now.” Then sometimes they ask if they can marry me. Nick: The best feeling in the world is to have people that did not come for our band and like our band and tell us that after the show. Especially, since no one has any pretense of what to expect. If they did like it, that is a really good feeling, it is the best feeling in the world. Ryan: It really feels like we are up there trying to win people over, it is challenging.
When this tour ends, what are your plans after? Ryan: More touring, we are going to do Bonnaroo. Then we are trying to route a tour around that so we will be touring in June and then the album comes out June 8th.
The first single is “Change” why did you go with that one? Nick: Seemed logical. Ryan: Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like that album is all over the place and so many songs sound different. I can’t say it represents the album best but it is one of the more upbeat heavier songs. I think live it is a lot of fun to do. Andy: We also did a lot of market research.
Did you really? Because people do that. Ryan: We polled people at the movies.
On your upcoming album Take a Vacation! all the songs are three minutes or less, was that planned or did it just happen? Ryan: No, I don’t know. I guess something switched in Jon and my songwriting and I guess we just trimmed the fat and cut out parts we didn’t need. It is going to kind of make it hard to do a headlining tour. A lot of our favorite records are really short. I mean, there are so many early Elvis songs that are under two minutes long it is really crazy. It wasn’t a conscious thing it is just the style of music we write is shorter, I don’t know for what reason.
The album comes out June 8th, are you planning on streaming it online for free before it comes out, or any other promotions? Ryan: We are sort of putting together some sort of marketing plan but that is not really my strong point, so the label is always coming up with stuff like that. We are doing something pretty cool where if you buy the vinyl you’ll get the CD for free. We are doing these really neat pre-order packages where we are doing these view master things from when you were a kid. We are doing a box set thing where you get one of those with pictures of the band and we did a couple of photo shoots for them. Stuff that is fun for us to do.
Did your label come up with those ideas or was it your guys? Ryan: That was ours. Nick: We really liked the idea of having a view master. Ryan: We were talking about it months ago. Nick: We just didn’t think it was a possibility. Ryan: The label has been really great about letting us do these crazy things already.
What about the vacation photo contest, was that your idea? Ryan: That was their idea, which I really liked because I have been meeting the kids every night and they are really excited about it. There is really nothing we have to do, it is just a great way to have people come for free.
When you (Ryan) were in Panic! at the Disco you wrote a lot of the songs, would you ever do one of those songs live again? Ryan: I don’t know, I sang a couple of the songs so I guess those would be the only ones I would do. I haven’t really thought about it to be honest with you. Andy: It is a different style so it kind of clashes a little bit. I am not super familiar with everything but if there are a couple of songs similar to our style sure it would be considered but otherwise, it would just clash with what we are doing.
I know your sound is so different, when did you feel the shift from Panic! at the Disco to The Young Veins sound? Ryan: The stuff that I was writing, like half this album (Take a Vacation!) with Jon would have been for the Panic! record anyway. It wasn’t a shift really except for when we quit, I guess it allowed us to do even more than we wanted. Maybe half this stuff we actually already knew [that] there would be no chance it would be for Panic! so we went wild with it. It wasn’t a conscious shift ever in our songwriting, it just kept evolving.
When you parted ways did you know your former band members would keep using the Panic! At the Disco name? Ryan: No, I didn’t think that they would keep the name. It was a little bit shocking when I heard about them doing these tours and stuff without us. I figured doing your own thing meant doing your own thing.
What is a song you never get sick of hearing? Andy: “Wounded” by The Cookies. No one is going to know what that is so you don’t have to write that down, but I am going to throw that out there. Ryan: Reason why? Andy: Reason why, well it’s an old song and it’s just really unique and clever. The vocal melody are just so challenging, and that stuff in today’s music is not accessible at all. You don’t find stuff like that. Ryan: You got one Nick? Nick: I just thought of one, umm… Ryan: The one that I keep listening to recently is the song “The Windmills of Your Mind”, the Dusty Springfield version. I think we might cover that song in the future but it is constantly on repeat for me. Nick: It is kind of an obvious one but “Waterloo Sunset” is still one of my favorite songs of all time which is by The Kinks. I’ve never gotten sick of listening to that song. Ryan: Yeah, that’s one of mine. Nick: I have probably heard it fifteen thousand times and it’s never gotten old. Andy: Also “No Scrubs” by TLC, that one never gets old. We sing that one in the van a lot.
Think you would ever cover that song? Andy: I hope.
You are going to need some filler songs when you headline. Andy: Yeah (laughs).
What is something you have always wanted to do but have not done yet? Nick: Shoot a feature film. Ryan: Shoot a feature film star. Andy: I would like to be in Nick’s feature film.
Seriously, are you into movies? Andy: Especially Die Hard. Nick: Yeah, I definitely want to make one though within the next year or so. Ryan: I don’t know, I am sorry I don’t have a good answer for this one. Nick: I don’t even want that to be the answer though, I want something crazier. Ryan: I know I am not really funny today, I am a little bit upset at myself actually.
You guys are young, there has to be something! Ryan: I have done it all (everyone laughs). I want to learn how to ride a motorcycle.
Do you own one yet? Ryan: No, but wouldn’t that be funny?
Well, some people buy frivolous stuff they don’t use. Ryan: Yeah, I have thought about it. Me and Jon were going to buy motorcycles when I still lived in Vegas and we were going to drive up into the mountains until we realized what a bad idea that was. I still would like to because I used to live near the PCH in California, so I always thought it would be fun to drive a motorcycle up and down the coast.
If you could see any band or artist perform any song live, what would it be and why? Andy: These questions are so hard. Ryan: They’re so good though. Andy: Bon Jovi. I agree! No, I’m just joking. Ryan: Can you travel back in time and see the group when they were young?
Yeah, any line up, any song. Ryan: I might want to see The Kinks do “You Really Got Me” like in 1965 or something. Nick: “I Was A Teenage Werewolf” by The Cramps.
Any particular reason why? Nick: Yeah, I’m a really big Cramps fan and Lux died last year, so I never got to see them. Andy: Can I just say, every song that Gentle Giant has ever done.
Just an entire concert, any reason why? Andy: That is such a bad answer. They are just really wacky and they are just this weird band from the 70s that never made it anywhere but was really cool. Ryan: I can’t understand why.
You (Ryan Ross) received a backlash when you left Panic! At the Disco, did you expect that? Ryan: No, but I guess…
Did you have to learn to roll with it? Ryan: Yeah, I mean it was already bad enough without that having to happen to. I guess, when people don’t understand the reasons why it’s easy to get mad at the person you don’t know for something you think they did. It’s weird how some of the fans took it personally. I wish they would understand, this is our life and we have to do what is best for us.
You have to play the music that you want to play. Nick: People grow up. Ryan: It seems to be passing a little bit. Some people are coming around and saying, maybe it wasn’t the smartest train of thought I was on a couple of months ago. I don’t know, I mean obviously if I was a young kid, a teenager and my favorite band broke up I would be a little bit upset too.
Estrella: Do you guys have any final comments? Andy: No, that was my two cents. Ryan: Do you want to comment on it? (laughs) Andy: No, that about covers it. Ryan: Cool, thanks.
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justzawe · 4 months
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interview | zawe ashton
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Actor, director and writer Zawe Ashton has no interest in being perfect. Drawn to the messiness of being a villain, Ashton uncovers the heartbreak behind the anti-hero as she takes on the role of the formidable, Dar-Benn, in Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels. Relishing the chance to make “her-story”, Ashton and DaCosta bonded over literature and their joint vision for an empowered, all-female, ethnically diverse ensemble. The lack of diversity on screen wasn’t lost on Ashton growing up as an aspiring actress – the ability to rectify that and heal her inner child is a mission Ashton is grabbing with both hands.
The vastness of the Marvel realm means most actors in Hollywood have their Marvel audition story. For Ashton, there had been previous close encounters, narrowly missing out in the latter stages. But with DaCosta, it was different. Ashton recalls, “We bonded over literature. Nia wanted to make a very small movie based on a Jane Austen novel and I was absolutely into this so we talked for a good couple of hours. But instead, what ended up happening was her asking me to play a villain in this movie… The process was so natural, I didn’t have to think so it made my goal really clear to serve Nia’s vision. Being part of this piece of “her-story” with the youngest black woman to direct a Marvel film felt extremely important as a moment in my career.”
A departure from her traumatic high school physical education lessons, Ashton felt empowered by the experience of getting into physical shape for the role, all while transitioning into motherhood. “It ended up being transformative. The entire stunt team I worked with touched my heart in such a deep way… They helped me realise a physical world so far removed from botched PE classes that had made me think that I couldn’t be a physically strong person. It was very powerful.”
It was also the opportunity to set her inner child free on set that made the transformation into Dar-Benn so liberating. She enthuses, “Having the inner child run wild was the best – and scariest – part of this film… I had to play which most of us haven’t done since the sandpit. So indulging in that was a very unique experience to have in front of thousands of people. But it was so fun – I honestly loved every second of it.”
But it was her character’s vulnerability that Ashton sought to capture. “Anti-heroes have always been attractive to me. As a child, I was drawn to the reasons for why they did what they did. So I was always really satisfied when we got to see their vulnerabilities that helped us to understand them.” And while egos often get in the way, Ashton had no qualms playing the villain. “I honestly feel like the responsibility to be the hero would be too much on my shoulders. I’m very comfortable in a space where I don’t have to present as perfect, where I get to be a bit messy or a bit frightening or a bit off centre… I always find that a very interesting journey to see why someone on the outside wants to carry out what they want to carry out.”
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Despite history being made with The Marvels, Ashton isn’t shying away from debates around wider representation across the film and TV industry. She considers, “Being part of a completely female driven cast is really important – bringing different ethnicities to the screen heals the inner child within me. I think back to myself as a young girl looking to film and entertainment and not seeing a broad spectrum of representation, and how that was more damaging than I could have realised or vocalised at that age. So being part of something that makes another little girl not have to experience that is very moving.”
And while she’s hopeful for the future, Ashton knows there’s still a long way to go. “I think the scale is tipping. But there is still a huge amount to do to truly, holistically balance out the things that need to be balanced out to have a healthier industry. I feel very grateful to at least be on that road and be part of the conversation… There are so many voiceless people out there, who should probably have the mic instead. But this industry is extremely powerful in terms of how we interact with it. So I’m really aware that I have this platform because of the work that I do.”
Not content with shaping conversations on screen, Ashton is also changing the narrative through her work as a writer and director. She muses, “There are a lot of stories that are brewing inside of me that I’m desperate to get out… You get to a certain point in life where you have this incredible vantage point over a huge portion of your lived experience that you can’t really access while you’re still living it. One of the benefits of aging is that your creativity really can deepen. You have even more life experience to draw from and more creative ways of looking at that life experience. It’s another way for me to process life.”
With so many stories to tell, one character that remains a cherished favourite is the enigmatic, if not slightly deluded, Vod from Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain’s, Fresh Meat. Ashton enthuses, “I cherish her as a character so deeply. I cherish the team that helped bring her to life – all the amazing production and design team who were all part of bringing her weird and wonderful world to life. Often as an actor you can be known for a role that has a small trauma attached to it, so the character becomes an avatar that you feel slightly trapped in because how you view the character isn’t how the audience see the avatar, so I was lucky. It’s one of the biggest achievements in my career so far!”
As Ashton continues to find her voice both on and off screen, she’s discovering new realms of possibilities.
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noahsartt · 1 month
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My reservations with the 2022 Interview with the Vampire tv series:
My thoughts on amc’s Interview with the Vampire (2022) tv series compared to the 1976 source material and what I liked about the 1994 movie.
Some reflections before the second season airs. I watched the series as it was coming out in 2022, so these thoughts have been sitting for over a year.
This is a subjective critique of the show, not me hating on it. I liked the show a lot & watched it twice. Many of the key changes were extremely creative ways of exploring those characters from new perspectives, instead of just pointlessly remaking something that's been done before. Distinct creative change should be the basis of every remake, no point is making something 'new' if there's nothing new about it. This show knew that, and the changes for the most part were written beautifully. ...But the movie is still my favourite despite its many flaws. Camp classic right there.
Issues with the show:
Making it take place 100 years later, it ruins the specific aesthetic of the book for me. (But I understand they had to in order to re-write Louis & Claudia as black).
Aging up Claudia. The way Bailey Bass played Claudia was amazing, no notes at all for her. I just wish they kept her younger because that was a very symbolic part of what made Claudia’s original character so tragic. She suffers in an entirely different way to Louis because of her age. New Claudia is supposed to be in the body of a 14 year old, but the actress was 18/19 so she looks much older already,  and no matter how well she played it, the age factor can’t be helped. Being stuck eternally in the body of a 5 year old (book) is so different to a 14 year old, who looks much older (tv show). Kirsten Dunst who was 10 in the movie, was able to play the little child - adult vampire progression a lot better. People say Claudia's original age is too 'disturbing' to see on screen... but that's the character...
Daniel being old… WHY?? Just so they could tie together the storyline or him meeting Armand multiple decades before ???? I only read IWTV and some of the TVL so I don't know everything that happens down the line for him, or what amc plans for the character in the show... but I don't understand the aging up except for 'diversity' reasons. Which, ok, but just to check a box? Louis and Claudia's race change make sense as a creative decision. But the Daniel in the book and film is a 20-something year old which is why he's so fascinated by Louis' 'gift', and doesn't understand the message Louis is sending, instead wanting to become a vampire too. Why would old Daniel want those same things? Changing Daniel's age is such an inherent thing... it's like if they didn't make Lestat blond. Eric Bogosian plays him funny though, I will say that. Christian Slater kind of just sat there.
Louis having no money and needing Lestat's financial support for his business ventures????? When it’s supposed to be Lestat leeching off Louis' estate … WHY. Why did they change something so fundamental about their dynamic. Lestat moves in because he needs wealth and Louis has it. And then he starts acting like it's both of theirs and Louis just lets him. Funniest thing ever. But in the show Louis moves in with him instead. That's just wrong.
Louis asking (basically begging) Lestat to make Claudia when Lestat is supposed to be the one to do it in order to ensure Louis doesn't leave him. Another fundamental part of their relationship that just got flipped around completely... and for what? Why did it change the things it didn't need to?
Antoinette... girl why are you there... we don't need more characters. Go away.
The guy that Louis gets with to make Lestat jealous …. why is he there either? In the book they don't need to bring other people in to irritate each other.
One of the most perfect scenes from the film was when Lestat was tormenting that girl and trying to get Louis to kill her. The show’s version with the opera singer wasn’t the same. The original scene is such a good depiction of their dynamic with each other: Lestat's eccentric killing methods and Louis’ shame and guilt. The show’s version didn’t live up to it. That scene was so excellent in what it set out to do. It captured their back and forth in such a simple way. That dynamic follows them forever, even as Louis begins to accept his nature, that spark of annoyance towards Lestat is ready to become a full fire at any moment. That scene is enough to be a full character study. The show has little bits here and there which capture something similar. But they should have recreated that scene at least.
Claudia and Lestat's relationship evolving from enjoying each others company and similarities, to detesting each other and competing for Louis’ affection. They didn’t spend enough time on Lestat and Claudia’s relationship in the show to fully demonstrate that, only a few scenes of them driving together and hunting together at the beginning. Even the two hour movie found a way to intergrade that better. Their relationship and the way Claudia is so starkly similar to Lestat when they move to Paris, is one of the my favourite parts of the book to analyse. Louis leaving Lestat and moving all the way across the ocean, only to be reminded of him in everything Claudia did. The show did have some purposeful parallels between Lestat and Claudia in the dialogue which I appreciate, I hope that continues in season 2.
Louis being in on Claudia's plan to kill Lestat and even being the one to finish off Lestat when it’s supposed to be Claudia’s idea on her own...?? Lestat's death is supposed to be an "ok, I guess that was necessary, time to move on with our lives now," moment for Louis. But he wasn't supposed to have the courage or the want to be the one to do it himself. He was hesitant and regretful in the show, but he still slit his throat... it was supposed to be Claudia alone. Credit where credit is due, the scene was beautifully filmed, the red blood on white cloth looked incredible and the entire scene captured the tone of devastation that the movie didn't. It was all very quick and emotionless in the movie.
Even though I hate Br*d Pitt's acting, his Louis was way more accurate to the book Louis. He basically was the embodiment of book Louis. Just sad and whiny the entire time. New Louis had more to him, I think Jacob Anderson even said in an interview that it was a purposeful decision to give Louis more grit. It's not a change I appreciated because it alters the original character too much. You can't change something that fundamental. Just ugh. In the show, Louis is more angry than pathetically sad, it’s very different to how the character was originally written. 
Sam Reid’s Lestat is pretty on the nose but still more serious than the original Lestat & Tom Cruise’s portrayal which was the perfect level of camp and eccentric. Tom cruise was playing Lestat from just IWTV but Sam Reid is playing him with the baggage of his entire life as written in the other books, maybe that's why he is different. Maybe his performance is even better because of it. I haven't read the other books so I can't really say.
I won't say anything about Armand (yet) because he hasn’t had his time to shine. We’ll see after season 2. I loved Antonio Banderas as Armand, and even though he was very different from how book Armand was, it was a change I liked. New Armand is going to be more accurate to the books I believe, but i didn’t like how Armand was there the entire time Louis was being interviewed… why...
Maybe I am one of the few that doesn't overtly appreciate the 'fresh' take of this story. Many of the things that draw me to the book and the movie have been taken away in this adaptation.
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I recommend this fan fiction that explores the idea of Louis being a person of colour in the context of the original book's 1700s timeline. It explores the intersectionality of Louis' struggle with vampirism, queerness & race while still being authentic to the book. Go read it.
In the Author's words: This is NOT a rewrite of the AMC TV show, nor does it intend to be. This is us making one (subtextually plausible) change to canon in order to 1) explore underlying issues with the source material and 2) see how it affects the way the events of IWTV played out.
Ok that's it. Will maybe add to this when the second season airs. For months, this was just for me in my notes app but what is tumblr for if not to air out my locked away ideas.
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yggdraseed · 5 months
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Women in Jujutsu Kaisen
Let’s get this out of the way first: if you’re reading this because you enjoy reading posts by people who hate Jujutsu Kaisen, you’re going to be disappointed. I actually like Jujutsu Kaisen a lot, I have a lot of positive things to say about it, and I’m going to be explaining my reasoning here. You should probably move on if you want trash talk. But if you have a negative view point that you’re nevertheless willing to reevaluate or recontextualize by looking at things from a new perspective, please read on.
A lot has been said about how women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen. A lot of good, and a lot of bad. I think a lot of the bad comes from how Jujutsu Kaisen was praised so early on for how it’s women were written, only for people to either not see it or have their expectations not be met due to events in Shibuya and the Culling Games. However, while I try to respect diversity of opinion, I feel like a lot of people aren’t really grasping why the way GeGe Akutami writes women was lauded. I think a people have lots of different ideas of what makes for a well-written female character, and don’t find what they’re looking for in Jujutsu Kaisen, thus they get angry and they post online about how GeGe Akutamisogyny isn’t going to beat “the allegations.”
I’ve never liked the justifications put forth for that argument. There’s a lot of subtext to how the female cast of Jujutsu Kaisen are written that can’t fit neatly into the simple world of page and panel counts or win-loss ratios. And, fortunately, there are tools for feminist literary analysis that I am going to employ in what will hopefully be a short trilogy of posts, starting here.
When I see people criticizing how women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen, I usually only see them using one point of interest: the outcome of a fight. If a female character doesn’t win a fight, then some people in the audience take that to mean that GeGe Akutami hates that character, hates women, and doesn’t want them to succeed — or some variation of that, perhaps less extreme.
This is a product of Jujutsu Kaisen being a Shonen, and thus being on the radar of Shonen fans who — let’s be honest — are not known widely for consuming anime or manga outside of the Shonen demographic. Shonen is heavily focused on conflict and competition as storytelling, it’s why the term “battle shonen” is used so prevalently. And Jujutsu Kaisen doesn’t try to deny its own Shonen heritage: it uses fights for storytelling all the time, sometimes even more than other Shonen seem to do.
I think this might also be a cultural thing. Anime and manga are written very differently from Western movies or comic books, with very different cultural background and different artistic sensibilities. However, that’s a topic that I’ll unpack another time, maybe not even in Part 2 or 3 of this post.
Point is, we need to step back and get some perspective. People who use the losses or deaths among the female cast as evidence that GeGe hates women, or sees women as inferior, or has some sort of passive, culturally-inherited sexism in their worldview are suffering from tunnel vision. You need to look at the story as a whole sometimes, not just the one subject in question.
Go back to the Goodwill Event, and the fight between Nobara and Momo. Their whole conversation is a huge part of why Jujutsu Kaisen was praised early on for how Akutami writes women, and I think the subtext of it really went over some people’s heads. It did mine, the first time around: to me, it just felt like a competent, if tired “girl power” moment for Nobara. But as I invested more time and thought into reading the series, and as I learned more since first viewing that scene, I started to realize what I wasn’t seeing in that scene.
Momo shares something in common with all of the Kyoto Students, Todo and Miwa being the exception. In addition to seemingly coming from a more-or-less established sorcerer pedigree, Momo shares the general pessimism that hangs over the Kyoto Students like a dark cloud. There’s this very morosely Japanese sense of “woe is me, but there’s nothing to be done” about Momo, Mai, Noritoshi, and Mechamaru, in one sense or another. These four are people who will complain about a problem, then just sit while it washes over them and batters them like a wave. They just accept the unfair hand they’re dealt in life, and while they don’t like it, they treat it as something no one can overcome. Furthermore, on some level, I think these four don’t necessarily want to overcome the misfortunes and injustices they face.
See, Momo pours her heart out at length about how hard it is being a woman and being a sorcerer. And the way she talks about it is a very different critique of society than you’d see in a lot of Shonen. She talks about how women are expected to be perfect: beautiful, graceful, exquisite, the model of femininity, while also keeping up with the macho “might makes right” sensibilities that dominate sorcery. In her words, “men have to be strong, women have to be perfect.”
This isn’t something that’s just being plucked out of thin air, this is a criticism of the girlboss culture that arose through the 2000s and 2010s up to now. Women are expected to battle sexism alone, in their own lives, by being exceptional: rather than reforming cultural structures that put women at a disadvantage to men, girlboss culture says women just need to always wear perfect makeup, always be fashionable, always work 2.5 times harder than men, and find time to raise children and have a side-hustle at the same time. Instead of fixing the problem, it’s telling women, “Just work harder. Just be better.” As if women haven’t been having to work harder for nothing in return for the past 50 years, holding down jobs that they have to go above and beyond to prove themselves in as compared to male coworkers for whom the job might as well be a guarantee by comparison, having a ceiling put on their promotion while men who didn’t put in as much work get to move up the company ladder, and frequently having to juggle having a child and taking care of housework in addition to the expectations of jobs that often don’t afford maternity leave. And then, on top of all of that, the expectation is then foisted on to have the time and energy to perfectly craft your hair, makeup, and outfit for the day, and if you miss a single step of the whole stupid dance, you’re seen as an underachiever. That’s girlboss culture, and that’s what Momo is indirectly criticizing when she laments the contradictory and unfair expectations women in the sorcery world have to uphold. They need to fight just as hard as the men, while wearing skirts and not getting a single scar on that pretty face.
(Just as an aside, I love the way this conversation comes about. Momo and Mai are pretty close to each other, to the point that it sometimes feels like nobody else in the Kyoto school likes or respects Mai like Momo does. And Momo targets Nobara with this whole speech because of the friction between Mai and Nobara, and because she wants to stand up for Mai. I like that element of both solidarity and conflict between women, about being a woman, and I’ve always gotten sapphic vibes from Momo and Mai, so I’m glad that she’s the one giving this whole speech and why she’s doing it. But I digress.)
And the thing is, she’s not wrong. Neither Nobara nor the story as an overall entity refutes anything she says. However, Nobara points out something else about Momo that she shares in common with the other Kyoto Students who were raised to be sorcerers: the way she treats her whole life like a job. Momo has internalized the culture she despises, and instead of trying to rebel, she just accepts all of it as “the way the world works.” She soldiers on, just as Noritoshi soldiers on with his family’s expectations, Mai soldiers on with her pain and feeling of being abanoned, and Mechamaru soldiers on with the isolation, unfairness, and general misery that comes with his Heavenly Pact. Soldiering on, as if soldiering on has inherent value when it leads nowhere and accomplishes nothing. Never addressing the problem, or trying to find a way around it; simply rolling that boulder up the hill, grumbling all the way. She and the other Kyoto Students have this sense of treating their own misfortune as a badge of honor. To them, they’re justified and validated because they have experienced more than their fair share of suffering. They’re always eager to flaunt the crosses they have to bear.
Momo treats being a woman as a curse. Funny how that ties into the rest of the narrative, huh?
For Nobara, being a woman is not some great burden she has to live with. Being a woman in general and being Nobara Kugisaki in particular is something she revels in, and it’s just the fault of everyone else if they think otherwise.
Let’s talk about Nobara, and let’s not reduce her to her death scene. When we meet Nobara, she’s immersing herself in the Tokyo way of life after moving from the countryside to the big city. She encounters a sleazy talent agency recruiter who’s pestering women on the street with his hand-rubbing, obviously nefarious ways… only for Nobara to stop him, turn him around, and say, “What about me?” He gets intimidated, tries to run, and she drags him back. From her perspective, he should be happy to have her, and the fact he isn’t means he’s ignorant of her beauty and wit and needs to be corrected. If he won’t convert to Kugisakism, then her charms are wasted on him, and he’s doomed to the dim world that is Nobaralessness. When she meets Yuji and Megumi, she introduces herself with a line that’s translated into English as, “I’m the only woman in your group.” But from what I’ve been able to gather, her line in Japanese is, “I’m the red mark.” The phrase “red mark” can mean “the one who’s different from the others” — like the one girl in a group of boys — or it can mean “the one who stands out.” So you can also read it as her saying, “I’m the stand-out of the group.” Nobara Kugisaki, everybody.
If you want to talk about how literary circles analyze how women are writing, let’s leave the topics of fight outcomes and feats to one side. One thing you immediately look for is motivation. What’s motivating a character? This is important for how female characters are written, and especially in Shonen, which revolves so much around characters with some goal or belief that the story pursues through fights and other forms of adversity.
Now poorly-written women will tend to be motivated by men. They’ll be attracted to a man, or trying to support or protect a man, or trying to find a man. This by itself isn’t a death sentence for a woman’s characterization, but it is a red flag. It’s also not as if women have to never interact with or think about men to be well-written. It’s not an on-off switch, a bad writing-good writing switch. It’s a meter, like Mahoraga steadily adapting to a technique. Just a little bit is fine, and can be even turned into good writing in capable hands. But if it becomes too prevalent and is never examined, then you get a situation where a story’s women are not permitted lives outside of being in a male character’s orbit.
How do we gauge this? Well, there are lots of ways, but one of the more well-known and simple techniques is the Bechdel test. The name is derived from Alison Bechdel, feminist author who penned such classics as Dykes to Watch Out For. Bechdel proposed a simple litmus test for how to tell an author’s seriousness about writing women, and it goes like this: 1.) Look for scenes where women talk to each other. 2.) In those scenes, check for how often they’re talking about things besides male characters.
This isn’t the only way to tell if women are written well or not, and some will say it isn’t even the best way, but it’s a good foot in the door to get us thinking about what divides well-written female characters from poorly-written female characters. I’m not going to go back and scan through the whole manga just yet, but let’s look at some examples.
— The aforementioned conversation between Nobara and Momo, where the two pit their different view of what it means to be a woman and a sorcerer against one another. — Maki and Nobara talking to each other after the encounter with Mai and Todo. Curious by meeting Maki’s sister, Nobara talks to Maki a bit about their upbringing. Having gained more insights into Maki’s past and personality, Nobara leans on her and tells her how much she respects her. — Miwa and Mai discussing the upcoming Goodwill Event in a flashback. Mai tells Miwa that Maki is weak, which leaves Miwa unprepared for their fight. — Maki and Mai arguing and coming to terms with what drove them apart. Mai just wanted a peaceful life with Maki, but Maki couldn’t be happy and authentic with herself if she just left things the way they were. She was forced to choose between herself and Mai, and Maki chose herself, knowing that Mai would suffer and that she’d shoulder some of the guilt for that.
This indicates that GeGe found it important to divorce the identities of the female characters from male characters. And this holds true in what drives and motivates the female cast.
Nobara is motivated by her own goals. She hates the countryside, and she loves the city; becoming a sorcerer is a way she can make a lot of money, live in the city, and pursue the kind of lifestyle she values. She wants to be a true blue Tokyoite, wearing trendy clothes and eating crepes and taking selfies by the statue of Hachiko outside Shibuya Station. She’s not doing this to avenge her dead brother, she’s not doing this to find her father, she’s not searching for a strong man to sire strong children — yuck. Nobara has aesthetic values and strongly held beliefs, and becoming a sorcerer lets her pursue those values and beliefs.
And if you really want to analyze the action side of Jujutsu Kaisen as an indicator for how GeGe feels about female characters, consider how Nobara takes to sorcery like a fish to water. Both Megumi and Yuji have their own internal dilemmas with being a sorcerer, but not Nobara. In a series where mindset is so important, Nobara has the mindset. Uro describes the model sorcerer as having “no concern for others and an overwhelming sense of self.” There is no one with a more overwhelming sense of self than Nobara. She’s loud, opinionated, loves to argue, flaunts herself, and demands other people give her more than what they think she’s due. She’s narcissistic, but that faith in herself makes her mentally strong.
She lacks experience, but even then, she learns and grows rapidly through the series. Due to running out of nails to fend off cursed spirits during the first stretch of Fearsome Womb chapters, she invents Hairpin as a way to reuse nails she’s already launched and embedded in a surface. She manages to land a Black Flash during the tag team fight with Yuji, and it’s her oppressive use of Resonance on Eso and Kechizu that turns the tides — a tactic which required her to hammer nails into her own arm. She takes it on the chin and gets her brain rattled around in her skull during the fight with Haruta, but even while borderline unconscious and suffering from a concussion, she forces herself to keep him talking in hopes Nitta can escape and manages to get to her feet and keep fighting despite the total disorientation and inability to summon her strength. While she didn’t win the fight, she showed more fighting spirit than half of the male cast tends to, and I find it kind of gross that people will ignore all of that and mock someone who kept fighting against the odds. That’s like laughing at Mumen Rider when he’s hopelessly trying to fight Sea King even as his body is breaking. I don’t exactly see what about either case is so funny or worthy of ridicule.
Even in the showdown with Mahito, people always fixate on how she dies, but never consider what led to it. She crosses paths with Mahito, and even knowing from Yuji what he’s capable of, she goes in — partially because he hurt Yuji, her friend, and she wants to make him suffer for it. And her technique turns out to be a worst case scenario for Mahito. She’s hammering his clone with Resonance and sending the blowback to the original while he’s fighting Yuji, dividing his attention and weakening him. Her only mistake was chasing him down, and even then, this isn’t the story punishing her. It’s the story being consistent with who Nobara is. She’s got a dangerous enemy on the ropes, her pride is bruised after the fight with Haruta, and she has a chance to get vengeance on someone who’s hurt her friend while helping said friend in the process. If she hadn’t followed Mahito into the subway, then she wouldn’t be Nobara Kugisaki.
And in her final moments, Nobara achieves something that’s considered to be out of reach of most sorcerers. She dies content, with a smile on her face. Nobara may not have realized her potential to be a great sorcerer, but she got what she, personally, wanted. Sorcery was a means to an end, and she got to live the Tokyo life and meet interesting people that she considers her friends. She got to fill out that finite number of seats in her life, and even meet a few people who pulled up a chair when she didn’t expect it. In her words, “It wasn’t so bad.” Nobody else but Toji and Gojo have gotten to die this satisfied — Toji because Megumi had grown up free of the Zen’in curse, Gojo because he was authentic to himself right to the end and left it all on the field. Nobara was authentic to herself right to the end, and that’s worthy of high praise. If she is definitely dead and not coming back, then she managed to accomplish what it was she wanted before dying. Not many get that luxury in Jujutsu Kaisen. It hurts because I liked her and admired her and appreciate the way she was written, and her dying doesn’t make the value of her character disappear from the story entirely. It’s the character’s death, it’s everything that led to that death and what that death means to them and to those who are left behind. And if it’s manga that explore death, nobody does it better than GeGe Akutami.
Lots of people will point to an interview where GeGe said that Nobara was not originally considered part of the cast, and they’ll use that as evidence that secretly, GeGe’s a big stupid misogynist who hates women and likes killing them in stories and blah blah blah blah blah. You know, first of all, I doubt that the editor held a gun to GeGe’s head and said “Put in a female main character or die.” Secondly, if GeGe really didn’t care, Nobara would just be a two-dimensional copy of Sakura who dies in the first arc or two. GeGe would not have put in the effort to set her apart from other female leads, or given her so many stand-out moments, or given her such an interesting motivation and world view. In short, if GeGe didn’t want to write a female character, they’d do what Kishimoto did: write Sakura. But that comparison is a can of worms I’ll need to pry open another time.
To sum up for the time being, no, GeGe Akutami does not hate women. Losing a fight does not make a female character worthless, and does not indicate a disdain for them on the part of the author. I don’t know about you, but I don’t read Shonen just to see who punches harder. I want to see characters be challenged, sometimes fail, learn, grow, and overcome adversity — and it wouldn’t be adversity if all the characters I like win and survive easily. I love Kashimo and will continue to love Kashimo, and Kashimo being super ultra dead doesn’t change that.
Look out for Part 2, in which I’m going to unpack some really contentious stuff when it comes to challenges and female characters in Jujutsu Kaisen. We’re gonna talk about the concept of screen time, we’re gonna talk about subtext, we’re gonna talk about great expectations and the great unexpected in Jujutsu Kaisen, and we’re gonna talk more in-depth about the narrative outside the narrative of Jujutsu Kaisen in a vacuum. If your sense for danger is giving you a bad feeling about this, then it should be: we’re talking about that. Switch on your Anti-Gravity System, it’s going to get messy.
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artist-issues · 1 month
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Hi! I've seen you comment a bit here and there about Pocahontas. This movie has had this quite messy reputation attached to it since it came out and hasn't been able to escape from it since then. Personally, I've always liked Pocahontas, but I do acknowledge that it has its glaring issues, especially when it comes to the context of what actually went down and Pocahontas's true story. I'm interested in reading your thoughts on the movie and what Disney could have done better regarding the whole "diversity" and historical accuracy thing. I genuinely believe Disney had the best of intentions when it came to the themes, message and depiction of Native American culture, but the execution unfortunately did not seem the most appropriate at times. What do you think?
I don’t know. I don’t have a settled opinion on Pocahontas. I will say I really enjoy it, and I think maybe the aesthetics of the movie are what appeal to me the most because it’s the one I want to have on in the background most often.
When you say “what Disney could’ve done better regarding the whole ‘diversity’ and historical accuracy thing” and “did not seem the most appropriate at times,” I don’t know if I understand what you mean. I don’t know if I understand what anyone means when they say that.
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There are almost zero cold hard facts about the historical Pocahontas that EXPERTS agree on. Almost zero. So when people say “oh no, it wasn’t historically accurate,” it’s like, “no, of course it’s not. It’s a fairy tale based on a historical person that we know very little about to begin with.” Seems like what they’re mainly mad about is that Historical John Smith’s version of Historical Pocahontas saving him is the framework for the animated film, and we all generally agree that his version was fake. And people are mad about that?
But…why? If it’s already supposed to be a fairy tale loosely inspired by a historical person we know very little about…I mean, nobody is furious with the Robin Hood stories and going “how dare you misrepresent Robin of Lockersley, 1160, and King Richard I!!” Because we all know that they’re stories loosely based on—anyway. You get my point. Why would you have beef about a fairy tale being based loosely? Moving on.
You can say “because now generations of kids are growing up thinking that’s the real story of Pocahontas!! What an outrage!”
…All right, well, then you’re doing a terrible job teaching your kids discernment as a parent. When kids I’m responsible for watch a movie, I tell them “it’s a movie. It’s not real.” If it’s a movie about historical events, I tell them, “If you want to know more about the real story, let’s learn about the real story.” It’s not on Disney to teach your kids that a fairy tale is a fairy tale, it’s on you.
Anyway, you get it. Moving on.
Thing is, the Pocahontas movie’s message is “Love tries to understand, not to possess.” Great message. Especially good when applied to the problem of prejudice.
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So then, they just shift the events, the character motivations, and the depictions around as needed, like they would any fairy tale in order to send that message in the best way. And because it is a fairy tale, not a documentary, great. Do it.
If Historical John Smith’s fake story makes that message more compelling, great. Use pieces of it. Why not? After all, they never claimed that this was the true, accurate history of colonization, the Anglo-Powhatan war, or John Smith’s interactions with Pocahontas. If they had made that claim, sure, let’s talk about historical accuracy. But they didn’t, so let’s not.
That’s all I had to say about the “historical inaccuracies” thing. Now let’s talk about “representation.”
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What is it that people have an issue with here? Did they really want Disney to animate hundreds of Powhatan’s people dying of disease? Did they want Disney to animate heads getting chopped off and women getting raped? What’s the argument? That Disney should’ve made the colonists the clear and undeniable villains, the monsters of history, and the Native Americans 100% pure and innocent, wronged victims?
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They’re not mad that Disney did a bad job representing Native Americans in a movie that was supposed to be a fairy tale. They’re mad that Disney didn’t represent Native Americans the way they would’ve.
Far as my eyes can see, people who call Pocahontas racist or misrepresentative just don’t want the story to be “Love tries to understand, not to possess.” They want the story to be “White colonists were unredeemable racist monsters and sub-human tyrants who deserved to rot in hell, while the Native American people were entirely innocent victims who did nothing wrong.’
The problem is that’s just not a true, or even helpful message for any movie to have. Sorry. The statement I just typed out up there in bold is not a true or helpful statement. And thank God the Pocahontas movie didn’t make it.
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There’s nothing racist being said in the Pocahontas movie. There are depictions of the sin of racism in the Pocahontas movie. There is a difference. Characters in the Pocahontas movie talk and sing about each other as if the other people group is sub-human. That is a depiction of racism. But the message of the movie, and the way it treats Native Americans, is to treat them like human beings. Therefore, the message is not racist.
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In terms of who is good and who is bad, who is right and who is wrong, the movie very clearly shows that the Native American characters did not start the violence. The Native American characters did not want war. The Native American characters were willing to be friendly and willing to defend their land and each other. The Native American characters were the first to try and make peace with the colonist characters. And they were all (Kocoum included) entirely human characters. They were even the good-guy-coded characters, in the movie’s conflict. All of the Native American side characters are noticeably smarter, kinder, drawn more carefully, and are more heroic than the white characters. (When Thomas is thrown overboard the other white side characters leave him behind. In contrast, when Namonteck is shot the other Native American side characters rescue him immediately and fall back.) And, not a caricature among them. Meanwhile, Wiggins, Ben, and Lion are all drawn with exaggerated characteristics. The heroine is Pocahontas the Character, not John Smith the Character. So what is the issue you have?
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What people think is racist is the “idealization” of a Native American woman falling in love—or, as they like to say now—“committing herself to a white colonist.” But that’s like…a gross oversimplification of the movie. John Smith (the character) committed himself right back to her, nobody wants to talk about that? Also, they low key didn’t commit themselves to each other at all costs—he tries to, at the end of the movie, stay with her or have her come with him, and she won’t leave her home and her people?? So what’s the argument?
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Not to mention, why is anyone even upset that the character Pocahontas falls in love with a white colonist character? Are you saying that this sort of thing would never happen? That a young woman who’s people are embattled with and mistreated by invaders would never find one invader who comes to an understanding with her, and then they fall in love? You’re mad because that would never happen? Incorrect. It happened all the time in history. It happens all the time in other stories you love, like West Side Story.
Who the heck cares if it didn’t happen exactly that way (even though maybe it did) with the historical Pocahontas? We already established that this wasn’t supposed to be a historically accurate retelling, it was supposed to be a loosely-based fairy tale. And the message “Love tries to understand, not to possess,” works perfectly with a fairy tale where the girl from one side of a racially-charged hate war understands and falls in love with a guy from the other side.
I mean people who talk about Pocahontas, the historical figure, with reverence and respect, all usually agree on one thing: she did help maintain some kind of peace between colonists and Native Americans. Whether or not you think the colonists should’ve even been there in the first place is beside the point—sorry, but it is; they were there, now let’s deal with the reality.
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So when Disney makes a movie where the goal is to tell the message “Love tries to understand, not to possess,” and they have to be true to the universally-agreed-upon “Pocahontas probably helped bring some peace…” in their fairy tale…why on earth do you have a problem with Pocahontas the Character falling in love as a reason for bringing about that peace?
It’s because you don’t find “falling in love” to be anything other than demeaning for a woman. And it’s because you don’t want John Smith, or any white colonist character, to be depicted as human. You want them all to be unredeemable racist monsters.
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The goal is no longer to have movies that say what Pocahontas said. We don’t want movies where there’s messy racism, but then it ends with attempts at peace and understanding. We want movies where there’s entirely one-sided racism, and then revenge for that racism. That’s what we want. We want endless apologies and zero forgiveness.
And for better or worse, Pocahontas is not a movie about endless apologies and zero forgiveness.
IN CONCLUSION: 1. None of the “you” statements were directed at you, idiosyncraticrednebula. 🫡
2. Anyone who wants to teach me where I’m wrong is welcome to, but you have to show your work, and you have to be consistent, you can’t just say “lol imagine thinking Pocahontas isn’t racist. You are the problem.” and then block me. 🙄 all right, well, you can, but all you’ll get out of it is an echo chamber.
3. If you want me to talk about the art, the storytelling, the quality of the movie outside of all this (and it should be outside of all this, because this was a fairy tale, not a historically accurate documentary) it’ll have to be in a different ask, and I’m happy to.
4. Should Disney have made it more clear that this was a fairy tale, a stylized story based only loosely on historical events? …Yeah. Definitely should’ve done a Prince of Egypt-style title card or something. But they didn’t—so now show me why it’s racist or misrepresentative.
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imnotgoinghome · 1 year
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Against All Stereotypes
Thank you to my brain for this idea
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Summary: Who would have thought of a Nerd and a Popular Girl being friends?
Paring: Peter Parker x Reader
Warning: yelling, kissing, fluff, stereotypes?
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First day of high school! You can imagine most people would be excited, at least that’s what all the movies and TV show say. But when you walked a day in your shoes, no one would be exciting about first days (especially at school).
Now, walking through the front doors was an adrenaline rush, don’t get me wrong, but once you got inside, you realized just how diverse high school can be (like you needed one more thing in your life right now).
No one truly knew how or why people tended to be so stuck in their own little groups, but that’s just kinda how high school worked. Every group came with their own set of rules.
The Gossip Girls made a rule with the Pretty Perfectionist that they wouldn’t cross paths, between the two groups there was a lot of diversity (even though they were basically the same, but don’t say that to their faces. They will get offended).
Now the Nerds and the Jocks on the other hand, they were two totally separate people. Nerds were the ones everyone stayed away from, but the Jocks, now they had a different story. The Jocks were pretty much who everyone wanted to be, and if you were a Jock, oh man would you get girls. And of course, like any high school movie cliché ever, the popular girls (meaning the Pretty Perfectionist and the Gossip Girls) went for the Jocks. Common knowledge of course.
The nerds, well, you can imagine how that went. Every single Nerd, for the most part, was sure they were in love with one of the popular girls, and all ended up getting rejected.
And then you had your common denominators, which was a horrible name. The common denominator consisted of the kids who weren’t popular but wouldn’t be considered nerds. There were several different groups of people within the common denominators, but everyone just referred to them as a whole (it was just easier that way).
You just so happened to land in this ‘common denominator’ group, but that didn’t last for long.
You quickly made friends with a lot of the Pretty Perfectionist (thanks to your looks), and started hanging out with them, becoming one of them yourself. You never liked to refer to yourself as a perfectionist, but you weren’t gonna deny that you were pretty.
You had self-esteem, self-confidence, and bit of an ego. Which was good, but honestly sometimes it wasn’t.
In middle school, you were always referred to as different, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. You just called yourself unique. You didn’t care about what people thought of you, what you looked like, who you dated, or boys period. But after hanging out with the Pretty Perfectionists, all that sadly changed.
Were you proud that you had become a snobby know it all, who cared about what other people thought and what you looked like? No, as a matter of fact, you kicked yourself every day for letting yourself go. But no matter how hard you tried, there was nothing you could do about it. That was who you were now, and you weren’t sure if anyone could ever change that.
You were walking to your first class of the day with Liz, one of your best friends, zoning out as usual. You zoned out a lot (especially since it hit you that you had changed), which the girls thought was really weird. Most of the time when they talked to you, they had to repeat themselves because guess what you were doing… overthinking and zoning out.
After realizing that you had forgotten your notebook (because who remembers those?), you dashed away from Liz, quickly picking up your pace as you neared your locker. The thing about running, in your chase just quickly walking, in the halls was that no one payed attention, leaving them to bump into you. Stupid phones.
Following one extremely hard blow, you were falling, slowly but surely falling to the ground. But before you could hit it, someone caught you.
As you looked up, looking into the chocolaty brown eyes of non other then Peter Parker, you realized your situation. Everything had happened so fast. You didn’t really have time to realize that you had fallen until you locked eyes with Peter as he helped you stand back up.
“Thank you” you said, still staring straight into his eyes. You were quick to notice of the light red that was now displayed on his cheeks.
“It’s no problem really, I’m just sorry I bumped into you” Peter said, rubbing the back of his neck. He quickly realized that he hadn’t actually told you his name, considering this was the first time you had spoken.
“I’m Peter by the way, Peter Parker” he added as he lowered his hand, stuffing it in the pocket of his hoodie were he had recently played the other one.
“I know” you said, making it known to him that you were well aware of who he was. He looked shocked as you revealed that you knew him. He wanted to ask you your name, but quickly stopped when you answered his question before he could ask it. “I’m Y/n”
“Can I ask how you know my name? Or is that weird?” He asked, still shocked a popular girl knew his name and was talking to him.
“No it’s fine, I’ve seen you, Ned, and Mj in the halls before. They tend to say your name a lot, and your not the best whispers” you told him as you giggled at his stunned reaction.
“I just don’t ever talk to you because the girls don’t really want me talking to guys, no offense, but especially Nerds… which is what they call you and your friends. I’m pretty sure if they saw us talking right now, they would have a heart attack” you added the last part with another giggle, seeing that Peter was laughing at your comment about ‘the girls’.
“Well, I don’t really wanna give anyone a heart attack, and don’t wanna get you in trouble with them…” he was still laughing, but you could tell he meant what he said.
“It’s ok, I’m not scared of them honestly. Spend a day with them you’ll realize just how stupid they are. They probably haven’t even noticed I’m gone” you said as you motioned Peter over to your locker so you could grab the notebook you came for.
You and Peter talked all the way to class, after finding out you had the same class in the morning (how had you never noticed him before?). You made sure to let Peter go in the class first, you coming in 30 seconds later, to make sure Liz didn’t suspect anything (not that she was smart enough to anyway).
Class went on for what felt like an eternity, but in reality it was only 45 minutes. After class, Liz headed off to her second class and you went to find Peter (you pretty much had the same schedule, only two classes that were switched, but the rest in common).
The rest of the day was boring, even though all you could think about was Peter, and the homework you had no idea how to do. Thankfully Peter had given you his number. Oh thank the lord for Peter Parker and his ability to listen.
You called Peter after school, asking him questions about himself as you worked on your homework over FaceTime (which for him was letting you stare at his ceiling as you talked).
“So, I’ve been meaning to ask, why are you so afraid of the ‘popular girls’?” You added, making sure to add air quotes to popular girls.
“Oh, I’m not afraid of them, I’m just… i don’t know, they’re popular?” He said, making more of a question then a statement. At that you laughed which, even though you couldn’t see it, made Peter smile.
“Oh really? Is that so? What an amazing and detailed answer Peter“ you gave him fake applause, making him brush out laughing, causing you to laugh as well.
The rest of your FaceTime call was much of the same. You’d ask him a question, he’d give a dumb answer, and you’d both laugh. Peter was a funny guy, even though he would never admit it. Peter only made jokes around people he knew and trusted, knowing he wouldn’t be judged for it.
From that day forward, you and Peter started to hang out, and quickly become best friends (even if Liz, Betty, Emma, Grace, and Hannah, the popular girls, were against it).
As time went on you told the girls about Peter, feeling comfortable with the fact that they were gonna freak out. And just as you thought, they freaked.
“WHAT?!”
“You’ve got to be kidding”
“Who?”
“Wait! Not the Nerd!”
“When did you start hanging out with him?”
The entire caffeine went silent, turning to look in the direction of the table you were sitting at.
“Guys! I told you know to make a big deal out of this!!” You said holding your head in your hands as you looked down at the table, questioning why you had expected them to be normal about this. I mean, you knew who you were talking to.
“How do you expect us to not make a deal out of this?!? Your hanging out with- with a Nerd” Liz lowered her voice as she spoke, getting more quiet with every word. Everyone eventually lost interest, turning back to their own tables, bringing back the normal loudness of the caffeine.
“Ok, you know what… I can’t do it. If you guys are gonna make such a big deal about who I hang out with, I’m leaving” you said as you got up and walked over to Peter’s table (which was on the other side of the caffeine, thank the lord), plopping down right beside him.
Ned was the first to speak. “So… that went well”
“If you call getting yelled at by people you knew would do that, after you telling them you hang out with people who aren’t them. Then sure, it was great” you stated sarcastically, leaning into Peter‘s arm, him grabbing your hand under the table, rubbing his thumb gently across the back of it as you intertwined your fingers.
“I know they can be jerks, but honestly a scene like that? Like if I told you I was hanging out with one of them, would your first reaction be ‘WHAT?!? ARE YOU CRAZY?!’? Like I just don’t understand what’s wrong with them!” You asked, placing your head on Peter’s shoulder.
“I��m so done with them” you mumbled, making your statement only audible to Peter.
You went to Peter‘s apartment after school, venting about the girls the whole way. For some reason you always felt better after venting, but then again, didn’t everyone?
After doing what felt like 7000 pages of homework, you and Peter decided to watch Star Wars, which you had only seen once before when Peter wanted to have a Star Wars movie marathon with you, Ned, and Mj, who ended up falling asleep.
The breeze in the room had given you chills, running down your spine as you grabbed a blanket. But Peter, noticing that you were cold, gently pulled you closer to him, throwing the blanket over the two of you once you were settled.
“This better?” He asked, looking down at your little face that he wanted so badly to kiss.
You were quick to respond with a small nod, your eyes leaving Peter‘s for a split second to examine his lips, which didn’t go unnoticed by him. He blushed slightly but smiled. You just looked so adorable in his arms, it was hard for him to not give into his urge kiss every part of your face.
You had so many butterflies in your stomach, it would have been impossible to count them. But non the less, they only multiplied when Peter finally gave into his urge, softly kissing you. You were surprised at first, but quickly got used to the feeling of his lips on yours and kissed him back.
When you pulled away, an interesting silence fell over the room, but you were the first to break it.
“Who would have thought Peter Parker knew how to kiss?” You asked, sounding completely genuine, which made Peter chuckle under you.
“Yea, well who would have thought one of the most popular girls at school would kiss a Nerd?” He replied, smiling like a dummy.
“Definitely not stereotypical” you added, looking deep into Peter‘s eyes. You could get used to that.
“Better yet, who could’ve thought about a Nerd and a popular girl being boyfriend and girlfriend?” Peter questioned, smirking.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing” you answered connecting your lips once again.
Who would have known that the day you told Liz, Betty, Emma, Grace, and Hannah about Peter could result with the beginning of you and Peter‘s relationship?
Not stereotypes, that for sure.
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tricksterlatte · 3 months
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Akeshu Holiday Heist Special WIP
This was going to be a oneshot sequel to my completed Persona 5 Akechi/Joker fanfic, Chase the Joker, set nearly one year after the ending. While I still have a few oneshots set in their future planned, this one's entire concept was changed, and the fic was scrapped. Since I had fun writing their banter, I'm going to post the WIP here anyways. You can read underneath the cut! As it's incomplete, there is no concrete ending to this segment at this time.
Sometimes, life could feel just like a Christmas movie. One could find the true meaning of holiday cheer amidst the chaos, no matter who they are or where they came from. It was a special time of year, and whether people celebrated or not, sometimes beautiful magic happened. 
Joyful moments could be shared underneath the tree as families discover the true meaning of the holiday season, whether related to Santa Clause, the meaning of life, or Kentucky Fried Chicken. True love could be discovered underneath the mistletoe, all while some coworker’s annoying as hell kids at the office Christmas party went ooh or help me or perhaps ew, gross much? On occasion, the stars aligned just right each December, and picturesque moments captured in the mind’s eye forever would feel just like the more diverse Hallmark movies. All three of them, if you were being generous.
It was at these times one must remember Die Hard was also a Christmas movie…which was the evidence Akira needed to utilize for their current situation, no matter how Goro denied it, all while they drove towards some rich bastard’s Christmas bash on a hellbent mission.
Car rides anywhere were enjoyable as long as they were with each other, and in the end that was all Akira could ask for. As Goro rambled on and on about cultural variations of the holiday, and how supposedly none of them involved homicide, Akira just held back laughter while applying the reddest lipstick known to man. He hadn’t ever worn a cocktail dress before today, but no one could deny he looked incredible. He was dressed to the nines in luscious red, a silky wig, and enough makeup that not even his own parents would recognize him, and yet it wasn’t technically for a date. What a homophobic shame dealt to him by the gods themselves.
…Okay, his parents hadn’t seen him in years, and the last time had been Goro punching his father in the face. It was better stated that not even his cat would recognize him, but Akira didn’t want to think about that either. So instead he just bickered with the man he loved.
“Honey, listen,” Akira countered, after Goro ranted for the entire length of some bubbly kpop song about being merry and happy. “I know you pride yourself on being right about everything, and I support you unconditionally, but have you ever considered you’re totally wrong about literally everything? We are living out a Christmas movie right now. I’m right.”
“Stating I’m wrong without providing actual evidence as to why again, Akira?” Goro said with an eye roll, though his rolling eyes struggled to stay focused on the road when Akira’s dress kinda showed his upper thigh. “You would not have lasted one week in a university setting’s debate team, and it shows.”
“Hey, neither of us went to college, on account of me being a sexy criminal superstar and you being sexy and also super dead. At least I read dozens of books on mythology and cultural figures when we still had the Nav,” Akira said right back. “I’m a master debater–”
“I swear if you say ‘and also a masturbator,’ I’m hitting the brakes at mach speed.”
“I mean no, I don’t need to do that when we’re in the same room twenty-four hours a day. Wow, you have such a dirty mind, did you know that?”
Goro finally stared not at the road nor Akira’s legs, but a secret third thing–his smug, stupid face, so he could shoot Akira the nastiest of glares. “Quite the talk from someone who made a kidnapping roleplay joke months after literally being kidnapped.”
Okay, that had been one time. And they were not talking about it. Not if Akira could help it. He finished applying the last of his makeup and examined himself in the mirror. If looks could kill, Akira wouldn’t need a knife tonight. Tragically, he still needed a knife, but at least he was pretty. 
“I never joked about that again, give me and my coping mechanisms some credit. Anyways, enough talk about my abduction. Ever heard of Krampus? He’s like the Mementos Grim Reaper used to be, except real, and festive, and I’m pretty sure he murdered children. How’s that for Christmas cheer?”
“I appreciate the sentiment behind a morally dubious Christmas special, but…Krampus aside, the holiday genre as a whole is ill-suited for activities such as murder, once we put aside frequently debated titles. There is a reason films such as Die Hard and American Psycho are commonly dismissed from a place among happy-go-lucky Christmas movies, and that’s due to them only portraying the holiday as background noise in favor of an action plot. It’s only a timestamp when all is considered, nothing more.”
God, Goro was so pretentious. No wonder Akira was in love with him. Here they were, driving towards some multimillionaire’s holiday party with a heist in mind and also assassination if push came to shove, and yet Goro was blasting some American artist’s holiday music on the Jokermobile speakers and discussing American fucking Psycho versus the concept of Christmas cheer. If he wasn’t wearing nondescript black clothing and gun holsters, Akira would blame the irritated snarl gracing Goro’s face on this Michael Buble person singing some no homo anthem about his buddy Santa.
Akira just giggled in his best falsetto, preparing himself for whatever crossdressing shenanigans he had to pull for their mission tonight, and flipped his wig over his shoulder. Brief little moments of domestic bliss were nice after everything, even if most people wouldn’t get it. 
“Okay, ignore the murder then. We’re still living in a real life romcom whether you think my jokes are funny or not, since my entire life is a joke.” Another unimpressed squint as Goro kept his eyes on the road. The self-deprecation didn’t hit like it used to for either of them. Damn their efforts to rebuild Akira’s self-esteem. Those efforts were getting in the way of dark humor! “It’s December 24th, we’re on our way to crash a Christmas party, and we are romantic and comedic. We even took that don we now our gay apparel song to heart, come on!”
Goro snorted, ever the long-suffering, disgruntled man in the face of whatever the fuck Akira was doing. “That can be said for your outfit tonight, but I don’t recall a black turtleneck ever winning one of those ridiculous ugly Christmas sweater contests.”
“No, see, you’re just dressed like the gay goth cousin who sits at the kids’ table during family gatherings because he hates his homophobic relatives.” Akira knew this because he had once been the gay goth cousin who sat at kids’ tables during their rare family gatherings because he hated his homophobic relatives.
Goro looked from Akira, to the road, to their GPS. His brow furrowed and he bit his lip once he saw how little time was left until their arrival. The plan had been for Goro to park the car and follow behind closely, and Akira would do the actual infiltration with a fake identity and a fake adoration for being surrounded by the rich and pompous. The flashy getup was excessive, in Goro’s opinion, but plenty of Shido’s affiliates, and therefore Goro’s whether he liked them or not, were occupying this little gala. Of the two of them, Akira was less likely to be recognized, especially when dressed like this.
That didn’t mean Goro was fond of the idea whatsoever, but that was only one stressor among the many weighing them down tonight. As Goro parked the car, Akira finalized his appearances one more time, double-checking his heels were just short and thick enough that he could still run in them, and that not a hair looked out of place.
He only became aware of his nervous expression when Goro turned off the radio. Turning to face his partner in crime, he saw anxiety reflected back at him, and Akira gulped down a lump in his throat. “Hey,” Akira said, reaching over to grab Goro’s hand as it held the steering wheel in a vice grip. “I know this time of year is stressful for everyone, but I’m going to be okay–”
“Are you okay, though?” Goro cut him off, flexing his fingers before letting go of the wheel. He squeezed his eyelids shut and visibly fought to unclench his jaw. “You’ve spent the entire car ride cracking ridiculous jokes and making up your own lyrics to every damn orchestra cover that played on the radio, but if you’re trying to hide how nervous you are, you’re not doing a great job. I thought we talked about this.”
Akira winced. Keeping secrets hadn’t been his goal at all, but he couldn’t blame Goro for that train of thought. Old habits die hard, whether trauma was involved or otherwise. He flopped back against the headrest, shifting their hands so their fingers intertwined. Even with gloved hands, the grip grounded both of them. “I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I just know if I think too much about the worst case scenarios, I won’t be able to focus on anything else. I’m worried about you too, though. What’s wrong? Is it about splitting up?”
The telltale twitch of Goro’s hand was all the answer Akira needed. He stayed silent and gave Goro a moment to find his words, taking in his harrowed expression as Goro’s thumb brushed across the various scars all over Akira’s hand. Goro had always wielded words masterfully on television and even in battle, whether they were honeyed vinegar or vulgar curses, but words conveying his innermost feelings still didn’t come easily. Akira wasn’t good at sharing his burdens purposefully either just yet, but they were trying. 
They were both getting better about trust and honesty, but sometimes Akira worried parts of them would always be trapped in the past, terrified of losing one another, or maybe in some long-lost Palace there was Goro, kneeling on some bloody floor or panicking in a hotel room, or there was Akira, trapped in a diner or tied to a chair in that hellish basement or crawling across frozen earth in a desperate rush because he couldn’t let him die, not here, not again–
“You know you don’t have to do this, right?” Akechi’s voice broke Akira out of the spiral before it could properly start. Suddenly Akechi’s head gently bumped into the side of Akira’s, and his thumb rubbed circles against Akira’s knuckles. Right. It was December, in the present day, almost a full year after three no good, very bad days. They were alive. They were okay. “I’ll admit I’m not fond of splitting up. I…I can’t lose you again.” Okay, so maybe Akira wasn’t the only one spiraling over that possibility. “If you no longer wanted to mingle with Shido’s trash, I would gladly take our little getaway car and drive wherever you wish–”
“Nope, I’m still going,” Akira butted in. He wasn’t offended by Akechi’s offer, but he didn’t want to back down now, and he knew Akechi didn’t either. He could do this. It wasn’t like he had to kill a million people, all he had to do was break into some big wig’s computer with a flash drive and then get the hell out of there. Hopefully no one paid attention to him, once they got over the dress and heels. “I have a dagger and I’m not afraid to use it, and I have my earpiece just in case. You have a sword and multiple guns and an actual sniper rifle. Give the both of us some credit! I killed a god three Christmases ago. A little breaking and entering is what the kids call small potatoes.”
Akechi said nothing, but at the rate he was stressing, he would fracture every bone in Akira’s hand, induce heart murmurs faster than you could say four Five Hour Energy shots, and go bald by age twenty-three. Refusing to let the man who was essentially his husband lose all his hair, Akira indulged in their old favorite vice: deflecting and changing the subject. “Also, this isn’t the getaway car. Stop besmirching the good name of our dearly beloved Jokermobile–”
“It’s not a good name at all, Akira,” said Akechi as he forced himself to relax. He didn’t buy the facade, but Akira wasn’t trying to fool him. They both just needed to calm down before they did anything reckless…even if a heist was also reckless. “Your habit of naming inanimate objects is getting out of hand. This isn’t the Jokermobile, it’s a black 2016 Toyota Highlander, and you only named it that because you wanted to make rear-ending jokes.”
Well, it was a good thing they had only been rear-ended by an actual car once, then. Akira took full responsibility for that one, it was his fault for trying to drive with a broken leg. Pour one out for the fire hydrant, the greatest victim of that hit-and-run besides Akira’s psyche. “And yet you never thought of a better name. Checkmate.”
“You’re insufferable,” Akechi sighed. 
“I think you meant irresistible, honey,” said Akira.
“Oh, pardon me. I meant to say you’re irritating and irresponsible. My mistake.” 
Goro didn’t give Akira time to reply before he unbuckled his seatbelt and inspected his holsters. “Do you have the flashdrive ready to go?” Akira reached into a side pocket of his dress and showed Goro the flash drive, shoving it back inside once Goro nodded. “And your dagger?” He flipped his skirt completely to the side, exposing lacy black underwear on top of the dagger strapped to the thigh lacking a dress slit. Goro forcibly ignored that and interrogated him again like the bastard cop he once pretended to be. “And your earpiece?”
Wow, not even a verbal reaction to his underwear of choice? Bummer. Akira rolled his eyes and gently swept the wig away. Barely visible inside his ear was the earpiece, but it was in place just as planned. Smiling and hoping the red lipstick wouldn’t smudge onto his teeth, he flashed Goro a thumbs up. “Yes, Goro, I’ll hear your illustrious voice loud and clear. What about yours?”
“I put mine on before we left. I came prepared, unlike you.”
“It’s not a competition, Goro.”
“Akira, we turn everything into a competition whether we like it or not.”
God, could Goro stop making good points tonight? He was beating Akira in the argument category of the Rivalry Olympics. Fucker. Conceding for now, Akira pouted as Goro let go of his hand to climb into the back. “Do we have any of those canned coffees left?” he asked while Goro inspected his ammunition.
“I grabbed extra at the 777 earlier, along with some other beverages,” Goro replied, briefly ignoring his mission prep in favor of caffeinating the idiotic love of his life. As Goro reached into their cooler, he continued, “Some are black, some have cream or sugar. How do you want your coffee tonight, my dear Joker?”
“Black like my soul, Crow,” Akira replied, fondly recalling his dear pal Satanael on the anniversary of a god’s death. Goro gave him a long, hard look, then hurled a bottle of milk at Akira’s face. Naturally, Akira caught it with all the proficiency in the universe. Then he hurled it right back at Goro, who snatched it from the air without even looking. Well, if Satanael wasn’t allowed, then Arsene better be. “Fine. Something with French roast, also like my soul.”
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chronicallyaunline · 3 months
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Legolas makes more sense if he’s autistic
I recently re-watched the Lord of the Rings movies and I couldn’t help noticing how strange some of Legolas’s behaviour is. So many of his lines are unconnected to a broader conversation, and when they’re directed at others they often feel at odds with the scene.
Alternative theories for why Legolas is weird:
Bad acting
Bad writing
That’s just how elves are
I’m going to disregard the meta analysis for now, but there is a decent body of evidence that elves do not behave the same way Legolas does. In fact, I think his weirdness is camouflaged by being the only elf in most scenes. The other characters and audience members are more likely to attribute his behaviour to being an elf than to him being whatever the Middle Earth equivalent of autistic is. All the elf characters love being aloof and saying cryptic bullshit, but this is something beyond that.
Some evidence:
Flat affect, issues with empathy
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After Gandalf is believed to have died, the Fellowship is in Lothlorien where an elf choir sings a lament to Gandalf. Legolas tells the group that it’s for Gandalf, but then says he can’t tell them what is being said because the grief is too fresh for him. His facial expression and tone are extremely flat. He isn’t malicious and doesn’t seem to lie anywhere else in the series, which suggests that he really does feel so intensely sad that he can’t tell the others what is being said about Gandalf. The fact that he feels that level of emotion with an entirely straight face reads like autism. A few minutes after this scene we see Galadriel experience intense fear, and in some scenes Elrond is visibly angry, which suggests that low emotional affect isn’t a facet of the species. It’s unique to Legolas.
While it doesn’t make sense for him to be purposefully unkind, telling people that their friend is being eulogized in a language they don’t speak and then refusing to translate is an odd choice. Why tell them at all if he wasn’t going to tell them what was being said? It seems like he struggles to understand what the impact of that would be on others.
Poor interoception (understanding of one’s own emotions and body signals)
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During a drinking competition Legolas appears slightly confused when he discovers that he’s experiencing symptoms of drunkenness. Legolas has been alive for centuries. It doesn’t seem plausible that he’s never had a large quantity of alcohol before. We don’t see other drunk elves in this series so intoxication could be highly unusual for them, but it still seems odd that Legolas would be surprised by a bodily experience (tingling fingers) being connected to drinking. He only identifies a “slight tingling” as a symptom, yet his movements and speech are slowed in a way that suggests that he is more affected than he realises. He has just failed to pick up on what is happening.
Unusual social behaviour
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Aragorn shares a plan to help Frodo by diverting Sauron’s attention with an army. Legolas unhelpfully summarizes with, “a diversion.” He also smiles slightly after saying this, which makes it come across as genuine rather than sarcastic. Either he has wildly underestimated the intelligence of everyone else in the room, is voicing his interal monologue, or is making an awkward attempt to be part of the conversation. There is no evidence elsewhere of him considering the other characters stupid or of him voicing his thoughts aloud. This looks more like mirroring, trying to be part of the conversation by parroting back what someone else said. This statement adds nothing to the conversation except to get him involved, which may be the true goal.
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When Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli first meet Eomer, Gimli says something rude to him and Eomer says that he would cut off Gimili’s head if it were further from the ground. Legolas responds by drawing an arrow and threatening Eomer, which takes a tense but calm interaction and escalates it into a stand off. There was nothing about Eomer’s behaviour to suggest that he was actually going to harm Gimili. It was more about trading aggressive banter than an actual threat to Gimli’s life. It’s Legolas who unnecessarily escalates the situation and causes the Rohirrim to draw their weapons. He isn’t dangerously impulsive elsewhere in the movies, which makes me think he didn’t understand the interaction. He took Eomer’s words as a genuine threat and reacted as though Gimli was already in danger, which doesn’t seem to have been the case.
Conclusion
I’m of the opinion that a neurotypical Legolas is kind of a bad character. It makes it difficult to get a sense of his internal life, what motivates him or why he responds the way he does. So much of what he does and says seems like the writers and actor just didn’t know what to do with him. That may be the case, but if we re-interpret his behaviour as elf autism, he’s a more interesting and sympathetic character. I think we are always meant to interpret him as having a different brain from humans, but even the oldest and wisest elves interact more “correctly” with others. I’m not suggesting that Legolas was written as intentionally autistic, but so much of what makes him an erratically-written neurotypical character makes him a plausibly written autistic character.
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I've been a fan of Tolkien for over 40 years, read everything he has published and read The Hobbit and LOTR a half dozen times over those decades. I loved the Rankin/Bass animated versions of the story as a teen and I thoroughly enjoyed Peter Jackson's take on the tale and appreciated the artistic license he took to round the stories out for film. I had no expectations going into The Rings of Power, positive or negative. I hoped it would be a beautiful expansion of a world I love and wanted to see more of. I saw the usually people already complaining about this and that, assuming they knew what was best for the works and of course knowing exactly what Tolkien would want and dislike (eye roll) and tried to ignore these trolls completely. They seem to like to ruin any and every journey before it gets a chance to begin and I would not want to spend one moment with these joyless creatures. All that being said I sat down with a snack and refreshments release night and watched the first episodes of The Rings of Power and was dumbfounded. What did I just watch I said to myself. It certainly wasn't anything like the trash mob of negative internet trolls said it would be. It was glorious. From the moment Galadriel's opening voiceover began to the second she plunged her brother's dagger into the ice wall I realized I had leaned forward on the couch and was smiling from ear to ear. The world had faded away and I was enthralled by the beautiful cinematography, the vivid colors and the sheer breadth of the opening shots, the Tolkienesque dialogue...I watched it again. Nope not me imagining it. I watched the rest of the episode and was so tickled I watched it again. I then watched the second. I was so happy, it's indescribable. They struck all the right notes and I was in that world again, like I was reading the books or watching the movies... immersed in Middle Earth and it's tales. Somehow they took the charm and detail of Jackson's movies, added a heavy dose of Tolkien lore, some artistic license and flawless creative CGI and created something fresh but familiar. I knew this place but it was like seeing it with new eyes, the inhabitants and places the same but even more vibrant. So far I'm thrilled with what they have done. If the story pans out and it continues on this path they may have something fantastic on their hands. Something to be celebrated by TRUE Tolkien fans and lovers of Middle Earth. "But it's not Tolkien's story." Well he's not around to create any more content, and it is based on the world and characters he created. If you don't want to watch something he didn't actually write tune out, but don't ruin it for the rest of us. What's wrong with more stories from Middle Earth even if they aren't written by the man himself if they're done well and in his spirit? "Why did they cast so diversely?" Well I don't know how to help you with your "problem" but the way I see it, the only people taking umbrage with that probably have questionable character. Tolkien created a large world with many races, species, etc. I don't remember him ever writing specifically that they were all white. Naturally in a world that big there would be many beautiful types of people, races, ethnicities and cultures. The expansion of this in the show only adds to the richness of the story. If not it would a pretty vanilla tale indeed. If you find yourself complaining about diversity you should probably take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself the real reason you have a problem with it. Lastly I want to address once more the groups that like to mass negative review things. You reveal yourselves when you give a negative review to something before it's even been released in its entirety. I'll be the first to edit this if it turns badly later, but I'll give it it's due first. It's seems like some kind of sickness, the need to try to ruin something just because they don't agree with how it's done or who's in it. It really invalidates all your reviews because you're not reviewing a thing on its content, you're reviewing it on your prejudice, you're reviewing according to your hateful opinions. You won't even give it a chance because "I hate this, and don't like that...oh the wokeness!" Not one of you will be able to look past any of your personal hang ups to give the story and it's presentation a chance to stand on its own, therefore your reviews are meaningless and should be treated as such. I hope that that's taken into account when the time comes to invest in more chapters, seasons and stories if this pans out. If you don't like it go away and let the rest of us enjoy it without having to listen to you try to ruin something without giving it a chance. Gandalf would disapprove. "May dawn take you all and be stone to you!" More Middle Earth is a Good Thing! by redkingisalive imdb 10 star review
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casuallivi · 1 year
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The Midnight Kiss
from a thoughtful elriel piece, to this silly fest. Me in a nutshell. sorry guys, I could not find a movie reference for this one nailing the date pace killed me, I wanted to be organic, but not boring, but comical, but not too much, and here comes cass/mor screams into the void so here's a pretty pic of breadticks 😬
Enjoy. Comments are welcomed and cherished :)
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Part 5: Not the girl you are used to
 “No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“No.”
“Do you honestly believe you can trick me into saying yes?”
Cassian grinned like an idiot, thumb swiftly skating on his phone keyboard, texting God knows who. “You used to fall for that.”
One would think he wasn’t so interest in the conversation, but Azriel knew his brother, could read the tension on his unstoppable tapping feet, the nervous twirl of the watch on his wrist, the childish attempt to beat him by exhaustion. Azriel ignored him. Cass could try all he wanted, but he was not agreeing to this insanity.
Tablet perched on his knee, he continued to work through a selection of garment choices for the winner of the Revelation Designer Award to choose from.
You see, Azriel didn’t believe in unpredictable events, because that would mean he wasn’t prepared for the “incident” happening, and Azriel was always prepared. In order to be ready, he spent a copious amount of time building back-up plans, which had proven to came in had along the years. His, wasn’t the least stressful way of managing a department, but sure was an efficient one. Needless to say he had nearly to none free time. Cassian, on the other hand, seemed to have a lot to spare, deciding to dedicate a part of his day into trying to annoy Azriel to submission.
Azriel had no interested in satisfying his brother’s current itch. A cunning, blond haired itch, who he also had no intention of getting involved with anymore. That’s why he was using this meaningless reunion - more of a one-on-one with his brother - to look through the strongest candidates’ portfolios, selecting D-Day outfits.
“Come one man, you are not thinking this straight. She’s the hottest model these days, runway elite.” Cassian moved forward, pushing a video of Morrigan in Azriel’s face, braving her latest runway in goddamn lacy red lingerie. Her color. Nope, do not go there. “She’ll be a good addition to our catalog.”
Azriel averted his eyes, crossing a giant ‘X’ in the current dress with a little more strength than necessary, the pen scratching the glass. Nope. He’d not be looking either.
“Hiring her for a sporadic shoot is doable, signing an exclusivity contract is dumb, a waste of money. She’s a runaway model, we’d have to compensate her that, pay her contract breaching, pay her even when she’s not working. You are the money man Cass, you know is not worth it.”
“She’s so fucking hot, tho. Trust me when I say she’ll raise our sales. Who wouldn’t want to see a hot girl getting delivery to their home monthly? Hell, I’d sign our magazine.”
"You don't sign our magazine?"
"Why would I sign our magazine?"
Azriel rubbed his forehead, the familiar pressure of a stress-induced headache making itself know.
That’s why his brother managed the money, not the people. The only people he got involved with, were the ones with an ass he was interested in tapping. And that is why he was pushing Azriel to sign an exclusivity contract with Morringan, as if they were a fucking model agency. Cassian might have the CEO position, but thankfully their grandfather left them the same amount of shares. Over his dead body he’d bring Morrigan closer.
“Marinos isn’t about hotness. We are a fashion magazine, Cass. A collection doesn’t sell itself simply by being clothes, is all about how we display them, the ambience, the models. It’s an art of luring the public into seeing themselves in the pages. We have to be diverse, keep it fresh.
“She is fresh!” Cassian argued, leaving his phone on the small table between them, tapping aggressively on the screen, the video rolling. “Look at her. She approaching that milf zone which makes her extra bangable to horny teens.” He held his hands up, palms flat in the air, making the universal sign of a balance. “They enhance their spank bank; we double our sales. It’s a win-win.”
Azriel slapped his brother’s phone face down, his disdain palpable. How Cass could address to someone, who he claimed to be in a serious relationship with, in such a way, was beyond him.
“You are disgusting. And she doesn’t have kids.”
Cassian laughed. “You don’t need kids to be a milf, baby bro,” he enunciated the words as if Azriel was slow. “You only need to be past a women’s prime, which we all know is in her twenties, and still be freakishly hot. Have you seen Mor? Check and check. We like to pretend they are a hot mom without the burden of a bastard running around.” Cassian winked, taking his phone. “Besides, Mor won’t be working much longer. I counting on you to help me make her retirement transition easier.”
Azriel stiffed on his chair.
Morrigan was doing what?
Bubbling laughter erupted from him, tears sliding down the corners of his eyes. Cassian stared at him as if he was insane. My god, he didn't laugh like this in ages. Morrigan would never retire, she loved her job more than life itself. That girl would probably die in a runway, her stone-cold heart finishing its complete transition into a block of ice.
"Are you having a stroke?" Cassin asked, confused.
“Did she tell you that? Did she say she was retiring?”
“She doesn’t have to tell everything, baby bro. Her man knowns.” Her man thought he leashed the untamable Morrigan. Her man knew shit. “She’s turning 34 soon,” Azriel knew that already, they were the same age, “it’s time.”
"Time for what?"
"For her retirement."
“You are so full of shit. Morrigan won't retire, she loves her job.” It’s the only thing she loves. “She won’t quit. She’ll never quit.”
Cassian slouched on the chair, spreading his legs to assert dominance.
“You are full of opinions about Mor today.”
“We were childhood friends. I believe I can judge her inability to drop her career for a man.”
The brothers have met Morrigan when they first moved to America to live with their grandparents. Their grandma quickly pairing Mor and Azriel in the same classes and extracurricular activities. Cassian was around too, but didn’t had much interest for the younger girl in pigtails running around with his brother. She sure had his attention now, wheater she liked it or not.
“Trust me, Mor is settling down. She has a man now, a provider, no need to tire herself crossing the globe all year long. Don’t give me that face. I’m telling you how man thinks.”
“I am a man.” Azriel stressed.
“You are, aren’t you. For a second there I had my doubts.” Cassian mused, remembering how he caught his brother getting cozy with Elain inside the elevator, their ride from hell…
Cassian scratched his stubble, contemplating the recent changes in Azriel's behavior.
His stoic brother, who could not get along with any women introduced to him, scaring them away with his blunt remarks and cold indifference, had been uncharacteristically catering to the girl who used to eye-fuck Cassian from across the room, giving him sunny smiles and entertaining him with dirty jokes. Now her looks where few and further apart, Elain hiding her snort behind her hand instead of giving him a full belly laughter, avoid responding to his innuendos with something dirtier, as she usually would. An unexplainable queasiness twisted in his stomach.
“Speaking of being a man. You and Lainy,”
"Elain.” Azriel corrected with annoyance. “Her name is Elain, not this ridiculous nasal stretch you do.”
“You and Lainy are close now, huh.” Cassian repeated the nickname to spite him, tapping his fingers rhythmically on the arm rest. “Close enough for you to take her home… mouth fuck under the moonlight...”
“Jesus Christ.” Azriel rubbed his face, wishing to be anywhere but here. “Your vocabulary is superb Cass, keep it up.”
“What? You were the one dry humping the girl in front of everyone.”
“No one was dry humping, your sick fuck. I don’t know what you do in your relationship, but us, normal folks, we can kiss for the sake of it, no hidden agenda.” Azriel was not cut out for the lifestyle his brother led. To kiss and bed anyone without knowing where their mouths and body might have been before? No thank you. Hard pass.
“You seriously dating the girl?” Azriel nodded, once. Cassian snorted. “Bullshit. I never saw you with a single girlfriend.”
Azriel watched his brother, his restless hand. His brow furrowed. Were Cassian and Elain closer than he anticipated? He knew they were friends, but this. This was something else.
“I didn’t see you either, now look at you.” He eyed the shinning gold band on his brother finger. A commitment ring. Ten years and he couldn’t get Mor to even address him as her fucking boyfriend, but one month was apparently enough to date his brother and get a ring stuck in her finger. Her words, not his.
“People will notice.”
“Say it a regular ring. I’ll get you an inconspicuous one.”
“I can’t have a ring constantly stuck in my finger, Az, it will give me tan lines. People will notice.”
“It’s different. I’m chick magnet, didn’t had a girlfriend by choice, fucked plenty of them, tho." His smug was presumptuous. "You, on the other hand, I never saw you with anyone. Why now? Why her?”
Because Elain is capable of shutting my mind down, she rambles so much I can’t hear myself thinking, can’t think about girls I shouldn’t be thinking. Because Elain made a crazy suggestion when I needed a light. Because Elain is the first woman I enjoyed kissing in a long time. Because Elain doesn’t make me hate myself. Because I want to live like a normal man being loved by a normal woman.
Azriel didn’t voiced the answers. None of them were for his brother’s peace of mind. His deal with Elain was private, there was no need to explain the reasons that bound them to Cass.
“You are awfully interested in my girlfriend.”
“Can you blame me? We figured you’d be coming out of the closet any day now. Then puff, you appear with a girlfriend.”
Azriel glared at him.
“I’ve told you, I’m not gay.”
“Well, now I know that. Cousin Rhys will be thrilled to know he won.”
“You and Rhys made a bet on me?" Cassian grinned. "Assholes.”
Hell yeah he bet on him. Azriel had always been a weird kid, full of don’t-touch-me, all worried about wrinkles on his clothes. Plus, the fact that never introduced a single girl to them, never talked about hook up, or dates, or dalliances of any kind was very suspicious. Cassian sat straighter in his chair, an idea occurring to him.
“Wait. Is this one of those fake-dating situations? You and Rhys working together?”
Okay, Azriel had enough. His brother had nothing of important to discuss, and he had a lot of work to do. He collected his things and got up.
“Damn, little Lainy sure is a good actress. I didn’t know she had it in her.”
Azriel flipped his brother on his way out.
.
.
.
“Marino. For two.”
The girl behind the small reception desk checked her system, confirming Azriel’s reservation.
“Follow me, please.”
Elain and Azriel walked behind the petite receptionist as they quietly moved between the tables filled with families, co-workers, friends, couples. Elain looked down to their joined hands. Azriel had taken a hold of hers soon as they were out of the car, Elain stopping dead in her track.
“What are you doing?”
“Building intimacy.”
“Over here.” The girl lead them to a round table by the window.
Tall framed glass from floor to ceiling, gave them a perfect view of the garden where the structure was built around, a magnificent fountain shooting jets in the sky, water lilies floating unbothered. Azriel pulled her chair and Elain sat down, nervous butterflies beat their wings desperately in her stomach, trying to break free. The girl gave them a set of menus, politely explaining that a waitress would take over.
Elain glanced discreetly at the other tables, trying to figure if theirs was the only one without breadsticks or if this place was too fancy to give them free munchables.
“What?” Azriel asked, following her gaze.
“Breadsticks,” she muttered.
She must have given him glutton vibes, because his eyes crinkled with amusement.
“We can order some if you’d like.”
"You a regular?" He shook his head.
"First timer. Didn't seem appropriate to take you to places I know." Did he want to keep her like a dirty little secret? Would you look at that. Elain was opening her mouth when he said, "I don't want us to make memories in soiled land. I rather start fresh, just you and I."
Elain closed her mouth. Oh, that's actually thoughtful. Her ears pinked on the tips, Azriel returning his eyes to the menu, thick black lashes nearly brushing his cheeks. Elain spied his new haircut, the slight fade on the sides making the perfect shape of his ears stand out, the glossy waves on top combed back in a stylish manner.  He looked particularly handsome tonight, reading the menu with the same keen attention he’d give to a report, as if analyzing steak options required a minuntious evaluation of each option presented. Elain got so lost studying him that when the waitress came, she was yet to choose an option.
Azriel made his order with mastery, adding a bottle of wine by the year. Elain was impressed. She generally chose her wine by category; red or white. She fumbled with the menu, grieving at the lack of breadstick or fries. The waitress took pity on her, helping her though the most requested dishes, asking for her preferences in meat, finding her the perfect dish to order.  
When she was gone, Azriel said.
“I booked us a hotel.”
Elain gasped exaggeratedly, wrapping her arms around her chest in a fake show of modesty. “How dare you? I’ve told you I’ll marry a virgin!”
The table beside their, containing what appear to be a squad of girlfriends in a night out, threw them suspicious glances, whispering heatedly amongst themselves. Azriel rolled his eyes.
“For the RD Award.” He reminded her. Elain needed no remind, she knew exactly what he meant, and she had no interest in it right now.
“Noooooo.” she let out a long-suffering whine, making him frown.
“Did you want to do that?”
“Don’t talk to me, I’m in mourning.” She used the napkin in her lap to dab the corners of her eyes, fake hiccups to match her fake tear. “I can’t believe I’m dating a man who talks about work on a night out. Lord, why have you forsaken me!”
A couple of snickers could be heard from the next table. Azriel rubbed his neck to mask his embarrassment, because her taunt was reasonable. He’d done it out of habit, used to interact with Elain in work related matters.
Despite is energetic disposition when it came to fashion, Azriel was an introvert who didn’t have much interest in anything else. In the past decade his life could be resumed in two things: Marinos and her. Azriel didn’t like people, didn’t have many friends, didn’t left his house unless he was working, didn’t travel unless he wanted to see her. After having to spend five days a week interacting with his employees, giving orders, creating back-up plans, correcting mistakes and solving endless problems, Azriel was perfectly fine spending his free time napping, eating home-made food, nursing a glass while a documentary rolled on the tv. It's how he recharged his energy. And for the dating department…
Truth be told, Azriel was a little rusty on the dating department. On the rare dates he agreed to go, he didn’t have to speak much, the women pretty content in talking about themselves, batting their lashes at him, intrigued by his silence, which they interpreted as a bad boy persona. They've read him wrong. Azriel wasn’t a bad boy, he didn’t have spare energy to invest in being one. Most times he was simple exhausted, uninterested, heartbroken, trying to distract himself to not think about her, trying to forget the woman who wasn’t a good parameter for quality time either.
Her name still caused him pain.
Mor.
He avoided using it, addressing her by the full name when necessary.
When he was with her, he was her secret, and he had to remain just that, a secret. Back them Azriel did lots of confidential encounters, last minute trips to where she’d be modeling, booking extravagant hotels for the pleasure of her company, appealing to secluded resorts if he wanted to see her outside a room, because their outings consisted in gathering with her friends, fund raisings and galas. Non-committal events that wouldn't put her in a spot she didn't want, because God forbid they were out, let’s say, enjoying a good meal, and someone spotted them.
“Now is not the time. My sponsors don’t like this kind of public attention. You know how prissy they are.”
“I’ve signed a no-dating clause, Az. I’ve told you that.”
“Please, please take me back. I won’t sign the clauses anymore, I’ll demand freedom in my personal life. I’m famous now, they have to listen to me!”
“Stop pressuring me! You are making me look like a villain. Look at everything I’ve done for you! They could sue me for being with you. Is that what you want? For me to be sue? Shunned from the spotlight?!”
“I’m sorry, Az. I’m really sorry. I don’t want it anymore; I don’t want to be a model if I can’t have you. I love you. You are my life.”
Elain rapped her knuckles gently on the table, giving him a worried look.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked gently.
Azriel sipped his water.
“That you are correct.”
Elain doubted. His expression had turned a little wistful, his shoulders sagging slightly. She decided not to comment on it, taking his lead to move the subject forward.
Azriel watched Elain sat higher in her chair, smugness pouring out of her. “That’s usually the case, but I’m glad you are finally admitting.” Her napkin went back to her lap. "Keep that energy when you wake up in the morning."
Azriel chuckled.
In the past, Azriel had judged Elain an airhead. Her eccentric persona and taste for crude jokes was far to similar to his brother’s, who couldn’t read the room to save his life. Cassian though himself the guru of flirting, but his inappropriate conducts had often rendered complains, Azriel having to arrange anti-harassment lectures to please the chief of HR. Azriel thought Cass would outgrow this childish fascination with making people uncomfortable as he grow older. He thought wrong. Turns out age was nothing but fuel to his shameless brother.
That’s why Azriel was instantly peeved with Elain, who strolled in his life with swaggering confidence and a sharp remark for everything, deeming her a female version of the brother who gave him constant headaches. Azriel was wrong again, but this time he was please to be. Now the paid her more attention, Azriel noticed Elain didn’t carry the same arrogant obliviousness as Cass. She was witty, outspoken, brazen even, having no problem in standing up to herself or what she believed, but she only joked around those closer to her, using her humor to make people at ease, to let them know she cared for them.
Sparkling chocolate eyes smiled at him.
Empathy wasn’t something Azriel was used to. It made him lightheaded.
Elain watched Azriel place one hand on top of the table, palm up, wiggling his long sumptuous fingers at her, the bronzed moisturized skin gleaming under the fluorescent lights. “Have I told you how lovely you look today?”
The word “lovely” coming out of his sinuous lips was enough to have her heart doing cartwheels. Her heart was trump. The useless lump of overly excited muscle had no business trying to beat out of her chest when Elain had put an extra effort in her appearance today. Gone were her everyday jeans and t-shirt, replaced by an elegant sage lily dress, the elastic ruched fabric ending with small ruffles around her knees, her pearl colored flats matching the pearl clips keeping her curls behind her ears, small sparkling dot adorning them.
Elain planted her palm in his. “Are you implying I don’t look lovely on the other days?”
“Would you drop dead if you spent a day of your life without contradicting me?” His voice lacked the usually annoyed undertone, his thumb tracing the path of her knuckles.
“Guess you’ll never find out.”
Elain put her free hand down as he had done, asking for his other hand, mimicking the strokes he gave her. Damn, this man’s hands were smooth as a baby bottom!.. is the rest of him this soft? Her thoughts slipped in a dirty tangent.
“I like your shirt.” The material of his dress shirt stretched comfortably over his chest, draping over his powerful arms, to end carefully folded around his elbows, leaving his forearms bare in a way he rarely did. The last time she had seen him sporting such a casual disposition, he stole her breath away. Literally. Elain licked her lips, her voice lower. “Black looks good on you.”
His lips tugged in the corner. “It is my color.”
“It is," she agreed in a daze
A tranquil atmosphere settled over them.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Mmh.”
“I'm glad I kissed you.”
Now she was full on blushing, her cheeks growing incredibly hot, especially when he lifted her hand to his face and kiss her palm. So, Elain did what she do best to mask embarrassment. She cracked a joke.
“My, my. I didn’t know you had it so bad. Tell me mister, how long have you been in love with me?”
“I’m not.” Azriel kissed her other palm, his gaze so intense she squirmed in her chair. Under the artificial light his eyes were all hazel, the fleeks of green hiding, waiting for the sunlight to unravel. “But I intend to be.”
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romanarose · 7 months
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For The Longest Time: Chapter 2
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William Miller x Fem!OC (Lorelei Giang)
Masterlist : Triple Frontier Masterlist
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Summary: Will finds out Lorelei is pregnant; Lorelei unexpectedly meets one of Will's friends.
Warnings and Content: Smut, PIV sex, oral fem receiving, mentions of weight. Pregnancy, mentions of abortion/discussing abortion, guns.
A/N: I wanna say, I am white, I am not Asian. I try very hard to make my oc's and characters diverse. I try to do as much research as I can in order to be accurate. If I say anything offensive ever, or incorrect please tell me! I do not have any friends who are Vietnamese but I have a friend of Asian descent whose taken a lot of time studying different Asian cultures who I try to go to when I can. I am not going to be upset if I am corrected.
**************
“Hey Will, watcha watching?”
Will was immediately aware of her change in voice. She spoke much softer… and he turned to her with slightly narrowed eyes. 
“Blue Earth.” He answered. “Thought you were going to bed?”
Lorelei had her robe wrapped around her, intentionally swaying her hips as she walked to him. She knew she looked good like this. Her hair was pitch black and even though she had set it in it’s curls a few days ago, they still held a natural looking loose curl falling around her shoulders. With the slightest make up she had applied earlier (tinted lip balm, bit of blush, the slightest layer of golden eyeshadow to compliment her honey brown skin, and just the most subtle layer of eyeliner) she doubted a man could noticed this. Man always say they like a girl who looks “natural” but have no idea what natural looked like. Lorelei liked to pretend she was above the opinions of men… but she wasn’t.
“Can’t sleep. Can I sit with you?” 
He smiled up at her. “Of course.” He was, however, clearly surprised when she sat down in her skimpy robe riiiiight next to him; thigh to thigh. He swallowed thickly..
She put on her best baby-voice, mimicking all she learned from rewatching Marilyn Monroe movies. “Do you like having me here?” 
He was eyeing her, she wasn’t sure her formerly fool-proof use of seduction was working. “Of course.” A pause. “Do you like being here?”
Lorelei graced him with a rare smile, leaning just a bit more and allowing her eyes to dart to his lips for just a moment. “Very much. I like spending time with you.” She continued trying her sexy voice but it didn’t seem to be working.
Will seemed immune to her. “Why are you talking like that? Are you feeling okay?”
Impossible, this one.
There was a moment when he leaned close that Lorelei thought Will was going to kiss her, but instead he was examining her skin. “Are you- are you wearing make up? Didn’t you go to bed?”
Lorelei dropped all pretense, sighing loudly as she flopped onto the couch. “Oh my god, William, I was trying to seduce you!”
Will sputtered out, choking on air. “Wh-what?” He turned to her in shock. 
“Yeah! You are too fucking nice to notice!”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“When I want to sleep with you, yeah!”
There was a bit of silence as Will considered what she said as Lorelei’s head remained flopped back on the back of the couch.
“Well. You could’ve just asked.”
Lorelei rolled her eyes as she sat up, groaning dramatically. “Oh my GOD!” Frustration, both sexual and with Will, boils over and she lunges in to kiss his neck, moving to straddle Will’s wide body as he pulls her onto his lap. “You are so painfully polite.”
“Well sorry” A suck on her neck. “I’m not jumping into your pants” A swipe of her tongue over forming mark. “Like everyone else.”
She pulled back at that, cocking an eyebrow at him. “Are you calling me a whore?”
Panic swept across his face as he tried to backtrack. “No nononononono I was just trying to be playful-”
“Relax, I’m just teasing.” She laughed, going to undo her robe to reveal the black underwear beneath. “I’m a bit of a whore, it’s okay.” Will went for her lips and she quickly dodged him. “And like a whore, I don’t kiss on the lips.”
The disappointment was evident on Will’s face, but he respected her wishes. “Understood.” Then, he allowed himself to look at the body presented before him. “Goddamn beautiful…” Wrapping his arms firmly around her bottom and lifted her up as he stood, thoroughly impressing Lorelei with his strength. At 5’5, she weighed 170 pounds and to Will, it seemed like nothing.
As he carried her into her bedroom, Lorelei tugged at his shirt and attempted to pull it up but Will stopped her; with one hand he held it down, his other arms carrying her full weight still with her legs wrapped around him. “Shirt stayed on.”
Again with the shirt… he had it on in all pictures, even at beaches or swim days, he never took it off when he worked outside (and boy, was she waiting for it… not that she watched him of course.) But Lorelei new better than to ask. She may be a bit of a bitch, but she wasn’t that much of a bitch. “Alright, seems we both got weird things.”
“Seems like we do.” He went back to walking and she went back to sucking on the pale skin of his neck; oh yeah, that was gonna show. “No kissing, shirt stays on. Couple of weirdos right here.”
With that, Will tossed her on the bed like she was nothing and Lorelei wasted no time taking her underwear off. She was not shy about letting men know what she wanted.
Will was not shy about diving in. 
He crawled up the bed and got right up inside her without another though, hands exploring her body as he lapped at her folds; William Miller knew what he was doing. 
He shoved her bra up and over her tits, reaching under her and unclasping it with one hand. “Take this fucking shit off.”
She did as she was told, happy to let Will take the lead for now. 
His voice softened for a moment as his blue eyes connected with hers, looking up at her over her mound. “Tell if I do anything you don’t like.”
“Yes captain.” She teased him. 
Will knew telling her he had made Captain by the end of his military time was a mistake.
“William,” She panted, hips bucking against his beard. “You’re fucking good at this.”
 “Oh princess, I’m not even trying yet.”
She was about to question what the fuck that meant when Will really picked up pace, tongue fucking her and only pulling back long enough to spit on her pussy before slapping it. 
“FUCK! WILL!”
“That okay?” He eyed her.
“Don’t fucking stop!” Lorelei grabbed his blonde hair, yanking him back down between her legs. He added another finger, furiously fucking her open and swirling his tongue on her clit; ever movement he made was accentuated by a loud smack of his lips, the wet squelch of her cunt being penetrated by his fingers, the scratch of beard against her public hair, all of which brought her gushing on his face, her thick thighs wrapped around his head and squeezing. Somewhere in the back of Lorelei’s head she worried she might hurt him in the way she wrapped her legs around his head so tightly, worried she might suffocate him… but from the way he gripped her thighs and continued to devour her, he seemed happy to die right there between her legs.
When he finally disengaged from her sopping wet pussy, William made his way up her body, licking a thick stripe up her tummy and stopping so suckle on her breast while she came down from her climax. Lorelei could tell Will was planning on fucking her like that, but she had other plans. With a push, she guided her back onto the bed. “I’m on top.”
Will could only smile at her assertion of dominance. “Yes ma’am” But when she began to climb on top, facing away from him, he stopped her. “What are you doing?” 
She was awkwardly half straddled, acutely aware of her asscrack spread open. “I wanna gonna ride you. Like, reverse cowgirl.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed.
“Is that okay?”
Quickly, he regained his composure. “Yeah! Yeah of course, whatever you want to do I just…”
“You juuuuuust?”
He blushed as he smiled nervously. “I just wanted to look at your pretty face is all.”
Well now, how could she resist that? Lorelei turned around, legs spread out around Will’s wide middle, grinding her core over his cock; she could get off just like this.
“You ready for me, big boy?”
“Been ready for you for months.”
Lorelei sunk down on him slowly, only able to take so much stretch at once despite ample preparation. The bed squeaked under her, the plush pillow-top mattress taking pressure of her knees so she could focus on the feel of Will; stretched by him, held by him, taken care off by him… she could get used to this.
But it was one night, she reminded herself. Just once. They weren’t dating, they weren’t in love, they weren’t even going to fuck buddies, just one night to scartch the itch and- OH
“You feel me princess? Your body making room to take me? You feel me up in your stomach?”
Forget her stomach, Lorelei was certain he was hitting her cervix and she was sure if she were to just cockwarm him, she’d cum just like this. “Fuck, Will…” Lorelei began to move, scooting on his pelvis to keep that sweet spot as his hands rested on her hips ever-so gently. “Fuck you’re in deep”
“I know, I know it’s a lot” Somehow, he didn’t sound braggy- just sincere, just very aware of his size and was intent not to harm her. She was going to give him the ride of his life. Lorelei began to bounce on him, hands bunched up in his gray t-shirt to keep ground, feel the way his hands would flex and grip on her skin. 
“You can  squeeze me, it’s okay.” She assured, but he was hesitant.
“Don’t wanna hurt you.”
She placed her hands on his, squeezing his fingers into her own flesh. “I like it.”
The way Will grinned at her as she road him was intoxicating, the slap of skin to skin damn near drowned by their repsective moans. In the past, with many guys Lorelei attempted to fake the sounds of pleasure, giving porn-y, fake sounds that the men just ate up, but there was no need for that with Will; he’d call her out on it anyway. She arched her back and moved to brace her hands on his muscular thighs, approaching her end quickly with the help of Will’s hands on her tits and clit.
“Gonna cum, Lore.” He warned, eyebrows pinched together in pleasure. 
“Cum inside, it’s safe.”
“Yeah? You want me to fill you up?”
“Please!”
Lorelei came as Will did, riding out her orgasm with his name on her lips and hi body shaking beneath her.
“FUCK!” William shouted. “Fuck, thank you, thank you, thank you…”
His spend fully inside her, Lorelei collapsed on top of him and Will took the opportunity to roll on top of her, fucking his cum back inside.
She thought she wasn’t ovulating, so she simply enjoyed the feeling of his cock plugging her up. Lorelei eventually kicked him out, cleaned herself off and immediately hoped he’d pretend it never happened.
Well, that was impossible with a positive pregnancy test in her hands.
Will was busy today, some volunteering duties at the VA and she was supposed to work a double but had begun puking, so they let her out a few hours early. How had she been this stupid? She was a nurse for fucks sack, an educated woman with a masters degree! Lorelei had paced her way out of the bathroom and into the living room, tears in her eyes and her mind racing. What is she going to tell her mom? Is she going to tell Will? Should she have an abortion? She was a single woman pregnant in America, all her family in Philadelphia and it’s not like they’d be much help anyway beside watching the baby… She wasn’t dating the father and she doubted Will wanted a baby. Maybe she should just take care of it and never say a word… 
But… part of her wanted this. She’d wanted a baby for years but life hadn’t granted her a relationship like that; a marriage. She wouldn’t even know what a healthy relationship looked like, her parents certainly weren’t the answer. She wanted a baby… but she wouldn’t do it alone. What did Will want? How was she going to tell him?
Well, she didn’t really have too. 
Will came home unexpectedly, looking in shock as he took in the scene before him. Lorelei in the living room, crying, holding a pregnancy test
They stood there for a long while, just staring… just looking at each other… before Will spoke.
“Is it mine?”
Lorelei nodded.
“Oh…”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“Are you keeping it?”
“I don’t know…” Lorelei watched him, trying to read his face but Will was good at masking; the military will do that to a man. “What do you want?”
“Oh… um… it’s not really my choice, is it?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, it’s not, but I’m asking for your opinion.”
“I don’t… I don’t want to make this choice for you, it’s your body-”
 “I know! I know it’s my body but I want to know what you want!” Why was she yelling? She didn’t really know, but she was frustrated. 
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry I just… I think… maybe if you also want to, and it’s okay, and I’d pay-”
“William.”
“I’d like to keep it.”
He wanted to have the baby?
“And you’d… be involved?”
Horror spread across his features. “Oh god yes, I wouldn’t just leave. Never.”
She wanted to believe him… Will was a stand up guy, but she never could get past her feelings of distrust. “And if I don’t want the baby, would you raise it on your own?”
“Lore, I wouldn’t force you to give birth-”
“Will-”
He sighed. “If it’s something you always wanted… Yes, I’d take the baby if you didn’t want to be involved.” 
Lorelei had no intention of giving birth to a child and never seeing it… but she needed to gauge Will. He was willing to be a single father… could you trust him not to run out on her and the baby like her own father had?
“Lore, listen, I’m sorry but I was running home to grab something for the benefit, they need it… I just need to drop it off so the auction can go as planned and I’ll be back, okay?”
Disappointment clouded her face. “Really Will? I just told you I’m pregnant and you have to leave?” Her voice cracked at the end… but Will had obligations.
“20 minutes, 30 tops. The grilled stopped working so I have to bring mine.” Will scrubbed his face. “I’m sorry but it’s a charity auction and-”
Will. Oh Will. Him and his charity work… how could she be mad about that? “Okay, go, I’ll be here.”
Will moved to the sliding glass door. “30 minuets.”
“30 minutes.”
*
It took 10 before Lorele heard the door open, and she began to step out of her room when she saw who was there; and it wasn’t Will. The man was short, tan skin, dark curls and a gray and black beard starting to grow in on his face. Thinking fast, Lorelei went to her bedside drawer, pushed past her verity of self toys and grabbed the gun before sneaking back to the bedroom door, ready to tell the intruder to put his hands up when she was face-to-face with a gun herself.
“Don’t fucking move.”
Lorelei scoffed. “You’re not the only armed one here.” Their guns were both pointed and cocked at each other, and Lorelei was not afraid to fire.  
He was not impressed. “Who are you and why are you here.”
The audacity. “I live here, who the fuck are you?”
The man actually laughed at her. He laughed at her! “Nice try, carino, but I know whose house this is, and it’s not yours.”
Did he know Will? If he did, why was he intruding, and how did he get inside? She narrowed her eyes. “What’s your name?”
He hesitated, but gave it to her. “Santiago Garcia. Yours?”
“Lorelei” He didn’t need her last name. “That’s a point in your favor, I recognize the name.” One of Will’s military friends. Lorelei glanced over to the pictures on the wall where she knew Santi’s picture was and he looked quite different from the man in front of her… did a beard and grown out hair make him look that different? 
“Well’s it’s not a point in your favor because I’ve never heard that name in my life.” 
That caused Lorelei’s head to whip in his direction. “What?” Will didn’t mention her?
“How about you lower your gun.”
“Lower yours.”
“You know who I am now!”
Christ, this man was irritating. “But I don’t know why you’re here. Apparently you thought the house was empty, odd time to be coming over for a visit when you haven't been here in two months.”
Santiago narrowed his eyes. “You’ve lived here two months?” He shook his head. “I came to borrow his power drill.”
“Why?”
A scoff. “To build the barbie dream house”
She rolled her eyes right back.
“And how did you get in?”
“I have his security information and he has mine.”
Lorelei was tired of him.  “Call Will.”
“Are you gonna shoot me if I go in my pocket?”
“You already have for fucking gun out, what am I worried about, a garade?”
Santiago didn’t seem impressed with her either, but reached in his pocket, dialed Will and put it on speaker.
‘What’s up?’
“I’m at your house.”
‘Why are you- oh fuck, Santi, now’s not the best time-’
“Are you aware there's a girl here?”
Lorelei interjected.
“I’m not a girl, I’m a grown ass woman!”
Santiago made the closed mouth sign with his hands, and Lorelei debated kicking him in the balls. 
‘Pope I’m on my way back just stay there, I can explain-’
“Are you aware she has a gun?”
‘What?’
“Yeah we’re in a bit of a stand off right now-”
‘What are you-’ Will pulled up his in home camera’s ‘FOR FUCKS SAKE SANTI PUT THE GUN DOWN SHE’S PREGNANT!’
Santi and Lorelei locked eyes and slowly lowered their fire arms.
‘Jesus Pope you just bring a gun to my house?’
“I always have a gun.”
‘Why?’
“You know damn well why.”
‘It’s been 3 years, no one is going to- oh my god, never mind, I’m walking in.’
As he said, Will walked through the door, grabbing Santi and yanking him away from Lorelei. “What the hell is wrong with you!”
Santiago sounded indigent. “Me?! You’ve had a girlfriend for 2 months and you haven't told us?”
Lorelei interjected. “Not his girlfriend.”
“Oh-ho-ho, so the block thickens!”
Will smacked him. “She’s my roommate”
“Apparently a little more” Santi wiggled his eyebrows and Lorelei broke down crying, hating herself for this disgusting display of weakness.
Will wrapped his arms around her but she shrugged him off. “We found out today, Santiago, so can you give us some space?”
Santiago clearly felt a little bad. Will had mentioned he and his fiance were hoping for children right after marriage so maybe he had a connection. 
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll… I’ll go. Fuck, sorry.” 
Will moved Santiago to the pantry, handing him the power drill. “Sorry, I forgot you were coming over…” Lorelei realized Will probably thought the house would be empty for Santi, but she had come home sick. “Listen, you can’t tell the others about this, including Laci.”
A small tsk and Santi spoke quieter. “I don’t know if I’m comfortable lying to Laci.”
“You aren’t lying, just… just wait a little and let us do this on our own time.”
“But she and I don’t-”
“Santi, we aren’t sure if we’re keeping it, and if you tell Laci, she’ll tell Ben and then the whole fucking town will know.”
He stopped, mouth shifting as he debated keeping a secret from his fiance. “Fine, but I can’t promise to keep it from her for long, okay? Can I tell her about Lorelei?”
Lorelei interjected. “Can you stop talking about me and my fetus like I’m not right here?”
Both men turned to her but Will spoke. “Well, you answer him, then.”
Everything that had been boiling up inside for the last few hours was ready to explode. She was frustrated, she was pregnant, she found out Will’s friends don’t know who she is… oh and she had a gun pointed at her. “Will, up until 15 minutes ago I didn’t know I was your dirty little secret so I don’t fucking care what he says.” She turns to Santi. “Tell your little girlfriend I’m pregnant, if you gotta tell her I had an abortion next month, that’s your fucking problem, not mine.” Back to Will. “I want him and his gun out of this house, and I want you to leave me alone for an hour minimum before you talk to me about this shit again.”
With that, and with echoes of Will insisting she wasn’t a secret, Lorelei stormed into the bathroom to take a long ass bath.
***********************
Will keeping her a secret.... what are we thinking about that???
If you've read the other series, you might be able to guess his reasoning and feelings behind it but
THEN COMES SANTI being fucking Santi. He's worried about the people's money who they stole that Yolanda warned hm about ;-; he wont let anyone hurt his family..... buuuuuuuut he's a lil gun happy.
You may be cool, but you will never be as cool as Lorelei.
Remember, reblogs are the best way to spread work, but comments mean the world!!!! i love your feed back!
This series is sharing my writing time with a Santi x reader x javier pena fic and my dark fic on my alt, @romana-after-dark, the wrong way
@pimosworld @my-secret-shame-but-fanfiction @whatthefishh @missdictatorme @milkymoon2483 @poeedameronn@itspdameronthings @miraclesabound
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sb25p · 1 year
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Warning: THE LAST OF US SPOILERS: EPISODE 5!!! IF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED EP 5, PLEASE SCROLL PAST!!!!!
Also this an essay!! 🥴 tbh I write these more for myself than anything else…my Tumblr is my mf journal.
I normally don’t like to write posts that involve spoilers for current series/movies etc but TLOU episode 5 affected me in such a powerful way, I feel like I just need to vent it for a min.
Can we talk about the final scene? How hopeful Ellie is when she wakes up only to find out Sam has unfortunately become infected. Sam then attacking Ellie for Joel and Henry to realise what’s happening and Henry to raise the gun to Joel.
The actor, Lamar Johnson, absolutely killed that role (no pun intended…too soon?)
Like we see his face go from confused to protective yet terrified, shocked, panicked, regretful, devastated, remorseful, angry and numb.
I could go on and on about the diversity of emotions that Lamar portrayed in that moment to capture the reaction of Henry losing Sam. The one person he loves more than anything and has sacrificed everything for only to lose at what he believes to be his own hands but as we know is due to being infected.
It was never Henry’s fault. Henry didn’t kill Sam. Sam was already dead. The infection took him. Henry actually saved Ellie from being harmed by Sam. He’s still a hero regardless of what he’s done. He continued to protect others but without Sam, what is his purpose? Sam to Henry is purpose. He always has been. Now that Sam is gone, Henry doesn’t feel any purpose and ultimately that causes him to take his own life without any hesitation.
Then we have the other parallel of Pedro Pascal in that situation playing the role of Joel Miller.
We see Joel (not for the first time) jumping in ultimately to protect Ellie. He’s terrified. He’s seeing her at risk and scared and she’s calling out to him in that moment for help.
Joel talks earlier to Henry about being relied on. He says that it’s easier for kids because no one is relying on them but that’s not really true is it? Because although Sam relied on Henry for protection, Henry relied on Sam for purpose. He loved him. He lived for him because he had Sam by his side.
What really got me in that moment after Henry shoots Sam, is Joel. The way his face turns into a realisation. An understanding.
It doesn’t happen right away.
I feel if you watch Joel’s face just after Sam dies, he’s asking for the gun because he’s afraid Henry will turn on the both of them, pin a blame on them maybe that Sam got infected because of them but when Henry says “what did I do?” You can see that Joel’s face falls. He goes from appearing assertive and protective of Ellie to becoming understanding and gentle towards Henry.
I think that is because Joel recognises that feeling all too well. It’s not hard to think that Joel would have had a time after Sarah’s death where he must have thought that life wasn’t worth living anymore. That his purpose in life has been ripped from him so abruptly and if his sole purpose now is merely to survive, what kind of life does he have anyway?
It’s why I always saw Joel to be one of the strongest characters in the whole of the TLOU universe. He was a father to an only child who was taken from him during the time the world was falling apart anyway. Not only was his own beautiful little world ended in that split second, the one he shared with his daughter, the whole planet was being ripped apart.
What motivated him to keep on living? We could say Tommy but a parents love like Joel’s is so incredibly powerful. Even my own parents once said to me (and I’m one of four children) that if I ever took my own life, they couldn’t go on themselves without me. The true love of a parent is absolutely infinitely one of the most powerful things in this world. Pedro absolutely portrayed that emotion in the moment when he’s trying to talk Henry down. It’s like he’s mentally saying “look at me, I understand, PLEASE, I understand”. Joel knows they’re not at risk to Henry at that moment, Henry is at risk to himself.
Not only that but Joel asks Ellie if she’s okay shortly after Sam dies and even tries to go to her but is stopped by Henry raising the gun to him.
We see Joel becoming softer and more of a father figure to Ellie in this situation. His usual hardened expression drops when he has just witnessed a serious threat to Ellie’s life. He can see the distress in her. He’s just watched her bond with a child over a period of time that she clearly felt very strongly for very quickly. He also has strong feelings about Ellie watching others die due to the discussion he has with her when she shoots the man in the previous episode to protect Joel.
“You’re just a kid. You shouldn’t know what it means to…” to kill someone he means.
He doesn’t want her to witness this world. He wants to protect her from it and we’re seeing so much more of that in these newer episodes. The paternal feelings he’s developing for her are slowly but surely finding their way out into the open.
And finally the note that Ellie leaves on Sam’s grave.
“I’m sorry.”
We see Joel realising when he reads this, that this young girl feels a lot more than she’s giving out. That Joel is starting to come to terms with how much of a weight is sitting on Ellie’s shoulders by being treat like a possible cure. That the thought of her feeling as though it’s her fault that she couldn’t save Sam from infection, ultimately has Joel feeling even more responsible for ensuring she doesn’t feel that way and that she understands how important she is in herself rather than to the rest of the crumbling world.
I really look forward to seeing how their relationship develops. Particularly, how Joel’s feelings develop further towards Ellie. I also look forward to seeing more vulnerability from Ellie. Joel walks around with this hardened expression but Ellie doesn’t need to do anything like that. We know from how she admits to Sam that she fears being left alone, that she has a lot of emotion she is holding back. She needs that someone to be vulnerable with and I can’t wait for her to let it all go for Joel.
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seraphsfire · 2 years
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things i did and didn’t like about rings of power (so you don’t have to watch it)
disclaimer: if you do want to watch it for whatever reason, please don’t pay for it, find a way to pirate it, don’t give jeff bezos any of your money. If you did really like it i totally respect that, i hope you enjoy it, these are just my personal opinions.
things i did like: 
the worldbuilding and set design is gorgeous, on par with the movies and i’d tentatively say the cgi is better than the hobbit trilogy. If that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in, i’d say it’s worth a watch. However, you’d probably waste less time by googling screenshots 
the dwarves are DELIGHTFUL. they’re a little different than Hobbit movie or Lotr dwarves, but they feel like Tolkien dwarves and they have a ton of personality and charisma. Disa is gorgeous and hilarious. And while she doesn’t have a beard, she does have sideburns that you couldn’t really see in the promo pics of her. (the dwarves don’t show up until episode 2 tho). They were probably my favorite part of the show so far.
The girl they cast to play Nori is super adorable and cute. The actors in general for the hobbits are very charming even if they look horrifically stinky and filthy. 
Morfydd clark doesn’t exactly feel or look like galadriel, but she does feel like an elf (unlike all the other elves in this show). If you forget she’s supposed to be galadriel she’s cool to watch even though the elves in this show are, in general, absurd. She’s clearly a good actor even though you can tell the directing on her part wasn’t great, there’s a lot of Very Dramatic squinting and Staring on her part and she has some ridiculous lines.
I actually really like the guy playing elrond. He also does feel like an elf and although he looks like a fancy hobbit, he’s the only one in the show i feel like is trying to be the character from the books he was cast as. If they did better stuff with his makeup and hair he could really be great. Idk maybe season 2 they’ll give him better hair or some Fenty diamond veil.
the elves’ (regular) costumes actually look a lot better on screen than they do in promo pics. Not super elfy, but enough of a fancy king-arthur feel for me to give it a pass. Much better than house of the dragon costumes (so far) or most of the non-important costumes in game of thrones.
things i didn’t like: 
hoo boy. 
i Mean i could go on and on about what the HELL were they thinking with the elves. Maybe not all the elves in the hobbit movies or lotr looked super elfy themselves (craig parker ily but you do look like A Dad) but the nasty looking short hair? 
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neo-n@zi style undercuts?
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 If they were going to do short hair they could have tried something. Idk. more romantic looking? or like cherub curls or soft floaty waves? there is so much hairspray in those elves’ hair. The ears are massive, thick and ugly looking. Their Token Diverse Elf guy is, other than galadriel’s brother, the only sort of unusual looking one to be passably cast as an elf but either he is a very bad actor or he was Very badly directed. His lines are awful. He’s supposed to be in love with this human chick but there is nothing about how they met, why they like each other, what they have in common, anything. No chemistry whatsoever. He’s also got a very stupid, plastic-looking costume. 
Also. They cast maybe the strangest oatmeal faced dudes they could find in britain as elves. What is this
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The elves armor is very stupid looking. Plain plate armor that is a matte grey for some reason, which i assume was to give it a softer look but really just ended up looking like it was spray painted, same with the chain mail they have under the armor. 
so much of this show had me going “wait, WHAT? why is that happening?” i knew this was mostly made up and wouldn’t have a lot directly from the silm or appendicies, but just trying to understand it narratively was baffling. They reference all these things they never explain. 
Galadriel talks about all the people she lost that the orcs / morgoth took from her but all you get is a seconds long scene of her looking at her dead brother. None of these other multitudes of people she’s lost are mentioned. A lot of stuff happens like this, just some character being like “oh this happened so thats why i have Emotional Damage,” and just moving on without any explanation. No chance to really get to know the characters, apart from a little bit with galadriel and she has very little backstory other than being Full of Need For Revenge.
WHY ARE THE HOBBITS SO DIRTY. WHY.
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they clearly know how to live off the land and build things, they’re not anywhere far away from water, but they are just COVERED with dirt and their hair is matted and absolutely nasty, their clothes are stained with sweat, their teeth are super yellow. they all look disgusting and i have no clue why. All the hobbits having an irish accent and there being a decent number of brown people among them unlike the elves or humans but them looking so gross feels Bad like a microaggression. but like i said in another post since I’m white and also not irish i feel like this isn’t something that’s my place to break down and discuss. The whole time they looked so gross that i was just cringing. They do act like hobbits tho. 
Just random plot threads and scenes that were so bizarre and cliche that they didn’t need to put in when there’s So much more interesting things to pull from in the appendicies. Sauron apparently leaves this Mark everywhere that looks like a trident and the elves just DON’T KNOW what it means. 
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why is sauron marking his victims like a serial killer? Why are there orcs poisoning cattle? why the hell did bronwyn’s son find that orc sword / morgoth’s sword / sauron’s sword or whatever? These are plot threads that are obviously put in there to make it supposedly interesting, but they’re all overused tropes from other stuff that afaik aren’t related to/established by anything that happens in silm or lotr, while they could have used so many other interesting things from the text instead. It feels VERY geared towards like, 8-12 year olds, but way too slow for them. Some things they rushed through, while other scenes, especially dialogue scenes with the humans, just dragged on without really giving any interesting information or character development.
there was this whole scene with galadriel escaping a sea monster for some reason which didn’t make sense, i don’t see why we could have seen more of her backstory instead, but i mean peter jackson did that kind of thing pretty often in lotr and the hobbit so whatever. It wasn’t actually even that interesting of a fight and they didn’t even show more than a fin either which was kind of disappointing.
galadriel being a Girlboss full of Revenge. I guess there’s ways to do that that i could have believed but it’s just So dramatic i just kept grimacing the whole time. Since she’s the main character pretty much, this doesn’t help. Opening with her as a very dour looking child building a boat out of paper was a really strange choice.
the “diversity” being all talk and no substance. Wild to me that amazon went to all that trouble to toot their own horn about diversity and piss off the racists and then didn’t actually bother. Yeah there’s brown hobbits, and a few brown dwarves. Galadriel’s company that she commands is 100% white and male. I saw maybe one east asian person. The border guards where the love struck elf guy works are all men. The dwarves with speaking roles are men other than Disa.
it’s bizarre, it’s all over the place, the lines sound like generic fantasy rpg #28, only a couple of them were actually taken from the text, it’s a sausage fest, the elves suck. The dwarves are cool and the one thing that really feels like Tolkien in the whole show. The worldbuilding is pretty. The music is kind of nice but not really noticeable. It has very little resemblance to anything middle-earthy, it’s very juvenile, and very boring. anyway. That’s about it. 
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neverwritewhatyouknow · 8 months
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Was sent an Ask before from an Anon, that for some reason whenever I tried to answer directly would cause my app to crash and my post to be totally deleted. So I’m going to try it this way and hope it works. I’m not retyping this for the 4th time.
The Ask: “I was wondering what your thoughts were on the PJO series casting a Black girl as Annabeth (not Black in the books) because (I’ve seen your posts) you seem mad at rwrb doing the same thing”
Hi Anon, welcome to the blog and thanks for your ask, even though you missed some rather critical details about what I’ve been posting about.
I’m not mad that Nora is being played by a Black actress. I’m mad that she’s not being played by a Jewish actress.
The difference between what PJ and RWRB did is that in the former, Annabeth is (to the best of my knowledge) white and blonde. She’s not a part of a minority. Having her portrayed by a Black actress doesn’t take anything away from the character, it only adds to her. It makes a character more diverse because you can, it harms no one, it removes nothing. This was a change that would only be beneficial.
What RWRB did wasn’t that. Nora was canonically Jewish. She was ethnically Jewish and also, at least mildly, religiously Jewish. This makes her a minority. When they removed that Jewishness from Nora by not hiring a Jewish actress, they removed a minority’s representation. Nora very much could’ve been both Black and Jewish if they wanted Nora to be Black while also keeping her canon ethnicity, but they didn’t care about her being Jewish. Which is really wrong and (going off of the reactions from the crew and cast) purposely hateful. Someone once told me that it felt like they were trying to make a visually diverse cast, which is why they hired a Black actress for Nora, because Jews are only thought of as white (which isn’t true). And honestly, it’s very likely this is why the movie did this. There’s nothing wrong with having a Black Nora, but she was canonically Jewish and there is something wrong with not having a Jewish Nora. Black + Jewish aren’t mutually exclusive to each other, but to RWRB they are, and that’s what the problem is. They erased Nora’s Jewishness with their casting.
Change a character’s race all you want as long as you aren’t erasing another minority to do so. Add on, don’t take away. Allow canon representation of minorities to exist onscreen without changes.
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I was the annon for "why nerds are racist" question. But is nerd oppression even real a thing. 😂😂😂
See it’s interesting because “nerd oppression” is just code for bullying in one’s teenage years. But bullying is something more than just “nerds” go through, it just so happened that during the 80’s where diversity wasn’t something people in or watching film and tv cared about the majority of writers and directors were cishet white dudes who felt like they were picked on harder than anyone else in school and reflected that in their work.
But because every kind of person has been bullied that trend surprisingly didn’t stick around long. It’s why a lot of high school centric movies and tv jumped from “the nerds are being picked on and get even/win the day” to “cliques hurt literally everyone” because there was an understanding that bullying was happening to everyone all the time everywhere.
But cishet white dude nerds never quite left the brief period in the 80’s where they were the oppressed majority in film and that’s translated into real life.
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