#a ghost coded line I wrote

[hyperfixiation-station]

“I love you,” he whispers, his breath warm against yourr cheek. “You’re everything to me.”

[robinsegghead]

Danny's Daycare Part 6

[Master List]

"I’m going to feel really bad about all of this if he doesn’t turn out to be evil.” Duke sighed.

          Tim hummed in acknowledgement, still buried in his work and completely enthralled and enraged by what he had found. Or rather, what he had not found. “He has to be something - there’s nothing about him! Daniel Nightingale does not exist! There’s no internet presence, no pictures, videos, nothing! Nobody who comes into that kind of money is just a… a…”

          “Ghost?” Duke asked as Tim snapped his fingers to remember the word.

          Pointing at Duke, he nodded enthusiastically. “Yes! That! He’s like a ghost or something- I don’t trust it!”

          Standing up, Duke moved away from the batcomputer and towards the exit. “Have you ever considered that maybe he’s just a nice guy doing a nice thing?” He paused, no response coming from Tim. “Of course not,” he muttered. “That would require seeing the good in literally anyone.”

~~~

            Sunday was much less exciting. Danny went to the store successfully, drank his coffee without spilling it on himself, fixed his coffee maker, and notably; didn’t kill anyone or run into any vigilantes. Which, thank Ancients, honestly. Danny was not here to play hero again, but he was self-aware enough to admit that if he somehow befriended the birds and bats that he’d let himself get dragged back into it.

            So he stayed inside. 

            Monday was also quiet. Twelve kids between Mia, Ember, and Danny wasn’t too bad but he did get lunch delivered for all three of them. The parents later that day brought news of Joker’s death which had apparently reached the public. The article said nothing about murder (although it was obviously speculated at) and neither Danny’s name nor his face were in the article. 

            He didn’t sleep that night.

            Tuesday wasn’t any busier than Monday, but it felt hectic, and Danny wrote a physical note to himself to hire more help. So far he’d gotten lucky, good workers wouldn’t just keep falling into his lap, he’d need to look for it. There was more speculation about the Joker’s death (there were even more parties) but Danny kept his nose out of it. Not his circus. Not his monkey’s. 

            Except it kind of was, and he’d killed the monkey.

            Wednesday was fine, Danny learned a bit more about the Joker through the constant barrage of news. It was through this barrage that he learned more about Duke’s past and its relation to the Joker. Feeling a bit like a creep, Danny found as much information as he could on the Thomas’s, where they were, how long they’d been there, and what had happened to them. It was… distressing to say the least.

            Danny contacted Frostbite about working on a Joker venom cure.

            Thursday wasn’t special. Danny both liked and hated how slow his days had been recently. No one had tried to mug him recently (which was fine albeit boring), with help at the daycare he didn’t find himself quite as exhausted at the end of the day, and sleep continued to evade him with the exception of small bouts that came on randomly and without care if he was laying down or not. Some would call it ‘passing out’, Danny called it power napping.

            He was just waking up from another one of his power naps, this one taken only a foot away from his couch, when his phone rang. The number wasn’t one he knew, but the area code was Gotham.

            “Hello?” He answered, stretching his stiff arms, and rubbing the sore spot on his head from where it hit the edge of the coffee table at the… beginning of his power nap.

            There was a shuffling on the other end of the line, then a groan, and finally, a response. “Danny...? It’s… Miguel. Listen I… I-” There was a choking sound followed by a wet cough and Danny realized this wasn’t exactly the call he’d been expecting. Slipping on his jacket and shoes and grabbing a first aid kit, he left his apartment.

            “Where are you?”

            “25 th and Mundson… I’m…” He let out a shuddery breath and Danny thought he heard sniffling. “It’s bad man.”

            Danny had already begun his flight from the moment Miguel had answered. It only took a couple of minutes, Danny spent the entire time speaking words of encouragement, instructing him on what to do. Miguel had been stabbed in the lower stomach and was losing blood fast. Upon arrival, Danny was grateful to see the kid still kicking, putting as much pressure on the wound as he could, just like Danny had said.

            “Hey, Miguel, how we doing?” He pulled the shirt away from his stomach and checked the wound. It was deep. 

            Miguel groaned, head falling back against the brick wall behind him.

            “None of that, kid, talk to me.” Danny pulled out wads of gauze and pressed them into the open wound trying to staunch the bleeding.

            Despite his request, Miguel didn’t manage to say anything, only letting out more sounds of pain every few seconds. Once he’d gotten the gauze wrapped tightly against his wound, Danny wound his arms around the boys’ frame and pulled him into his arms. 

            “Thompkins clinic is only a couple of blocks away.” He murmured, booking it down the sidewalk. 

            Miguel made his discomfort known as he loudly groaned and cried into Danny’s shoulder. Guilt tugged at the half dead king. He’d been in tough spots, but honestly? This was a first. He’d never held someone while they bled out except himself and he was sure he would have been happier going his whole life without. 

            As the building came into sight he felt the prickle of hope just under his skin, only to been diminished by Miguel’s breathing coming to a stop.

            “Come on, kid. Please.” He grit out, shoving through the door.

            The receptionist stood up quickly, fear being replaced by resolve. She moved immediately, opening the door to the actual clinic.

            “Doctor!” She shouted, as Danny shoved past her and laid Miguel on the table. 

            “He’s been stabbed. He called me eleven minutes ago, I applied pressure and wrapped it eight minutes ago, it’s deep.” He barely breathed, forcing the words out as fast as he could.

            Doctor Thompkins and her receptionist nurse worked quickly, pushing Danny out of the room and trying to save Miguel’s life. Sitting in the waiting room was excruciating. With his advanced hearing he could tell when the doctor pulled out the paddles, when she zapped Miguel (Danny wincing at the phantom ((ha)) feeling of electricity coursing through his own body), he could hear when she demanded the nurse for more medicine, to wipe the area, to hand her a tool, and he could hear it all knowing he couldn’t help.

            He’d come to Gotham to help people. And he couldn’t. He sat in the lobby, paralyzed, unable to help one of the few people he’d specifically offered his help to.

            When the door opened almost two hours later, the nurse offered him a small smile and nodding for him to go to the back. He didn’t waste a second, breezing by her and directly to the bed Miguel laid in, covered by a blanket, vitals stable.

            “He’s going to be okay.” Doctor Thompkins starts, looking over a clipboard. “It was pretty serious, his heart stopped three times and we had to bring him back. If this were any other kind of clinic I would have had him transferred to a hospital via an ambulance the moment you brought him in.” She said pointedly, there was no real bite in her words. “I’d like to at least keep him over night, make sure he’s okay before he goes galivanting around Crime Alley again.”

            Danny nodded. “Thank you.” He paused, staring at Miguel before turning back to the doctor. “Sorry, uh, I’m Danny. Danny Nightingale.” He held his hand out to shake, blood still caked under his fingernails no matter how many times he’d tried to scrub it away.

            She offered a small smile. “I’ve heard a great deal about you Mr. Nightingale. He looks a bit old to be yours though.” She gestured to Miguel.

            “Oh, no.” He chuckled. “We’ve only met a couple of times, but I gave him my number in case he was ever in trouble. It came in handy tonight.” 

            Nodding, the doctor looked back at her clipboard. “Do you know about family? Anyone we can contact?”

            He sighed, Miguel’s phone heavy in his pocket. “I grabbed his phone but… I know it’s just him and his little brother. I don’t know where the brother is, but I don’t want him out there all alone all night. He might come looking for his brother. I’ll see if I can find any information in his phone.”

            She nodded again, hesitantly before turning away. “I have a couple of things to work on, but you’re welcome to stay here for a while.”

~~~

           Tucker had found Miguel’s little brother’s information in the phone and Danny had set out immediately. He had no idea how Tucker had done it, there was no phone number for his brother, no home address, but Tucker just gave one of his ‘you won’t understand even if I dumb it down for you’ sighs and Danny didn’t question it.

            He’d felt bad about leaving Miguel, but Doctor Thompkins assured him the boy wouldn’t wake until the morning and it would be more dangerous for Santiago (Miguel’s little brother) to be alone all night. So he’d left.

            He didn’t like what he’d found. 

            An abandoned office building on the edge of Crime Alley. Not just abandoned, caved in, likely from a bomb, half the building was missing, there was no roof, most of the second floor had crumbled away leaving the first floor open to the dangers of the night.

            “Santiago?” Danny called cautiously. “My name is Danny; I know your brother.” He hoped Santiago was here. Please don’t let him be searching the streets for his brother. Miguel had said he was only thirteen. “Miguel’s hurt, I’ve come to take you to him.” 

            His senses flared and his body moved on instinct, dodging the long piece of wood that swung at his head. Rolling forward and springing back up, he spun around to face his attacker. His attacker being a little kid. He wore a worn-down jacket, the zipper was open and broken, there were holes in the t-shirt underneath, his jeans were shredded around the ankles and his toes poked through the shoes that were holding on by the shoelaces.

            Raising both hands in a surrender motion, Danny sighed. “Santiago?” The boy’s look was guarded, but fear was clearly underneath, and he nodded once, barely. “I met your brother the other night, my name’s Danny. Your brother got hurt and I took him to Thompkins clinic, I came to bring you to him so you wouldn’t worry about him all night.”

            The two-by-four lowered slowly but not all the way. “’E may’ve mentioned ya.” His voice was so quiet, barely a whisper.

            Danny nodded encouragingly. “I want to help you- both- if you’ll let me. But that’s not what I’m here for tonight. I didn’t want you to be alone or go searching for your brother, so I came to bring you to him. And then, at least while he’s healing, I’d like to help you guys out, if you’ll let me.”

            And with the look Santiago gave him, he was optimistic that he could wear them down.

~~~

          As he’d learned in the past six months, Danny wasn’t just the king of the infinite realms. No- he was the king of hasty decisions. He already owned the apartment building he lived in and he’d been fixing up the empty apartments, but without much thought (or asking Miguel and Santiago’s opinions) he went online and purchased all of the necessary furniture to house two boys and set the delivery for the next day.

          “Mr. Nightingale-” Miguel started.

          “Danny.”

           Miguel ignored him. “Mr. Nightingale, tha’s too much. We can’t accept this. Why would you even want us to move in?” His balled his fists in the hospital blanket. Doctor Thompkins had thankfully stepped out to give them some privacy. “What do you want from us?”

           “Listen, Miguel,” Danny rubbed a hand across his forehead. “I don’t WANT anything FROM you. I want you both to be safe. I want you both to go to school. And I want you to only worry about grades and socializing and other kid things.” He raised a hand calmingly as Miguel geared up to argue. “And I know you aren’t kids- you’ve been through too much to be considered kids, but you are young, and you deserve to feel safe.”

           The brothers looked between each other and Danny.

           “I don’t want to charge rent; I don’t want anything from you.” He repeated. “I want to help you, remember? That’s what I do. That’s what people like me are made for. Helping.”

           Santiago, in a rare show of childishness, climbed onto his brother’s bed and into his lap, whispering something in his ear. The two shared a pointed look, a telepathic conversation happening between them while Danny tried not to watch. Miguel sighed.

          “So… how would this work?”

          Danny leaned back in his chair, hoping he looked less intimidating like this. “I own the apartment building I live in. I’d like to give you two one of the apartments to live in, rent free, obviously. I’d like to tutor you both so you can get into a good school before next semester, we could do that on weekends and in evenings. I would also like you to leave your gang,” Miguel opened his mouth, but Danny pressed on. “I can offer you a job that will pay much better than any gang will.” Miguel’s mouth shut.

          The three sat in silence for a moment after that, Miguel thinking it all through. “Why us man?”

          The Halfa shrugged. “Why not? I can’t help everyone, but I can help you two. You’re just as deserving as anyone else is and I have the means.”

          “This ain’t some weird sugar daddy situation, is it?”

           Danny actually laughed at that. “No, Ancients no! I already told you what I want. And it’s not anything weird or creepy or gross. I just want to help.” I just want to protect.

           “Fine.” Miguel mutters. “But no creepy shit! An’ you ain’t my dad!”

           He nodded, grinning. “Agreed.”

~~~

            Danny insisted they stay at the clinic for another twenty-four hours, both so Miguel could recover a bit more before walking around and so he could get the apartment set up before their arrival.

            First he contacted Ember and begged her to work the whole day tomorrow and be responsible about it, then he called Mia and told her he had a family emergency and would be out the following day but that she could call if she needed and to keep Ember in line. 

            After that he called Jazz because that’s what he did when he did something crazy.

            “Danny?” She answered.

            “I did something hasty again.”

            She sighed. “What is it this time? A restaurant? A hotel? Tell me it isn’t Phantom rela-”

            “What? No! No it’s- you know how I bought my apartment building before moving here? Well… I just invited a couple of kids who need a safe place to stay to live in one of the apartments and I’m kind of freaking out.” 

            She hummed, neither approving nor disapproving, just signaling that she was listening.

            He phased into his apartment and threw his bloody jacket on top of the trash can. “I’m giving them an apartment on my floor, paying for their school, and tutoring them on the weekends. They’re good kids, they just need help.”

            “Danny.” She sighed. “You can’t help everyone.”

            “I know!” He snapped.

            Neither said anything for a moment, allowing their personal frustrations to subside before continuing. They didn’t fight often anymore, but when they did… it could get pretty explosive.

            “I know, Jazz.” He started again. “I can’t help everyone. I know that. But I can help them. Isn’t that why I’m here? To help?”

            She chuckled. “I can’t believe we ever didn’t know your obsession… Remember I wasn’t particularly excited about the daycare in the first place?” He knew, she’d thought he was crazy. But she’d gotten with the program and helped out immensely. “Look, you’re an adult, and more importantly, I trust you, just be careful okay? You’re always doing these crazy last-minute things and it worries me. You’re stretching yourself so thin.”

            “I know.”

            “I’ll call in a family emergency at work tomorrow and come help you out. What do you need from me?”

            And that’s why he always called her. He felt the tension release from his shoulders as he went through a mental checklist of tomorrows to do’s. The apartment needed to be cleaned, furniture needed to be moved in, groceries, clothes, and books needed to be procured after that, and they’d need phones.

            She agreed to show up at seven in the morning to start cleaning the apartment. He could go out and buy essentials while she did that and the furniture would likely be delivered in the early afternoon so they could start moving it all in. They didn’t want to stress the boys out with too much stuff, so Danny promised to keep it to the essentials.

            “Well, I’ve got to get up bright and early to help my kid brother with another crazy scheme, so I’ll be going.” The teasing in her voice was palpable. “I love you, brother.”

            “Love you too, sis.”

            It was nearing midnight when Danny finally ended his call with his sister and looked over the furniture set to be delivered the following day. Two mattresses and bed frames, a couch, a table and chair set, two desk with chairs, and a tv stand (no tv, he was worried how the boys would feel if it was obvious how much he’d spent. He’d get them a tv soon.). For an exorbitant price, it would all be delivered the following day by two in the afternoon.

            Danny took another power nap.

            This one was longer than most and he awoke with a start as sunlight poured into the apartment. Dragging a hand down his face, he stumbled towards the kitchen. When had he last eaten? Didn’t matter, he didn’t have much. He didn’t eat much these days. Not for lack of trying, he was just so busy.

            Opening his fridge (praying there was some fresh fruit or something he could grab quickly) he was shocked to find a container of what looked to be chicken parmesan and a sticky note attached to the lid. 

             Don’t know how a twig like you took out the Joker, eat something. -RH

            There was another container next to it with some kind of stew.

             Okay, not a fan of chicken parm? Fine, but eat the stew. -RH

             There was a third container next to that, some kind of steak and potatoes.

             Do you eat? I swear they aren’t poisoned. -RH

             Danny chuckled. Only one person knew he’d killed the Joker, he hadn’t even told Jazz when she’d called after the breakout, which meant the Red Hood was breaking into his apartment and leaving him meals. Why? As a thank you? Danny stilled owed him a thank you for all he’d done for his people. 

            Reheating the chicken parmesan Danny let his thoughts turn from the Red Hood to his plans for the day. According to his phone it was nearing seven. He’d also gotten confirmation sometime in the middle of the night for the furniture he’d bought saying it’d arrive closer to two. 

            He scarfed down the food (he couldn’t remember ever eating something so delectable) and made his way down to let Jazz in. [SE7]  It had been a few weeks since they’d been able to have brunch, and he smiled when they made eye contact. Her hair was pulled back with a bandanna, her jeans were cuffed, and she wore an open jacket over a ratty old t-shirt. She looked ready to get to work.

            “All right, Mr.-fixes-everyone’s-problems-but-his-own, lead the way.” She arched an eyebrow, clearly still miffed that he hadn’t told her about buying and renovating the building.

            He brought her up to the fourth floor. “This is where they’ll be staying. It’s got two rooms so they won’t have to share, but it’s also on my floor so I can be nearby if they need an adult.”

            “Is that what you think you are?” She teased, lowering the bucket of cleaning supplies she’d brought along.

            Rolling his eyes, he opened the balcony window blinds. “I cleaned all of the open apartments when I bought the place, but it could use a thorough dusting and vacuuming. The furniture will be arriving around two, so we’ve got time. I also need to get to the grocery store to stock their cabinets and pick up some essentials, I was going to take your car. You good here while I take care of that?”

            She nodded. “You won’t even recognize it when you get back.”

            He wasn’t sure if that was meant to be reassuring. But he let her get to work anyway.

Danny didn’t drive much these days. He didn’t have a car and even if he did the likelihood of it getting stolen or broken into where he lived was high. He preferred to take buses or trains anywhere he needed to go but with how many bags of things he intended to get it just wouldn’t be convenient.

            First stop was the department store. He picked out a couple of outfits for each of the boys (he guessed at their sizes as best he could) and some packaged underwear and socks. He picked out bed sheet sets and comforters, a shower curtain, bathmat, bath towels, and kitchen towels. What else… they’d need dishes! 

Loading the essentials -cups, plates, silverware, a couple of pots and pans, knives, a cutting board, and measuring utensils- he stopped and considered getting more. Before he could go completely overboard, he cut himself off. He still needed to get groceries and toiletries and it was already nearing eleven.

            He picked out shampoo, conditioner, toothbrushes and paste, deodorant, combs, a hairbrush, and anything else he thought they might need. At twelve he made his way to the grocery store which he originally thought would be the cheapest part of the trip. Until he saw the prices of seasonings. Five dollars for a jar of garlic powder! 

            Not that Danny was terribly concerned about money, he’d basically been dared by Clockwork to find a way to use it all up without simply giving it all away, but when he thought about all of the essentials the boys would need… flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, half a million seasonings, as well as shelf stable snacks and some canned goods… the cost added up.

            Swiping his card without a second thought, Danny loaded up the car. 

            Jazz was right. When he got back the apartment looked…. Well it was the same, obviously, but it was so much cleaner, fresher, it had a lighter feel to it. Every speck of dust was gone, the carpets had been deep cleaned, the bathroom sparkled, and the kitchen was ready to be filled.

            It didn’t take the two of them long to unload everything from the car but by the time it was all put away (and they were both thoroughly exhausted) the furniture was being delivered.

            “Remind me again why we didn’t ask any of your many ghost friends to help us with this?” Jazz huffed, pulling the couch up the stairs as Danny pushed.

            He chuckled. “You were the one who said, and I quote, ‘We don’t need ghost powers, we are perfectly strong and capable humans, and we don’t want the neighbors to suspect anything’.”

            “Well that’s not even completely true, is it?” She huffed. “Just do it!” 

            Giving his best impression of a super villain’s laugh, Danny hesitated for only a minute before granting mercy, turning the couch intangible, and flying past Jazz with the furniture. She didn’t laugh, clearly exasperated, following him and muttering things under her breath while he flew back and forth bringing up the furniture. 

            Jazz began assembling the bedframes while he finished bringing up furniture. When he finally settled back into the apartment he felt like collapsing onto the couch and taking one of his power naps. The black spots in his vision went away with just a bit of blinking and he pushed away the thought. He didn’t need a nap, he needed to get this done.

            “Danny?” Jazz asked, cautiously, noting his momentary dissociation. “You okay there, brother?”

            He nodded slowly. “Tired. I’ve been pretty busy recently.”

            She eyed him skeptically but let it slide. He listened to her chatter on about work while they put together the beds ‘and it’s hard to believe he’s really dead but thank Ancients because that monster didn’t deserve to claim insanity even once!’, Danny trying to keep from wincing every time she speculated about the Joker’s murder/death.

            Just as they were finishing up Danny’s phone began to ring.

            “Hello?” He moved away from Jazz to get a bit of privacy.

            “Mr. Nightingale? It’s Dr. Thompkins. The boys are getting restless, and I’ve caught them trying to leave twice. I think it’d be best if you came down to get them.” Her voice was professional, but he could hear a hint of exasperation underneath.

            Giving a quick confirmation, he hung up. “I’ve gotta go pick up the boys, they’re getting restless. You wanna stick around? I was gonna order pizzas.”

            “How about this; you take my car to pick them up so Miguel doesn’t have to walk much, and I’ll call in pizzas which you can pick up while you’re out?” She reasoned from the floor. She’d sprawled out after they’d finished the last of the furniture and had apparently decided to become a permanent resident of the floor.

            “You got it, sis.” Swiping her keys once again he made his way out. On the short drive over he felt the anxiety begin to bubble up. What if they hated it? He didn’t know these kids that well, what if they were super overwhelmed and up and left? He wasn’t a father or guardian to anyone (except the entirety of the infinite realms but that’s beside the point)! He couldn’t take care of kids! Santiago was just thirteen! Being neglected at that age was what led to Danny dying at fourteen!

            The panic took over his senses and before he knew it he’d arrived outside of the clinic. Once inside, the nurse (the same from the night before) smiled and gestured for him to go on back. He made eye contact with Miguel and waited. Waited for something. Waited for him to change his mind about all of this. Waited for him to run. Waited. Finally, Miguel sighed. “All right. Let’s go, man.”

Prev. Next

[cherryredstars]

God I am such a sucker for soft!Simon and I love how you write for him. If it's okay, could I request a nsfw oneshot? Maybe it's their first time getting physical or something like that. Just anything soft n intimate, ya know?

Pairing: Simon “Ghost” Riley x gn!reader

Warnings: 18+, NSFW, Soft Smut, Sexual Intimacy, Handjob, Grinding, Lots of soft and playful tones

Summary: One scenario in which you and Simon begin to have sexual intimacy. 

A/N: My Love Mine All Mine is so Simon coded ( Listened to it on loop the whole time I wrote this)

Word Count: 1.6K (Not Edited)

Like all the times before this one, it starts off slow. 

You lay gently on your back, soft and sweet kisses planted on your lips from Simon. He is still tense, the muscles of his upper back stiff and rippling under his shirt. Your soft hands, hands so much softer than his own, reach up and massage the muscles as best as you can from your position. Like everything about him, the muscles are large and you have to dig the heel of your palm into them to get them into a lax state. He groans softly in appreciation, his body sinking softly against yours like water. His own hands, spread wide against the expanse of your back and between your shoulder blades, arches your body into his to cradle you. 

His kisses distance from your mouth, showering whispering kisses to your cheeks, forehead, and nose. The tenderness makes you giggle, throwing your head back in a way that makes him move his hand to hold the back of your head in support. You can feel Simon smile against your skin, his scar above his lip brushing against the skin of your jaw and neck as he moves his kisses downwards. 

“What is it?” He asks, a gentle layer of happiness and giddiness in his tone.

“It tickles,” you smile up at the ceiling as his short stubble rubs against your skin again. 

His smile widens for a second, humming against your skin as he gives the side of your neck one last kiss. He pulls away, his hands moving to rub the soft skin of your arms. His hands leave your body briefly, grabbing the ends of his shirt and slipping it over his head before throwing it to the side. Scars decorate his skin, shiny and pale in the dim light of your shared bedroom. To make him more comfortable, you sit up and remove your own shirt. Both of your chests are bare to each other, and Simon grabs your hand to hold it over his heart. 

It beats widely against you, pulsing with warm blood. The erratic beats contrast Simon’s practiced composure as he stares down at you. With your hands still pressed to his heart, you lean up and press a kiss to the back of your hands. Under your palm, his heart beats harder against his skin as Simon’s breath hitches. His hold on your hands lightens, and you take it as a chance to roam over his skin. He is silent as your hands trace the path of his scars. Just like every time you have done this, his stiffens as you touch them until his body melts into the soft kisses you give each shiny line. When you pull your face away from his chest, craning your neck to look up at him, Simon recaptures your lips. His hand finds your cheek, stroking it as he leans your body back down to the mattress. Your arms come to wrap around his neck lazily, opening your mouth to embrace the warmth of his tongue. 

His hands slip down to your waist, squeezing and massaging the skin with gentle pressure. His hands continue to slip down, finding the band of your pants. His thumb brushes over it, stilling when your hands cover his and guide him in pushing them off of you. His skin, rough and slightly dry, brushes against the smoothness of your legs. Your underwear was taken with your pants, leaving you completely exposed to him. Simon’s breath catches in his throat as he stares down at you, a nervousness gathering in his mouth that he forces out with a swallow. Copying his actions from before, you take his hands and place them over your chest. The beating is strong yet calm, and he nods in understanding. An understanding that only the two of you share. 

His hands trail upwards, moving to your shoulders and down to your hands where he links your fingers together. He brings them back so they wrap around his neck, his head lowering to rest against your shoulder. Your hands moving to his hair and neck, your hand playing with the soft locks as you cradle his neck. The sound of his pants shuffling catches your attention, but you don’t look down. You give him his privacy, leaning your own head down to place kisses into his hair. His hair smells like his shampoo, slightly earthy but warm. It reminds you of a softer variation of what he smells like when he comes home from deployment, his body still carrying the rays of the sun and in a thin layer of sand and dirt. 

He moves his head slightly, and you lean yours back so he can move it fully. He looks up at you, his leg rubbing against yours as he shifts. His head moves up and rests against your forehead. His bold eyes stare into yours, glowing with affection and a slight hardened edge of determination. You tilt your head slightly, bumping your nose with his. The last hardened ridge of his face melts away as he smiles down at you with a playful eye roll. You smile back, your eyes crinkling as you reveal your teeth. 

“Hi,” you whisper playfully. 

“Hi,” he whispers back. 

You have to turn your head away as you smile goofily, and Simon nudges his head against the side of yours affectionately. He kisses the side of your jaw, a deep chuckle escaping his throat, “C’mon, love. Stay with me, yeah? Don’t go ‘round gettin’ distracted.”

The rich tones of his voice draws you back to him. When you turn your head back towards him and your eyes reconnect, a soft breath escapes his nose. “There’s my pretty baby.”

You grow bashful at his words, having half the mind to throw your hands over his face so your face can stop heating up. Another deep chuckle escapes his mouth as he moves his hands to massage your waist and hips again. The rough pad of his fingers are delicious over your skin, and you arch your lower half into his hold. You rub right against the hardness of his erection, causing a hiss from him. You try to lower your hips back down, but Simon tightens his hold on them, moving your hips slightly to grind against him. 

A pleased sigh leaves his lips, his eyes closing as he kisses your jawline again. You hum in appreciation for his actions too, bringing your hips upwards to press more firmly against him. You know he isn’t ready for penetration yet, and you’re just happy that he feels this comfortable. You moan softly in his ear and Simon groans in response. Your hand tightens in his hair as your own eyes shut, causing another noise out of him. 

“Can I touch you?” 

Your voice is soft and needy in his ear, and he gives you a small nod against your head. “Please.”

He stops his movements, both of you watching as your warm hand trails down his body. It slips from around his neck, making a path down his chest and stomach until it rests right above his stiffened cock. His head pulses and the slightest bit of precum dribbles from his slit. Your hand is gentle as you wrap your hand around his tip. His hips instinctively buck into your grasp, smearing his pre into the palm of your hand. A dragged moan leaves him when you squeeze his head slightly before you loosen your grip and give his length lazy strokes. His nose bumps into your jaw as you continue giving him that sweet attention, eyes screwed shut.

“Hand is fucking soft, love. Feels so fucking good.” He grumbles, his hips snapping forward slightly. 

You hum in response, rubbing your palm around his tip a few times in tight circles before jerking him off again. Simon’s mouth is parted the whole time, occasionally letting out soft noises and praises of approval. He lifts his head, moving it to give you kisses that mask his moans. You smile into them, opening your mouth for him once again. He hums in thanks, cradling both sides of your face as his brows furrow. His tongue is warm in your mouth, and his hips keep snapping into your hold. A few minutes later, he pulls away with a moan. 

“Shit. Gonna cum, love. Keep going.” 

You nod in understanding, moving your hand faster as Simon throws his head back. His teeth grit, muffling the hard groan that rumbles in his throat as he releases. White liquid spreads over your stomach, your eyes completely hypnotized by the way Simon tries to catch his breath as he mutters ‘fuck’ repeatedly. Once he’s finished spilling his pearly release onto your skin, his hand snaps down to stop your slow pumping. His chest heaves with every breath, and his forehead falls back against yours. He stays there for a few minutes, both of your hands stilled around the base of his cock with his body hunched over you protectively. You can feel him softening in your hold, but you watch his face as his eyes squeeze shut before giving you a half-lidded stare. Your free hand comes up to his face, rubbing his cheek. He leans into the touch, a noisy breath leaving his nose. He kisses the side of your palm before you move it, pushing sweaty hair out of his face. 

“You okay, Si?” You ask gently, both of your hands falling away from his cock as he begins to sit up. 

He takes a few minutes before he clears his throat, giving you a small smile, “Yeah. Thank you, lovie.”

He sighs as he stands up, coming to lift you up. You giggle as your arms wrap around his neck, pressing yourself into him as he lifts you off the bed. He kisses the side of your head as he carries you to the bathroom, sweat and cum drying on both of your skins. Ever so softly, he nuzzles his head against yours again and whispers, “Thank you.”

Part 2

[twowaywardorphansjournal]

Xerox

Summary: Sam's well intentioned idea leads to a minor disaster.

Content: Sam x Reader, a bit of swearing, Sam being a dork, Reader being a little sassy, really don't think there's too much to warn about

Notes: Got the idea from this post and decided it was a bit Sam-coded. Just a funny little drabble that I hope you enjoy.

****************************************************************

You know it wasn’t intended.

You know Sam meant well.

But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t an absolute disaster.

Leaving Dean to work through everything that came with the Mark of Cain, you and Sam had found yourselves in Alabama on a hunt. Although you were pretty sure it was your basic haunting, you never settled on an answer until it was practically smacking you in the face. You’d had too many close calls to get cocky and certain in this line of work, which was something Sam appreciated about you. After interviewing the 19-year-old employee at the xerox store, you stumbled upon something else you hadn’t expected: a conversation about hunting in the modern age.

“Do you know how revolutionary it would be to have a hunter journal in the cloud?” Sam asked, his voice loud and passionate in the confines of the car. He had practically swooned when the store clerk had started his spiel about software that converted everything to a digital file.

“In the words of your brother, you are geeking out about this, Sam.”

“No, I’m not.” Sam answered automatically. He must have felt the look you gave him, because he glanced at you from the driver’s seat. “Look, all I’m saying is there’s a new generation of hunters out there who aren’t gonna bother sitting around reading books. If we can share our knowledge, get it to them in a version they will read, think about how many more people we could save.”

Despite your teasing, you agreed that he had a point. You’d run across a handful of “Gen-Z” hunters who were more interested in their social media page than the back story of what they were hunting. If someone could impress upon them the importance of research that they would actually read, you could help strengthen the chances of them surviving their next hunt.

It turned out you were right about the haunting. The ghost of a troubled young man was haunting a record player that had been recently donated to the suite next door to the copy shop. Both of your sharp hunting skills was met with a rare gesture of gratitude; the teen employee convinced his manager to let you have access to the digital conversion software. You tried to offer some kind of payment, but Sam poked you hard in the side to shut you up. As you were getting ready to leave town, Sam considered letting you drive for about five seconds, the possibility of getting to mess around on his computer glittering in his eyes.

When you got home, Sam set to work digging through the collection of books for some basic hunting notes. Vampires, werewolves, and some of the other basic creatures that amateur hunters tended to gravitate towards. Dean even assisted with finding some of their dad’s first notes about ghosts. Everyone agreed that it was better to start off small and see if this idea even worked before delving into the entire library in the bunker.

Two nights in, while you were helping Sam put away some of the books, you happened to see a crumpled set of papers tucked in between the pages. Curious, you cracked open the spine to take a better look. After three seconds of reading, you blushed. Then you panicked.

“Sam?” You asked, your voice wavering.

“Hmm?” He didn’t look up from his computer.

“Please tell me that you didn’t scan these loose pages.”

“I, uh…” He blinked, processing what you were saying. “Loose pages? What?”

“In this book,” you repeated slowly, “the pages here. Did you scan them?”

“I dunno.” Sam replied, giving you a blank stare.

“Sam, these are letters I wrote to you.” You held them out to him. “Private, sensual letters.”

Sam met your eyes for a moment, then quickly grabbed the papers out of your hand and started to read. He cleared his throat as he got further down the page.  

“Fuck.” He whispered to himself.

Setting the paper down forcefully, he hunched over his computer. You stepped up behind him, chastising yourself for not listening to his full explanation of how everything worked. Then you noticed all the names on the page.  

“Wait, did you…” You trailed off, your stomach twisting in on itself at the horror of this getting worse.

“An hour ago.” Sam said curtly.

“Oh my god. Sam!” Gripping his arm, you leaned closer to the computer. “There are 10 people who have already viewed this! Did you scan the pages?”

“I don’t know!” Sam roared. He was scrolling furiously through the electronic pages, and you didn’t know how he was even differentiating them. He stilled suddenly. “Shit.”

“No,” You groaned, flopping your head down on his shoulder.

“It’s only ten people.” Sam clicked a few times and then let out a heavy breath. “It’s only ten people!”

You sat up, visually confirming that the pages had been deleted. “Just pray that one of them wasn’t…” You paused when you heard footsteps.

“Don’t you lose that girl, Samuel.” Dean called as he entered the room. “She’s a spicy one!”

[ilikekidsshows]

I don’t think the majority of Marinette stans know the difference between being nice and being kind. These are the definitions I got from Google.

Nice:

- Focus: Pleasantness, agreeable demeanor, and politeness

- Motivation: Often driven by a desire to be liked or avoid conflict

- Examples: A nice person might smile frequently, offer compliments, or be helpful in small ways, but their actions might not always stem from genuine care or concern for others’ well-being

- Potential drawbacks: Can be superficial, used as a social strategy to gain approval, or even be manipulative in some cases

Kind:

- Focus: Generosity, empathy, compassion and a genuine concern for others’ well-being

- Motivation: Driven by a desire to help, support, and uplift others

- Examples: A kind person might go out of their way to offer assistance, listen empathetically, provide comfort, or act generously, even when it’s not socially expected or convenient

- Potential drawbacks: Can be seen as naïve or vulnerable if not combined with healthy boundaries (I hate that this is what Marinette seems to believe)

Key Differences:

Depth of Concern: Kindness involves a deeper level of genuine care and concern for others’ well-being, while niceness may be more focused on being liked or avoiding negative interactions.

Motivation: Kindness is often motivated by empathy and a desire to make a positive difference, while niceness may be motivated by a desire for approval or social acceptance.

Actions: Kind actions often involve going the extra mile and putting others’ needs before one’s own, while nice actions may be more focused on social expectations and politeness.

Authenticity: Kindness is often more authentic and genuine, while niceness can sometimes feel more surface-level or performative.

In essence while being nice is about being pleasant and agreeable, being kind is about genuinely caring about others and acting in ways that benefit their well-being.

For all that the other characters wax on about Marinette’s kindness, outside of saving Fu’s life, I can’t point to any particular scene as proof. This is just another one of Marinette’s informed attributes.

While writing this, I realized that Chloe is the opposite. She has an abrasive personality and never bothers with performative gestures. Yet she’s shown that she’s willing to go the extra mile for the people she cares about even when it doesn’t benefit her. It’s really interesting to me that the hero is nice but not kind, while someone portrayed as one of the villains is kind but not nice.

---

If it's something Maripologists believe it was probably sold to them by the writers first. The writers were the ones to write Marinette rarely going beyond surface-level niceties and then treat that as shorthand for true kindness and compassion. And, like, even Marinette’s niceness is debatable. What is polite about taking out your insecurities on any new girl you meet? What is pleasant about ghosting your parents’ customers, your friends or even your boyfriend? What about insisting only your feelings and thoughts matter is agreeable? These writers are so bad at their job of writing that the only thing separating Chloé and Marinette is that Marinette feels bad about all that after the fact, which the writers treat as the only thing that matters because whoa-oh! Marinette is upsette!

Like, it's just like that thing I wrote about how villains can be used to reflect and challenge your hero: what is Marinette's moral code as a hero? Does she even have one? What are the hard lines she won't cross as a hero, the things she considers as going too far for the greater good? Because, like, I feel like having that should be the bare minimum for any character devoting themselves to vigilante justice, of taking on a secret identity to protect what they consider to be worth protecting. Once again, Marinette does the bare minimum as a hero; she'll stop the immediate Akuma threat and clean up afterwards, but anything else in terms of collateral will be a total surprise because it doesn't matter to her (or, rather, it doesn't matter to the writers, so she and no other character ever even considers this conundrum).

[ninasdrafts]

I couldn’t fool you if I tried, not by a long shot. You spot my lies from miles away, hidden in the lilt of my voice and the set of my mouth. I don’t have to say a word. It’s the little things. You know what to say to get me out of bed in the morning, curtains half-closed, sunlight peeking into the room. Your hand reaches for mine when we enter a room full of people because you know I tend to get overwhelmed. You are quiet at night, in the space between trying to stay awake and falling asleep, and when my eyelids grow heavy your fingers trace mine to let me know I’m not alone. You ask me what’s wrong only once, and when I tell you I’m fine, you don’t dig deeper, even though you know I’m not. You know I’ll cave in and tell you when I’m ready. You eye my ink-stained fingers, but don’t comment on them, a secret smile ghosting over your lips. You leave the lights on for me, turn the music up for me, lower your voice for me. We speak in code, using made up words, paint each other’s worlds in colours others are blind to.   You don’t have to tell me you love me. It’s visible in everything you do or don’t do. I hear it in everything you say or don’t say. It’s in the spaces between. Concealed beneath fits of laughter, lines of our favourite songs, hidden in words I wrote. You see me. You know me, better than anyone ever has. To be known like this... I don’t know how it could get any better.

to be loved is to be known / n.j.

[typethreeghost]

sweet nothing by taylor swift is locklyle coded

AND I AM GOING TO DISSECT IT

okay so i was watching all of 'midnights' lyric videos on youtube because i wanted to analyze them and connect them to lockwood and co somehow (typical fangirl shit). THEN it was sweet nothing's turn and for the first few seconds i thought offhandedly wow this is very locklyle coded so i replayed it so i can analyze better THEN I FREAKING REALIZED THAT THE WHOLE LYRIC VIDEO LITERALLY SHOWS FEATHERS. FEATHERS AS HOW THAT DAMN SPIRIT CLOAK WAS DESCRIBED, WITH ITS COLOR AND EVERYTHING. SO THAT REALLLLYY KEPT ME GOING

[mind you this was ten seconds in i was already screaming that's literally them]

THEN i started to really analyze the lyrics and y'all i'm screaming 'cos this is DEFINITELY one of the most locklyle coded songs out there. so here i am with the lyrics as i narrate how it is locklyle coded (warning, this is very much self-indulgent i love finding songs connected to my faves, and that moment of realizing SHIITTT THIS IS SO #THEM CODED SO sorry if it is unorganized)

[LOOK AT THESE FEATHERSSJHFDD?????? HELLO?? SPIRIT CAPE MUCH]

They said the end is coming

THE PROBLEM

Everyone's up to something

everyone is doing something to survive and 'get rid' of the problem

I find myself running home to your sweet nothings

anthony lockwood king of sweet nothings without a doubt???? the praises? compliments??? random comments??

Outside, they're push and shoving

You're in the kitchen humming

shows the normalcy of the problem in their world (plus, in a literal sense, the second line is something lockwood actually does lol, and the first shows the problem as it is)

All that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing

EXACTLY she is not an asset indeed!!!

On the way home

I wrote a poem

You say, "What a mind"

This happens all the time

lockwood to lucy's drawings :DDDD

NOW THE BRIDGE i am particularly excited about:

Industry disrupters

ghost cults + literally everyone working against lockwood and co

and soul deconstructors

FITTES, rotwell, and orpheus society!!!!

And smooth-talking hucksters

RELIC MEN

Out glad-handing each other

DON'T THEY.

and THIS:

And the voices that implore

"You should be doing more"

To you I can admit

That I'm just too soft for all of it

WTEHJKSDGHS4?@!?$@?#$#?! that part literally has thousands of locklyle interpretations, but the 'voices' that i could only think of right now are the skull, penelope, and everyone against lucy (and co).

okay so as i am writing this i just somehow realized this goes BOTH WAYS, WORD FOR WORD. LUCY TO LOCKWOOD AND VICE VERSA WOW ALRIGHT.

additionally!! the song is about finding someone who loves you for you and not what you can do for them. i think that in the context of the show and the following sequences from the books, they captured it perfectly by proving both to each other they appreciate and respect one another because of who they are as a person—not only by their talents and what they bring to the job.

[yayasvalveplay]

You know as much as I love tfes s1 on paramount I think hasbro adult did a really good job with their alternate story line of all the terrans being es megs bitties with different batches of sires for example I really like how they wrote twitch and thrash as the classic megop sparklings, I also thinks its super interesting they wrote the relationship between grimlock, starscream and tarantulas being hashtags, jawbreaker and nightshades sires, I know it gets a lot of bad rep but when megs went into a seemingly kinda early heat cycle in s2 that felt kinda forced for show pacing and elita and skywarp found him panting with his milfy tits out and valve panel open in the middle of a forest and they just couldn't resist fucking him and that's how the chaos terrans were born and their behavioral issues come from the fact that meg's coding got a little fragged up because of the early heat

I also think it proposes a nice new family dynamic of housewife megs bringing his kids over for a playdate at his human amicas house because their basically cousins, besides, megatron is retired, who cares if he just doesn't want to fight anymore and just wants to cook and clean for his husbands that are such dutiful sires and gossip with his bestie over some tea (with a teacup that his sweetheart of a daughter and son twitch and jawbreaker made in a pottery class for him) while he rubs his already slightly bumped stomach, happy as he can be.

(I'm so horny right now)

I'm crying that is acually adorable. Yes all of them just being megatrons sparklings with different sires. Megatron collecting conjunx's like pokemon cards is such a funny concept.

Listen hes an old man, just let him have his sparklings in piece GHOST.

Dot is such a good aunt, cooing at the sparklings. Telling Megs how good he's been raising them, and giving the sires hell to step up their game. Even though they all do, she just likes seeing them struggle a bit.

But also the kiddos playing with their cousins Robby and Mo, making sure to play nice since they are squishier then they are. While the moms drink tea outside gossiping.

[shyravenns]

NikPrice headcanons that I wrote at 2am

. Price doesn't bother to say much to Soap or Ghost about their relationship since they so often remind him of Nikolai and himself. He sees the same level of codependence and rapid-fire intensity that they display towards each other, and he can't help but think of the gold necklace that's neatly tucked in his shirt.

- No such thing as a slow burn for these two. If you thought Ghost and Soap were codependent then you haven't met young!nikprice. They got better as they got older, but You Can Tell

- met in a scary forest, nik got a knife held to his throat, and Price woke up three hours later in an abandoned shed with their clothes scattered everywhere god bless 🙏

- both of them have scary dog privileges

- no matter where he is, Price will always look up at the sound of a helicopter and watch it until it fades into the distance.

. Price doesn't believe in soulmates, but he remembers to thank whatever God must be out there for putting him and Nik in that God forsaken forest where they both met each other.

. They absolutely fail at pretending to be excited when they see each other. Soap snickers as Price damn near refuses to take his eyes off of Nik vs Farah who rolls her eyes at the goofy smile Nik has plastered to his face when he sees Price. They're like *children*.

- Price is a boydad and Nik is a girldad go argue with the wall

. Price so blatantly loves the faint grey hairs that are slowly beginning to grow on Nik's belly. It's a reminder that they're still alive, and that maybe that happy ending is just on the horizon for them both. He wants to grow old with him.

- Nik, who is so gleeful at the faint grey hairs that have began to show in Price's beard over the years.

- got married in a run down chapel with a priest that Nik may or may not have threatened with a knife

- they have mastered the art of silent conversations much to everyone's annoyance.

- Nik is a romantic, and if you see Price with different flowers on his desk every Friday then no you didn't.

- both of them have shot each other, and no one knows the full story (Nik has told several different versions every time someone asks)

- they hibernate in the winter or at least they try to lmao (they both love naps). There's no little spoon or big spoon, just pass out on the bed and pray that neither of them fall out.

- dear God the snores that come from the both of them 💀

- He was his King, and God help anyone who dared to disrespect his King 😤😤😤

- They both enable each other lmao they're both several shades of unhinged, and honestly it's what makes the sex between them better

- my personal au is that Nik eventually gets hurt to the point where he can't go on missions anymore, and Price does not hesitate to step back from being in the field to take care of him. He's tired, and if this is the final push for him to lay down his weapons then so be it.

- They know each others moods as innately as they would their own. Nik can read the lines of exhaustion on Price's face as clearly as ever, and Price knows the deeper meaning behind every single one of Nik's "jokes"

- Price surprising Nik with his own new identity, and taking his last name 🥺 As if Nik would ever give up his last name "Price"

- would kill for each other 100% don't even have to ask twice.

- they like to fish, but honestly Price just likes it when Nik begins telling another one of his stories while he sits back and listens to the sound of his voice and gentle waves of lake at their quaint little cabin

- Not the best cooks, but they try! Have definitely taken a cooking class together with mixed (aka illegal) results.

- Alpha/Alpha coded im not sorry

[darylsfavoritegirl]

rewatching twd (mostly daryl scenes 😝) and OH LORD i love how he is so pookie-coded. i love how he is just such a supersitious person... that whole chupacabra deal😭😭 i love how he absolutely REFUSES to step back when dale tells the people around them abt that one time daryl claimed to have seen a chupacabra... he is just so confident theyre real😭😭😭 dont even get me started with the cherokee rose episode..

i love imagining how he'd be super into listening other people talk about myths like this, he'd actually be really into it and try to understand the gravity of those situations. i bet pre apocalpyse daryl would worry about ghosts or bad entities pestering him if he had done smth morally wrong (?) yk now and then

i dont remember who it was but someone wrote something along the lines of how merle used to trick him into believing that fairies are real etc on a daryl headcanons post. IT MELTS MY HEART.

[zot3-flopped]

https://www.reddit.com/r/travisandtaylor/comments/1d50evf/taylor_swift_goes_off_when_questioned_about_her/

Disregard the opinion blogpost linked here and check out the comments by QuestioningStega confirming that Taylor uses ghostwriters.

They say: "I can confirm that Taylor uses ghost writers (I have friends who write for her), and that she also often gets jealous if you write too many "hits," and will fire writers constantly (even those who write popular songs). She does write some of her own songs! And many people I know think their lack of success is what drives her nuts. But she uses a legion of ghost writers." "Typically when we ghost write, we write both lyric and melody! We often work in teams, and with a lot of artists I've worked for they have writers who have been around for a while to help us write "in their voice." From what I've heard, Taylor's team will often go over songs with the ghost writers! Also she'll often change songs that are already written. I'm aware of at least a few songs that were totally finished and handed off, only for her to butcher them in order to "add lore."" "I can confirm, for example, that 1989 has almost zero lyrics or melodies written by Taylor on it."

"All of our NDAs are lifelong NDAs. They're paying us to pretend they wrote these songs forever. There's no chance they'd risk being outed as a liar down the line. Oh yeah, the pay is definitely worth it! I think a lot of us have been in the industry long enough to know that "making it big" has way less to do with being a good writer, and way more to do with what you look like/who your dad knows/do you fit the demo that the label wants to hit right now. So for us, we're not looking at this thinking "oh man! They made $250,000 on that song, and I only got paid $15,000 for it (or whatever)." Any more than someone coding at Apple is annoyed that their code powers an iPhone, and they're only making $80,000 a year. For me, I'm married and have three kids! I make more than enough to happily do that and spend exorbitant amounts of time at home with them. So any loss of being able to say "hey I wrote that!" Is more than made up for by the hours I'm at home with my kids."

Grain of salt of course, but this person does come across as very knowledgeable. The fact that Taylor has "eras" with wildly different sounds and word usage makes sense if she didn't write much of it at all. I could believe she wrote the entirety of TTPD though with how meandering it was.

Very interesting.

[alamogirl80]

Last Line Challenge

Rules: in a new post, show the last line you wrote (or drew) and tag as many people as there are words (or however many you like).

Thanks for the tag @cacodaemonia I have not been writing much mainly because I've been reading so much Call of Duty MW2 Soap/Ghost fic. (and I'm not sorry, there are some wickedly amazingly talented writers in that fandom, holy shit!)

Anyway... here is another line from upcoming chapters of my codywan "And I'll Follow the Light in You"

Fox and Obi-Wan meet: (Fox) “You’re older than I thought you’d be,” he remarks. Obi-Wan raises his chin a little, smirking. “Well, you’re rather gray for a 14 year old yourself, Commander.” Fox’s eyes narrow for a moment, then the corner of his mouth lifts slightly. “I like him, Codes. He’ll do.”

Yes it's more than one line, no I don't care.

no pressure tags @trixree @imrowanartist @deadstarsrisingsblog @frostbitebakery

[ohbo-ohno]

i just went back and re-read the texas chainsaw ghoap x reader you wrote and i've been obsessing over THAT audition tape and...my mind has worms re the insane, unholy combination of the two:

reader, a naive camera operator in the room with a crush on...Soap who came in for an "audition" because...Ghost figured out where you work, knowing that Soap's going to lure you into their big fuck-off car outside...

help me bo, you're my only hope

LUMI HELLO I LOVE YOU!! link to that here for those interested. also i cant believe you sent this to me instead of just posting it it's fantastic

thinking about ghost and soap spotting you and immediately contriving a needlessly complicated plot just to kidnap you kinda kills me lmao. ghost is like "let's just take her off the street" but soap already has a whole fake identity developed for both of them and he doesn't want to ruin his boy's fun :/

the texas chainsaw ghoap thing i wrote is veryyy criminal minds coded lmao, they literally kidnapped a whole group of people just to see who would survive to the end so they could have a new toy. so in this situation, they're not snatching you just to keep you, they're snatching you to make you play along in a sick game to then decide if they want to keep you. insane freaks!

also thinking of soap doing an accent to fuck with you and then switching back to his natural scottish and laughing when you get all surprised... improving in his audition and throwing in ridiculously sexual lines to watch you blush and squirm (you ask him to stop making eye contact and he refuses bc wdym you expect him to deliver lines to a wall? no, it's easier looking at you <3)... he mentions his "partner" simon and you're a little crushed that he's taken and he has the time of his life flirting with you and watching you try to hold yourself back because you think he's unavailable

[callipraxia]

Even Further Interview Analysis - On the Portrayal of "Otherness."

Maybe fourth fifth sixth time will be the charm when it comes to attempts to communicate what I'm thinking about this topic, post-Hirsch interview. I'm drawing from several quotes here that don't immediately link together at all, but trust me, folks. If you want to, of course. The full transcript of the interview, conducted and generously shared by @fordtato and @hkthatgffan, can, as always, be found here. The three previous interview-related pieces of content I've written can be found in their own section here on the handy-dandy directory post on the dreamwidth archive of my less ephemeral blog posts. 

For some variety, we're going with a quote from one of the Interviewers, a Hirsch quote I only made a joke about in my original post, and...uh, one of the same quotes from Hirsch from my last post. I...have a lot of thoughts, I guess. At the same time. In no order that can be translated into the English language very exactly. Anyway....

[Hana]"...with Ford in particular, with all of the content in the journal about him feeling “strange, on the outskirts of society, not understood,” it resonates so much with LGBTQ+ fans. Everyone I know who’s a big Ford fan is from some part of the LGBTQ+ community. There’s lines in there about romance baffling him, and stuff like that, where we’re like, we get it, we understand it, it makes sense, it resonates. Regardless of whether or not this was intentionally planned when you wrote it, how do you feel about Ford being interpreted as a bit of a queer icon for so many in the fandom?" -------------------- [Alex Hirsch] "When you do a clone story, the point of a clone story, in my mind, is a character seeing themselves in a different light, right?" -------------------- [Alex Hirsch] "I think that Bill was trying to find Ford, but I think- I always think of Bill as like, this guy who has, like - you know, he’s stirring the pot of soup that is the Ford plan, and he’s got like 900 pots of soup across the universe of different things he’s working on, and at any given moment, he’s so cocksure that it’s all gonna work his way eventually. Bill’s a trillion years old, so it’s like, Ford disappearing for thirty years is like- [snaps fingers] is like somebody saying they’re ghosting you and then texting you the next weekend, you know what I mean?"

This...thing will be divided into three parts: The Part Where Calli Talks About Sex and Gender and Neurodivergency, The Part Where Calli Talks About Mental Disorders, Addiction, and Fiddleford McGucket, and then, last but not least, The Part Where Calli Talks About Different Approaches To Writing Aliens. These do not, however, each correspond to one quote, and there will be some overlap here and there, so bear with me, if you will. There's also a stronger element of "reader response" in here than there was in the "Ford Plan" essay - there's still a good amount of canon analysis, but I do talk a bit about my own reactions to things and compare my writing process to Mr. Hirsch's toward the end, so I completely understand why those parts might fail to interest people. That said...let's begin.

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I. The Part Where Calli Talks About Sex and Gender and Neurodivergency TW for mentions of toxic masculinity, possibly homophobic aspects of queer-coding, domestic abuse, and my view that Bill is so close to being a sexual assaulter that his, er, anatomical limitations are a moot point.

There's a certain irony to Ford's status as a queer icon that I don't think I've ever seen pointed out before. I'm basically writing a book about this, actually (sort of - long story), but since I have no idea if that will ever go anywhere, I'll talk about it a bit here anyway. It's how, in a story where one of the threads is Dipper sorting out what it means to be a man, it strikes me enormously that his personal idol ends up almost personifying Traditional, Slightly Unhealthy Masculinity, at least at first glance.

Ford's first major action on-screen is, of course, picking up J1, so that we can see his hands...and then he hauls off and punches someone in the face. I wrote a 10,000 word essay (readable here) about Ford's anger issues and how they interact with his sense of self; the reason I wrote it was because of the revelation that Ford's actually a lot more casually violent in his limited screentime than Stan is. I won't go over all that ground again, but the second thing we ever learn about Ford is that he can and will shoot first, basically. And possibly literally, since he's carrying a massive gun throughout the scene and the very next episode establishes that he keeps at least one firearm (or...shooty-weapon of some sort, anyway) concealed on on his person at probably all times, considering he had it on him for game night with his nephew. Based on the weird mix of manual weapons and (if Stan was telling the truth, anyway) firearms in the Mystery Shack and in the Bunker, it seems entirely possible that he's been a bit of a weapons aficionado for a long time, well before he started walking the multiverse. As for afterward, well...afterward, the man sets his head on fire for a laugh, swings around with his magnet gun like the illegitimate love-child of Magneto and the Amazing Spider-Man, and I read a degree of awe in Dipper's statement that the aftermath of Weirdmageddon was the only time he'd ever seen Ford cry...in the whole month he's known the man. Given how few contexts he's had to reasonably see Ford have much a reason to cry in, I assume the remark was made just to underline the severity of the situation: Ford is this tough, stoic space cowboy who just went through days of torture at the hands of a mad god without breaking, so you know it's Serious Business if he's crying. Manly men like him just don't do that, do they?

Of course, along with all this testosterone poisoning, we also did always see plenty of evidence that Ford wasn't actually a talking sci-fi cardboard cut-out of the Marlboro Man. For one thing, there's the way he introduces himself verbally, once he's past the whole fistfight phase of events: "Greetings!...I like this kid! She's weird!" I suspect he started making his way toward also being something of an icon in the neurodivergent communities at about that exact moment. The moment also had the effect of reminding us: this potentially intimidating figure in black with a gigantic gun who can beat Stan in a fight is also, after all, also the Author of the Journals. We don't know much about the Author, but we do know that he was a scientist so brilliant that McGucket, a genius in his own right, accepted a place as his assistant. Hard to be that without also being something of a nerd, right? We also know that he's a very talented artist, and that he writes in oddly-structured sentences, and also that he writes in cursive - maybe that was just something I noticed, since I also write in cursive and occasionally oddly-structured sentences, but it was endearing and relatable to me, anyway. Most importantly, we also know that he apparently finds the unusual as cool as Dipper, our protagonist, does. In other words, we are reminded that, dramatic entrance notwithstanding, he's one of us, and as Hana noted...a lot of us ain't exactly Models of the Elusive, So-Called 'Norm,' are we? This is only emphasized as time goes on, given his enthusiasm for DD&MD and how we soon learn he is significantly more complex than he might have seemed at a glance - aside from being severely flawed, fully aware of it, and riddled with guilt, he also quotes poetry at what it seems safe to assume was one of the lower points in his life, an action shortly followed by philosophical reflections on the nature of heroism. It's also established that, in the sharpest departure of all from the Traditional Masculinity tropes, he didn't have a female partner before his long exile and isn't still griping about that fact to this day. In the America of his youth, just being a single man in his thirties who had never had a girlfriend, or even just didn't complain loudly about not having a girlfriend in between relationships, was the kind of behavior that could make the government suspect you were both gay and/therefore a Communist, especially if you were someone high-profile enough to be working on science with an enormous grant not all that long after the Space Race. Plus...look, the idea of a domestic abuse victim being shipped with their abuser is...not something I'm all that comfortable with, but I get where people get the idea from, and while Bill is definitely not a man, he does use the same pronouns as one. I can imagine people imagining it as a gay-adjacent ship even before the Journal came out and all but explicitly labelled Ford as One of Us when 'us' is defined as the Not-Straights as well as one of the Not-Neurotypicals. It's possible, as I said in my first interview overview, to use the Journal to build a case for Ford's heterosexuality, but the balance of evidence seems to tilt toward the idea that he's Something Else, even if it's not all that specific about what, probably to some extent because there's good reasons why Ford himself might not know, or at least not know the words to apply to the situation. That, however, is material for the post I'm thinking of putting out, like, the day before the new book comes out in July or something. Here, we're discussing not so much sexuality per se as the experience of Otherness.

As I mentioned briefly in the previous paragraph, the LGBTQ+ community isn't the only one which has taken Ford to its heart. Members of the neurodivergent communities - autistic people in particular - have also related strongly to Ford; in fact, this is actually the primary reason why I related to the guy so much. I'm asexual, so I'm in the Not-Straight Club, but for various reasons, my feelings of alienation began long before I noticed that I still thought kissing sounded vaguely unpleasant while others my age had revised their elementary school opinions on the subject. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of feeling that I was...off to the side, somehow, whenever other people were around. I was just an observer, never quite understanding what I saw, always reading like mad to try to figure out how people worked and apparently coming up with some...odd...ideas in the process before high school, which was when I started running across words in classes that seemed to describe the world as it appeared from my point of view. I wouldn't be diagnosed formally with any of my several DSM-V entries until many, many years later, but there was a profound relief in knowing that there even maybe was an explanation better than just "u a freak, lol." Having those words, and with them some sense of history and community, made it all seem more natural, not less so. This is similar to how a lot of people have said they feel about finding out that there's a word for being gay or trans or otherwise queer in some way, and there was some relief tied up in that, too, when I eventually found out that there's a whole world of other aces as well as other people otherwise wired like I am, but it was less of an issue for me, and therefore not what I first "clicked" with Ford over, even though I kind of read him as some kind of ace as well. Instead, for me, it was over how I related to the feeling of being the one person in the room whose occupational interests didn't align with everyone else's - of being the kid who could never quite get it right at Show and Tell. Over knowing what it's like to have your classmates nearly put you in the hospital when you hadn't done anything to them. Over how even the things your family says to make you feel better just underline how you're Different, how you're not really part of the circle even with your own parents. And yes - over having developed a certain amount of bitterness and distrust and general unfriendliness toward the 'normal' world over time. That's definitely a place where there's the potential for the portrayal of Otherness to become...an issue. Another such place is when we get to the matter of Bill.

Bill is presented as a highly alien being, but there's a lot of ways in which he's all too human. Far too many of the ways in which he's all too human happen to be ways that strongly imply that if he had a human body, he'd be one of the not-charmers we used to see getting interviewed and then arrested on To Catch A Predator. And he uses male pronouns in English, appears with accessories which allow big dramatic gestures, has a high-pitched, whiny voice, is a relentless sadist, and is most frequently shipped with human males. All taken together, if one looks at Bill through the lens of queer coding, he can come across as something not dissimilar to the stereotype of the Depraved Homosexual, a homophobic stereotype used to imply that gay people, and especially gay men, are inherently villainous and dangerous...and that's even before we get to the Penthouse scene, where Bill makes his entrance singing a love song to someone he's abused for years who, at that particular moment, he also has on a short leash. Literally.

Did the writers intend for Bill to come across as The Dangerous Gay? I...like to think not, but as Hirsch himself admits in both the discussion of Grenda and to an extent the discussion of the intent behind Ford's alienation - the world was radically different back then, so that you could end up unthinkingly writing certain things then that you know would never fly today, and which you wouldn't even try to make fly today, not least because now you know better than you knew back then. To his credit - well, the thing he specifically apologized for wasn't my apology to accept, as I am exceedingly cisgendered, but I do feel he handled having that brought up about as gracefully as possible. As far as Bill goes, though...maybe you could convince me he wasn't deliberately portrayed as a gay pervert specifically, but I'm not sure there's an argument which could persuade me to buy the idea that Bill wasn't intentionally, or at least knowingly, portrayed as some form of pervert, especially in season 2 and the Journal. The first time I read the Journal, after a steady progress of growing more and more uncomfortable with the overt psychological, financial, spiritual, and physical abuse, I threw the thing at one point in Ford's first section while exclaiming, "what in the sam-hell?!" - which, for me, is the equivalent of much stronger profanity, because I usually swear like Fiddleford, if I must add any embellishments to my expressions of disapproval at all. That was how overtly rape-like I found the post-betrayal possession plotline in the Journal. Okay, so, Bill doesn't have a penis. Cool. I don't care. He's still shown (repeatedly, even) to take sadistic pleasure from robbing others of their physical agency, of reducing them to helpless objects which he can treat however he pleases. Even once he loses the ability to do this to Ford completely, he goes out of his way to overcompensate for it: when we first see the two interact in "The Last Mabelcorn," Bill introduces himself by warping Ford's dreamscape into his own image before he proceeds to box Ford in even further, surrounding him with copies of Bill's self and also getting into his personal space and touching his mental representation of himself, to Ford's obvious consternation. And then we get to Weirdmageddon, where first he turns Ford into his backscratcher, and then the next time we see them, the scene is played almost like a literal attempt at seduction - though, of course, with nasty little details like the "literally on a leash" and "the sofa is alive" bits, just to keep Ford off-balance, so that he reacts instead of thinking. It's possible that they also, to some extent, to play into the depiction of another Other category often associated with Bill, though I don't tend to personally share this view. in a...questionable way. This topic is the portrayal of mental illness as Other.

The Part Where Calli Talks About Mental Disorders, Addiction, and Fiddleford McGucket TW for, well, discussion of mental illness, addiction, and how both Fiddleford and my grandfather had those issues.

I suppose we all see the issues that touch us personally first, so let's just jump straight into it and speak of probably the first thing in Gravity Falls that made me uncomfortable. That thing was Fiddleford McGucket.

"Legend of the Gobblewonker" is a great episode, but I'll be honest: the whole bit with McGucket at the beginning of the episode made me cringe the first time I saw it, and it kinda makes me cringe whenever I rewatch it to this day. There's just not much getting around it: McGucket looks and sounds like a caricature of people from the same part of the world as me. The way the other characters regard McGucket makes me self-conscious (well, moreso than usual) about the way I sound when I talk, and I kinda want to kick Blubbs a little every time I see the episode. Or maybe even say something exceedingly unkind to him about how he's a fine one to make comments about other people's mental capacity when he's dating Deputy Durland. Not something I'd actually do, of course, because it's not Durland's fault that he is like he is, but dang, do I want to put Blubbs in his place in that scene sometimes. It then gets even less comfortable for me once I consider that McGucket is also portrayed as a caricature of people with dementia, severe mental illness, or both in that scene, and it becomes more uncomfortable because when I combine that with everything else about McGucket, it starts feeling an awful lot like the butt of the joke is someone with an uncanny resemblance to one of my real-life grandfathers. And then came the twist of the episode, and that...actually opened up a whole 'nother can of worms for me, because to me, the way McGucket acts at the end of "Gobblewonker" and during some asides in "Society of the Blind Eye" makes me think that he is, essentially, faking insanity in order to manipulate people in the "present" times of the show. And that's...not the same issue, exactly, as him being written as an insulting caricature, but it's kinda uncomfortable, too.

I will give Gravity Falls this: it does a decent job of sympathetically portraying characters who are clearly not mentally well or neurotypical all the time. Dipper and Mabel are all too familiar to those of us who grew up with unacknowledged stuff going on, and you'd have to try pretty hard to write Stan more like someone with ADHD and moderate depression, not to mention some compulsive behaviors. Ford's mental breakdown in 1981 is also played completely straight with little to no effort to inject any humor into it, even though he falls into the category of "visibly 'crazy'" toward the end of it. We know very little about Dipper and Mabel's background, but the troubled circumstances in which Soos and the Stan Twins grew up are also handled fairly realistically and sympathetically. Notably, however, while Ford acknowledges he came close to "losing [his] sanity" in the past, none of the Pines family ever acknowledges that there might be something "wrong" with them in the present - that is a label reserved for others, mainly Bill and Fiddleford, with a side of every member of the Gleeful family and a sprinkling of Pacifica to taste. This makes it a tad awkward that all of them originate as villains of one or another caliber...and yes, I did mean to include Fiddleford there. Watch "Legend of the Gobblewonker" with the assumption you've never seen anything else about the character and listen to what Fiddleford says after his robot is wrecked, and then put it together with the nature of the problem Fiddleford was trying to solve. Fiddleford wasn't just looking for attention - he was specifically trying to convince the people that there was a dangerous monster in the lake. Later in the episode, when Soos and the Mystery Twins have the bad luck to get too close, he also plays the role to the hilt, seriously endangering their lives before he's stopped by a quirk of geology. The outlines of his plan become obvious from there: if the robotic nature of the Gobblewonker hadn't been revealed, then either the stories of what happened to Soos' boat (or, in the worst-case scenario, the dead bodies of its occupants) would have seemingly confirmed Fiddleford's ravings about a dangerous beast that destroys watercraft living in the lake. At that point, Fiddleford would have gotten validation, sure...but even more importantly, fishing season, whether officially or unofficially, would have gotten cancelled as a result of his shenanigans, despite the effect this would have on the local economy, which is why I tend to think he went with the 'lake monster' strategy in the first place. It seems to me that his reasoning ran something like, “if Tate's excuse for refusing to interact is that I frighten the customers, the obvious solution is to create a situation where there are no customers in a way that can't be traced back to me.” And if someone has to take significant property damage, or even get actually hurt, to make that happen, well....

So yeah. Swap him out with someone doing absurd things for the sake of his love life instead of because of his desire to induce his son to speak to him and it's pretty classic villain behavior. This is underlined by Fiddleford's own descriptions of his other stunts: the pterodactyl-bot he built in response to his divorce was "homicidal," and his next project is apparently going to be a death ray. In the Journal entry which corresponds to the episode, Dipper is still clearly wary of him. Anyone who didn't know how the story was going to end could easily buy this episode as an indicator that Fiddleford would at least sporadically be a threat, perhaps along the lines of Gideon - who, incidentally, Fiddleford is more than happy to work with at the end of the season, even though building the Gideon-Bot would have necessarily given him some insight into Gideon's predilection for illegal mass surveillance operations. In every other appearance he makes in season one, though, Fiddleford merely acts out a parody of psychosis, with his two bouts of conflict-enablement at the beginning and end of the season merely bracketing the act; once we learn about the essential falseness of his act in "Society of the Blind Eye," the brackets become underlines that reinforce what the episode shows us retroactively. "Society of the Blind Eye" shows a man who perhaps, based on his reaction to the image of the Blind Eye, has PTSD or something similar, but except for his moment of panic after he sees the Eye in the Journal, he is clearly shown to be in full command of his faculties throughout the episode. It happens twice, in fact, in his first scene of the episode: after throwing up an almighty clamor, he stops carrying on about Lee and Nate vandalizing his home once he thinks he is out of earshot of others and mumbles that they did indeed "get [him] good." A moment later, he spots his "visitors" and then slips right back into character, yammering about his hourly arguments with his own reflection...at least until Dipper flatly tells him to drop the act, and he does. Instantly. Without hesitation. He no more thought that his reflection was some other hillbilly watching him bathe than I did. The implication in "Blind Eye" is a bit pitiable - that he pretends to be the happily deranged Ol' Man McGucket character to cover up his loneliness and lack of self-esteem - but it's still him faking insanity, which is...not good behavior, at least. He ends up being a cringy stereotype of people from my part of the world and from my social background (my father was born as poor as it sounds like Fiddleford was in a state which shares a bit of border with Tennessee), and he also seems to be someone who is exaggerating the symptoms of his mental problems the way so many of us in Diagnosis Club are often accused of doing in real life. And he comes across as a bit of a pot shot at homeless people, sometimes, too. That's...a lot of issues for one dude to have, especially given his relatively minor role in the series proper.

Of course, the dirt-poor cackling hick stereotype...I'm not partial to it, but I don't actually really hold that one against the writers too much. Southerners make fun of ourselves all the time, after all, and the line between laughing with people and laughing at them is a treacherous boundary, one which everyone probably perceives a little differently, which is why it's always more comfortable to write about your own people. The way I 'read' the Folks Who Talk Like Me - that is, Fiddleford, Bud, Gideon, and kind of Farmer Sprott, I guess - in the series makes me generally feel that the writing staff was in fact laughing at us and not with us, but since I am not Jewish or Hispanic or even a man and yet presume to write from the points of view of the Stan Twins and Soos on a regular basis, I...don't reckon I'm quite standing in a glass house, but I'm close enough to doing so that it would probably be a bad idea for me to throw around any stones no matter how careful I try to be about that sort of thing, y'know? But the "Fiddleford crazy" narrative - that one kind of bothers me.

I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago that my first impression of Fiddleford was that he's not dissimilar to what you would get if you wrote a somewhat unkind parody of my grandfather, who had severe bipolar disorder with psychotic features in his later years. To a degree, I still see Fiddleford that way even after it becomes apparent that he's not half as out of it as he pretends to be, and that's because when do we learn for sure that Fiddleford is sane, it's in the same episode that we learn about something else he has in common with my grandfather: that is, a history of addiction. They even both created the instruments of their own destruction: Fiddleford invented the memory gun which gradually eroded and scarred his brain to the point that there's a bit of an implication that he might not ever fully recover, and Pawpaw spent several decades as an alcoholic after making a decent chunk of his lifetime income bootlegging, a classic case of getting too high (or low, as the case might be) one one's own supply. In the "Blind Eye" tapes, we get the impression that Fiddleford also genuinely did descend into madness for at least a while in the year or so after the Portal Incident, and it's shown to be a direct effect not of trauma from his experiences with Ford and Bill, but of his chronic use of the memory gun. Mr. Hirsch even compares him to an alcoholic in the Interview, and while my grandfather was luckier, it's not at all surprising or unrealistic that Fiddleford's habit ends with him homeless, wifeless, friendless, cultless, and estranged from his only child. The McGuckets are as much of a tragedy as the Pines family in their own way, and you could easily write a decent neo-Southern Gothic about them alone...if, at least, you figured out what to do with Fiddleford post-breakdown a little less clumsily than the showrunners did.

There's a gap that doesn't make sense. Fiddleford in the "present day" is clearly far more rational than he was at the end of the Blind Eye tapes and is just playing up his former symptoms when he deems it useful so that he can avoid confronting his problems directly, but in the last Blind Eye tape, he was so out of it that he was speaking about Bill in tongues. What the heck happened? Is the implication that once he was kicked out of the Blind Eye, he just...automatically recovered enough to use his new reputation strategically for no reason other than lack of access to the gun, instead of seeking out other drugs? And then, when he ends up facing his demons by sheer accident at the end of the episode, he just...spontaneously finishes getting better instead of being even a little re-traumatized by the horrors floating back to the surface of his mind, or the sight of what he looked like as he fell apart back then? And then he is just effortlessly forgiven for everything by everybody? Bear in mind that he probably abandoned his son before he finished his mental collapse (it's possible that Fiddleford just stayed in Gravity Falls and started the Blind Eye because Emma-May had already initiated their divorce, but when he walked out on Ford, there's no evidence that there was anything at all preventing him from continuing to walk right on back to Palo Alto) and that it's canon that for a while, he was non-consensually wiping Ford's memory when he deemed it necessary. Since the memory gun is presented as Fiddleford's drug of choice, him secretly using it on someone else is...well, to put it extremely mildly, not cool, dude, not cool at all. And far from using the Journal to patch up this uncomfortable fact the way they tried to use the Journal patch up how equally uncool it was for Mabel to slip drugs into people's food, the writers actually used the thing to establish these events as canon shortly before having other characters begin singing Fiddleford's praises to the skies with no acknowledgment whatsoever that he, like his fellow older adult characters, is a messed up person who's done some seriously messed up stuff in his day. It also surprises me that I can't recall ever seeing a single person imply that Tate might have only "forgiven" Fiddleford in hopes of getting the money after the old man kicks the bucket. Where everyone else has a variety of fallout to their sins sooner or later, Fiddleford only pays on-screen for what he did to himself, not for how it affected other people, and the degree to which he even had to pay for that is glossed compared to what other members of the cast get. What makes him so special?

It's possible that, having played Fiddleford as nine kinds of potentially offensive stereotype throughout the series, the writers just decided to not go any further in the hopes that this would even up the tally sheet and sweep the issues with the character under the rug, so to speak. It's also possible that he and Tate are being shielded from exposure to the full fallout of the plot solely by their status as minor characters - I had to dig release-the-balrog levels of deep to construct any kind of canon-based personality for Tate for my fics, and though his role in the backstory is huge, Fiddleford's actual contributions to the story are fairly small. He doesn't even get to remember "wait, Stanford Pines is the Author, and his device leads to demon-land?!" before we find this out by other means. Redemption arcs, too, are one of the show's weaker points; this is most obvious with Gideon, who snaps out of what has appeared to be a near-delusion at the end of one speech near the very end of the show and is just readmitted into society without much comment, but the process of showing someone changing instead of just showing them changed is one the writers seemed to have struggled with a little in general. I think, though, that at least part of the reason why Fiddleford's redemption comes about a bit awkwardly is really just because of an inherent weakness of allegory: when you use a thing as a representation of something else, it's never going to fit perfectly. It will always have extra baggage and individual quirks that, once you look at it for a few minutes, start to undermine the message in some way.

Fiddleford may be genuinely mentally ill to some degree - aside from his apparent breakdown about the time he got kicked out of the Blind Eye, he's also fairly realistically portrayed in the Journal as anxious and possibly dealing with a "functionality-allowing" level of OCD - but he definitely isn't actually an alcoholic: he's a symbolic representation of an alcoholic. In "Society of the Blind Eye," Fiddleford is really just a means to an end, the vessel through which the show conveys one of the lowest-key "don't do drugs" messages ever written by showing that trying to cope with your problems by blacking them out will just make things worse for you in the long run. This fits in with how the writers intended to use Fiddleford in "Legend of the Gobblewonker," where I was supposed to come away with a message about being nice to my grandparents instead of with the impression that this man is as dangerous and unscrupulous as anyone or anything else in this town, and it fits in with the characters-as-tools approach to writing that Alex Hirsch mentions several times throughout the Interview (remember that thing? The thing I was originally talking about? Yeah...). It's obviously more successful than anything I've ever done, but my objection to that approach is that it causes the exact kind of snarls I've been talking about in this section here: when the character is a character, you play out the consequences of these things, but when the character is just a symbol for something else, you're likely going to end up with these dangling issues that create uncomfortable snarls the second you take a closer look at them. I'll continue to elaborate on this theme in my next part, where I talk about Dipper's clones and Bill and the Axolotl and other such non-human entities.

The Part Where Calli Talks About Different Approaches To Writing Aliens. No real TWs here, but there are spoilers for some of my fanfics.

I made a joke about Mr. Hirsch's comment on clone stories in my original running commentary, but it really was a line that surprised me a little. This is because it never, ever would have occurred to me that the point of a clone story could be to see their "template" in a different light. Probably this is in part just due to other fiction I'm familiar with which deals with the clone idea in a lot more depth, but I do think it is also at least in part an effect of philosophy and/or habits of character creation.

The role of habit, of the tendency we all have to write things the way we always have done without thinking about it, cannot be underestimated. I come from a play-by-post roleplaying background; until GF and the idea for For Want of a Jailbreak slammed into my life like a freight train in 2021, my game was also the context of all of the creative writing I’d done for the past twenty years. Creating a character who exists solely to play a role in someone else’s story therefore just sounds odd to me, considering I have sunk hundreds of thousands of words and the majority (a slim majority, but still) of my life to date into something where literally everyone is the main character of their own story while simultaneously playing a supporting role in two or three or seven other characters’ stories. If you recognize this format, it’s because it’s not entirely dissimilar to how the plots, such as they are, of American soap operas work. Characters may start out as just adjuncts to the plots of established cast members, but if they gain any traction at all, they’re quickly going to start developing their own storylines, just like Tracey and Quattro did after I tried to put them in FWJB Part II to create a specific conflict. They created the desired conflict, all right, but they also created fifteen others and somehow ended up being absolutely essential to the thematic unity of the piece – it doesn’t work without them, even though I never intended for them to contribute to any themes. I didn’t even intend for the series to have any themes; I had absolutely no plans to explore ideas in this fun little AU I’d cooked up. The themes just arose from the characters instead of me manipulating the characters to prove a theme.

This approach does, admittedly, have its compensations, or at least compensates for one of my greatest creative weaknesses: I suspect I would have gotten bored and/or never figured out how to end Part III if I’d had a Message in mind when I started talking. I’m not a terribly organized person, and if I try to get organized, I have so much fun making plans that I never get around to actually doing anything. My imagination also, though, to put it mildly, is rather weak in areas where Mr. Hirsch’s seems to be quite strong. This is probably no small part of why I find analyzing what he says about his writing style so interesting, really, and after doing so for a while, I think I’ve found an essential difference. It’s that he seems to generally know what he wants to say and then just says it instead of waiting to see what he ends up with, and he doesn’t spend an awful lot of time worrying about all those grey areas on the fringes that complicate the message. The first half of that sentence is a strength; the second half is...more complicated.

One of the perks of knowing what you want to say and saying it boldly, without worrying too much about all the finer shades of grey around the edges, is (or at least, I imagine it is) that it makes writing symbolically much easier for authors like Mr. Hirsch than it is for authors like me. Things are rarely symbolic in my universes; I can write you a twenty-page essay about [insert symbol] from [insert famous novel] if you give me two days and a source of pressure, but that’s because I am really good at participating in English lit classes, not because I really feel the symbolism. Symbols just aren’t what I think in – I’ll never forget reading about how zombie stories are apparently often written in times when people are anxious about immigration and that vampires represent fear of the Gay, because I’d never been more baffled in my life. It just failed to compute. If people wanted to write xenophobic and homophobic rants – or so I wondered as I read what the undead were apparently supposed to really be about – then why didn’t they just...do that, so the rest of us could avoid them and get on with wondering “but no – what if everybody at the cemetery did just pop up one night? How would we really respond to that?” A few years ago, in one of my Charlotte Bronte moods, I wrote 48 poems on post-it notes at work and then revised them all into a Mead composition book, and not one of them means anything. Half of them are descriptions of actual events, with minimal commentary. They’re poetic in form, but they aren’t really poetry because I’m not really a poet. Mr. Hirsch’s work is not (generally, though some of it is) poetic in form, but the imagination behind it is a poet’s. Therefore, he could write “Double Dipper” and use the clones to make a point without proceeding to get into all those side issues that go with the kind of clone story I’m more familiar with, such as personhood and legal rights and all that kinda stuff. The clones to Mr. Hirsch are symbolic representations of introspection, not characters; it’s debatable, really, the degree to which anyone in Gravity Falls should be considered a true character outside of the Pines family, because even though the show uses the town’s name as its title, it isn’t actually about the town of Gravity Falls: everything else in the setting exists solely to tell the one family’s story, and that’s that. It's tidy and compact, like a poem.

I, as established, am more of a “spend ten years cross-hatching tiny different areas with subtly different pencil points to create a greyscale drawing” person (metaphorically – I like metaphors much better than symbols), but I have to admit – there is something attractive about the idea of drawing in broad, bold lines like that. Attractive and a little frightening. Part of the reason it’s frightening is because, of course, overlooking those details means someone is going to get angry with you sooner or later. Unfortunately, that's also part of the reason why it has a certain appeal. It's when you write like that, after all, saying things without fifteen qualifying statements tacked on at the end or a lot of deep dives into the minds of the characters, that you create room for audience engagement and therefore create an intellectual property that can, in theory, outlive its first audience and attain a lasting degree of success.

Some years ago, I formed a theory about the Harry Potter books, and so far, nothing I’ve come across has contradicted it. That theory is that the series owes part of its success to its “dormitories based on personality” system and the way that encourages people to identify with “their” House, and that it owes most of the rest of its success to the ways in which it betrays its own ideals. From a very early point in the fandom, after all, there was a certain...tension over the places where the series said one thing but seemed to practice another one, to greater or lesser degrees. The books knock us about the head with the idea that individual choice is destiny, but sons always look uncannily like their fathers, somehow. I could write a whole essay about ways Book 7 takes every issue the series ever had, magnifies it, covers it in high-wattage lights, and then...just walks off, apparently having never noticed there was a problem at all, much less that the problem had just got worse. These contradictions grew sharper and sharper as the series went on, to the point where eventually, it became clear there was a real issue in the foundations of that IP rather than just a failure to think about the full implications of a few things, but I suspect there is something universal about successful properties in the broader idea, because all things which bold-strokes authors seem to never, or at least only minimally, think of and which people like me can’t stop thinking of? Those things make up the boundaries which define the spaces where fandoms grow. There’s a lot of books I’ve loved passionately in my life, but only a very few I’ve written about outside of school. The balance of good points and unpalatable implications cannot be anything other than precarious anywhere it occurs, but it’s on that razor’s edge that a certain kind of personality feels compelled to explore the areas that cause discomfort instead of doing what I did with, say, Divergent, which was “loudly express my displeasure to anyone who would listen after getting halfway through the second book before my distaste for the main character became so overwhelming that I couldn’t finish it.” I don’t think that Gravity Falls’ issues are as deep-rooted and insidious as the ones in Harry Potter, but there’s some issues just the same, and...well, here I am, aren’t I? How many words have I written about this one interview so far? The document I’m typing this in is using Times New Roman size 12 font and very narrow gaps between the lines, and these words are about halfway down the tenth page. I’ve written three reasonably competent novels set in this universe and a handful of short stories I wouldn’t be embarrassed to produce in an undergraduate fiction-writing class and also some fairly well-received canon essays. And in July I reckon Disney is, indeed, going to part me from yet more of my money, even though it’s a book about Bill when “Bill dies” is one of my very favorite moments in the whole series because I hate him. I also consider him one of the problematic issues of the franchise for – believe it or not – even more reasons than the ones I’ve already discussed in the first two body sections of this document, though he could be the ultimate expression of those as well.

I already discussed in part I why I find some aspects of his portrayal uncomfortable as far as it comes to sexuality, so I’ll not repeat that. As for part II, the reason I don’t take any particular offense to him on the mental health angle is that I don’t personally regard Bill as a depiction of a mentally ill character. He says he’s insane, but Bill says a lot of things and even the most honest of them are no more than half-truths. Bill cheerfully classifies himself as "insane," but like Fiddleford, he isn't, at least not by any definition of the term which is precise enough to be useful. Bill's behavior can come across like a bad dose of anti-social personality disorder with narcissistic and histrionic features, which is quite an unfortunate combination to have when he also is a sadist, but he knows right from wrong, as he proves by how quickly he goes from gloating to groveling once he’s trapped inside Stan's mind. He may not understand exactly why it works or how it would feel to have someone do it to him, but he understands perfectly well that he’s putting the emotional thumbscrews to Stan and Ford by attacking Dipper and Mabel, and he understands just as well that they are not in any mood to play games after they turn the tables on him. He also betrays a clear consciousness of guilt in the scene where Time Baby raids the Fearamid and he acts like a teenager who just had the cops called on his noisy party full of underaged drinking. He is not at all confused about why Time Baby and company want to rain on his parade or under any impressions that appear to be out of touch with reality. When he does things like present Dipper with a screaming head that he treats like a gift, I truly don't believe he's so "lol crazy," or even so alien that he doesn't understand that nobody would want that thing; I believe he does things like conjuring the head and the living sofa and whatnot because he understands humans and therefore knows they will disturb his victims, who will therefore be off-balance and who will therefore continue to react instead of think. This keeps them right where Bill wants them, in positions where he has the maximum advantage before he offers a deal. This is controlled, well-reasoned behavior, not the result of a lack of comprehension of what a human boy in the 21st century finds desirable or of what Ford might consider appealing interior design. Here’s the part where I get around to those aliens I mentioned in the section title, because while I can’t fathom liking him, I do think I would have loathed him less it if he had been a little more alien. As it is, though, he ends up compacting everything I dislike about humanity into one geometric figure and not, to my mind, doing much else.

While a character like Bill has to have a good grasp of human psychology and an ability to imitate it in order to manipulate his victims, one of my issues with Bill is how I never really got the sense of how Other he is. We’re told that he’s Other in ways that aren’t just versions of villain stereotypes, but we’re not really (in my opinion, mind you) shown it. From even the limited amounts we know about Bill and the GF Multiverse, we can deduce logically that he probably does have incomprehensible numbers of plans going at once, and that he can somehow process them all at the same time when even the slightest attempt to do the same would probably drive one of us to madness or force our heads to collapse into black holes, but emotionally, I don't ever feel it, and so it’s relegated to something Alex has to remind us of, because Bill ended up too human for the thought to flow naturally, somehow. Hopefully we'll get some good dirt in July, but for now, Bill is an alien, but he doesn’t quite feel like one. He doesn’t feel like something with answers, like something above us, like something older than the galaxy. He feels more like a human being than some of the actual human beings do. He feels like...well...to quote Ford, “the scam artist he is.”

To be clear, though, I’m not bashing the writers here: for one thing, writing alien intelligences without stumbling into insulting some category of people by pure accident is hard. Most writers are human, and the less like you something is, the harder it is to imagine the world from that entity’s point of view. For another thing, too - no matter what else Bill is, he's also one of the most effective representatives of evil I’ve seen in fiction in a very long time, and since he is a central villain in a high-stakes story, that means he succeeded in the most important part of what he was there to do. The writers had the guts to follow through with making him a virtual singularity of unpleasant traits without softening him up around the edges along the way or even giving him the excuse of an alien's incomprehension of why what he is doing is bad, and they had the skill to write him as pure, unabashed evil in a way that nevertheless acknowledges how complicated people’s motives for dabbling in the Dark Arts can be. He is a symbol even I can work with: I find it believable that he could get a lot of people to do the wrong thing for the right reason, because his alienness just makes him generalizable, a sort of talking abstract concept, like a sentient but bodiless force of evil that looks a little different to everyone who looks at it. Most people who do evil things, after all, are not born declaiming the “now, gods, stand up for bastards!” speech from King Lear: there’s something we can, with a greater or lesser degrees of effort, understand about many people's reasons for stepping onto the slippery slope even if we still firmly denounce the act of taking that step. Bill also seems to start small, at least on the surface, in what he asks of his marks, so that it feels like: oh, surely I can be just a little selfish just this once, and it won’t hurt anyone, and probably no-one will ever even find out about it – that’s the routine he runs on Dipper in “Sock Opera.” Or he uses those groomer traits of his to slowly skew your view on normality and/or morality, so that perhaps you’re Ford, and view stealing nuclear waste as a “public service” after he whispers in your ear for long enough. I can understand how he managed to get by so long before he resorted to the inelegant tactic of using people's family members as hostages to get his way; although evil and unappealing in himself, he has the skills to present what looks like an appealing deal to others a lot of the time. It's a sign of an intellectual maturity in the show's composition that we see Bill, most of the time, as less of the mad god and more of the guy you don't want to do business with, really, but who you know you might well end up needing to do business with - as the manifestation of all the little compromises everyone makes, which for some ultimately spiral out of control. And while he is annoying, even that can work in his favor under the right circumstances, because he’s the kind of annoying that makes at least some people (ie, me) want to put him in his place. I think I’m sensible enough to realize I couldn’t really outsmart him, but I dang sure would want to try. He can get an emotional reaction from anyone, and generally the one he wants at that. He’s a brilliant creation, really, and an accomplishment for a creator to be proud of regardless of whatever else he is.

The Part Where Calli Tries To Draw Some Conclusions

In the beginning, five tries to get this far ago, I had no idea what, if any, coherent point I might end up with. I didn’t even really expect to end up with one. I just had reactions to what I read in the transcript, and I knew that if I wrote about them, I’d get a clearer idea why I was reacting and maybe some new insights into something I love, ie, the show. I was not looking to write an essay about how Gravity Falls is Problematic in its portrayal of the Other, and I was not looking to write an essay to defend it from such charges. I was just writing to figure out what exactly it was I thought about the issue. Now, here at the end, here’s what I think I’ve written:

1. There are some ways in which some of the depiction of Otherness in Gravity Falls are indeed potentially problematic. 2. These issues are not, on the whole, crit fails. Every work has its flaws, and, as usual, the ones left in GF just highlight the excellence of the rest of the final product even more. 3. Commercially successful writers and fan writers may, in part, be distinguished by the approaches taken to character selection and usage; we're also symbiotic organisms, where we get improved quality of life and they get fans who stick around and spend money for a really long time. 4. I...may have figured out how to get rich? Pretty sure I can't use it, but I think it just might work for someone with the skills. Let me know if you're the one who pulls it off, somewhere out there.

There's a lot more I could have said here - and, in fact, a lot more I did say in one draft or another. Sometimes I ended up cutting passages when I got to the end of them and realized I no longer agreed with my original premise, and sometimes I gave up on a point as so convoluted that it would have made it difficult to get back to the main point afterward. In several places, there's ideas that feel important, but I can't quite pull them out of the air yet. But here's where I think I'm going to wrap this one up for now.

[black-arcana]

Blackbriar ➢ Floriography

[Intro] Will you talk to me through floriography Will you throw me a letter into the raging sea Or should I stop?

[Verse 1] I've been listening to ghosts Imperceptible but so close Searching for whispers to expose (to expose) I hope you’re messaging me in code Been reading all the things you wrote Every insignificant footnote

[Pre-Chorus] Did you leave a mark on a tree That reminded you of you and me? (you and me) Have you been trying to visit me in my dreams lately? Will you write me a song in cryptography?

[Chorus] Will you talk to me through floriography Will you throw me a letter into the raging sea? Or should I stop being so persistent Searching for something non-existent?

[Verse 2] I've been reading behind the lines Been deciphering the signs A couple of million times (times) Did you fold a page in my favorite book Marking words from a quiet nook Did you make an acronym out of a lyrical hook?

Pre-Chorus] Did you leave a mark on a tree Or speak through floriography? 'Cause these ferns and foxgloves are following me (following me) Must I heat up a piece of paper (piece of paper) To reveal invisible ink? (invisible ink) ’Cause I've been trying to tell you so many things And have been waiting for an answer ever since

[Chorus] Will you talk to me through floriography Will you throw me a letter into the raging sea? Or should I stop being so persistent Searching for something non-existent?

[Instrumental Break]

[Outro] "Meet me at the Taxus tree Quickly, silently Don't let them see, will you?"

[xxxkokin]

lolita is not a love story.

part I

the first thing i have to confess is that i started reading lolita because of lana del rey.

she wrote a song by the same name (utilizing the lines, “light of my life, fire of my loins” in the chorus) as well as including a more subtle version titled carmen in the same album. both of these songs were based on the events and imagery shown in the book.

the entire novel is narrated from the POV of humbert humbert, from prison, after he is caught having an illicit sexual affair with a child who he took in a cross-country trip. several times he makes commentary to his lawyer or quips about his own morality.

humbert humbert is terrifyingly charming in the first half of the book, with the gait of an abandoned man and the pale expression of a ghost. he’s educated, distinguished, even silly at times (referring to himself by several names, Humbert the Humble, Humbert the Brute) though this perception of an otherwise striking and eloquent European man falls apart at the seams as the book trails onward. he does not lie about being a pedophile, and being almost 3 times older than the objects of his affections. he is simply in a state of delusion—he sees certain children as “nymphets”, girls who are borderline demonic, seductresses who call to his heartstrings and attention (even unbeknownst to themselves, according to him). specifies ages 9-14. and though the reader knows what kind of advantage he holds over them, what kind of moral code he falls under, we want so badly to believe him. to think that some moments of his character are sweet or even likeably pathetic, that his love for dolores may even be somewhat genuine—alas, he is in love with her innocence. the idea of her. not for who she is. what claws at me the most is that i was unable to tell during some moments, whether he had professed true love or a dreadful perversion.

i experienced a betrayal in this book, almost as if i were in the shoes of dolores haze herself. so many of her traits feel kindred to how i was when i was younger: the brash stubbornness, the portrayal of flirtation based on her playful quips, tanned skin and freckles, her sharp humor, an even sharper mouth, and eventually, her sense of lost innocence. dolores (nicknamed “lo” by her mother, “lolita” by humbert) is initially affectionate with the protagonist, as the reader could be—teasing him, occasionally brushing up on him and comparing him to her british idol in the newspapers. however, as she realizes the deep and immense horror of her situation—the isolation, humbert’s calculated manipulation, the moral imperative of their age gap relationship—dolores haze finds her careless toying with a man becoming recklessly dangerous.

“Don’t do that. Don’t drool on me. You dirty man.”

she says this after a moment in the car where Humbert kisses her neck. page after page, the reader realizes that the very character of Lolita is told from the perspective of someone who wants to believe she was in control. Dolores Haze was a child. Dolores Haze has few lines and even fewer friends. She does not have a voice in the story, at least, not unless it is a “childish whine” to the protagonist. she is 12, later 13, later 14, capable of forming independent thought, and yet humbert treats her as an object of complete and untouched adorability. he throws out the fact that she has an IQ of 121 almost carelessly (again, she was in seventh grade?) and decides that she was ‘dumber than her quotient suggested’. humbert could not possibly interpret, or possibly, disclose, that dolores haze was terrified of being left alone after the death of her mother, financially and emotionally unable to sustain herself, and had forgone her logical thought for her safety.