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thankskenpenders · 5 months ago

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Thoughts on two specific areas of the writing in Sonic X Shadow Generations

The best new 3D Sonic game in over a decade (or even two, depending on who you ask) dropped late last year. And I didn't write anything about it! Sometimes life happens. Well, I've finally sat down to finish Shadow Generations, and by now everyone has already been singing its praises for three months. This is the rare instance where the entire Sonic fandom, and even mainstream reviewers, are in agreement on something. The level design is the best it's been in a long, long time and the cool factor is off the charts, embracing Sonic's peak cringe era in an incredibly confident way. It's great. If you're even reading this post, you probably don't need me to tell you that. So I won't!

No, what I'm really interested in here is the writing. Because this is me we're talking about. But I actually don't want to talk about the main narrative of Shadow Generations, which is really solid little story about Black Doom trying to mold Shadow into his perfect soldier. No, I'd like to zero in on two other aspects of the writing here: the revisions made to Sonic Generations, and Gerald Robotnik's unlockable journal.

The updated Sonic Generations script

The new package mostly presents Sonic Generations how you remember it. There are some tweaks, but it's not a major overhaul. Graphically, I don't think the game has been touched much, if at all. I certainly can't notice any difference without a side-by-side comparison, despite playing it on a PS5. The most notable update is that the game's script has been rewritten by Ian Flynn.

Naturally, this caught my attention. Generations always had a nothingburger story, so with Ian rewriting Pontac and Graff's lame dialogue there was nowhere to go but up. (I don't like to pin the blame for those games' stories entirely on them, as a ton of it was dictated to them by Sonic Team, but, well, I don't think they're very good dialogue writers.) But it's less a complete rewrite and more like Ian was brought on as a script doctor for some minor touch ups here and there. Many lines of dialogue are completely identical to how they were originally written in 2011, and many others only have slight wording changes. Ian was clearly not allowed to request additional scenes or extend the ones that already existed. He has to match the original beat for beat so that they can reuse 99% of the cutscene animations. Don't expect it to be a whole new experience compared to the original.

Still, I think the new script is an improvement, albeit a minor one. Various things have been tweaked to maintain characterization consistency. Cream calls Sonic "Mr. Sonic" instead of just "Sonic." Instead of calling Sonic "buddy," Rouge uses the pet name "Blue," like she tends to do in things like the IDW comics. Espio doesn't have to remind you in the dialogue that he's a ninja, and he no longer has a line making it sound like he has some kind of soul reading power. I also like that Modern Sonic now actually has responses to what his friends say when he rescues them, rather than being silent like Classic Sonic. They won't blow you away, but they make Sonic feel a little more engaged with everything.

In general, the altered dialogue just seems tighter to me, and some of the more childish or trite wording of Pontac and Graff's script has been altered. Here, let's actually make a direct comparison, just because this stuff is interesting to me as a writer. Here's a couple lines from after the Egg Dragoon fight late in the game, in the original script:

Modern Eggman: Ooooh... I can't believe this! I was supposed to beat you this time. Modern Sonic: Aw, I'm sorry! I didn't get that memo. I beat you every time! [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat this guy every time. It's like it's our job or something!

This is a simple exchange. Eggman is mad that he lost. Sonic is unflappably confident because he always beats Eggman, and he explains this to his younger self. But the wording here isn't particularly good. Eggman's simple and direct wording makes him come off like a little kid who's mad because his older brother beat him at Mario Kart, rather than a mad scientist who just had his plans foiled. It's making light of the situation.

And I've never liked Sonic saying "It's like it's our job or something!" That doesn't feel like a thing Sonic would say, it feels like a thing an outside observer would say about Sonic. This is a frequent problem with so-called "MCU dialogue," where quips meant to echo the commentary of a casual, somewhat disinterested audience are inserted into the story itself so that the writers can be like "See? We get it. We're genre-savvy, too!" It also just reminds me of bad Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric lines like "Rings! It's like they're made for me!"

And then here's Ian's rewrite:

Modern Eggman: I recalibrated everything! This was supposed to be my time! Modern Sonic: Oh, please, keep dreamin', Egg-head. I beat you every time. [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat him every time. Our score card's flawless.

Eggman's still mad about his defeat, but the line "I recalibrated everything!" makes it more specific. He put all this work into the engineering side of his latest scheme and got tunnel vision, thinking if he got his creations just right there'd be no way he could lose. "This was supposed to be my time!" also turns it into a time travel pun, which is a bonus. He's still pitching a fit over losing, but it feels more like Eggman pitching a fit, rather than sounding childish.

And then instead of saying that beating Eggman is "like his job or something," Sonic says he's got a flawless score card against Eggman. He doesn't take Eggman seriously as a threat—at least, not to his face. He acts like it's all a game. But he conveys this in a way that feels truer to the character, rather than feeling like the words of a real world observer poking fun at the tropes of the Sonic series.

Is this amazing, A+ dialogue that blows me away? No. Again, it's not a completely different scene from the one we already had. Ian had to fit the beats of what was already there. He couldn't go all out and write an all new story confirming his longstanding headcanon that the Time Eater is a remnant of Solaris or whatever. But the wording here makes the existing story land a little better and feel truer to the characters in subtle ways.

But to me, the main change is that the Sonics and Tailses seem to have a more solid understanding of what's going on with the timeline and the Time Eater, compared to how idiotic they sometimes seemed in the original game. Which is good! No more standing outside Green Hill and wondering why it seems so familiar. Thank god. As part of this, yes, there are a few more references to past games in the dialogue, like Sonic briefly being confused about the fact that they're time traveling without the Time Stones, or South Island and Westside Island being acknowledged as the normal locations of Green Hill and Chemical Plant. Yes, ha ha, insert joke about how Ian loves references here. Look, it's Sonic fucking Generations. It's a game built entirely out of nostalgic references. Just own it! And, again, in this instance Sonic and Tails come off as less stupid when they make it clear that they do, in fact, remember their adventures from presumably less than a year ago in-universe.

Eggman, too, seems to have a better understanding of the powers he's toying with. Where in the original vesion his focus was simply on going back in time to undo his previous defeats and he seemed kind of oblivious to how much the Time Eater was actually fucking up the universe, here Eggman says he wants to use the Time Eater to give himself complete control over the entire timeline. Eggman also makes way fewer references to his own failures and shortcomings. Of course he won't admit that Sonic has defeated him time and time again. To him, he's never truly lost—Sonic just keeps delaying the inevitable total victory for the Eggman Empire.

So, yes. The new Sonic Generations script is better. It won't blow anyone away, but it's better than it was. It's been elevated from "kinda lame" to "fine." No, if you really wanna see Ian flex his ability to breathe new life into old Sonic stories, look no further than...

Gerald Robotnik's Journal

Hoo boy.

The story of what happened aboard the ARK has always been... a bit confusing, to say the least. Fans with encyclopedic knowledge of the script for every route of Shadow '05 may disagree, but it's the truth. We've had all the pieces to understand the story for a long time now, but that info was given to us out of order by a pair of unreliable narrators—Gerald, who became a vengeful lunatic shortly before his death, and Shadow, who was subjected to multiple rounds of amnesia and altered memories. Some of the ambiguity left by Sonic Adventure 2 was cleared up in Shadow '05, but that game also retconned in a bunch of new elements to Shadow's backstory (aliens!) that lead to further confusion. Not to mention the fact that that game had multiple routes and only revealed the truth about Shadow if you sat on the ultimate final boss battle for WAY longer than the fight would normally last. Or the fact that Sonic X made its own tweaks in its telling of the story. Or the fact that none of these things ever had the best English translations. I can't blame anyone who hasn't played those games in two decades for not remembering the truth about these characters and getting some details mixed up.

What we needed was something to piece together all of the info we have into one coherent backstory, told in chronological order. And thanks to Shadow Generations, we have that, in the form of an official journal tying together what we knew from Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow '05, and Sonic Battle into the tragic tale of Gerald's rise and fall.

Ian Flynn was the perfect man for the job here as the guy who started his career by tidying up the mess that was the first 159 issues if Archie Sonic. This is what he excels at: taking disparate bits of weird Sonic lore from multiple different sources, boiling them down to their most interesting elements, and connecting it together in a way that will make the audience see the dramatic potential he's always known was there. Rather than feeling like a cynical exercise in franchise building, going back and explaining things that never needed explaining so that people can add more bullet points to the wiki, he puts a new spin on things that retroactively enriches those past stories. The story here means something to the characters involved and gives us a better understanding of them as people, rather than as plot devices to motivate Shadow.

(And, of course, Ian didn't do this journal alone. He wrote the story, but I also have to give a huge shout out to Evan Stanley, who made the final product. All of her handwritten journal entries, sketches, and "photos" included throughout. The physical damage done to the journal over the course of 50 tumultuous years, passing from Gerald to Eggman to a certain special someone at GUN. The way Gerald's handwriting gets less and less legible as his mental state declines. So much love was put into what could have been a mere text dump in a menu, and it really elevates it to the next level. Congrats on officially getting hired by Sega, Evan, you've sure as hell earned it!)

The main idea the journal conveys is that Gerald was under a lot of pressure from a lot of different parties—GUN, the President, his colleagues aboard the ARK, Black Doom, even his own family—and boy did it get to him. The known incidents aboard the ARK mentioned in previous games are put together here to form a story where everything slowly spirals out of control as Gerald keeps compromising his morals to further his research, thinking he'll eventually find some way out of all this because he's a genius. I won't recap that whole story here (if you haven't already played the game and read the journal entries, I would highly recommend at least reading it on the Sonic wiki), but I'd like to highlight my favorite elements of the story, as Ian tells it here.

1) The Eclipse Cannon

Here's something that never quite made sense in Sonic Adventure 2: why does the ARK have a laser that can blow up the Earth built into it? It was supposed to be a peaceful research colony. Sure, Gerald went crazy and swore revenge on the Earth, but, like... when did he have an opportunity to go back up to the ARK and modify it? Did he have someone else do it? How? The ARK was raided by GUN and shut down! And then they arrested him, held him in prison for an unclear period of time, and executed him by firing squad when he was no longer useful! It doesn't add up. Shadow 'the Hedgehog '05 would give its own answer by introducing the Black Arms and saying that the Eclipse Cannon was always supposed to be a secret trump card against the Black Comet. But, like... we know that's kind of a bullshit answer, right? You don't need enough power to blow up a whole planet just to destroy a comet.

Well, the new journal retains what we already knew, but it paints a much more complete picture.

See, long before Gerald ever made a Faustian bargain with Black Doom, he had already made one with an even greater evil: the military. GUN gave Gerald much of the funding for the ARK, Gerald's personal utopian research station in space, but it didn't take long for GUN to start pressuring him to design them weapons. Gerald tried to get GUN off his back by personally contacting the President of the United Federation, and the President gave him an alternative: how about, instead, you just use your genius brain to figure out the secret to immortality for us, so our soldiers can be immortal? Gerald was initially sickened by the notion and found it completely absurd, like chasing a shadow... but given no other option, the sarcastically named Project Shadow soon began in earnest. (Maria would later put a more positive spin on the name after Shadow's awakening, pointing out that a Shadow can show us the direction of the light, like she says in the game itself.)

Of course, this search for the ultimate life form didn't go very well, and without any results on that front GUN kept hounding him for weapons. Gerald would throw them a bone here and there to get them off his back. His research on Chaos resulted in the Artifical Chaos prototypes, which he worried would be used for warfare but could at least theoretically be used for search and rescue missions in floods, in his mind. But that wasn't enough. So he gave them Chaos Drives to power their mechs. And that still wasn't enough. He's got Emerl. He'll give them Emerl. They're not impressed by Emerl. They'll shut the whole ARK down if Gerald doesn't give them something big.

Fine! GUN wants something big? Gerald builds a huge fucking laser cannon into the ARK. However, as a middle finger to GUN, Gerald makes it so powerful that it would destroy the Earth if it was ever fired at any target on its surface. In other words, GUN now has their ultimate weapon of mass destruction, fulfilling his contract, but they can never actually use it. Oh, the delicious irony. (And also Shadow will blow up the Black Comet with it in 50 years yada yada yada.) Is this perhaps extremely shortsighted and naive of Gerald, to believe that such a weapon would never actually be used just because of the risk? Of course. But hey, that's Gerald for you. And I love this as an answer.

(Also, this, uh, kinda echoes something from real life! Remember the bit in Oppenheimer where he says all nuclear war will become unthinkable, and Edward Teller responds "until somebody builds a bigger bomb"? Yeah, Teller went on to conceptualize a superweapon codenamed Project Sundial that would have been able to kill all life on the planet, as the ultimate deterrent for war. This was never made for obvious reasons, but hey, there's a basis for this sort of thinking outside of heightened sci-fi! There's a whole Kurzgesagt video about this if you're interested.)

2) The Biolizard

The Biolizard is, of course, brought up as the initial failed prototype of the ultimate life form, from before Gerald met Black Doom. We don't really learn all that much about it that we didn't already know, but I just love the way it's framed in the story.

As you can see above, we actually get to see a picture of Maria holding up the cute little salamander that would end up mutating into the Biolizard through Gerald's experiments. (Researchers want to figure out how to replicate salamanders' regenerative abilities for humans in real life, too, so this was a natural starting point for the project.) And then, after it grows to a monstrous size and goes out of control, Gerald has to lock it away in an unused sector of the ARK. He needs to keep the poor thing alive for his research into harnessing Chaos Energy, building life support systems directly into it, but he doesn't have the heart to tell Maria what happened. So it just becomes this first dark secret weighing on his conscience. The Biolizard becomes Gerald's Tell-Tale Heart beating beneath the floorboards of the ARK. I love that.

3) Lost Impact was the breaking point for the ARK

Remember the level Lost Impact in Shadow '05? The flashback level on the hero path where Shadow is running around fighting Artificial Chaos enemies on the ARK 50 years ago? Yeah, that wasn't just a random incident. That was important, as we now know due to its placement on the timeline.

See, Emerl's rampage aboard the ARK that was chronicled in Sonic Battle and Dark Beginnings set off a domino effect. Emerl riled up the Artificial Chaos, causing Gerald to lose control of them. They became violent, and so Shadow had to stop them, as depicted in Lost Impact. The thing is, that incident sent an SOS signal to GUN telling them that shit was going down on the ARK. Gerald didsn't fully understand the trouble he was in and assumed that he'd simply be reprimanded by the higher ups, or maybe face legal action. But, well... the next time he heard from GUN, armed troopers were raiding the ARK.

So Lost Impact was the straw that broke the camel's back. I just really like that detail.

4) Maria

And, of course, there's Maria herself. Maria has often been more of a symbol than a character, this perfect embodiment of everything that's good and pure in this world who gets killed to motivate Shadow and Gerald's revenge plots. But I really like the wrinkles this journal adds to her and Gerald's story, and their relationship. This is the most fleshed out they've ever felt.

For one, the journal leans into the idea of Maria's intellectual potential. The rest of the Robotnik family is all geniuses, after all, and she was proving to be a really bright kid. She excelled in her studies on the ARK, and she even helped design Shadow's jet skates and inhibitor rings. When Maria died, the world didn't just lose a symbolic personification of purity. She genuinely could have been a hugely influential scientist who did so much good for the world. That's what Gerald wanted for her. But we'll never know, because GUN killed her.

Speaking of her family, their presence isn't just mentioned for the sake of fleshing out the Robotnik family tree. It's mentioned that as Gerald struggled to find a cure for Maria's illness through his genetic research, he faced mounting pressure from his family. They didn't want Maria to be up on the ARK forever. They wanted Gerald to hurry up and find a damn cure, or otherwise just send her back home to Earth so she could be with her family again. She'd been up on the ARK for so long that Gerald's coworkers started thinking that she had been born up there. Eventually she gains a baby sister on Earth who she's never met. A rift forms between Gerald's two sons, and he's unable to really deal with it because he's so consumed by his work. There's this sense that the family is falling apart, and that everyone is dreading the possibility that Gerald will never find a cure and that Maria will just spend her final years up in space and die far away from her family, because Gerald just couldn't let go. If that happens, it'll break the whole family. But he can't stop now. So he just keeps working. Curing Maria is the only way to win his family back, in his eyes. It can't all be for nothing.

But my favorite detail regarding Maria is this one paragraph:

Maria is growing into a lovely young woman. It breaks my heart that someone as bright and energetic as her is diminished by disease. There are no visible effects, and I've caught my fellow researchers muttering to each other, doubting her illness. It is infuriating. I find all my reason and restraint vanishes when she's slighted.

This is SUCH a great addition to the story! It's always been true that Maria doesn't really seem all that ill, just looking at her in cutscenes. With this one little comment, Ian flips that issue on its head and turns it into a story about invisible disability. She doesn't act like she's in chronic pain, so she must not be, everyone thinks. And this really, really gets to Gerald, as does the pressure from his family. He's dedicating his whole LIFE to saving her, and they think she's faking it?! It's such a small addition, never referenced elsewhere in the journal, but it adds so much flavor to the story, as does the implied family drama. It grounds Gerald and Maria and makes them feel more like real human beings, rather than being pure archetypes. It's just enough info to let my imagination run wild filling in the blanks.

You also get the feeling that Maria being such a walking ray of sunshine was the only real source of joy Gerald had left in his life before Shadow was awakened, and the only thing keeping him from snapping under pressure sooner. All this stuff just keeps piling on, everything's spiraling out of control, but at least Maria is keeping her chin up, right? It makes so much sense that losing her would make him go off the deep end when it's framed like this.

It's just... man, I never thought I'd care so much about Gerald and Maria. But that's the Ian Flynn touch. After years of less than stellar Sonic writing that seemed to be embarrassed of itself, I'm so happy to have new games coming out that fully embrace the history of the series like this, making its world feel so rich and real instead of just serving as an excuse for a string of platforming levels. I don't even like Shadow '05, but I'll be damned if Ian and the rest of Sonic Team didn't make something amazing by "yes, and"-ing Shadow's cringe past here. Sonic has truly reached levels of "we're so back" never thought possible.

#tkp post #other media

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ivorivet · 2 months ago

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Fellowship Cloak Weaving Draft

Hi all! I've been kind of quiet on this blog, but I have something really exciting to share today: after six years, I FINALLY figured out the weaving draft for the Fellowship cloaks from Lord of the Rings.

This is a problem I've been trying to figure out since shortly after I made my Legolas cosplay in 2018. The cloaks that the nine members of the Fellowship receive in Lothlórien look like a nondescript gray fabric from far away, but zoom in and you'll see a very complex pattern of horizontal and vertical bars of dark gray and white.

(First image from Alleycatscratch, second is a photo of the scarf of the same fabric I bought from Stansborough where I was attempting to trace the pattern repeat with orange thread)

This is going to be a long post, so I'm just going to lead with the completed draft:

Imagine me Will Smith wife posing at this for the last 24 hours.

It's got the correct size of pattern repeat! It's got the five individual ripples! It's got that dumb little pattern break in the middle that breaks up the center of the leaf motif! I am OVER THE MOON about figuring this out, especially starting out with very little knowledge about weaving drafts in general. More ramblings about this type of draft and my thought process below:

This particular pattern is known as "shadow weave," a subset of color-and-weave where the pattern is created from the interplay of different warp and weft colors plus the weaving draft itself. To get an idea of how that works, let's start by looking at plain weave in one color:

The solid purple bar at the top indicates the color of the warp threads, and the solid purple bar at the right indicates the color of the weft threads. So far we've got our basic under-over-under-over pattern in a single, solid color (purple). But what if we add an additional color (green) to the warp, and alternate those colors? Then we'd get a speckled fabric like this:

The visual effect looks pretty much identical regardless of if you start with green or purple. However, if you also alternate purple and green in the weft, it produces a very different effect depending on if you start with purple or green (note the differences in the bar on the right):

So cool, now we can make either vertical or horizontal stripes! If you double up on the colored threads in some areas, you can even flip between the two and start dividing the fabric into "blocks," like so:

Note that with all these changes, the only thing we've been doing is changing the order of the colors in the warp and weft. The actual weave structure itself is still just regular ol' plain weave. The pattern that we've created in the pictures above is called "log cabin," which you can read about here. But similar effects can be created by skipping shafts/picks in the weaving draft as well. So how do we get from log cabin into the more complicated and general category of shadow weave?

It's weird to describe how to convert a given pattern into shadow weave. There are multiple very good books with chapters on shadow weave as well as books entirely dedicated to it. Despite my best efforts, all these explanations still got so technical so fast it feels like, to me at least, asking a 6 year old to recite an entire Shakespeare play verbatim immediately after confirming that they can, in fact, sing the alphabet song. So I'm going to give my best shot at explaining it, and if it doesn't make sense, just blame it on me and check out some of the linked books above if you're really curious.

Think of shadow weave as a beauty filter for a black and white drawing. If you create a pattern out of black and white blocks/pixels/whatever, the shadow weave "filter" can be applied to it to create a similar pattern that preserves the shapes in the original, but makes them out of vertical/horizontal lines instead of solid color blocks. So in some of these books you'll find mention of converting a twill or an overshot pattern into shadow weave - that's what this is referencing. The original pattern (usually designated with light yarn) gets a secondary shadow pattern (in dark yarn) inserted into in between every other thread (also called an "end" when referencing warp yarns).

I got stuck at this point for literal years. I could find examples of weaving drafts using shadow weave, but couldn't figure out how to generate ones of my own. I imported some of the drafts I found in books into weaving software and poked around to see if I could push the patterns in the direction I wanted by changing individual elements. My experiments in changing individual warp ends and weft picks always ended up looking like stretched or compressed versions of the original pattern (when I was being careful), or incomprehensible garbage (when I was being daring). I even bought a sample of the fabric from Stansborough in the form of a scarf, thinking I could brute force it by using a magnifying glass to figure out the interlacements. I was able to figure out how large the pattern repeat was (approximately 160 x 80 ends), but otherwise I got nothing but eye strain. I ended up tabling the project and coming back to it every couple years, banging my head against it until I gave up.

Until one day last week when I was flipping through the Strickler book and saw this page:

And I was like

HOLD UP

IT'S HER

...or at least a close cousin of her. BUT IT WAS A START.

So the first step was to identify what about this pattern needed to change in order to make this look like the Fellowship cloak. Overall, the main differences were:

Pattern repeat on Strickler 304 was too small - it was 42 x 42 ends and I needed it to be somewhere in the ballpark of 80 x 80 before altering the repeat.

The Fellowship pattern has a weird vertical dividing line that runs down the middle of the leaf motif, effectively doubling the width of the repeat by creating two similar looking but different leaves. This was the change I was least concerned about, as flipping between vertical and horizontal lines is pretty a straightforward process as shown above with the log cabin draft.

Strickler 304 also has a different number of waves (peaks and valleys, or whatever you want to call them) compared to the Fellowship pattern. There are 3 waves in Strickler and 5 in Fellowship. Figuring out how to add these extra waves was the biggest obstacle for me to address.

And finally, a couple of things I didn't need to care about for the weaving draft: 1) the Fellowship pattern is elongated in the warp direction, but this has more to do with a little extra spacing between weft picks as compared to the warp threads. When weaving this you'd just need to make sure you don't beat it very hard and you'll get that tall rectangle shape instead of a square repeat. 2) Both patterns have mirrored symmetry around a diagonal line drawn through the center, meaning that for treadling I could "tromp as writ" or basically just mirror the threading diagram to get the treadling instructions. For reasons I can't figure out, the Strickler pattern isn't exactly tromp as writ but looks close enough to it that the effect is still there. But I don't really care enough to figure out why - the important thing is that it gives us a threading diagram to start with!

So to start with, here's what Strickler 304 looks like in my weaving software:

(By the way, this is Fiberworks PCW Bronze. The trial version is free, and the only difference between that and the paid version is that the save/print options are disabled. I'm not sure they know about screenshots, bless their hearts.)

This is a design for 8 shafts and 8 treadles, thus the 8x8 square in the upper right corner. And you can see in the threading diagram (upper horizontal bar) and treadling diagram (right bar) that the curvature of the waves takes a similar shape to the curves of the final pattern. We just have to figure out why. And since I had already tried changing individual warp ends and treadling patterns without much success, I needed to approach in a different way.

What ended up helping me see the forest for the trees was de-shadowifying the pattern. It's relatively easy to get the black-and-white version of the pattern from the threading draft - you just need to delete the shadow, which means removing every other warp end. This is what deleting all the dark ends from the warp and light ends from the weft looks like:

We can also see with a little more detail how the threading diagram is similar to the curve in the pattern. The pattern is 21 pixels tall, but it's been chopped up to repeat over 8 shafts, like so:

OKAY COOL COOL COOL. EVERYTHING'S COMIN' UP MILHOUSE IVORIVET. From this green squiggly line we know two things:

The final number of warp ends in the shadow weave pattern is double whatever the height of the squiggle is. In the case of the Strickler pattern, we're going from 21 to 42. Since we know that we need our final height for the Fellowship pattern needs to be 80, the squiggle for that pattern needs to be around 40 pixels tall.

We needed to stitch three repeats of the Strickler threading diagram together in order to see the full squiggle. How many waves does the Strickler pattern have? Three. How many waves does the Fellowship pattern need? Five. How many shafts do we have to work on? Eight. What is 5 x 8? 40!!!

So how about we make a NEW squiggle, only 40 pixels high instead of 21? (We're gonna drop the pixels in blue, since threading diagrams won't work if you put a single end through two shafts.)

Next, we're going to chop up that squiggle and use it to create a new threading diagram in Fiberworks. I'm also using "tromp as writ" here to create the treadling pattern.

LOOK AT THAT. IT'S GOT MORE WAVES!! FIVE OF THEM!

And then we add back in the shadow by creating a space for a new end between each existing end:

And then add in the shadow. I'm using 4 as my number for the shadow offset since we're using 8 shafts. So shaft 1 shadows to shaft 5, shaft 2 shadows to shaft 6, etc.

And we're going to apply tromp as writ again to get:

AYYYYYY WE'RE GETTING CLOSE! I'm fairly certain that the reason why the Strickler treadling wasn't exactly tromp as writ had something to do with centering the pattern repeat a little more than this, but I don't really care about that so I'm going to leave this treadling the way that it is.

From here out, we need at add that weird vertical dividing line that chops up the center of the leaves. So we double the pattern repeat along the horizontal axis, and offset a 40 pixel section in the middle of the threading diagram by 1 pixel. I've also colored in the differences between the dark and light ends to help differentiate the original and shadowed curves a little bit more. (I also tried offsetting the colors of the warp ends by 1 as well like what we did in the log cabin example, but I ended up liking the way that this looked more.)

THERE SHE IS!!! MY PRECIOUS!!

From here on out, there is still a ton of work I need to do if I actually want to weave this cloak from scratch. I did buy roving in quantities that could be used to spin both the dark and light yarn (dark gray Gotland for the dark yarn, and dove gray merino + white alpaca for the light yarn), but there's still the matter of, like, handspinning a cloak's quantity of extremely fine yarn. I did start spinning the Gotland several years ago as fine as I could possibly manage, and got through maybe 20 ounces of it. However, I'm a much better spinner now and I'm not sure if the my skeins from several years ago would be suitable for weaving, or if it would be worth replicating what I did back then vs. just starting over with a new standard. There's also the possibility of just... buying weaving yarn if I want to skip that step, which would definitely save me a significant amount of time.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far and I hope it helped break down why this was so exciting for me!

#lord of the rings #lotr #weaving #lotr cosplay #shadow weave #handweaving #hand weaving #cosplay #fiber arts

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spicy-apple-pie · 2 months ago

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I want to rewrite Jason’s initial Red Hood arc soooo bad.

First off, Hood is brought on not as a villian but as a vigilante same as Batman. Only he comes in the a message. He declares that Batman is a coward and not fit to protect Gotham.

Batman tries to communicate with him to try and work something out, because so far Hood’s doing good work. So if he just can figure out Hood’s gripe with him, they could team up. Of course Jason says cryptic shit to get under Bruce’s skin. At one point Tim!Robin tries to talk to him, but this seems to strike a nerve. Hood pulls a gun on Robin and threatens him to leave or he will kill him. Tim isn’t even supposed to be talking to Hood alone so he leaves, not wanting to risk a fight.

Batman and Hood are tense around each other, but overall civil. Until Red Hood makes his first kill.

It was a CEO or some higher up in a company. He all but admitted to some terrible crime, but Bruce Wayne was attempting to get him life in prison before he was found dead in his cell. The kill was claimed by Red Hood and he criticizes Batman for allowing a guilty man to potentially be let off the hook via expensive lawyers.

This starts causing some friction between them and Batman starts really investigating Hood. Things are getting heated and more personal with Hood, as he’s started to alluding to knowing Batman’s secret identity. Eventually, it becomes obvious that Red Hood is Jason Todd.

Batman goes to confront him, but Jason decides to make it super dramatic because of course he does. And leads Bruce all around Gotham before settling on a warehouse. There, Joker is tied up, beaten to the brink of death, a bloody crowbar on the ground infront of him. Jason holds a gun to Jokers head, keeping Bruce at a safe distance.

Jason then preforms his monologue. About how he never blamed Bruce for his death, even in his last moments. But how he couldn’t understand how Bruce could let him live. He gestures to Joker. And he could never forgive Bruce for letting another Robin on the streets. Not after what happened to him.

Bruce tries to talk Jason down. At one point he says “come home, son.” Which enrages Jason. He immediately shoots the Joker point blank and turns the gun to Batman.

“Will you forgive me,” He asks, as Joker lies dead on the floor, “Now that you’ve seen your ‘son’ kill without a second thought, abandon your morals when it’s convenient for you? Or will you ship me off to Arkham? Bury me away like the rest of your problems?”

Bruce slowly starts walking forward. Jason’s finger immediately grips the trigger. “Don’t move or I shoot!” He tries to be intimidating, but his voice quivers.

Bruce only stops when the barrel of the gun is pressed to his chest. He knows Jason wouldn’t shoot him. Even if he does, Bruce would understand. Maybe he even deserves it. He slowly brings his hands up to Jason’s helmet. Jason is frozen in shock as Bruce pulls it off gently and drops it to the ground. He cups Jason’s face so gently, even with his thick gloves. He pulls off his own mask, revealing his eye’s brimming with tears. They seem older and more tired than Jason remembers.

“My boy…” Bruce cries. Probably the only tears Jason seen him cry.

And Jason wants nothing more than to fall into Bruce’s arms. Allow himself to be cradled, warm and safe in Bruce’s arms. It only lasts for a moment, until he remembers the hate he has for Bruce. And he hates himself for going soft for just that moment.

He pulls out a smoke bomb from his belt and disappears before Bruce’s very eyes.

Months go past and Hood is mostly quiet, except for the few prevented robberies. Bruce doesn’t actively seek out Jason, or maybe he does idk doesn’t matter just at one point, Jason kills someone and it turns out they were being framed. Bruce knew this and captures the actual suspect and gets him arrested. News spreads about Hood’s kill streak was soured by murdering an innocent man.

A few days later, Jason shows up in the manor. He looks like he hasn’t slept at all. Bruce doesn’t say anything as he pulls him into a hug. Jason cries into his shoulder.

Bruce doesn’t let go.

But tbh I haven’t thought super hard about this. The motivations need to be figured out more. I just kinda like the thought of Jason trying to be morally better than Bruce to teach him a lesson.

#shut up spicy #batman #dc comics #dc #batman comics #batfam #batfamily #batman dc #jason todd wayne #jason todd #dc red hood #redhood

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marvelstoriesepic · 4 months ago

Text

Wake up (part 2)

Pairing: Avenger!Bucky x Avenger!Reader

Summary: Bucky will not abandon you unconscious while hoping for answers about what viciousness is running through your body. After all, Hydra always takes everything a person has to offer.

Word Count: 6.2k

Warnings: mentions of Bucky’s past; Bucky is going through some emotional shit here; Hydra; vomiting; seizure; guilt and self-blame; medical setting and distress; grief; PTSD; anxiety; panic attacks; so much angst

Author’s Note: A second part to Wake up has been the winner of my poll, so here we are. I’ve been sticking with the angst of the first part and I'm not gonna lie, this might have been the hardest thing I’ve written so far. So, please read the warnings before diving in and be beware that this does not end well. (I really don’t believe that all hope’s lost but read for yourself) But I actually do like how this turned out despite it hurting me so much lol. Let me know what you think ♡

part three

Angstober Masterlist | Masterlist

Bucky Barnes has lost a lot in his long life.

He has lost pieces of himself - some torn away violently, others slowly dissolving in his grasp no matter how hard he tried to keep them.

It was torturous and agonizing, prolonged over time, creating empty voids where something complete once used to be.

He has lost the weight and warmth of his own limb, his left arm stolen from him under the most excruciating circumstances, only to be replaced by a piece of metal that messed badly with his nerve endings.

His body bears the evidence. Scars marrying his flesh, muscle and sinew replaced by cold and unfeeling vibranium.

His mind has suffered even worse. Memories shattered, rewritten, erased. A name that once meant something - James Buchanan Barnes - reduced to something foreign, something he had to claw his way back to.

He has been unmade and remade too many times to count, his identity fractured into a thousand pieces. Each one holds remnants of the pain, of orders barked in languages he barely recognizes, of faces he was forced to forget the moment they fell.

His past is an open wound that never quite heals, no matter how much time passes. He has lost friends, family, freedom - every tether to the life he once lived.

But he survived.

Somehow, despite the things Hydra did to him, despite the decades of blood staining his hands, despite the decades of his limbs moving to another brain, despite the guilt slithering through his veins and dragging its nails down his spine. He survived.

He fought his way back. For you. Because of you. You helped him get himself back.

And that’s why this loss - your loss - would be different.

He doesn’t even acknowledge this with dramatics, doesn’t try to make it sound noble or poetic. It’s not something to be proud of. It’s just the truth. A certainty.

If you leave him, he will not survive. He would not even try.

A simple fact that is not simple at all.

It’s the most devastating, soul-crushing fact of his existence.

Because if you never open your eyes again - if those beautiful, expressive eyes, the ones that soften whenever they land on him, the ones that twinkle like stardust only for him because you love him so much - stay closed forever, then what reason does he have to go on?

If he never sees that smile again, the one that makes his knees weak, that makes his chest feel too small to hold everything he feels for you - the smile only made for him because you love him so much - then what point is there in taking another breath?

If you never wrap your arms around him again - never squeeze him so tightly he can feel your affection seep into him, warming the coldest, most forgotten parts of him, because you love him so much - then what is he supposed to do with himself?

If your lips never touch his again, never press against his skin, never ghost over his own in those kisses that steal his breath even if it is a simple peck, or if you end up breathlessly clinging to each other, all because you love him so much - then he might as well have nothing at all.

And if your voice - your sweet, adoring, and grounding voice - never speaks those three words again, the ones that leave him on this world, the ones that remind him that despite everything, despite all that he has done and all that he has lost, he is still capable of being loved - if he never gets to hear those words again, then there will be nothing left of him.

Because without you he is just a man with too many ghosts and too little purpose. A man trying to walk on broken legs, reaching for something, grasping at something, hoping for something, that will never be found.

He would not survive it. Not again. Not this time.

Bucky doesn’t remember the run to the med bay.

It went so fast but also way too slow.

Moments before, he was in your shared room, shaking you, begging for you to wake up, and then, he was barreling down the hallways, your body limp in his arms.

His boots slammed against the floor, his breath coming in ragged rasps. His grip around you was so tight that if you had been awake, you would have told him to ease up, that you weren’t going anywhere with that soft and gentle voice of yours. But you weren’t awake. It was only him.

He doesn’t remember how many doors he crashed through, doesn’t recall how many people shouted his name as he stormed through the compound like a man possessed.

All he could focus on was you, your weight in his arms, the unmanageable silence coming from you. It was too quiet. Too still.

You were and still are the only thing in his focus. The only thing in his mind.

The moment he bursts into the med bay, Bruce is already moving, eyes wide behind his glasses as he takes one look at Bucky’s desperate face - at you - and points to the nearest examination table.

“Put her down. Now.”

Bucky hesitates for only a second.

“Barnes!” Bruce snaps, voice sharp.

And Bucky moves, his hands trembling as he lowers you onto the cold metal table, his touch lingering longer than it should have, afraid you will leave him the moment he lets go.

Then Bruce is there, hands on you, tilting your head, checking your pulse. Bucky feels something inside him snap.

Bile surges up his throat, hot and acidic, and before he can stop himself, he staggers backward, barely making it to a medical waste bin before his stomach heaves violently. His whole body shakes with the force of it, his metal hand clutching the edge of the table so hard it groans under the pressure.

He only hears someone - Tony - mutter behind him. “Jesus. Alright, Barnes, maybe you should-”

“No.” His voice is hoarse, sore. He doesn’t even look up, just wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, his entire body coiled so tightly he feels like he might snap in half.

He is not leaving.

He doesn’t hear whatever else is said because Bruce is calling for Dr. Cho, his voice tight, controlled but urgent. She appears within moments, already shrugging into her white coat as she assesses the situation with a practiced eye.

“Tell me everything,” she demands, moving beside Bruce as they work over you.

“She was exposed to something - some kind of airborne agent.” Bruce says quickly, Bucky not able to get a word out. “Came back from the mission fine, but then-”

“Then she wouldn’t wake up,” Bucky rasps, his voice barely above a scratchy whisper. He forces himself to step closer again, his fingers jerking at his sides. He wants to touch you, needs to touch you, but Bruce has already started attaching monitors to your chest, your temples, your wrist.

So Bucky can only stare at your unmoving face, and his gut contracts dreadfully, twisting like a wrung-out rag. A breath flees his mouth in a rough gust.

Because you are lying here, looking as if you are fading further away by the second.

Bucky is grateful that no one is paying him any mind.

Every ounce of attention in the room is on you, and that’s exactly where it needs to be. No one spares him so much as a glance, and hell, he is thankful to be ignored.

Because if they looked at him, they would see the way his hand wouldn’t stop shaking. Even the metal seems to be quivering, the nerve endings in his shoulder acting up. They would see his chest rising and falling too fast, his breaths sharp and strained like he is moments from shattering into something unrecognizable.

But none of it matters. Because you are still lying there, too still, too limp, too silent, too pale against the stark white of the medical bay’s harsh lights.

The color has drained from your face, your lips slightly parted, your breathing faint but regular. It’s the only sign of life you give.

Your head remains tilted unnaturally to the side, strands of hair sticking to your cheek from the moisture of Bruce’s sensors as they gather data, searching for something that might explain what the hell is happening to you.

Tony is somewhere behind him, speaking hurriedly into his earpiece. “Yeah, well, tell me something useful, here, Fitz!” His voice is sharp, frustration a part of it, but there is something else there, too - something too close to fear. Bucky doesn’t hear that in Tony often. “I don’t care what Fury’s saying - no, I don’t care - just get me those samples analyzed faster.”

There are agitated voices somewhere to his left. Steve and Natasha. Steve is trying to get to him. Bucky knows it without turning around. He can feel his best friend's presence, hear the urgency in the way his boots scruff against the floor, the way his voice lowers as he mutters something to Natasha, arguing. But the redhead doesn’t budge, Steve doesn’t reach him, and Bucky is left standing in place, barely keeping himself upright.

Bruce and Dr. Cho are working in tandem over your body. Bruce adjusts the monitors, his fingers hovering over your wrist for a moment, measuring something by touch alone. His jaw is tight, his usual steady hands moving just a fraction quicker, his eyes switching between the data on the screen and your unmoving form.

Dr. Cho is settling up and IV, her hands deft as she inserts the needle into the delicate skin of your forearm. The bag above you fills with something clear, something Bucky doesn’t recognize, but he trusts her. He has to. She murmurs something to Bruce, and he nods, glancing at one of the monitors before adjusting the oxygen mask now resting over your face.

“We need a full toxicology scan,” Dr. Cho says, voice firm but calm. Something Bucky can’t manage right now. “Start running a metabolic panel and check for neurotoxins. If this was airborne, we need to know if it’s still in her system.”

Bruce is already moving, tapping rapidly at a tablet screen. “Her vitals are stable, but they’re low - lower than they should be. She’s there, but barely.”

Bucky’s hands clench into fists, his nails digging into his palms, he is sure even the metal will have marks. His head is spinning, everything outside of you irrelevant to him. There is too much movement, too many sounds, too many people talking, but none of it matters because you still haven’t moved. You still haven’t opened your eyes.

His bones feel like they are collapsing. Like a house of cards caught in a slow fall.

And Bucky swears that if you don’t wake up soon, he won’t be able to breathe at all.

The waiting for results is maddening. He is hardly moving, hardly breathing, only able to wait for someone to say something that will make sense of this.

Bruce is the first to speak. He pushes his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, squinting at the tablet in his hands like maybe if he looks at it long enough, the numbers will rearrange themselves into something different. Something fixable.

“There’s nothing,” he says, voice quieter than before. Stunned.

Bucky blinks, his body stiffening. “What?”

Bruce glances at Dr. Cho, but she is already busy studying the results on a separate screen, her lips pressed tightly together.

“Nothing toxic in her blood,” Bruce continues, carefully neutral. “No neurotoxins, no foreign substances - nothing that should be causing this.”

Bucky’s insides lurch, churning like a sea under a violent storm. He tilts his head forward as if he misheard, his mind running. “No. No, that’s not-” He gestures uncoordinatedly to where you still lay, unmoving, breath slow but there. “Look at her! There’s gotta be something.”

Dr. Cho finally speaks, measured but voice set. “Medically speaking, she should be awake.”

Bucky got shot in the chest once.

He still doesn’t know how he survived. It hurt like hell.

But those words are the bullet that will tear through his heart, make him crumble, kill him.

Should be awake.

But you fucking aren’t.

“You’re saying she’s fine,” he grits out, his tone steely, voiced with something dark. The same darkness that knots deep in his belly. “But she’s not moving, not waking up, not-” His voice breaks, and he presses his mouth closed so tightly to make a sound stop from boiling up. His head shakes vehemently. “There has to be something.”

“Bucky-” Bruce tries, but Bucky doesn’t let him finish.

“Check again.” His voice is lower now, dangerous, but everybody surely hears the desperation in his tone. “Check again, check everything - you must’ve missed something.”

Bruce exhales, rubbing his temples. “I’ve run the tests twice-”

“Damnit, then run it a fucking third time.” Bucky’s voice rises.

“We’ve checked everything. There is nothing wrong-”

“Then why isn’t she waking up?” Bucky roars, and suddenly, everyone in the room is dead silent.

Tony looks between Bucky and the doctors, his expression grim. Steve, who had edged closer, takes a careful step back, but looks at Bucky warningly, yet still utterly sympathetic. Natasha has just the slightest sheen over her eyes herself, but tries to keep her composure. Sam is standing in a corner, watching without a single remark. That’s new for him.

Even Bruce and Dr. Cho pause for just a second, eyes falling to him.

Then Dr. Cho exhales sharply, snapping her gloves off with quick, almost harsh movements. “Everyone out. Now.”

Tony raises a brow. “You kicking us out, doc?”

“Yes,” she replies curtly. “You’re all in the way. We need to focus. Here are too many people. This won’t help us and it won’t help her.”

Steve hesitates but eventually nods, throwing one last glance at Bucky and at you before stepping out, Tony following behind. Natasha slips out almost quickly, searching for a place to be alone. Sam leaves without a word, expression stony. The room empties.

But Bucky doesn’t move.

“Bucky,” Bruce says, softer now, as if he is speaking to a wild animal, careful not to startle it. “You should go too.”

Bucky doesn’t even blink. “No.”

Dr. Cho frowns unpleased, crossing her arms. “You’re not helping her by being here. You’re just getting in the way.”

“I’m not leaving,” Bucky grinds out, planting his feet like a goddamn mountain. His breathing is too rough, his pulse too high, but he doesn’t have time to care. The only thing he cares about is not to leave you.

Dr. Cho lets out a breath through her nose, but she doesn’t argue further. There is no time to fight with a stubborn ex-assassin who looks like he’s one wrong word away from losing his mind.

“Fine,” she relents, turning back to Bruce. “Then stay out of the way. We have work to do.”

Bucky doesn’t even acknowledge her.

Guilt sits in his chest like something rotten. It is an anxious tangle of nerves and dread and agony that curl in his stomach, inescapable. It’s as if his body is rejecting him all over again.

It feasts on every nerve and every cell and gnaws and gnaws and gnaws, hollowing him out from the inside.

He let himself believe that you were fine. That this is just his paranoia, just his need to keep you wrapped up, shielded from every possible danger - the worry he always feels for you, the way he clings so much.

But your chest rises and falls so slow and mechanical, and it’s not right. Your color is drained to the point that you look ghost-like. It’s as if your body is just pretending to be alive. As if it’s just waiting for something, stalling.

You look like you are already knocking on death’s door.

And they try to tell him there is nothing wrong.

The words make his scull vibrate with rage, but even more so with fear. Such a gripping and burning fear. His pulse is a single beat he can feel all along his skin.

Because what if there really is nothing? What if there is nothing to fix and you are already half gone?

His hands are trembling so hard, not even forming a fist can stop it.

He should have brought you here sooner. Should have forced you here the second you got back, should have ignored your reassurances, your sugary and alluring voice telling him that you feel fine and that you love him and there is nothing to worry about.

But he did worry.

He did have that awful, gut-deep feeling, a whisper in the back of his mind, telling him that something was wrong. But he convinced himself that it was just him. That you are fine. And you would be fine. And this was nothing. And there was nothing to worry about. That you would wake up and smile that soft smile at him and wish him a good morning, honey. You sleep well? with your endearing morning voice and all would be fine because you would be there and awake and with him and in his arms and the sun filtering in would illuminate your body and make you gleam in your ethereal glow and he would tell you you look beautiful and you would giggle and you would kiss him and you would tell him you love him and he would repeat it a thousand times over and-

He wants to throw up again, feeling the nausea rise. He wants to undo whatever led you here, wants to rip apart the universe until he finds the moment where he should have acted, should have saved you, should have known better.

Because things like that happen to Bucky Barnes.

The voices are there. Bruce and Cho speaking in hushed and clinical tones, words slipping past his ears. He hears them. Knows they are saying things that should matter. Should mean something.

But he can’t focus.

Because the only thing his brain registers, the only thing anchoring him to anything right now, is the slow and rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor.

It pounds in his eardrums, in the space behind his eyes, sinks beneath his skin. Unchanging. It should be a comfort. A reassurance. But it’s not.

It sounds too artificial - as if it’s the machine keeping you here instead of your own will. Instead of you.

His heart seems to try and outrun a fate that has not been decided yet. His hands flex and curl, doing nothing else. He is so helpless. Drowning in the air, like a scream caged behind his ribs with no way to escape.

Bucky is not a man who would ever think about praying.

But for you, he would sink down onto his knees and beg, beg until his lungs give out, plead until his voice dies, and him with it.

He wants to move. Wants to do something. But all he is forced to do is watch. Watch the way your body doesn’t stir, the way your lips remain slightly parted, breath scarcely there. You seem asleep in a way that isn’t right.

Bruce says something. He doesn’t catch it.

Dr. Cho responds, sharper this time, with a note of urgency in her tone. But Bucky still can’t process the words.

Because the beeping is the only thing.

The only proof that you are still here.

The sole factor preventing his thoughts from plunging into a darkness he can't drag his way out of.

The sound of your heartbeat, manufactured and distant, is the only thing between him and utter ruin.

And then it stutters.

Just for a second. A fracture of a hesitation, a hiccup in the mechanical pattern.

But it is clear.

And Bucky’s breath seizes, every nerve ending in his body lighting up under a fire that might just burn him to the ground.

Another stutter.

He lunges forward without thinking, knocking something over in the process, metal clattering against tile. Bruce shouts his name, Cho curses, but Bucky doesn’t hear anything.

Because something is happening.

The beeping stutters again. Then again.

Then your body jerks. A sudden, unnatural motion, like a puppet with its strings, yanked too hard. Your chest arches up, limbs jolting, fingers curling in on themselves like they don’t belong to you anymore.

The heart monitor lets out a rapid sequence of beeps, the steady pattern broken, discordant - like a song ripped apart note by note.

A seizure.

Bucky doesn’t even have time to feel the utter terror pumping up his belly and rushing up to his face in less than half a second, only that it is propelling him forward. He doesn’t care that Bruce and Cho are already moving, doesn’t care that there are hands trying to hold you down, voices shouting instructions.

He drops to his knees by your head because his legs won’t hold him up anymore. His hands reach instinctively - one cradling the back of your head, the other threading into your hair, gripping almost too tight, as if he can keep you here just by holding on. He never should have let go in the first place. Another thing to hate himself for.

“No, no, no, baby, baby, please-” His voice is wrecked. Shattered and gravelly, rasping against his throat like it’s tearing him apart from the inside out. The words barely make it past his lips, broken things gasped between strangled sobs.

“Stay with me, doll. Please. Please, don’t- don’t do this, you don’t get to do this, not to me, not to me-”

His breath is failing him, catching on every desperate syllable, every plea. His chest aches and caves under the panic and horror, he can’t hold himself up properly anymore. His forehead presses against yours, his tears hot where they land on your skin, his entire body shaking against you.

He is crying, saying things not even he understands. His voice is a single crack, a sound so undone it doesn’t sound human. He begs and begs and begs, but you continue to cramp.

A sob rips through him, brutal and loud, and he sucks in a desolate breath between the wreckage of his words.

He doesn’t know the way Cho and Bruce are working frantically, doesn’t hear the sounds of other people in white coats hectically running around.

All he knows is you.

And the way your body seizes beneath his hands, the way your face remains slack, the way your breath catches as if your body itself is deciding whether to keep you here or let you go.

Bucky grips you harder and presses his lips to your temple in a way that is almost rough.

“Stay with me,” he whimpers against your skin, voice not even a real whisper, hoarse and thick with cries. “I can’t lose you. Won’t survive. I won’t survive.”

You gasp.

Your body stills. Limbs falling back onto the hard table with a sharp clang.

And his world is falling apart, into itself, collapsing, crumbling. His eyes fail, not showing him the whole picture anymore, burning his vision away and replacing it with cruel pictures. He falls into an abyss so deep he won’t ever meet the ground and the reprieve of shattering into the floor-

Beep.

A single note.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

It’s rhythmic. It’s there.

Your heart is still beating.

The sound sends a shockwave through his chest, his heart, his core, him. It rattles his ribs.

Bucky shudders. A deep, guttural sob rips through him and he buries his face against your hair, his arms wrapped so tightly around you it’s as if he’s trying to fuse you to him, trying to force the universe to let him keep you.

He chokes on a sound, nothing more than a shattered breath. His body sags, overwhelmed, drained, but his hands refuse to loosen their hold on you, careful of the cables attached to your body.

The chaos of the room dims just slightly, shifting to more focus.

“That-” Bruce analyses in a clipped tone. “That wasn’t just a seizure. That was an autonomic collapse. Her body just shut down.”

Bucky is still swimming in the aftershock of nearly losing you, he can’t comprehend anything other than the smell of your hair and skin.

“That’s not possible,” Cho considers, voice low, but there is just the tiniest hint of concern in her voice now. “Not without something triggering it.”

There is shuffling around him - machines being adjusted, readings being analyzed. But Bucky stays right there, forehead pressed to yours, his thumbs smoothing over your cheekbones as if you were made of glass. “Come back to me,” he breathes, pleading. “Please come back, please. I can’t- I can’t do this without you. Can’t do anything without you. Y/n, please!”

Bruce releases a breath somewhere nearby. Bucky lost all his senses.

“I need to see the chemical breakdown of that gas - now,” he instructs.

“Come back. Come back to me, baby, come back,” Bucky croaks out, still not addressing the two discussing your situation, his voice rough and barely working. His lips don’t move from your temple.

Cho’s hands move over the tablet, scanning your vitals. “Her body didn’t just react to it. It adapted to it. And now-” She pauses, face tightening as she processes the data. “It’s waiting for something.”

Bucky heaves up a breath, a sick and swirling tension writhing in his stomach like a nest of snakes. “Waiting for what?” he finally acknowledges.

Bruce’s gaze flicks up, something apologetic and utterly pained behind his eyes. His voice is careful. “A command.”

Silence slams into the room like a sudden, vicious drop in pressure.

Bucky grows cold. The sickening sensation in him spreads. His hands tighten around you in instinctual protection.

Fucking Hydra.

“This wasn’t just some toxin or experiment,” Cho continues, flipping through the data, her expression darkening. “This was programmed. Her nervous system - her brain - it’s been put in a dormant state. Not a coma, not unconsciousness. Something else.”

Bucky is shaking his head before she even finishes speaking. “No. No, she - she’s right here, she’s breathing, she-”

But he can’t deny it. Can’t ignore the chilling, creeping terror worming around his spine, despair festering it. Because he knows this. Knows the way Hydra takes people and twists them, programs them like machines, like weapons, like him.

His stomach sinks, drops, falls - down, down, down. Falling into the abyss. Never to land. Never to return.

Nausea rolls over him in sick ways. But he can’t let him heave it up again. Because therefore, he would have to let go of you. And he will not do that.

“It’s got to be some kind of activation sequence,” Bruce says grimly. “A failsafe. Whatever was in that gas, it did something to her. Put her into a kind of-” he pauses, carefully glancing at Bucky, “-standby mode.”

Bucky’s jaw is hard, it would hurt if he could feel it. “Then wake her the fuck up.”

“We’re trying,” Cho snaps back, stress sharpening her usual calm tone. “But this isn’t just a medical problem, Barnes. It’s neurological. It’s programming.”

Bucky flinches. His fingers tangle in your hair and he tucks you impossibly closer. “She’s not a machine,”he spits out, voice shaking, harsher than he means it to be but not able to change it. “She’s not like-”

He stops himself. The words She’s not like me nearly escape, but he forces them back down his throat, though it burns.

Bruce and Cho exchange a look.

And that’s when Tony speaks up from the corner of the room - seemingly having allowed himself to come back inside - voice resolved, hard. “Then we need to figure out what the hell they were trying to turn her into.”

No. Please, god, no. Not her. Not you.

Bucky is unaware of his movements, of the way he is clutching you tighter, the way his body trembles, the sting in his throat from how ragged his breathing has been for the last couple of however long he’s been here already.

He can’t keep you from this. Can’t protect you from something that has already taken root inside you.

Just like it did in him.

His vision is a hot fog. The room nothing but a smear of sterile white light and moving shadows, the voices of Banner and Cho turning into indecipherable noise as they scramble for answers.

Tony is heading to his lap to probably run every scan known to a man on that goddamn gas. Steve is speaking too. Where did he come from? Since when is he here again? But Bucky doesn’t care. He doesn’t listen.

Because you are still motionless in his arms.

They are talking about activation sequences. Standby modes. Neurological programming. They’re using all these terms, these medical, scientific explanations - but none of them are saying what it really means.

Hydra did something to you.

Hydra put something in you.

And if there’s one thing Bucky knows, one thing that has been burned into his very being, it’s that Hydra does not give. It does not take halfway. It does not leave things unfinished.

They only ever take everything.

And only with a little bit of smoke in the air, you have been exposed to for mere minutes.

A rough, strangled sound makes its way up his throat, and it takes him a second to realize it’s even coming from him. A horrible, cracking noise of grief and rage and devastation. His fingers dig into the warmth of you, your neck, your back, your thigh, needing to feel you, needing to have you here with him even though his mind is screaming at him that all the parts of you he had are gone already.

But he won’t accept that.

Shaking fingers card through your hair, pushing damp strands away from your face, his metal hand cradling your cheek.

His voice is an aching whisper. “You’re stronger than me, you know that?” His breath shudders over the words, his quivering lips brushing against your forehead, lingering there. “You always have been.”

His thumb gently strokes over the hollow beneath your closed eye, his jaw clenching hard as he takes in the deep stillness of your body. His chest tries to draw in air but is constricted.

He can’t see you like this. You are never this still. Never motionless. You live in the moment - in bright, uncontainable energy.

“You’ll get through this.” Each word drags thickly from his throat. It hurts so much. Everything hurts so much. “I know you will. You always do. You always pull me with you, too.” His laugh is soft and hollow, broken like the man he is in process of becoming again. “Even when I didn’t want saving, you just-”

He swallows hard, squeezes his eyes together, and takes a deep breath filled with your scents. But it mingles with the sterile smell of that moisture and clinic. A tear slips past his lashes. Another follows.

“You never let go.”

His head bows, his forehead against your temple, a shallow gasp slips from his lips.

“And I won’t either.”

His flesh thumb presses lightly to your neck, enough to feel your pulse. He hears the beep of the monitor but he needs to feel it.

“I’m right here, baby,” he breathes. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He presses his lips to your temple, to your cheekbones, to your forehead, your nose, everywhere he likes. Everywhere he has to. He lets himself feel the warmth of you, the thumps of your heartbeat against his fingers.

Another tear slips past when he presses another strained whisper to your skin.

“I’d go anywhere with you. I’d follow you to the end of the world. But you gotta wake up, baby.”

“Bucky,” Steve’s voice finally meets his ears, but it sounds too damn soft. As if he is talking to a wounded and aching creature.

As if he expects Bucky to break. He might. He will.

Bucky snaps his head up, and the look on his face must be something terrible because Steve actually takes a step back.

“You think I don’t know what this means?” Bucky growls, his voice a debris of sound. His hands shake so hard against you, he can’t even hold you as tight as he wants to anymore. And for the first time in his life, he hates the warmth of his flesh. Hates that the metal doesn’t run through both arms, because maybe then he wouldn’t have to feel this overpowering helplessness.

Maybe then he wouldn’t feel human enough to understand what it means to lose.

Maybe then he could just return to be the machine he was supposed to be all along.

He already feels himself going back to him.

“She’s not like me,” he snarls, voice catching on the words, breaking them apart. “She’s not going to be like me.”

No one answers him.

No one says no, of course not, she’s going to be fine, we’ll fix this, we’ll wake her up and this will just be another nightmare we all wake up from.

Because no one knows if that’s true.

Bruce’s fingers move over his tablet. “Whatever Hydra did… it’s not finished yet. We need to be prepared.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bucky’s voice is lethal, pure steel dipping into panic.

“It means,” Bruce hesitates, glancing at Steve for help but the blonde doesn’t seem to know better, so he continues. “We don’t know in what state she is in. This could have done anything to her-”

A low, animalistic sound rumbles from Bucky’s chest. “Then we stop it.”

Bruce looks at him, eyes trying to soften, but he seems too remorseful. “We don’t even know what it is yet.”

“We stop it,” Bucky repeats, harsher this time. Because the alternative is something he can’t think of.

He sways, a choking sense of deja vu inching up his spine. He knows this feeling. He’s lived this feeling. That moment, the harsh, dizzying drop into nothingness, when you realize you don’t know yourself anymore. That you never really did.

And now, Hydra is doing that to you.

Cho stiffens suddenly, eyes rapidly moving across the screen in front of her. “Wait - something’s changing-”

Every muscle in Bucky’s body locks as his gaze snaps to you, his breath stalling.

Your fingers. The barest twitch. A tiny, nearly imperceptible movement against his chest.

But it’s there.

Bucky sucks in a breath so sharp it burns. “She’s-”

Before he can finish, your entire body spasms intensely.

Alarms shriek. Machines stutter to life. A sharp, erratic beeping floods the room.

Your scream tears through the space. Guttural and fervent and wrong.

Bucky’s blood freezes mid-flow, turning to shards of ice beneath his skin.

Because you are screaming like you are dying.

And suddenly, everyone is rushing around. Bruce and Cho are lunging forward, Steve is cursing under his breath.

Bucky can’t move.

Frost crackles through his veins, leaving only numbness behind.

You continue screaming. It sounds like it’s affecting your vocal cords.

There is winter inside of Bucky.

His arms tighten around you, his body moving on pure instinct, pressing you to him.

“It’s okay, baby,” he gasps out, not even sure if you can hear him, but he can’t help it. He cups your face between his hands, hoping to still the way you thrash around and bump your head against the metal beneath you. “I’m here. It’s me, baby. It’s Bucky. I’m here. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

But your screams don’t stop.

Your hands claw weakly at your own chest, at your throat, as if trying to get something out, as if your own skin is suffocating you. Your nails leave scratch marks on your collarbone.

And Bucky loses it.

“Do something!” he yells, his head whipping around to Bruce and Cho, his voice shredded with desperation. “Help her!”

Bruce quickly injects something into your IV, Cho adjusts the monitors as they beep wildly.

But Bucky doesn’t see any of it.

He only sees you.

His world narrows down to your face, to the way your lips part on a strained gasp, the way your body shakes in his grip, the way your screams turn to whimpers and then stop altogether.

Then, your eyes snap open.

Bucky stops breathing. Stops moving. Only stares agape.

Your gaze is on him, wide and glassy and soaked in terror.

But you look at him in a way you never looked at him ever before.

You look at him like you are not yourself anymore.

You look at him like you don’t know him.

You look at him like you don’t recognize him at all.

“Without you, the world means nothing to me.”

- Emily Brontë

Part three

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ericshoney · 11 months ago

Text

Driskill Hotel ~ Sturniolo Triplets, Sam and Colby

Summary: You tag along with your friends, Sam, Colby, Nick, Matt and Chris to the Driskill hotel, only to be a target for the night.

Warnings: swearing, spirits, ghosts, attachments, targeting, scratching, touching, headaches, platonic friendship, platonic nicknames

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"What's up guys! Today we are at the Driskill hotel." Sam shouted at the camera.

"We have some special guests you've been asking us to collab with for a while now. The Sturniolo triplets!" Colby cheered as the camera panned round to the identical trio.

"But they aren't our only guests, we have one of our regulars, Y/n!" Sam added as the camera turned to you.

You waved as Sam and Colby talked about the hotel. You had been on their channel before and were close friends with the triplets, so when the five males said they were doing a collab together, you had to join.

"We know what Y/n thinks of the paranormal, but what about you guys?" Colby asked the three.

As the guys talked, you looked around, feeling as if you were being watched, but there wasn't anyone. You went to turn back to the guys, when you saw a shadow go past towards the vault.

"Kid, you okay?" Chris called, seeing your distant focus.

"Not to startle anyone, I swear I just saw a shadow go past." You answered.

"No fucking way, already!" Nick exclaimed, making you laugh.

"Yeah, towards the vault." You said.

"You've always seen things early on in investigations." Colby stated.

"Either they like to show themselves, or I have terrible eyesight." You joked.

The six of you then started to explore, listening to the guides tell you about the spirits of the hotel, the history and some encounters they've had. You didn't see anything else for the time you were with the guides, only hearing a few noises, which the others heard too.

When it was time for you to explore without the guides, things started to get weird. You were standing next to Nick as you stood at the stairs where Samantha fell. Sam was asking some questions, when you felt a tug on your t-shirt.

"Nick, fuck off." You mumbled, thinking it was the eldest triplet teasing you.

"I didn't do anything." He responded.

You looked down but didn't see anything. Matt and Chris were further away from you, as well as Colby.

"What's wrong?" Matt asked, seeing your confused expression.

"Something tugged me, I thought it was Nick." You answered.

"Yeah cause I always get the fucking blame." He grumbled, making the others laugh.

"Maybe it's Samantha." Colby suggested.

Just then, one of the flashlights went on, making you all gasp.

"Samantha, if that's you can you touch this flashlight." Sam said, pointing to the light.

It then turned on again, making the guys react. You fell quiet as Matt asked the next question.

"Samantha, was it you who tugged Y/n's t-shirt?" He asked.

The flashlight turned on again, indicating a yes. You smiled a bit, feeling mixed emotions.

"Hi Samantha, I know this might seem scary, but we don't want to upset you. Did you like the sweets we left?" You asked softly. The light turned on again quickly.

"Maybe she's overwhelmed with everything. You have to remember the time period she was from." Colby suggested, just as the light turned on once again.

After a bit, you all decided to explore the area where Carlota was suspected to be. The moment you walked in, it was like someone took all your breath away.

"Fuck." You mumbled, holding your head as you stumbled slightly. Matt who was behind you, quickly grabbed you, holding you up.

"Hey, you okay, sweetheart?" He asked.

"Just went really dizzy." You answered.

"What the fuck!" Chris then exclaimed, making you flinch slightly as he was right behind you.

"What!" Sam exclaimed.

"Where the fuck did you get these scratches?" He called.

Upon hearing this, Sam, Colby and Nick rushed over to you as Chris gently touched the back of your neck. You winced slightly as the boys saw three long scratches down the back of your neck.

"I don't know." You answered, as they inspected the injury.

You all then heard a loud knock in the corner of the room.

"Carlota, is that you?" Colby called.

Another loud knock was heard, making you gasp. Matt kept an arm around you to keep you steady as the others set up the EMF rope. You watched but then started getting sharp pains in your head, causing you to fall to the floor.

"Shit!" Matt grumbled.

"Hey, Y/n, look at me." Matt called.

"Guys, help!" He called for the others.

The other rushed over, Sam leaving the camera to face the opposite wall, the five males surround you to try and support as you kept your eyes tightly shut, groaning in pain.

"Hey Y/n talk to us, what hurts?" Colby called, placing a hand on your shoulder.

"Fuck....my....head." You groaned.

"It's gotta be Carlota, maybe she feels threatened?" Sam suggested.

"Carlota if your targeting Y/n, back the fuck up from our girl!" Nick exclaimed.

"No time for jokes, Nick!" Chris scolded.

"I'm not, you dumb fuck." Nick muttered.

"Carlota we order you to leave Y/n alone, you shall not touch her, call out to her or follow her!" Matt shouted.

Suddenly, you fell back. Colby who was behind you, caught you and helped you sit down. Sam rushed to grab you some water to drink as the triplets sat next to you.

"Hey, you feeling okay?" Nick called, as you drank some water.

"Yeah, sorry that was weird." You said.

"Don't be sorry, kid, it's not like you asked for it." Chris responded.

"You want to take a break?" Colby offered.

"If that's okay." You replied.

"Of course and if you don't want to come back in this room, you don't have too." Sam replied.

You nodded as Matt helped you up to your feet. The five of you left the room to take a break, hoping the rest of the night would be calmer.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Taglist

@mattsfavbigtitties @lgbtq-girl @onelesslonelygirlbieber6 @riowritesitall @sturniolo-fann

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gatorbites-imagines · 3 months ago

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Okay, your head canons (get it? Am so hilarious) with our dear big tittied viltrumites (Nolan, conquest, thragg. I don't think kregg has such big ones but we love him anyway?) was Amazing, loved them

But they got me thinking about a petvincible harem + the four of them 😮😮. Would it be chaotic asf? Yes, but what's better then like 20+ (I cannot keep track of all the invincible variants, but add your OC ones aswell cause I love them) pairs of man boobies? 4 more pairs of man boobies.

I just really like the idea of them all sharing a tiny three bedroom apartment with a working reader, it makes my little gay heart happy. I also like like the idea of big strong men getting dicked down, can ya blame me?

Thank you for reading my yap session my favorite gator 🤗🤗

I know these men hate to see me comin, they would never know peace.

i have like no gifs i can use for this stuff, so have these ones instead.

what should i call this group? they arent petvincibles, so... viltruwives?

At this point, readers neighbors gotta think he's in some polygamist cult, or that he's in some super kinky relationship, cuz he's got these four massive buff men coming and going. Whys that one wearing so much leather? (idk, I feel like Conquest would think leather is fancy, you can't tell me this guy wouldn't wear cowboy boots)

Nolan is used to being a husband on earth after having been with Debbie so long. Is he still with Debbie in this setting? Are they divorced? Is it an open relationship kinda deal, and she is also seeing Paul?

Well, this means Nolan already knows his way around the court. He knows how to clean, how to cook, how to grocery shop and take care of the home and taxes. Hell, hes still making money from the books he ghostwrote or wrote under a fake name, so he's the only one with an income outside of you

Kregg, I feel would quickly get an understanding of it all, would find a way to fake an identity, get a job, and start raking in cash. Hes crazy smart and all that, and he gives the vibe that he would be lethal in the business world. Homeboy probably works banking or finance. Or some other soul crushing job, where he gets to fuck over other people's lives. I feel he would end up a mean cook as well, after much experimentation.

Conquest? He gets to stay retired for a while. To just get to live, to experience and feel. Let him pick up hobbies, like gardening or even painting. It looks horrible, but being able to create instead of destroy would give him some kind of peace. I think he enjoys going on walks in the morning, like, walking normally, in his comfortable clothes. Gets himself a coffee, a bagel, sits in the park with his sudoku. Texts the reader good morning, wishing him a good day at work.

Thragg has the hardest time just being... part of the plebians. He would still see all of humanity as worthless insects, no, lower than insects. But the reader loves humanity, loves earth, so he puts up with it. He wouldn't want to work either, cuz that's for lowlives, but I do think he would end up doing something just out of boredom. I don't know what he would do, but he would have some job where he gets to bark orders, crush other people's hope and wishes, and exert his power. He probably works for the IRS..

Methinks reader is just enjoying himself most days. Like, who wouldn't love to come home from a long day of doing customer service, and just being able to literally dive head first into the pecs(tits) of the closest viltrumite.

Reader will never need a weighted blanket, he can just lay down on the bed, make grabby hands, and whichever viltrumite has the time just lays down on top of him. True peace and therapy trapped under such a large and powerful man. Gets all the stress of the day to melt right off.

At least two of them would try to talk you into getting a moustache... Nolan would be chill with you getting whatever, Conquest I think doesn't care too much.

You guys aren't secretive of your relationship, and you become a bit of a joke in your friend group for being such a dilf and gilf hunter. Nobody dares mess with you though, all four of your boyfriends look like they kill baby deer and drink their blood for breakfast.

Insert them also “working on your stamina” with you, cuz god are you gonna need it. I feel these four can be just as much as all the Marks combined. Age doesn't mean their needs have gone away, and now they actually have an outlet. The Marks are never older than a few hundred years at most (except for emperor mark). But these guys? They've gone thousands of years without just doing it for pleasure and fun (outside of Nolan), so, they got a lot of catching up to do.

reader has once again saved the universe by being kinda dumb and pathetically cute. build him and his broken dick a statue.

#gator rambles #petvincible #or are these also petvincibles?#invincible #invincible x male reader #invincible x reader #nolan grayson x male reader #nolan grayson x reader #general kregg #general kregg x male reader #general kregg x reader #invincible conquest #conquest x male reader #conquest x reader #grand regent thragg #thragg x male reader #thragg x reader

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waywardmaslow · 7 months ago

Text

The Epic Codependency of Sam and Dean Winchester

• Dean went and got Sam from Stanford not because he needed Sam’s help finding John but simply because he wanted Sam with him 1.01

• Dean threw himself off a bridge just because that’s what Sam appeared to be doing 1.01

• Sam knew immediately when Dean was really a shifter 1.06

• “We accept homeowners of any race, religion, color… or sexuality.” -Larry and Lynda @ Sam & Dean 1.08

• Sam felt no guilt over someone having to die in order for Dean’s life to be saved 1.12

• “A king or two queens?” -Michael “Two queens.” -Dean “Yeah, I’ll bet.” -Michael 1.18

• Dean no longer wanted to hunt down the thing that killed Mary if it meant Sam dying 1.21

• Dean wasted one of the 3 remaining bullets for the colt on a low-level demon who was attacking Sam 1.22

• Sam blindly trusts Dean when he says John is possessed 1.22

• Sam and Dean coming up with identical cover stories and coming to the same conclusion re: “Dana Schulps” clue while separated during a hunt 2.07

• Dean gave Baby to a stranger and locked himself in with a Croatoan-infected Sam, ready to kill Sam then himself once Sam went rabid(or let rabid!Sam infect him too so they’d be monsters together) 2.09

• “So, uh, ..king-sized bed?” -Susan “No no, we’re uh.. 2 singles. We’re just brothers.” -Sam 2.11

• “Bonny to your Clyde” -Hendrickson @ Dean about Sam 2.12

• Dean was willing to cover up a murder Sam may have committed 2.14

• “You two are bickering like an old married couple.” -Bobby @ Sam & Dean 2.15

• Dean’s current relationship with Sam was more important to him than the normal life he could’ve had if Mary never died 2.20

• Dean cared more about Sam going to law school and marrying Jess than he did about any of what he had purely for himself(his job and gf) in his Djinn fantasy 2.20

• When Lily opened up to Sam about accidentally killing her girlfriend, Sam empathized with her by bringing up how Dean might be dead(for all he knew) instead of bringing up Jessica’s death(which he canonically blamed himself for) 2.21

• “Something big’s going down, Dean. End-of-the-world big.” -Bobby “Well then, let it end!” -Dean after Sam died 2.22

• Dean sold his soul to bring Sam back from the dead (which lead to him breaking the first seal kicking off the apocalypse) 2.22

• Ruby used Sam’s fear of losing Dean then grief after his death to manipulate him 3.02/3.16/4.09

• Sam was willing to bleed an innocent human dry in order to summon the trickster to bring Dean back 3.11

• Sam was willing to become an organ-harvesting immortal to keep Dean from dying and going to hell 3.15

• “Whatever the magic pill is, I’ll take it too!” -Sam “What is this, Sid and Nancy?” -Dean 3.15

• “Sammy, all I’m saying is you’re my weak spot. You are. And I’m yours.” -Dean 3.16

• Sam tried to open the gate to hell (risking letting more demons into the world) to save Dean 4.01

• Sam tried to sell his soul multiple times to get Dean back from hell 4.01/4.09

• “Are you two like…together?” -Ruby 4.01

• “You don’t need me. You and Ruby go hunt demons.” -Dean being more jealous of Ruby than suspicious 4.04

• Dean willingly handed Anna over to the angels who wanted to kill her because they threatened to send Sam to hell if he didn’t 4.10

• Dean’s siren was an idealized version of Sam 4.14

• Sam consumed more demon blood than normal to kill Alistair and save Dean (it’s likely that this was the turning point when Sam became addicted) 4.16

• Dean knows Sam’s habits so well that he’s able to track him down even when Sam’s trying to do the opposite of what he thinks Dean would expect him to do 4.21

• Sam hunted down Lilith to avenge Dean (which lead to breaking the final seal releasing Lucifer) 4.09/4.22

• “Whatever we have between us, love, family, whatever it is..” -Dean to Sam 5.04

• future!Dean was willing to sacrifice all his friends (including Cass) to avenge Sam 5.04

• Dean prevented the endverse future simply by reconnecting with Sam 5.04

• “We’re all we’ve got. More than that, we keep each other human.” -Dean to Sam 5.04

• “The relationship that you have with your brother seems dangerously codependent.” -Dr. Fuller to Dean 5.11

• Sam and Dean are soulmates with a shared heaven 5.16

• “Sam and Dean are psychotically, irrationally, erotically codependent on each other” -Zachariah 5.18

• Dean decided against saying yes to Michael because he didn’t want to let Sam down 5.18

• Dean prioritized helping Sam over Adam in the beautiful room and it led to Michael taking Adam as his vessel 5.18

• Dean was ready to die with Sam/let Lucifer beat him to death if Sam couldn’t regain control of his body 5.22

• Sam’s love for Dean gave him the strength to overcome Lucifer 5.22

• “Dean didn't want Cas to save him. Every part of him, every fiber he's got, wants to die, or find a way to bring Sam back.” -Chuck voiceover 5.22

• Having a normal apple-pie life means nothing to Dean if Sam isn’t alive to be part of it. -> “I wanted my brother! Alive!” -Dean / “Had I shown up, Dean, you would have just run off(away from Lisa and Ben).” -Sam 6.01

• “That woman and that kid; I only went to them because you asked me too!” & “I showed up on their doorstep half out of my head with grief. God knows why they even let me in. I drank too much. I had nightmares. I looked everywhere. I collected hundreds of books, trying to find anything to bust you out.” -Dean to Sam 6.01

• Dean chose hunting full-time with Sam over staying with Lisa and Ben 6.02

• “The minute Sam walked through that door, I knew. It was over. You two have the most unhealthy, tangled-up, crazy thing I’ve ever seen.” -Lisa about Dean and Sam 6.06

• “Mallory to your Micky” -Veritas to Sam about Dean 6.06

• Dean died to make a deal with Death to save Sam’s soul from the cage and in doing so chose Sam over Adam 6.11

• Sam took on his cage memories so Dean wouldn’t be left alone 6.22

• Dean became Sam’s stone number 1 when he was having trouble telling what was real 7.02

• Sam and Dean each quickly recognized each others leviathan doppelgängers 7.06

• Sam’s grief over losing Dean is paralleled to Amelia’s grief over losing her husband, both believe their loved one is dead, both get their loved one back. s8 Flashbacks

• “Is it just me or are you getting a workplace-romance vibe from those two?” -Michael & “Dude, they just sat and talked about how they have been apart for a year. You were probably right about that whole office-romance thing.” -Brian about Sam and Dean 8.04

• Sam chooses Dean over Amelia 8.10

• Dean chooses to take on the 3 trials mainly because he doesn’t want Sam to do it and risk his life, he wants Sam to reap the benefits of a demon free world 8.14

• Dean’s perfect ending is simply for Sam to get out of hunting and lead a normal apple-pie life till he’s old and grey 8.14

• “Cass, you got your ears on? Listen, you know I am not one for praying, 'cause in my book it's... it's the same as begging. But this is about Sam, so I need you to hear me.” -Dean 8.16

• Dean killed Benny so Sam could be saved from Purgatory 8.19

• “You two fight like an old married couple.” Charlie to Sam & Dean 8.20

• Dean chose a world with demons over a demon-free world without Sam 8.23

• “You know what I confessed in there? What my greatest sin was? It’s how many times I’ve let you down. I can’t do that again.” -Sam to Dean 8.23

• “Don’t you dare think that there’s anything past or present that I would put in front of you.” -Dean to Sam 8.23

• Dean violated Sam’s trust and autonomy via tricking him into an Angel possession to save his life 9.01

• “There ain’t no me if there ain’t no you!” -Dean to Sam 9.01

• Dean kicked human!Cass -who was being hunted by angels- out of the bunker rendering him homeless so his mere presence wouldn’t drive away the Angel keeping Sam alive 9.03

• Young!Dean gave up a chance at a normal life so he could continue being there for Sam 9.07

• Dean gave Crowley permission to use one of the brothers’ code words to warn Sam about Gadreel 9.10

• Dean didn’t regret letting an Angel into Sam, even though it had resulted in Kevin being killed 9.13

• Sam could break through the MOC hold on Dean like Collette was able to do for Cain 9.16/9.21/10.23

• “You’re lying to Sam like he’s your wife.” - Crowley 9.17

• Sam tricked a man into selling his soul so he could torture the demon for info on where demon!Dean was 10.02/10.03

• “Right now I’m doing all I can not to come over there and rip your throat out…with my teeth.” -Demon!Dean to Sam 10.02

• “What did Sam say? He wanna divorce?” -Dean 10.03

• “I tried to kill him, Cass.” -Dean “It would take a lot more than trying to kill your brother with a hammer to make Sam want to walk away.” -Cass 10.03

• “Homosexual murderers!” -Bev “Like Leopold and Loeb!” -Hetty 10.06

• “Then would come the murder you'd never survive, the one that would finally turn you into as much of a savage as it did me. Your brother, Sam.” -Cain to Dean 10.14

• Sam was willing to bleed himself to death to unlock the Werther Box to get the codex so a cure for Dean could be found in the Book of the Damned 10.19

• Death wanted Sam to be killed because he knew Sam would never stop looking for a way to free Dean from the MOC regardless of the consequences 10.23

• Sam was willing to let Dean kill him so Death would send Dean somewhere he wouldn’t be a danger to anyone due to the MOC 10.23

• Dean killed Death because he couldn’t go through with killing Sam and Death had threatened to do it if he couldn’t 10.23

• Sam’s efforts to get the MOC off Dean result in the Darkness being released 10.23

• “I unleashed a force on this world that could destroy it to save you. And I’d do it again, in a second I’d do it again.” -Sam to Dean 11.01

• Dean: “Where’s Sam?” Crowley: “Don’t worry about Sam.” Dean: “I’m sorry; have you met me?” 11.10

• Dean chose comforting/looking after Sam over helping Cass fight Lucifer in the cage 11.10

• Sam was willing to risk his life letting “Cass”/Lucifer use his soul as a power-boost to save Dean who was trapped in the past 11.14

• Dean saw a manifestation of dead!Sam(part of his soul in distress) in the soul-eater’s nest 11.16

• Dean killed himself so he could bargain with a reaper to bring Sam back from the dead 11.17

• Because Dean thought Sam was dead, he was ready to let himself (and the couple they were trying to save) be killed by the werewolf pack they’d been hunting 11.17

• Michelle: “I just watched the man I love die; there’s no normal after that.” Dean: *thinking about how he’s just experienced the same thing with Sam except with a different outcome* 11.17

• “You fight like brothers; you’re almost as bad as [me and Sam].” -Dean “Actually, it’s more like an old married couple.” -Caesar 11.19

• Sam got infected by the Darkness fog and Dean abandoned the people they were trying to protect and instead tried to infect himself so he could die with Sam 11.20

• Dean used his relationship with Sam to relate to Amara and get her to reconcile with Chuck 11.23

• Amara in 11.09: *kisses Dean* -> Dean in 11.23 to Amara: “You simply need your brother. I mean, hell, maybe that’s why you wanted me. But deep down, you didn’t really want me…cuz I’m not him.”

• Sam and Mary: *trapped in Asa’s house by a demon* -> Dean: *stuck outside* “Sam! Sammy! Hey!” *after breaking in* “Where’s my brother?” 12.06

• “We’re like the American Oasis.” -Dean comparing himself & Sam to Liam & Noel Gallagher 12.07

• Sam and Dean were each willing to die so the other could escape the federal prison and live on 12.09

• “You know, sometimes me and Sam have got so much going on that…we forget about everyone else.” -Dean to Cass 12.23

• Dean began to warm up to Jack because he saved Sam’s life 13.04

• Sam and Dean were unfazed by being stuck in the Bad Place because they had each other 13.10

• “I don’t care what happens to me. I never really have. But I do care about what happens to my brother.” -Dean 13.20

• “And if we die? We’ll do that together too.” -Sam to Dean 13.20

• Dean went mute after Sam was killed and later set off on a suicide mission to retrieve Sam’s body or die trying 13.21

• Dean said yes to AU!Michael to save Sam from Lucifer 13.23

• Dean knows Bert and Ernie are gay 5.03 and suggests he and Sam dress as them for Halloween 14.04

• Though Dean was unable to take back control or cast Michael out, his resistance due to his attachment to Sam made him enough of a nuisance to Michael that he willingly let Dean go(temporarily) 14.09

• Sam was able to figure out where Michael had Dean trapped in his mind via knowing how Dean could be best subdued/distracted 14.10

• Sam broke through Michael’s hold on Dean with just one word: “Poughkeepsie” 14.10

• Sam was the only one who could talk Dean out of locking himself in the Ma’lak box with Michael for all eternity at the bottom of the ocean 14.12

• The thought of letting Dean down broke Sam free of Chip Harrington’s mind control 14.15

• “We have lost way, way too much. And it’s hard not to feel like just… cashing out. I felt like that. After Chuck, back at the crypt. But you know what brought me back? You did. By sayin’ that what we do still matters.” -Dean to Sam 15.04

• Dean was willing to abandon Cass in Purgatory, so he could get back home before the portal closed and save Sam from Chuck (that’s the only reason he sent up that prayer to Cass) 15.09

• Dean was willing to sacrifice Jack so he and Sam could have a life free of Chuck’s influence/control 15.17

• Dean was willing to trade everyone(who’d be collateral damage if Billie became the new god) except Sam for a shot at getting rid of Chuck 15.17

• Sam broke through Dean’s desperation to be rid of Chuck no matter what the cost, thwarting not just Billie’s plan but also Chuck’s brother-kills-brother endgame 15.17

• Dean stood outside Sam’s Stanford dorm for hours because he was so afraid of Sam possibly rejecting him, he didn’t know what he’d do if he didn’t have Sam 15.20

• “It’s always been you… and me.” “I love you so much..my baby brother.” -Dean to Sam 15.20

• Dean wouldn’t let go till Sam told him it was ok, he wanted to be sure Sam would be ok without him 15.20

• Sam spent the rest of his life mourning Dean and honoring his memory, named his son after him 15.20

• Dean’s heaven was not perfect till Sam got there 15.20

#sam winchester #dean winchester #supernatural #samdean #barniversary

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miraculouslbcnreactions · 9 months ago

Note

Wait, I was reading your posts and came across something I've found confusing. How is Adrien asking Ladybug wth she is doing in Volpina a bad thing? From Adrien's perspective, Ladybug's a celebrity tracking down a middle schooler with zero clout and humiliating her for lying about meeting her before. That's, uh yeah? Imagine if that happened irl lmao. Millions of teenage girls would perish at 1D's hands. My middle school would be a horror story. And it's made clear multiple times in the episode that her motivation is jealousy. It's one of the few episodes where the lesson Marinette gets makes sense I think, because she was genuinely spiteful in shitting on this random girl in front of her crush. That's significantly different than Ladybug just asking for a retraction from the Ladyblog. It's also one of the few times when Adrien's celebrity background actually affects how he acts, and it makes sense that Marinette doesn't make the connection between superhero=celebrity=not allowed to scream at middleschoolers in public. If half the kids in her school didn't lie about meeting Ladybug before, my suspension of disbelief is gone.

I've seen this argument before and it makes no sense to me, especially in the context of the lie that Lila actually told and the way the Lila confrontation actually goes down. A lot of people who have this take seem to think that Lila's lie was, "Ladybug saved me," and that Ladybug made a big public confrontation which is not what canon actually gave us. The confrontation was done in a mostly private setting and, while we never see Lila's full Ladyblog interview, this is how Ladybug sums up the interview in Volpina:

Ladybug:(sarcastically) Well hey Lila! How's it going? Long time no see. I saw your interview on the Ladyblog, awesome job. Oh sure! I remember our instant connection when I saved your life and we've been really good friends ever since! Practically BFF's! Uh actually, when did I save your life again, Lila? I don't recall. Oh yes! Of course, now I remember. Never! And we're not friends either! Miss Show-Off here was trying to impress you and everyone around her.

Lila didn't just lie about meeting Ladybug, she lied about having an ongoing, close relationship with Ladybug, two very different things. And Ladybug isn't just a celebrity, she's a superhero who is fighting an active terrorist. If I had to rewrite this confrontation, I'd keep it pretty much the same and just change the "Miss Show-Off" line to something like:

Miss Show-Off here was trying to impress you and everyone around her, putting herself and all of you at major risk! You know that Hawkmoth would do anything to get these, right? (gestures at her earrings) Did you even stop to think about what he'd do if he learned the identity of my supposed best friend? Of course not. You were too busy trying to look cool to stop and think things through like an actual superhero! We keep our identities and relationships secret for a reason!

Is this the kindest, most gentle way to confront someone like Lila? No, but it's very in character for Marinette to be filled with righteous fury when she sees someone using her name for their own personal gain. I really can't blame her for getting incredibly angry at this total stranger presenting herself as a Ladybug authority and using that authority to manipulate Marinette's friends. As I've said before, take away the crush complication and Marinette's actions still make total sense to me.

I'm not a huge proponent of virtue ethics. That's the idea that you need proper motivation for an act to be morally justified. If you do the right thing for the wrong reason, then the act is bad no matter how good the results and vice versa. If you view the world that way, then sure, you could possibly argue that Marinette's actions were wrong just like you can also argue that Gabriel's actions were totally fine, but I don't view the world that way. Switch Marinette's motivation from jealousy and a little righteous fury to pure righteous fury and almost nothing changes. She'd still need to confront Lila, the words would just be a little different.

It's not like this confrontation stops Lila, either. Chameleon gives us this:

Lila: (in flashback) Not only did Ladybug save my life, we've become very close friends. Marinette: She lies with every breath. Nino: Wait. You eavesdropped on Lila and Adrien? That's not cool. Alya: A good reporter always verifies her sources. Can you prove she doesn't actually know Ladybug?

Quick mini rant before I give the next Chameleon quote: this isn't how verifying your sources works, Alya! You should be verifying that Lila does know Ladybug, not the other way around! Right now, Marinette and Lila have equal authority on the topic as far as you know and there is no evidence to support either claim, so you should be looking for proof that Lila isn't lying! Proof isn't a first come, first serve problem even though a lot of people fall into that trap. This is especially true since Lila goes on to make claims like this:

Lila: Of course Ladybug saved my life. She never misses an opportunity to rescue her best friends. Max: Didn't your tinnitus give you vertigo when you went up the Eiffel Tower? Lila: Oh no. Ladybug knows me so well that she brought me an earplug to stick in my right ear.

So Lila keeps right on lying about her relationship with Ladybug, presenting them as close friends, making it even harder for me to get on the "Marinette was in the wrong for privately confronting Lila" train. If anything, Marinette was too tame! She needed to go full scorched earth and have Alya post a public retraction that included a message about the dangers of claiming to be personal friends with someone you don't actually know.

If the show went that route and had Ladybug give an equally furious smack-down and Alya posted it without a second thought, THEN I'd probably be on team "Marinette needed to tone herself down because she went too far" because that isn't a heat-of-the-moment reaction. It's something Marinette would have time to think through. But Volpina didn't go there. Instead, we just get Marinette reacting live to someone using her name to flirt with her crush. Remember, this is the setup to Marinette transforming and jumping in to stop Lila:

Lila: Not only did Ladybug save my life, we've become very close friends because we have something very special in common- it's what I wanted to tell you about. I'm the descendant of a vixen superheroine myself, Volpina. Adrien: Volpina? Marinette: Volpina? Adrien: Wait a minute! I think I read about her in my book. Lila:(stopping him from grabbing the book) Of course she's in your book. She's one of the most important superheroes. More powerful and more celebrated than Ladybug. Between you and me Ladybug doesn't even make the top ten. My grandma gave me this necklace. [Marinette runs off to transform] Adrien: (holding Lila's necklace) Are you telling me this is a Miraculous?! (Ladybug lands in front of them)

This wasn't a planned confrontation. It was Marinette reacting live to some pretty massive lies. If Ladybug had been swinging by and just overhead this, then the scene once again wouldn't change much. That's why blaming Marinette for confronting Lila in the "wrong way" feels so victim blame-y to me. "How dare Ladybug not be perfectly poised at all times and react with grace when someone lies about being her close friend and teammate!" is not a take I'm ever going to agree with. And if you want to use the middle schooler defense? Then it applies to Marinette, too. She and Lila are the same age. Why the different standards just because Marinette has fame that she never asked for or sought out?

I've never been much of a fan of holding celebrities to an "always on" standard where their every interaction needs to be done with poise and grace even if the interaction happens out in the wild and not at a planned even where the celebrity can be mentally prepared for dealing with fans. That's extra true for accidental celebrities like Ladybug. Marinette didn't take up the earrings for fame and they certainly haven't brought her fortune, plus she has no PR training. Expecting her to be a PR master who knows how to handle her accidental fame is, once again, a little too victim blame-y for my tastes. Ladybug is here to save the world, not sign autographs. You can hold her to politician standards when you start paying her for risking her life on the daily.

There's a version of Lila where I would have a different take. A version where the lie really is minor and Marinette really did "overreact", but even there my lesson wouldn't be "Marinette was totally in the wrong" because I genuinely think that sends the wrong message to kids and kids are the show's target audience. Think about what you're actually saying here, "Because Marinette is famous, she needs to accept that people will lie about her and just ignore them even if people believe the lie."

While that isn't exactly a wrong take, it's still really messed up. It's not okay for people to use Marinette's name like that just because she's famous. The reason she needs to learn to let it go is because that's what's best for her mental health, not because her fame makes her lesser than others when it comes to things like personal privacy. The lies are not magically okay just because she's well known.

Remember, Marinette is a fictional character, but the kids watching this show are very real and they're way more likely to be Lilas than Marinettes. And the kids that do relate to Marinette in this episode? They'll be kids who have dealt with the rumor mill spreading lies about them or their friends without the celebrity complication. The show should not be telling either set of kids that Marinette is the one in the wrong here. That is the wrong moral and why I hate this episode so much. I might feel differently if the intended audience was teens and if this plot was allowed to be more complex, but none of that is true. The show is aimed at kids ages 5 to 12 and every episode is supposed to teach its own moral with Volpina's moral being "Marinette was explicitly and totally in the wrong here."

This is the age of internet personalities where there are more easily-accessible celebrities than ever and where many of them do not have the wealth needed to protect themselves from fans nor the PR training to know how to handle extreme fans if there even is PR training for that! That means that it's honestly really important for kids to learn to view these individuals as people who it's wrong to lie about and who deserve the same respect as non-famous people. Treating celebrities as public commodities is how we get things like the Kit Connor scandal where an 18-year-old actor felt forced to publicly come out because the internet wouldn't shut up about his sexuality. Oh, and since you brought up one direction, I'll also note that the band members have publicly stated that online shipping discourse has negatively impacted their relationships. So, yeah, I'm never going to agree that kids should be told that it's okay to lie about celebrities or treat them as fictional characters to play with and that the celebrities are the ones who are wrong if they get upset about that behavior. That shit is toxic.

If we go the "minor" lie route, then my version of this episode would be a very sad one where Marinette learns that people are going to ignore her boundaries and lie about her and there's nothing she can do about it. A lesson in mental health training that will hopefully help kids who are dealing with bullies, but that does not present Marinette as totally in the wrong. It just teaches her when to pick a fight and when to let it go, which is a very important skill to learn even outside of lies about your own person. There will be many times when you hear people say something that you vehemently disagree with and it's important to learn when to pick a fight and when to just let it go, knowing that no good will come from speaking up even if you're 100% in the right. It's a very sad, but also very necessary skill.

I think Adrien has a place in that story. A place where he still tells Ladybug to let it go, but it should NOT have been played the way it was in canon where he acted like Ladybug was totally out of line. He needed to be way more compassionate and understanding of her very justified anger. I've written Adrien giving advice on this topic before and it's always presented as, "people are going to be assholes and you have to learn to ignore them for your own well being," not as, "you are wrong to be upset about strangers telling lies about you. You agreed to deal with this when you decided to be a hero" because what kind of asinine lesson is that?

You could also keep Adrien's canon reaction and have the lesson be him learning that it's okay to have boundaries. That his fame doesn't negate his bodily autonomy and right to be treated with dignity. That people chasing him down, invading his personal space, and otherwise preventing him from living a normal life is wrong. I love it when fanfics take this approach to Adrien's part in the Lila conflict. It's very cathartic to see his friends supporting him and protecting him from Lila.

I really have tried to see Volpina from the "Marinette was totally in the wrong" perspective because I've come across it several times, but I just can't wrap my head around it. If you've got a counter argument, then feel free to try to change my mind because I've given you my full thoughts here, but know that I'm probably not budging on this one. You'd have to make some pretty dramatic changes to canon for me to feel like this take has a point. I think the only way that I'd be on Lila's side is if it was very clear that no one believed Lila and Marinette still had the same reaction that we see in canon as that does feel like going too far. But everyone believed Lila so that's not a solid argument and I'm just never going to agree that people have to be cool with others lying about them just because they're famous. I honestly despise celebrity culture so much and hate that people are basically forced to deal with that bullshit if they want to be successful in certain artistic fields.

#anon ask #lila salt #ml writing critical #ml writing salt #volpina salt #ml's wacky morals

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