#'everything goes including characters being graphically tortured to death

[actualaster]

there someway to report an incorrect tag wrangling on AO3?

There's a fic with a ship tag that wrangles to "[canon character]/OC" except the "OC" in question is a canonical character.

Like. A minor character, yes, but there is a whole canonical sequence where this is relevant.

(I remember this because it caused a fuss in the fandom about "what the FUCK this is such bullshit, that character would NEVER do this, it's character derailment!" I also checked against the game script, and searched through the fic for context to be sure and the fic is, in fact, referring to this canonical character not an OC)

[bubonickitten]

Fic summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Previous chapter: AO3 // tumblr

Full chapter text & content warnings below the cut.

CWs for Chapter 33: mental confusion & dissociation/dpdr; anxiety & panic symptoms; some passive suicidal ideation; themes of grief & loss; internalized victim blaming & guilt; trauma related to loss of autonomy & feelings of violation (specifically, descriptions of being forced to read Jonah’s statement); Lonely & Hunt themes; a hostage situation; threats of violence and actual knife violence, including graphic descriptions of blood & fatal injury; subsequent character death (dw, JM & co. are fine); a bit of Flesh-typical grisliness. SPOILERS through Season 5.

_______

What happens next is… unexpected.

Channeling the Ceaseless Watcher has long since become second nature, requiring little effort on Jon’s part. Fury drives him to put more force into this particular command than he has bothered to in a very, very long time. It should have been enough to hurt – potent enough to hurt himself, scalding his throat on its way out – but the brutal zeal he has come to expect from the Eye isn’t there.

It’s still compulsion; still leaves a buzz on his lips and a heavy, charged feeling in the air; still makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end as a shiver skitters up and down his spine. But the connection feels weaker than it has for… Jon can’t even remember. Doesn’t know how long he’s been here, let alone when that connection began to wane or how long the process took.

Even so, there’s enough power behind the compulsion to garner some sort of reaction. Yet, the ghost doesn’t so much as wince. It simply… answers. Its speech isn’t pressured or harried; its expression isn’t fearful or pained. The desperate resistance that typically accompanies such a compulsion is conspicuously missing.

“I’ve been telling you the truth,” the ghost says. Prompt, as if the answer is so self-evident that it requires no preamble. Succinct, as if the claim is so ordinary that it doesn’t bear consideration. Unnervingly composed, as if the words are freely given rather than torn from the recesses of its mind. “I know it might seem like this will go on forever, but it doesn’t.” 

Is that supposed to be a consolation? To make the wait any less torturous?

“I am aware,” Jon says scathingly, “that everything ends eventually.”

“Sure, but not now. Not here.”

“You’re lying–”  

“You just compelled me; how could I be lying?”

Jon’s lips move soundlessly for a minute before he manages to formulate a response. “B-because if you’re just a figment of my imagination, then – then why would compulsion even have any effect?”

“That’s a weak excuse and you know it. Don’t you think you’d notice if you were trying to compel thin air?”

Much as Jon wants to refute it, the answer is, quite simply, a resounding yes. The line he cast hooked something, and although it didn’t fight him when he reeled it in, there was still a heft to it. Behind the words was something solid and real – the undeniable and staggering existence of another mind, exuding presence where there should have been only absence.

“You asked me a question, so stop shutting me down and listen.” A fierce glower from the Archive might be enough to discourage most. Martin doesn’t bat an eye. “You went to the Panopticon.”

Jon tosses a furtive glance at the tower in the distance. Its call has been incessant since the beginning of the end. Or… had been? He’s learned to tune it out to an extent, but it has still always been there, waiting, a noisy interloper thrashing at the edges of his consciousness. Now that he’s actually devoting attention to it, he becomes acutely aware of how quiet it has become. It doesn’t give so much as a tug, as if it has finally resigned itself to the fact that its Archive has no intentions of–  

–standing at the center of a room disintegrating under its own weight: recessed prison cells little more than collapsing alcoves, vacant tombs framed by time-eaten brick and corroded bars now more rust than iron–

The thought wasn’t spoken aloud – at least, Jon doesn’t think it was – but he claps a hand to his mouth anyway, reeling from the intrusion just the same. 

“You Saw the Eye,” Martin continues.

–watching from the epicenter of a world constrained by a moldering tapestry of dead-end instinct and recycled, near-depleted fear, its once-vibrant patterns graying and fraying at the edges–

“It pointed you to Hill Top Road–”

–plucking at a single taut strand hidden within a knot of tangled threads, nearly lost amongst the slackened tatters; taking hold, following its trail, unraveling it from the rest along the way–

“–and when you got there, you…” Martin falters. “W-well, you didn’t really go into all the details, but–”

“…my memory of the trip back is fragmented, and I have only faint impressions–”  Jon stops abruptly, unsure of where that came from.

“You remember?” Something in Martin’s tone – an undercurrent of anxiety mingled with hope – grates uncomfortably. It embeds itself in Jon’s chest, plays tug-o-war with his breath, and loops around his heart, alternately prodding and pulling and compressing. His mind itches, like something is trying to worm its way out.

“There was something else.” Jon squints as he tries to dissect his unease. “Something under the fear–”

“–a huge shape, a shadow surrounding it on all sides; getting darker, getting closer, coming up from deep, deep below the surface–”

“–something to be dug up, rooted out, buried within – to reach it, to approach that source, that rolling, molten center of it all, the only thing you have to do is dig–”

A snippet of an image bursts into his mind:

…a plain, painted white door with a brass handle, otherwise unremarkable and entirely unassuming. And yet–

Careful, whispers the frigid air around him, inside of him.

“…that’s – that’s just my memory changing to fit what I know now,”  he says aloud, taking the warning to heart. He should know better than to keep probing. Hasn’t he dug enough graves by now?

“They’re still here – so it – it didn’t happen–”

“–spent so long trying to get that door open, but nothing worked. When I finally stopped trying it was the final abandoning of my hope – trapped in this place for the rest of my life, assuming I even still aged–”

“There was a door,” Martin echoes, unrelenting. “There was a door, and you went through it–”

“What else is new?” Jon mutters. It would be just like him: barging through doors, heedless of what waits on the other side, all because of that insufferable need to know.

“You went through the rift there. It brought you back. You came back,” Martin says, misty-eyed but nonetheless broadcasting defiance with his hands planted on his thighs, his elbows angling outward as he leans forward to put himself on Jon’s eye level. “Please, Jon, you have to remember.”

“I… I don’t remember going through that door,” Jon says – but as his mouth shapes the statement, he finds it riddled with cracks. They radiate and fork like lightning with every syllable he speaks, and as that fragile shell continues to disintegrate under closer scrutiny, he can see the contours of a different story hidden underneath.

…the staircase pitches down, down, down, stretching far deeper than it should…

“…and then I – I remember feeling a surge of terror as I heard the door close behind me with a click–”

…crowded out by a much deeper, more primal fear when he sees the fissure in the ground ahead…

“–I think I had a nightmare, but I don’t remember the details. I felt as though there was something I was missing, just beyond my grasp–”

…and yet there it is, boldly existing where it has no right or reason to be: a gnawing, open, inflamed wound in the fabric of reality, pulling him toward it like a black hole…

“–I remember standing there, looking down it with this… feeling of dread–”

…he hears a faint rustling, the whispers of tiny avalanches of dirt scraped loose and sent sliding down the walls of the crevice…

“–there was something else there, something I knew but could not remember. Every time I felt I was close, I was overcome with dizziness and nausea that threatened to topple me over–”

…he knows exactly what to expect, and still he isn’t prepared when the first of the spider’s legs peeks up and over the lip of the fissure–

He flinches back violently, sheer panic coursing through him like a lightning strike. Frantically, he clutches at his chest, knuckles blanching as he seizes a handful of fabric at his neckline.  

“Jon?” Martin reaches out, but stops short of touching. “Are you okay?”

No. No, he isn’t. Jon can barely even fill his lungs right now, overwhelmed as he is by the sudden, acute conviction that his own heart is trying to choke him, lodging somewhere in his larynx and drumming mercilessly against its walls. He stares wide-eyed at the ground, but he can still feel Martin’s eyes on him, scalpel-like on his skin.

“I – I – I feel like I remember it clearly but sometimes things are so weird that you start to doubt yourself–”

“–I can no longer clearly distinguish between what is memory and what is nightmare. For many years, I thought that it might have been some strange or distorted memory–”

“They’re all real memories,” Martin says. “I – I think so, at least. I mean, I don’t know exactly what you’re seeing right now, and you never went into detail, so I wouldn’t be able to verify any of the specifics. But that general sequence of events – going to the Panopticon, then to Hill Top Road, and through the rift? That all happened.”

There is a meaningful pause in which Martin clearly expects some sort of acknowledgment. Jon has nothing to offer. He wishes he did. Real or not, the disappointment on Martin’s face is enough to turn Jon’s stomach – and there’s nowhere in this blinding, empty space for him to hide himself away.

“You’ve just… forgotten anything that happened after the point where you left the Lonely last time,” Martin persists, “because – well, that’s the Lonely’s MO, isn’t it? But you didn’t choose to stay here before, and you didn’t choose to be here now.”

Jon squeezes his eyes shut. Having only two, and with the ashes of a dead world muffling the noise, he doesn’t notice that Martin has moved until his hands are already cupping Jon’s face.

It comes as no surprise that he had forgotten what warmth felt like. What he did not realize until now is that he had forgotten what cold felt like. It was a painful process, acclimating to the Lonely, but once he let the chill seep into his bones, the pins and needles were quick to fade. With no fluctuation in temperature and nothing to provide a contrast, it was easy to just… forget.

Being so suddenly reintroduced to that sensation is jarring; the warmth searing after so long spent wanting. Jon can just barely pull in enough air to breathe out a fearful, disbelieving whisper: “Martin…?”   

“Right here,” Martin says, just as quiet, just as guarded. Then Jon feels thumbs begin to stroke his cheekbones, slow and steady and soothing, and his eyes flutter open at the movement.

Gently, Martin moves one hand, placing it under Jon’s chin and guiding him to look up. Before – even just minutes ago – Jon might have fought it. Now, as if under a spell, he allows Martin to tilt his head back, to coax him toward eye contact.

There’s a glimmer of what looks like hope in Martin’s eyes, but it’s tempered by the tense set of his jaw, as if he doesn’t quite dare to voice that hope. For a drawn moment they hold that position, Jon’s thunderstruck stare locked with Martin’s expectant gaze, until the tension chips away the last of Jon’s reticence.

“You’re warm,” he rasps.

Martin blinks at him once, twice, a bemused expression on his face – and then he’s blinking back tears, even as a chuckle ekes out of him.

“Jon,” he says in a wobbly voice, an equally-wobbly smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, “my hands are freezing.”

Right now, Jon can’t remember ever having felt anything so warm and alive. So… real.

And so wrong.

The Lonely excels at snaring cherry-picked wisps of memories, at muddying context and flattening the nuances of relationships until all that remains is the worst of oneself and others. Every wound, every humiliation, every rejection, every instance of alienation and insecurity is thrown into stark relief. Meanwhile, anything that might make the hurt worthwhile or even just tolerable – any genuine connection, any comfort, any transient moment of belonging or emotional fulfillment – fades into the background. The ghosts left behind to fill in the gaps are expertly designed to seed doubt and erode away at a victim until they too become little more than vague recollections – and then, eventually, blessedly, vanish from living memory altogether.

Simulating substance, though – let alone generating true warmth, capturing the reality of human touch – seems beyond the Lonely’s capabilities, if only because such a thing is beyond the scope of its understanding.

So how, then? How can this feel so real?  

“Are you with me now? Are you – can you…” Martin takes a shaky breath. “Do you remember?”

Between all the fear and pain, apparently Jon still has room for muscle memory not rooted in trauma. Trembling, still teetering on the edge of doubt, Jon lurches forward. Martin is there to catch him, gathering Jon into his lap and cocooning him in that impossible warmth. Without a second thought, Jon returns the embrace, his arms snaking under Martin’s and his fingers scrabbling against Martin’s back for purchase before coming to rest just under his shoulder blades, clutching two tight fistfuls of fabric.  

It’s… overwhelming. Jon just barely keeps from whimpering as he shoves his face into Martin’s chest, two sets of memories vying ruthlessly for validation.

One is a present and future where nothing ever changes, an endless expanse of stale terror and slow decay. In the other, everything changes: a door of a different sort thrown open and stumbled through; a whirlwind of reconciliations and second chances; a new path where hell is a certain past and a possible future but not a torturous present.  

It’s disorientating, and earthshattering, and impossible–

But he can’t get all of that out, so all he says instead is: “Too good to be true.”

The noise Martin makes is something between a sniffle and a laugh. “No offense, Jon, but how is anything about our situation too good to be true?”

“Because it’s better than this. Anything would be better than this, and – if you’re real, that means…” Jon shudders, clinging harder. It’s impossible to press himself any closer to Martin’s comforting bulk than he already is, but that won’t stop him trying. “I can’t do it all over again. I can’t.” 

“You won’t,” Martin says, one hand stroking soothingly across Jon’s back. “We all know, now. We know what Jonah is planning. We have a plan to stop him. We’re going to stop him. This time he’s the one in the dark – he’s the one caught in the web – and we’re not going to let him win again.”

“You don’t know that. You can’t know that.”

“Neither can you. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.” 

“Is it really worth the risk?”

“What?” Martin breaks the embrace to put his hands on Jon’s shoulders instead, forcing him upright. “Of course it is! We can’t just – let it happen!”

“No, we can’t. And that’s exactly my point.” Jon focuses very intently on the weave of the fabric beneath his fingers. “Maybe it’s… safer. If I stay.”

“I know it feels safe–”

“Not – not for me,” Jon clarifies. “I just mean… the Ritual can’t go forward without a conduit. If I take myself out of the equation–”

“You think Jonah will just give up?” Martin says heatedly. “He’ll find a replacement, you said it yourself.”

“Not anytime soon.”

“We don’t know that. He could have other candidates lined up. I mean, what about Basira? Jonah’s always calling her ‘Detective’, and the way he says, it’s like… like how he says ‘Archivist’. Like it’s some sort of – proper Beholding title he assigned her. Rubbing it in that she’s stuck serving the Eye just the same as the rest of us, that she’s feeding it in her own way whether she likes it or not. He held her hostage to force Daisy into working for him – what’s to say he won’t find a way to do the same in reverse?”

Jon scoffs. “Basira knows better than to–”

“It’s not about knowing, Jon! It’s about what’s at stake, and what makes you vulnerable, and…” Martin huffs. Jon catches a brief flash of a grin, thin-lipped and humorless, as if Martin is reacting to a private, morbid joke. “What’s important to you, and what you’re willing to sacrifice to protect it. There’s not a single person on earth who’s immune to being manipulated. It doesn’t matter how smart or competent or well-adjusted or good you are – everyone has a tipping point, if the right person corners them in the right place at the right time and pushes all the right buttons.

“If Jonah made Basira choose between losing Daisy and becoming the Archivist, and she chose the latter, it wouldn’t make her foolish, or – or – or evil. I wouldn’t judge, because I know what I’d choose if I was in that position. And I’m sure she’d do everything in her power to avoid being what Jonah wants in an Archivist, but – she’d still be trapped in the same position that you are now, and I don’t think she would miraculously fare any better. He’d torture her to mold her into shape, and if it didn’t pan out, he’d throw her aside and move on to the next candidate.”

“That’s–”

“Or, what if he writes you off as a lost cause, doesn’t see any of us as a decent replacement, and decides to start from scratch? He wouldn’t want any loose strings. He killed Gertrude and Leitner because they knew too much; I doubt he’d think twice about giving the rest of us the same treatment.”

“I–”

“What if, what if, what if. We can both trot out as many hypotheticals we’d like, but it doesn’t change anything. We can’t predict the future, so we just have to take a leap of faith. You and me.” Martin exhales with a sense of finality. His smile, while no doubt intended to be reassuring, twitches at the corners, betraying his nerves. “It worked before, right?”  

“This is bigger than you and me.” Martin flinches as though struck. Jon hates himself for it. “I – I’m sorry, but it is. I mean, look around.”

Jon raises his head just enough to steal another glimpse of the Panopticon, still looming inexorably in the distance. A mistake, he realizes belatedly: the sight of it is like a gravity well, and it takes forceful effort to tear himself away once it has him riveted.

Martin doesn’t follow Jon’s line of sight. He only stares down at his lap, unconsciously clutching his hands to his chest, fingers tangling together just under his chin. Jon lets his own hands migrate to Martin’s shoulders. Martin keeps his head ducked, but his eyes do flick up to meet Jon’s through the curtain of his hair. 

“This happened once,” Jon murmurs. “I can’t let it happen again.”

“It won’t,” Martin insists, rallying. “We won’t let it. But you staying here won’t help anything. Jonah will find another way. He’ll keep trying until he gets it right, whether he has you or not. He’ll recruit as many Archivists as it takes, hurt them like he hurt you, sacrifice as many people as he needs to get all fourteen marks in. He’s the common denominator, he’s the one who has to be eliminated. Not you.”

As Martin speaks, Jon lets his hands slide down from Martin’s shoulders. Before he can pull them back into his own lap, though, Martin seizes them and holds them tight.

“We’ll find a way to stop him,” he continues. “And whatever happens, however it plays out… one way or another, we’ll do it together. That makes it worth it.”   

“It’s not about together, it’s about what I did, and you can’t understand that. You… you can’t know what it was like, the – the – the violation of it all, I can’t describe – I’d never felt such–” Jon sucks in a sharp, shallow hiccup of a breath. “And – and then, what came after…”

The memory is possibly the most visceral in Jon’s extensive collection of scars, which is a high bar to meet. Whatever inhuman durability the Eye granted him, a physical body wasn’t built to contain that much violence. A single psyche was never meant to channel the brutal restructuring of an entire world in the blink of an eye.

He could feel the seams of reality rip open as if he himself was being torn apart; could feel the sky crack open as if his own bones were being snapped into pieces; could feel the shockwaves reverberating in the roots of his teeth. The door bursting into splinters in his mind, the shrapnel from the blast mincing his capacity for conscious thought, the flood of Seeing swamping every shred of selfhood – it wasn’t so much a physical pain as it was a sensation of pure force and pressure, too massive and too concentrated for one mind to process. 

“Regardless of whose fault it was, I was the one who pulled the trigger. Or,” Jon says, seeing Martin about to dissent, “maybe I was the trigger, or the gun, or – or the bullet. Whatever the case, it was – it was my voice shaping those words, my eyes reading that statement, my skin being worn like a – like a glove by the Eye, by the Archive, by – by him, and–”

Jon cuts himself short with a gasp, his uncooperative lungs spasming painfully when he attempts a deeper breath.

“Maybe – maybe I’m not the only one with that potential. Jonah could choose a new candidate, build another Archive. That doesn’t change the fact that I am presently the biggest risk to the world as we know it.” Jon looks Martin directly in the eye, trying to convey the true reality of the situation, begging him to understand. “All it would take is one incantation, Martin. Ninety-four words standing between the entire world and what waits behind that door. I’ve been the monster in everyone else’s story for so long, and I… I’m so tired.”

“I know,” Martin says, “and I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make it okay to chase the worst outcome.” 

“The worst outcome?” Jon says incredulously. “Are you even listening? I’ve seen the worst outcome. I’ve lived it. Staying here isn’t it.”

“It is for me,” Martin retorts, a blotchy red creeping up his neck and onto his face. “You know, I… I can’t imagine making any choice that would mean losing you. It hurts to know that you could.”

“I wish I didn’t have to,” Jon murmurs.

“Well, good news: you don’t. We have options, and… god, I wish you wouldn’t always immediately choose the one that hurts you the most.”

“I…” Jon’s throat clicks when he swallows. “I’m just… trying to do the right thing.”

Martin watches him silently. Jon can’t bring himself to look Martin in the eye, too afraid to confront what he might find there. Instead, shamefaced, he allows his gaze to drift: first to the red blotches staining Martin’s cheeks, then to the tired lines of his face, then back to that angry, mottled flush, this time noting how it obscures the freckles that Jon loves so dearly. Every observation Jon makes only compounds his guilt.

Then Martin shrugs.   

“Okay,” he says. “Fine.”

That was… easy. Suspiciously easy. The thought crosses Jon’s mind that perhaps the Lonely managed to deceive him and this isn’t Martin after all. But no, he thinks a moment later, Martin has always been able to match his stubbornness pound-for-pound and tit-for-tat. Play-acting at passive-aggression is very much within his wheelhouse.

What Jon doesn’t anticipate is Martin gathering him back up into a bear hug. Jon exhales with a surprised little oof as he’s pulled tight to Martin’s chest.

“Martin…?”

“Hm?”

“What, ah… what are you doing?”

“Oh, you know. Sharing body heat.”

As pleasant as the pressure is, and as much as Jon wants to shut his brain off and sink into the embrace, he’s always been the type to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“What–?”

“I’m not leaving without you, so I suppose we’ll both just have to get used to being cold and bored and pointlessly sad. We may as well get a head start on trying to keep warm.”

“What?” Jon starts wriggling, trying to worm his way out of Martin’s grip just enough to get a good look at his face. Despite the concerted effort, he only succeeds in getting a faceful of wool as Martin tugs him close again, resting his chin on the crown of Jon’s head for good measure. “Martin!”    

“Jon,” Martin replies, infuriatingly nonchalant.

“This is – this is serious!”

“Yep,” Martin says, enunciating the end of the word with a pop. “Now shush, I’m trying to dredge up a change in scenery. Holidays are always lonely. I know I’ve got to have at least one memory of staring wistfully out a window at a winter wonderland knocking around in my brain somewhere…”

“You want to make it colder?”

“I saw a survivalist documentary once about emergency shelters. No offense to your subconscious, but apocalypse dust doesn’t make for a good bivouac. Snow, on the other hand–”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Jon huffs, planting both of his palms on Martin’s chest and trying to shove off.  

“So are you. Ball’s in your court, Jon. You figure out what you want to do, but wherever you go, I go.”

“That is not fair–”

“Tough.”  

“No.” Jon redoubles his efforts to squirm away, ducking his head to dislodge Martin’s chin. “You can’t–”

Martin loosens his grip somewhat, letting Jon draw back enough for them to stare daggers at one another. Jon’s intimidation factor is significantly undercut by the fact that his hair, now thoroughly tousled and frizzy with static, is hanging in front of his face. To make matters worse, when he tosses his head and tries to sweep it out of the way, he belatedly realizes that a bit of it has gotten into his mouth, and his scripted protest dissolves into spluttering. 

Martin, damn him, watches with a smirk that is just as endearing as it is endeared. Jon wishes he could muster up some outrage, but he’s long since passed the point where he felt the need to save face around Martin. Now, Martin’s smug affection is just charming rather grating.

“Martin,” Jon says, trying and failing to revive his aloof, stuffy academic persona. Summoning that tone of voice is one thing. Subjecting Martin’s name to it is something else entirely. It used to be so thoughtlessly easy. Now, he can only muster up that offhand disdain in jest.

That’s not a bad thing – Martin never deserved that sort of contempt. But Jon is trying to voice some sincere disagreement, here, and it’s difficult to do that when Martin is looking at him like… like he’s gone and made a fool of himself, and Martin has magnanimously chosen to find it adorable rather than cringe-worthy.

“Martin,” Jon tries again. Apparently, if he’s not striving for any particular tone, his voice automatically defaults to something that can best be described as terminally exhausted. The hint of amusement in Martin’s eyes dissipates immediately at the drastic shift. “You don’t belong here.”

“Neither do you.”

“You don’t get it–”

“No, I do,” Martin says. “You explained yourself perfectly. You feel like you need to sacrifice yourself to keep the world safe.”

“It’s not about feeling, it’s about the reality of the situation.”

“Okay, well, you’re an important part of my world, and I want to keep you safe. I think it’s only fair that I get to indulge in a bit of self-sacrifice, too. I mean, if it’s okay to sacrifice one person for the sake of the world, what’s one more?” 

“Martin,” Jon says, as sternly as he can.

“Jon,” Martin returns, parroting Jon’s tone, but with an undertone of amiable mockery.

If they were bickering over something trivial, Jon might reciprocate. Right now, he can’t find any humor in their situation. Martin must realize that, because his expression falls and he sighs.

“Look,” he says, just as uncompromising, but now thoroughly somber. “I can’t imagine what it was like, being used like that, being forced to watch, surviving it alone for so long. No one deserves that, and – if you feel like trapping yourself here is the only way to keep yourself safe, then I… I don’t blame you if you want to stay.”

“You think I’m running away,” Jon realizes suddenly. 

“Maybe not consciously. And ‘running away’ has the wrong connotations. I just mean that stopping Jonah shouldn’t fall on your shoulders. I know you’re tired, and if you want to tap out, then… I get it, I really do.” Martin offers him a wry smile, offset by the wistful look in his eyes. “It would probably be the first time I’ve ever seen you show any hint of a self-preservation instinct, honestly.”

“I’m not – I’m not trying to–”

“I know your brain starts twisting my words right now, so let me be clear. I’m not accusing you of being selfish. Quite the opposite, really. It’s okay if you want to keep yourself safe. Just… don’t pretend that staying here would save the whole world.”  

“It would make it safer, at least. For – for a time. And you’ve said yourself that every moment counts for something.”

“Yeah. That includes your moments. And if you want to spend them here, that’s your choice. Just like it’s my choice if I want to spend them here with you.”

“He has a point.”

The two of them spring apart at the unexpected interruption – like two teenagers caught snogging at a funeral, supplies the unhelpful part of Jon’s brain that habitually compensates for fear with snark. Jon topples sideways out of Martin’s lap, Martin subsequently scrambles to his feet, and Peter looks on with a self-satisfied smirk. 

“You know,” Martin says, brushing himself off as he levels Peter with a vicious glare, “for someone who hates hearing other people talk, you do a lot of eavesdropping.” 

Jon’s heart plummets into his stomach. Eavesdropping.

“In my defense,” Peter says, “you weren’t making it difficult.”

“How much–” Jon groans as he struggles to stand, flinging one hand out for purchase. The instant Jon is upright and blood rushes back into his cramped limbs, his knees nearly buckle beneath him. Without even a sideways glance, Martin loops an arm around his waist and tugs him close, practically supporting Jon’s entire – admittedly negligible – weight. “H-how – how much did you hear?” 

“Oh, enough to gather that Elias really doesn’t know what he’s dealing with.” Peter grins. “Does he?”

Jon’s blood runs cold in a way that has nothing to do with the Lonely – and now that Martin has thawed him out, he can actually feel the chill washing over him. 

“Never mind that,” Martin says. “What are you doing here? You agreed not to interfere–”

“Until your time was up,” Peter says amiably. “And you’ve just hit the seventy-two hour mark.”

All the color drains from Martin’s face. 

“That’s not possible,” he says, his voice shaking just slightly as uncertainty wedges itself into the widening crack in his bravado. “It’s barely been half an hour since you last spoke to me. If I was already so close to losing, you wouldn’t have bothered trying to make another deal.”

“Deal?” Jon’s heart rate ticks up another notch. “What deal?”

“Time works differently here than it does in the outside world,” Peter says.  

“If anything, you owe me an extension,” Martin says, lifting his chin as he recovers from his momentary shock. “You broke the rules with your little interruption earlier – and if time is as weird as you say, how am I supposed to know how long that really took?”

“We had an agreement.”

“Martin?” Jon tries again, louder this time. He can barely hear himself speak over the blood rushing in his ears. “What is he talking about?” 

Martin and Peter continue to argue over his head.

“Yeah, but you can’t expect me to believe you’re telling the truth. Let me finish what I came here to do – see if I can bring Jon home, without any more interruptions from you – and then I can confirm for myself how much time has passed in the real world. If – if – it really has been three days, I’ll uphold my end of the bargain. But until then, you’re not getting my cooperation.”

“Enough!” Peter snarls. “We had a deal. You’re embarrassing us both, making this more complicated than it has to be–”

“What deal?” Jon bursts out, shouting to compete with the thunder of his own heart.

Peter looks down at him as if seeing him for the first time. Normally, Jon might scoff at the malevolent leer on Peter’s face; summon some bluster of his own and return that cold contempt tenfold. But Martin has only just taken a chisel to his defenses, wrenched him up and out from the depths that had been keeping him static and numb and untouchable. He’s too raw, too exposed, too brittle to mask the bedrock of fear underneath it all.

“Martin here took a very foolish risk, and the gamble didn’t pay off. I did warn him that his faith in you was misplaced, but… no use trying to talk sense into a hopeless romantic.”

“What does that mean?” Jon tugs on Martin’s sleeve. “Martin, what does that mean?”

“I had three days to find you and bring you home,” Martin says, still not taking his eyes off of Peter. “We leave the Lonely together by then, or not at all.”

“What? Why?” Jon yanks on Martin’s arm again. “Why would you do that?”

“You know why.” Martin finally looks at him, eyes blazing. “For the same reason you’d do the same for me–”

The next thing Jon knows, he’s being shoved away – forcefully enough that it would knock him off his feet on a good day, let alone right now, with his legs too weak to hold him up. He’s pitching forward before he has a chance to consciously process why.

Even though the fall is a short one, even though it takes barely more than a second for him to go from (what can be charitably called) standing to landing on hands and knees in the dust, there’s still a frozen moment where he finds himself back in time, trapped in indefinite freefall and beholden to the mercy of Mike Crew, unable to breathe or scream or beg–

Then he hears himself make a noise – some humiliating blend of an indignant squawk and an alarmed yelp – and the flashback ends, landing him back in the present moment as soon as he hits the ground.   

Bewildered – and a little affronted, feeling rather like a sleeping cat shunted out of a warm lap – he looks up to demand an explanation. What he sees nearly plunges him into yet another memory.

Except this one is real. This is happening now. This is happening again.

There’s a knife. Martin’s head is wrenched back to expose his neck, and there’s a knife at his throat, and looming over his shoulder is a familiar face: haggard and harried-looking, with a menacing glower that would be fearsome on its own, but made all the more threatening by a pair of wild, terrified eyes.

It’s obvious in the lines of his face, the faint tremble in his hand, the sweat on his brow: Trevor is desperate, and desperate people act in unpredictable ways.  

“Not a word,” he commands, and then, in a low growl against Martin’s ear: “And you. You so much as flinch and you’re dead. You might be bigger, but I’m faster, and I’m the one with the knife. Try to overpower me, and I promise you won’t live long enough to regret it.”

Jon gets as far as parting his lips before Trevor angles the blade, the harsh white light of the Lonely glinting off the metal. Jon’s every instinct screams at him to move, to pull Martin to safety – to stand up, debility be damned, or do anything at all to diffuse the situation. He wants to snuff out anything and everything cruel enough, brazen enough to trigger the abject terror he sees in Martin’s eyes, starting right here and now. He wants to excise that fear and force it down Trevor’s throat instead. Make him feel it.

He could do it, too. He could–

“What did I just say?” Trevor taps the knife against Martin’s throat – delicately, but deliberately, a measured one, two, three punctuated by a demonstrative slicing motion. Martin squeezes his eyes shut as the sharp edge skates across his skin, just shy of carving into him. Jon’s jaw snaps shut so quickly his teeth collide with an audible clack. “Don’t test me, Sims. I’m a quicker draw. You won’t be able to order me fast enough to stop him bleeding out. And you” – Trevor twists his hand in Martin’s hair and jerks his head back further – “stop squirming. Last warning.”

A choked gasp escapes Martin’s mouth, but he does go still. As still as possible, at least – Jon can see the rapid rise and fall of his chest, the way the knife-edge creases the skin beneath it with each shallow breath, the way his eyes keep darting to the left, trying to catch a glimpse of the Hunter just outside his periphery without moving his head.

Jon wishes more than anything that he could offer some sort of reassurance – and do a better job at it than he did the last time this happened – but he doesn’t dare speak. What would he even say? During the apocalypse, Jon offer some protection, but now? Much as he hated his post-apocalyptic station, Jon would do anything in this moment to have that power back.

Then again, all of that power ultimately amounted to nothing, didn’t it? They escaped this – and many domains that came after – but Jon couldn’t save anyone in the end. Martin was no exception.

Satisfied that the threat has served its purpose, Trevor shifts his attention. Jon’s eyes are still glued on the knife; on Trevor’s white-knuckled grip on the handle; on the dangerous indent the blade leaves on Martin’s throat, its depth fluctuating by micrometers with every minute spasm of Trevor’s hand, with every truncated breath Martin dares to gulp down.

“Heard you talking,” Trevor says. Jon nearly stammers out a denial before he remembers why he hasn’t said anything – and that Trevor still hasn’t lifted the ban. As an added precaution, Jon plasters his tongue against the roof of his mouth and clenches his teeth. “You need this one for something, don’t you?”

Puzzled, Jon follows Trevor’s eyes, and–

Right. Peter. He’s still here, and useless as ever – simply standing there with his arms crossed loosely in front of him, watching the proceedings with some mixture of distant fascination and mild annoyance.

“Bring her back,” Trevor says, applying pressure to the knife for emphasis. “Now.”

Jon tenses. How little that blade would have to sink in to draw blood, to sever something vital–

“Who?” Peter taps a finger against his lips in mock consideration. “Oh, right. Your… pack. Had trouble following her, did you? That’s alright. It was bound to happen eventually. Your endurance isn’t what it used to be.”

Trevor’s hand twitches. “Where is she?”

“Nowhere, now. You’ll never find her.”

“Bring. Her. Back.”

“She’s long gone.”

The tiniest amount of blood wells up where the knife bites into Martin’s throat. Martin’s breath hitches. Jon could kill Peter a second time just for that, if only he could say a word.

“Tell me where she is,” Trevor says, low and dangerous, “or he’s dead.”

Peter bares his teeth in a smile. “No.”

“Tell me!” Trevor bellows, and then he’s heaving Martin aside to charge at Peter.

Martin pitches forward and onto his knees before he can steady himself. Immediately Jon is at his side, stuttering out a feverish mantra of are-you-okay-are-you-okay-are-you-okay. His hands flutter uselessly for several seconds before they settle over Martin’s ears, tipping his head back so Jon can examine his neck. It’s bleeding freely now, the knife having cut deeper with Trevor’s careless handling. Jon whimpers in sympathy.

“I’m fine.” The pronounced quaver in Martin’s voice is not reassuring. “It’s not that deep.”

It’s not, but that does little to settle Jon’s nerves as he gathers the cuff of his sleeve in one shaky hand and brings it to Martin’s neck, applying gentle pressure to staunch the flow.

He’s scarcely aware of what’s going on in his periphery until he hears Peter say, “That was a mistake.”

Jon glances up just in time to see Trevor primed to strike – leaning into Peter’s space until their faces are scant centimeters apart, one hand fastened to Peter’s lapel, the other still gripping the knife, this time holding it flush to Peter’s throat. The gleam of the metal seems dull in comparison to the steely glint in Peter’s pale eyes.

Then Peter’s lips twist in revulsion, the temperature plummets, and Jon knows what’s about to happen just before Peter opens his mouth.

“Go. Away.”  

There is a gravity to the command, as if reality itself is being rewritten: one thread excised from the tapestry with surgical precision, a new one spoken into being and deftly sewn in to replace the old.

In the breadth between the two words, an avalanche of fog billows in. It lingers for only a fraction of a moment, dispersing the instant the last syllable leaves Peter’s lips. In its wake, Trevor is gone as if he’d never been there at all. The void left behind should feel incongruous, but instead it just feels… right. An empty space more tangible than any person could ever hope to be.

Peter straightens his clothes, rolls his shoulders, and turns his cold eyes on Martin.

“Now then,” he says crisply, “enough stalling. You lost. It’s time for you to make good on your word.”

Martin laughs. “You really think I care about–”

“And you,” Peter sneers, fixing his gaze on Jon, “will stay here.”

A stab of icy panic shoots through Jon’s heart. Immediately he shrinks back and hunkers low. Just as immediately, a protective arm enfolds him, a comforting weight settling heavy on his shoulders as Martin gathers him close.

“Not to worry, Martin,” Peter says languidly. “He’ll get used to it here. If anything, it’s far kinder than the swift and bloody end he would meet at the hands of some of the other–”

Peter’s sentence terminates in a confused, punched-out noise. It might have been the sort of cry that starts out as autonomic, born in the fleeting, flailing moment before the conscious mind becomes aware of the source of the alarm. It never progresses beyond that nascent stage. Almost instantaneously the sound is throttled, swallowed up by a winded exhalation.

It happens in a blur: a bright silver flash, a swift horizontal slice from left to right, and then a gush of crimson. Peter’s lips move wordlessly, nothing but a horrible gurgling noise and a spatter of red spittle spilling out. His throat bobs with the effort – to swallow, to breathe, to speak, Jon doesn’t know – and splits the seam wider.

Well then, Jon thinks as he eyes the rapidly-expanding borders of the vibrant stain creeping down Peter’s shirtfront. I… suppose that saves me the trouble.

Peter staggers forward a step, then collapses to the ground, finally revealing his assailant.   

Julia Montauk stares down at her prey with eyes perhaps more wintry than Peter’s, watching impassively as he gags and writhes, fumbling to stem the flood, his feeble fingers slipping uselessly on blood-slick skin. It takes little more than a minute for the weak death throes to subside, and only when the last rattling wheeze of a breath passes through his lips does Julia blink.    

Julia doesn’t even take the time to revel in the kill, wiping the blade off on her trousers without fanfare. “Where’s Trevor?”

“You might have asked him,” Martin says, a nervous laugh bubbling out of him as he takes in the grisly aftermath.

“Bastard wasn’t going to tell me anything.” There’s still blood smeared on Julia’s hands, staining her sleeve, splattered across her ashen face. She pays it no mind.

“No,” Jon agrees quietly. “He wouldn’t have.”  

“You will, though.” The hand holding the knife is trembling, but Julia’s stare is unwavering.

“I… I can’t.”

“You can,” Julia says, matter-of-fact. “You will.”

“I’m not… I’m not a Hunter, Julia. I can’t track him any better than you can.”

“You can See things, can’t you?” Julia advances a step. Although she still carries herself with lethal purpose, Jon can see the way the Lonely has drained her – in the lines of her face, her hollow tone of voice, her haunted eyes. “Well, See which way he went.”

“It’s not… there’s no direction here, no – no distance, not in the conventional sense. Travel doesn’t work like it does in the real world. The journey is the journey, and the destination – whatever it is, and whether you reach it – is dependent on your state of mind.”

“I don’t want your cryptic bullshit,” Julia grits out. “I want a straight answer.” 

“R-right, ah–” Jon clears his throat. “What I mean is, there’s no one way out of here – or… there is, but – it’s not a physical location, per se, it’s–”

“Wait,” Martin says. With mild alarm, Jon looks to him with a question on the tip of his tongue. That question goes unasked: Jon has seen this particular shrewd look often enough to recognize that Martin knows exactly where he’s going with this. “If you want advice, you have to give us something in return.”

Julia barks a laugh, but there’s no true mirth in it. “If anything, he owes us for stealing.”

“Gerry wasn’t yours to keep,” Jon says.

“Gerry?” Julia chuckles derisively. “You that soft on him?”

Jon is too tired to mince words. “I burned his page.”

Martin gives Jon a chiding look, but he doesn’t get a chance to follow through on the reprimand before Julia takes over.

“You did what?” she says, deadly calm.

“He… he asked me to.” Julia’s nostrils flare and her fist tightens around the knife, but Jon doesn’t back down. “He was a person, Julia, and he was hurting. The world was cruel to him while he was alive, and what happened after was even more so. He was owed some – some basic decency for once. All he asked for was to be allowed to rest.”

“So that’s that,” Martin interjects before Julia can reply. “Jon doesn’t have what you’re after, and he’s not a monster, so the only other reason to keep hunting him would be petty revenge. If you want help, you have to promise to leave him be after this.” A pause. “And – and Daisy, too.”

“Everyone at the Institute,” Jon adds. “It’s not full of monsters like you think. Most employees don’t even know the Fears exist. They’re just… normal people working a nine-to-five, and they don’t bring the ghost stories home with them when they clock out at the end of the day.”

“Well,” Martin says thoughtfully, “there is one monster on payroll.”

“Martin,” Jon admonishes, but Martin pays him no mind. 

“Elias Bouchard,” he says. “The head of the Institute, that is.”  

Julia snorts. “You want your boss dead, do it yourself. I’m not an assassin for hire.”

“Yeah, but you hunt monsters, right?” Martin says. “Well, Elias has been killing people to prolong his own life and he has no plans of stopping. You’d be doing a public service taking him out.”

It barely scrapes the surface of the truth, but Jon remains silent. Where he has a tendency to overdo it – to inventory every piece of supporting evidence, to exhaust every possible avenue of debate, to lay out every justification to hammer his point home – Martin has an appreciation for parsimony and precision. In this instance, he seems keen on keeping things simple, doling out only as much information as he deems necessary to lead Julia where he wants her to go.

To plant the seed of an idea and let her nurture it to its natural conclusion. 

“Might be a challenge” – Julia’s eyes seem to light up at that – “seeing as he’s in jail right now for the last two murders he committed, but he keeps implying that it’s only temporary. I’m sure he’ll find a way to blackmail or bribe his way out eventually.” Martin shrugs. “Anyway, he’s fair game if you can manage to get your hands on him, but you have to leave the rest of us alone.” 

Julia lapses into a pensive silence. Her mouth remains shut, but Jon can see the outline of her tongue beneath her upper lip, running over her front teeth as if she’s tasting the idea. Savoring it. 

Finally, she lifts her head. Her eyes find Jon’s. Her pupils shrink as they hone in on him, and for a moment it feels as if he himself is being constricted, the full weight of her attention coiling around him like a python and squeezing the air out of his lungs.

“So?” Martin says, and Julia’s eyes swivel to him. Martin meets them – just as intently, just as searchingly. “Will you call off the hunt?”

Slowly, her eyes slide away from him and back to Jon. She holds him there, trapped in a predator’s tractor beam, for an agonizing moment. And then–

“Fine,” she says.

“You–” Martin raises his eyebrows. “Wait, really?”  

“I need to find Trevor.”

“How do we know you’ll keep your word?”

“You don’t. But your boyfriend’s getting to be more trouble than he’s worth. Monsters are a dime a dozen. No sense in getting us killed over a single one.”

“He’s not a–”

“Isn’t that right?” Julia brandishes her knife, pointing the tip directly at Jon’s face. The distance minimizes the physical threat, but not the weight of the accompanying condemnation. “You aren’t special. Just another parasite masquerading as human. Your boyfriend is fooling himself, but you? You’re not fooling anyone. Not even yourself.”  

Martin bristles. “He’s not–”

Julia keeps her eyes trained on Jon. “Now finish what you were saying earlier, Archivist.”

It was Martin who initiated the negotiations, so Jon looks to him for guidance. Although Martin is clearly still furious – and seriously weighing the benefits of spite against the risk of incurring Julia’s wrath, if Jon is any judge – but in the end, he does offer a curt nod. Only when Jon receives the go-ahead does he begin to answer. 

“I, ah – I can’t tell you which way to go, because the way out of here isn’t a place. It’s more of a… a method. And it’s not exactly the same for everyone, because loneliness isn’t the same for everyone – which means the antidote isn’t the same for everyone.” Unthinkingly, Jon leans against Martin’s side. “Your reasons – for being here, for wanting to leave – aren’t my reasons, and vice versa.”

“Get to the point.”

“It’s about connections. Attachments. To have any hope of navigating the Lonely, you need a reason – something to anchor you, to… to remind you why it’s worth the effort. And in my experience, it’s vital that the link goes both ways.”

“Meaning?” Julia says through gritted teeth.

“Generally speaking, the Powers are evenly matched. It’s one thing for Avatars to, ah…” Jon’s gaze drifts to Peter’s crumpled body, sprawled where it fell. To the places where blood has soaked into the ground, forming crimson clots in the bone-white sediment. “To kill each other. But overpowering an entire domain is something else entirely. If I tried to – to brute force my way out of here using only the Eye, it would never work. It’s just… fear crashing up against fear. You need something else, something stronger than fear, to shift the balance.” Jon takes a shaky breath. “There’s nothing tying me to Trevor except for fear. My fear of him; my fear feeding him.”

Julia purses her lips. “So you can’t find him.” 

“I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not,” Julia says, tossing her head back with a scornful laugh. “Some help you are. I’ll just have to find him myself.” 

“That’s what I just said–” Jon stops himself as Julia shoots him a warning glare. “B-but what I mean is that being a Hunter won’t be enough. We’re more than just fear.” Jon bites his lip and then continues, murmuring: “Ours, or that of others.”   

“Yeah,” Julia scoffs as she turns to leave. “Whatever you say.”

“Julia–”

“What?”  she snarls, whipping back around to glower at him. 

Jon struggles for words for a minute before settling on, “Good luck. I… hope you find him.”

“Sure you do,” Julia says scathingly.

With that, she stalks off without a backward glance. It takes only a few long strides before the fog swallows her up entirely. 

Martin heaves a sigh that is equal parts relief and exhaustion.  

“Do you think she’ll find him?” he asks after a moment.

“I don’t know,” Jon says. “Maybe.”

“Did we do the right thing there? There’s no guarantee she’ll keep her promise.”

“I don’t know.”

“Daisy had a change of heart. Maybe they will, too.” Something must show on Jon’s face, because Martin follows it up with, “You don’t think so.”

“It’s not impossible, I suppose. But even if they change their mind about hunting me, I… have a hard time imagining them giving up on hunting altogether. The Hunt is probably the only thing keeping Trevor alive at this point, and…” Jon sighs. “I don’t know. Sometimes people surprise you.”

“Hm. Either way, it’s… out of our hands, I suppose.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Martin echoes. And then: “Why did you want to help, anyway?”

“It felt… unfair, to deny them a second chance. Daisy got one. I got one.” Jon shrugs halfheartedly. “For all the harm they’ve caused, I’ve done far worse.”

“Jon–”

Jon doesn’t even register the thought crossing his mind before he’s blurting it out: “And – they were children.”

Martin frowns. “What?”

“I…” Jon chews on his lip. “Julia was seven when she lost her mother to the Dark. Arguably lost her father that same night. Trevor… he grew up surrounded by the human sort of monster, but he was still only sixteen when he met the real thing. A teenager, and he watched a monster rip his brother’s throat out. Whatever happened after, whatever choices they made… they didn’t deserve their first monsters.”

“Neither did you,” Martin points out.

It all comes back to that, doesn’t it? What all of their lives might have looked like had they never crossed paths with capital-F Fear. All the branching routes they might potentially have followed, had so many hypothetical futures not been so brutally suffocated in the cradle en masse.

“More than once,” Jon says, “I was given a choice whether to die or… become something else. It doesn’t balance the scales – and maybe it’s not a kindness, given how cruel a choice it is – but… I still didn’t want to deprive them of options. They’ve been subjected to enough of that.”

“So have you,” Martin says quietly. “And it’s not wrong to act in self-defense.”

“No. But it’s not wrong to give people a second chance, either. Ill-advised, maybe, but… I can’t help but think – monsters don’t show mercy, or – or pity. But people can.”

Martin watches him with an expression that is at first quizzical, then concerned, then exasperated – at Jon or on his behalf, Jon doesn’t know – before finally settling on a wistful sort of understanding. 

“Yeah, well,” he says grudgingly. “People can also stand to find a balance between mercy and, you know, basic self-preservation.”

“Touché,” Jon says with an embarrassed laugh. “I, ah. I’m sure Basira will have some choice words when we tell her what happened.” 

“Mm.” Martin is quiet for a minute. “So… when you say we’ll tell Basira what happened…”

Jon sighs. “I still think it’s… unwise for me to leave–”

“But not wrong.”

“Debatable,” Jon parries. He stares into Martin’s eyes, searching for… he doesn’t know – any hint of tractability, anything that might signal willingness to compromise. He finds none. “But it’s a moot point, isn’t it? You’re not going to budge.”

“Nope,” Martin says with a shrug. “Sorry – or… actually, no. I’m not going to apologize for wanting to keep you safe. You wouldn’t, if it were me wanting to stay.”

“That’s… that’s different–”

“You’re doing the double standards thing again,” Martin says. “Whatever. We’ll work on it. Together. The only question is where. So… what will it be?” He extends a hand. “Are we staying, or are we going?”

Jon stares at Martin’s upturned palm. Affection blooms and then wilts under a searing catch-22. The guilt is unavoidable; he has only to choose to whom he will owe his – endless, inadequate – apologies. What does it say about him, that he’s agonizing over what species of shame he can better bear to live with, rather than the objective consequences of his choice?

He doesn’t want it to be his choice. He wants to abdicate responsibility; he wants to be shielded from accusations and blame; he wants plausible deniability; he wants to be selfish with none of the guilt–

But he would still be making a choice. An unscrupulous, underhanded one. Because he knows that Martin will always choose to save him. That Martin will feel compelled to save him. Jon can be honest with himself, own up to his selfishness, and save himself – or he can force Martin to do it for him. Either way, Jon will be putting an entire world at risk for his own sake. The question is whether he burdens Martin with the same guilty conscience.

Fleetingly, he wonders whether he is the trolley or the operator; then he decides that it doesn’t matter, because he frequently hates metaphors and he always hates ethical dilemmas and he especially hates ethical dilemmas couched in metaphor. He isn’t safe within the low-stakes confines of a thought experiment, and his frenzied indecision has consequences beyond sleepless nights or an exasperated debate partner.

Exhausted tears prickle in Jon’s eyes as he tries to find sense in a stream of consciousness more akin to whitewater rapids. He can barely catch a glimpse of each thought as it surges by.

“Jon?” Martin prompts. Jon clings to his voice like it’s a buoy. There’s hope in it, but of a fragile sort, quaking under the threat of being dashed. “Home?”

Home. Jon wants to go home. It’s self-centered, and undeserved, and indefensibly dangerous, but–

“Please,” Martin says – so quiet, nearly a whisper, as if it isn’t meant for Jon at all, but rather a prayer to whatever deity might be listening.

But there is no benevolent power listening. No one else to hear except Jon. And someone like Martin deserves to be heard. 

Martin was right before. Jon has taken leaps of faith. It’s no surprise, he supposes, that the deciding factor is still now, as it has always been, Martin.   

______

Martin is sincerely contemplating the pros and cons of just throwing Jon over his shoulder and hauling him bodily out of the Lonely when finally, finally Jon’s cold palm alights on his outstretched hand. Martin struggles to swallow as he looks up to meet Jon’s eyes, terrified of what he’ll find there. Somewhere in his chest, a pendulum swings wildly between disbelief and relief.

Then Jon gives the tiniest of nods and relief wins out, so immeasurable that it could have bowled Martin over had he not already been on the ground.

“Home?” Martin says again, just to be sure. Please say yes.

Jon’s fingers curl around Martin’s hand. “Home.” 

With that one syllable, relief turns to rapture. When Martin clasps their hands together more fully and pulls him forward, Jon doesn’t resist. Martin takes that as permission to draw him into a full embrace. Jon follows his lead, climbing into Martin’s lap and throwing his arms around Martin’s midsection.

“Thank you,” Martin whispers into his ear. Jon lets out a soft, juddering sigh, and although his breath against Martin’s neck doesn’t feel quite as warm as it should be, it’s reassuring all the same. More reassuring is the way that Jon tightens his grip, locking his hands together against the ridge of Martin’s spine. 

They stay like that for some time – breathing, Martin notes, in perfect synchrony – until Jon starts to shiver, as if he’s just now become aware of how cold it is.

“Come on, then.” It comes out as little more than a croak, and Martin clears his throat before continuing. “Let’s get you home.”

Obediently, Jon slides off of Martin’s lap. His movements are jerky, and when Martin stands and reaches down to help him to his feet, there’s a short delay wherein Jon just stares blankly at Martin’s hand. It takes a few seconds of Martin wiggling his fingers before Jon reaches back, and even then, Martin still has to meet him more than halfway.

Martin wonders how much of that is due to Jon’s own continued reticence and how much is simply the Lonely trying to drag him back under now that it’s so near to losing its grip. Regardless, Jon’s about as light as he could be without literally losing a few ribs. It takes no effort at all to support him, ragdoll as he is.

Having his feet under him does appear to loosen the shackles somewhat. Jon seems to be making an active effort to stand on his own now, his face scrunching up in concentration as he glares down at his legs.

“Here, let me–”

“I’m fine.” It isn’t said irately or even tersely. If anything, Jon’s mouth is running on autopilot while he pours all of his focus into the insurmountable task of standing on his own two feet. The wrinkles on his forehead deepen, muscles in his jaw moving minutely as he clenches his teeth.  

It’s an expression Martin associates with Jon’s trademark, occasionally belligerent insistence on self-sufficiency. Disorientation, it seems, doesn’t curtail that innate stubbornness.

“Let me help,” Martin says, more firmly this time. 

Gone are the days when Jon would have bitten Martin’s head off for such a thing. Granted, even back then, Jon’s attitude wasn’t much of a deterrent. Martin all but evicted him from the premises when he tried to sneak into the building while he was still on worm-induced medical leave. Even so, Martin expects at least some perfunctory grumbling. Instead, Jon just sighs and lolls against Martin’s side, so abruptly that Martin almost doesn’t catch him.

“Oh! Okay. Do you, um… do you want me to carry you? Or – or I can put you on my back, if you think you can hold on?”

Jon opts for the latter suggestion. Judging by how decisively he drapes his arms over Martin’s shoulders, wraps his legs around Martin’s midsection without a hint of self-consciousness, and readily allows Martin to support him with arms hooked beneath his thighs, this must not be a first for him. He settles quickly and breathes a contented sigh that rustles Martin’s hair.

Once Martin’s brain stops short-circuiting, he takes a few steps – and then promptly realizes that he has no idea where he’s going.

“Um. Jon?”

Jon gives an inquisitive hum. An unfairly adorable one, at that, vague and groggy-sounding.

“Do you, uh… do you know which way is out?”

“Oh, it doesn’t really matter which direction you go,” Jon mumbles into Martin’s shoulder. “If you just keep moving, and not forgetting why, it’ll spit you out eventually. Hard to get free once it’s got you stuck in place, but it has to get a grip on you first. Like a… sundew.” A pause. “But frost-tolerant.” Another, slightly longer pause. “And… allergic to companionship.”

“That metaphor got away from you,” Martin teases. Jon accepts the charge with a sheepish chuckle. The sound of it ignites an affectionate thrill in Martin – a warm, pleasant buzz with which the Lonely’s chill could never hope to compete.   

So, just like when he first landed in the Lonely, Martin simply… starts walking – only this time, he’s not on his own. It isn’t long before the dust beneath his feet ceases to be; not long after, the distant tower fades from view. Martin braces himself to wander headlong into yet another iteration of the Lonely – some projection of his own memories, or Jon’s, or even some horrible amalgamation of the two – but the empty white backdrop remains just that. 

The fog is still thick, but its consistency has changed. Before, it was an endlessly-generating blanket of mist, opaque to the eye and yet uncannily insubstantial – as if it existed on a plane slightly removed from everything else, leaching its cold into the skin without ever closing that last atom’s breadth of distance that would lend it true presence. Now, it’s more like smoke: capable of being interacted with and responsive to Martin’s movements, parting and wafting easily out of his way as he continues onward. 

Then, in a terrifying instant, the fog condenses. It obscures Martin’s vision entirely, leaving him unmoored in space with only Jon’s comforting – if slight – weight against his back to keep him grounded. He has a moment to feel as though the walls are closing in on them–    

And then it all fades.

_____

It’s a bit of a shock to the system, stumbling out of the Lonely. In an instant, the temperature goes from freezing to just uncomfortably chill, which still feels warm in comparison. The space in which they find themselves is still cramped, but poorly lit now. In the Lonely, everything had a soft-edged, mirage-like quality to it. Now, as Martin’s eyes adjust to the murk, the world starts coming back into focus. He can even see the outlines of the brick comprising the walls surrounding them.

He has only a few seconds to revel in the solid reality of the ground beneath his feet.

“About time,” comes Daisy’s voice from behind him.

The sight that greets him when he turns around almost makes him wish for the blurry edges and washed-out colors of the Lonely all over again.

The area is illuminated only by the open trapdoor in the ceiling, but it’s sufficient enough for Martin to take in the scene in front of him. The floor, the walls, and even the ceiling are splattered with bits of gore and viscera. Chunks of muscle and gristle litter the ground, along with the mangled remains of what looks like the sloughed-off skin of degloved hands.

One of them gives a minute spasm. Daisy is swift to react, swiveling so abruptly that it nearly gives Martin whiplash. She zeroes in on the thing – one of its meatless, finger-like appendages still twitching weakly – and lunges towards it. There’s a revolting squelching noise as she crushes it beneath her boot. Martin can taste bile in the back of his throat.   

“What the fuck.”

“Found out why Magnus wanted me out of the way,” Basira says tonelessly from where she stands behind Daisy.

“Flesh,” Daisy adds, entirely unnecessarily.

“Yeah,” Martin says, his voice pitching higher, “I can see that!”   

“Probably want to avoid going down that way,” Daisy says, jerking her head at the nearest corridor, where the scatterplot trail of lifeless… Flesh spiders, as Jon calls them, disappears around the corner. 

“Noted,” Martin says, breathing through the nausea. “Wait, did you two – on your own–?”

“Daisy, mostly,” Basira says.

“But–”

“The artefact–” Daisy reaches into her trouser pocket.

The brooch she presents is instantly recognizable, looking exactly as its catalogue entry detailed. What the item description didn’t capture, however, was the sense of dread the sight of it inspires. It awakens something in Martin’s core – a primal, animal instinct that warns of a world that will eat him alive. You are prey, it whispers urgently, just the same as all the ancestral creatures that came before you.

Martin’s reaction must be evident enough, because Daisy hastily returns the artefact to her pocket with an apologetic grimace. “It, uh… it works.”

“Oh,” Martin says breathlessly. “Oh, wow.”

“Yeah,” Basira snorts. “Apparently the universe decided we were due a win for once. Then promptly decided it didn’t want us to get too excited.”

With how quiet Jon has been for the last… however long passed before they emerged from the Lonely, Martin assumed he had fallen asleep. Now, though, Jon makes a noise – rusty, a bit wheezy, but nonetheless classifiable as a laugh. 

Basira narrows her eyes. “What’s so funny?”

Jon hooks his chin over Martin’s shoulder so he can address Basira directly. “Just… twice now – three times from my perspective – he’s tried to orchestrate a Flesh mark, only to be foiled by the fact that it has terrible timing and can’t follow instructions. He’s going to be livid.”

Hoarse as Jon’s voice is – the sort of raspy, painful-sounding croak of someone speaking around a sore throat – there’s still some genuine mirth in it.

“By the way, Basira, you’ve got a bit of…” Jon gestures vaguely, staring at Basira’s shirt.

Basira follows his line of sight. When she sees the unidentifiable glob of meat clinging to the fabric just under her neckline, she swears and starts rubbing furiously at it with her sleeve. Jon lets out another chuckle.  

It’s the laugh of a man who hasn’t slept in over a week and is strained nearly to his breaking point. Martin can relate: he hasn’t gotten much rest himself recently, having spent most of the past eight days fueled by anxiety and a frankly irresponsible amount of caffeine. Now that the immediate danger has passed, the exhaustion is finally catching up with him.  

Basira is too busy glaring at Jon to notice that Daisy is also struggling to compose herself, forcibly suppressing a smirk and schooling her expression before stepping forward.

“C’mere,” she says, her voice gruff as she overcompensates to hide her amusement. “You’re making it worse. It’s all over your sleeve now.”

Basira scowls, but she doesn’t argue. Daisy begins picking at the gore – how she can stomach doing that with her bare hands, Martin doesn’t know. One of her hands migrates to Basira’s shoulder. It rests there for a moment, then surreptitiously begins to brush away another previously-unnoticed bit of flesh. Basira, unfortunately, is not easily fooled.

“Ugh. It’s everywhere, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Daisy says, knowing better than to attempt a direct lie. “I don’t think this shirt is salvageable.”

“Probably for the best,” Basira sighs. “Whatever. I need a shower. Incinerating our clothes can wait.”

“Speaking of which,” Martin says. “Do I want to know what kind of mess I’m walking into when I get upstairs?”

“Nothing worse than usual,” Basira says. “It wasn’t nearly as bad as when Hopworth attacked. Managed to keep it contained this time. Pretty sure nothing made it into the Institute proper–”

“It didn’t,” Daisy confirms. Then, more subdued, rubbing the back of her neck: “I, uh… I could sense them before. Knew they were down here. It’s why they didn’t get very far. I’d probably know if there were any that got away.”

“So, the Hunt–?”

“Talk about it later,” Daisy says. The way she casts a glance over her shoulder doesn’t escape Martin’s notice. Nor Basira’s, it seems, given the concerned furrow between her eyebrows. “Looks like you could use a lie-down.” She lowers her voice and jerks her chin in the vague direction of Martin’s shoulder, where Jon has once again buried his face. “Is he, uh…” 

“I can hear you,” Jon grumbles. “And m’fine.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“You’re a walking biohazard and I have an isolation hangover,” Jon says, lifting his head only enough so that his reply isn’t muffled. “Talk later.”

He makes a shooing motion with one hand, then slumps forward again: a clear refusal to entertain any further discussion. Martin feels much the same.    

“Wait,” Basira says. “Is Lukas–?”

“Dead.” Martin expects her to ask him to elaborate, prepares to argue his case for postponing the play-by-play (at least until they’ve all have a chance to clean up; ideally until after they’ve all gotten in a nap). Instead, she responds with only a single nod.

“Good.” Then she grabs Daisy by the elbow. “Shower. Now.”

“Hope the Institute’s plumbing can handle viscera,” Daisy quips as Basira steers her towards the ladder leading up into the archives.

Martin shakes his head in half-horrified hilarity. On the one hand, it’s difficult to fathom how this became their normal; on the other hand, it’s hard to say whether he’d even know what to do with mundane normal anymore. At some point, it’s either laugh, cry, or go lay facedown in a ditch somewhere.

“Come on, you,” he sighs, hiking Jon up higher on his back. “Let’s get you horizontal.” 

Jon doesn’t protest – simply leans his entire weight forward, molding himself to Martin’s spine, burying his nose in the crook of Martin’s neck, and breathing a soft, “Alright.”

_____

End Notes:

- Catch Martin being EXTREMELY conscious of the terms & conditions of every deal he brokers, because knows he’s not the only petty bastard who will gleefully exploit a loophole. Also catch him going out of his way to specify that Elias Bouchard, Head of the Magnus Institute, London is NOT included in any protection clause, and in fact targeting him is not only permitted but very much encouraged.

- Archive-speak citations for Chapter 33: 053; 154/141/088; 001/126/057; 047; 047; 004; 047; 004; 001/044. - There’s a canon line from Jon in 154 – “Maybe it’s worth it? The risk – you and me, together, getting out of here” – that I sort of… borrowed and reworked for some of Martin’s dialogue, so if that part sounds familiar, that’s why, lol. - And the “I can’t imagine making any choice that would mean losing you. It hurts to know that you could” and “where you go, I go” lines are, of course, stolen wholesale from episodes 199 and 200, because if I’m already repurposing dialogue, I may as well run with it.

- Thank you for reading!

[theyareweird]

9 Deceiving Games Which Aren’t for Kids

For nearly a decade, many games have gained popularity among gamers which has globally impacted the internet. One of the main reasons for this is the aesthetics and styles in which the game developers have decided to structure their work around. These games often come across as cute, fun and silly to children. However, these deceiving games are categorized in the horror genre and aren’t for kids. This article will discuss what games are not for children and why these video games are often being confused as franchises for kids. Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers to the games.

1. The Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) Series

Don’t be fooled by the Chucky Cheese rip-off. These games need to come with seizure warnings. There are a lot of flashing lights and intended blurry screens which will cause anyone head and vision problems. Secondly, the games rely on a player’s fast reflexes and ability to intently listen to all the audio around them. Oftentimes, the sound effects are rather creepy and loud. Not only will a player’s hearing be affected, but these gameplay mechanics will also trigger strong paranoia. There’s also a series of fast, loud and sudden jump scares throughout the games to cause anyone anxiety. In addition, the game series also comes with a lot of dark and complex lore which revolves around a crazed child serial killer.

2. The Bendy & the Ink Machine Series

This isn’t the old Disney franchise it appears to be. The games may look like old animation, but the universe isn’t friendly. Along with the many anxiety-inducing jump scares, there are lots of grotesque monsters which try to kill the player in horrific ways; such as an axe to the head. The lore to these games is the true horrors. If the story isn't sickening, then its twisted. The main lore revolves around a horrible man who goes insane towards wealth. This causes a lot of death, manipulation, cult-religion, sacrifice and inhuman experiments.

3. Yandere Simulator Series

Forget everything about the Japanese culture because, this game has nothing to do with kawaii teenagers. Rather, this game is the dark side to Japanese media. The game is full of blood and gore with its “creative” acts of violence. Not even YouTubers can show many of the scenes without censoring them. Murder, kidnapping, perverted behavior, smoking, drugs, alcohol, blackmail, along with physical and mental torture; are all featured gameplay mechanics in this game.

4. Hello Neighbor

Goofy graphics aren’t only for kids, which makes these games one of the most deceiving video games on this list. The story of the first game involves a young man confronting is childhood trauma of being kidnapped by his neighbor. Jump scares are riddled all over the game as the player acts through the young man trying to break into his old child abductor’s house while also attempting to discover his secrets. Later scenes are rather disturbing as the young man has flashbacks to when he was locked up in his creepy neighbor’s basement.

5. Little Misfortune

Cuteness can be clueless. Likewise, deception is a demon. Based on this statement, the game also contains the main theme of child abduction. In fact, all the sad and horrific adult themes a person can think of are presented in this game. Cussing, depression, substance abuse, neglect, general abuse, death, puberty and body sexual misconduct are some of the topics included. A player can attempt to avoid reading anything inappropriate, but its impossible to prevent the two main characters from talking about disturbing subjects as the game progresses. It’s also impossible to avoid seeing and doing unsettling things. This is due to the gameplay mechanic of making choice selections for the characters in order to progress in the story.

6. Parsnip

Again, this is not Disney and cartoons aren’t only for kids. Unlike the more obvious games previously mentioned on this list, this game has a lot of semi hidden themes. Narcissism, depression, child neglect, smoking and alcohol abuse are a few topics in the game. However, the main theme includes sacrificial rituals for Satanism born of animal slavery.

7. Hello Puppets & Hello Puppets: Midnight Snow

The Muppets may be mentioned in the first game, but Jim Henson has nothing to do with either of these games. Thanks to the voodoo rituals, the lore centers around crazed and disfigured puppets brought to life by kidnapping humans and converting them into hosts. Jump scares, blood and gore add to the player’s paranoia and anxiety. In addition, the first game is packed with consistent cussing and fowl language.

8. Duck Season

This isn’t a remake to a game of childhood nostalgic. Instead, this is a new take on the game entirely. The game has several routes and endings. Depending on the players choices, there’s an ending where nothing occurs. However, if the player decides to shoot the dog and do a series of other specific tasks, different things will happen over the course of the game. These range from weird, sad, disturbing and scary. Blood, stalking and murder are the most consistent subjects in the game.

9. Doki Doki Literature Club & Doki Doki Literature Club+

Once more, the teenage Japanese culture isn’t innocent. Depending on the player’s choices, many sad and disturbing things will take place in the game. In addition, the more the player replays the game, the scarier it becomes when the game begins intentionally glitching out. Depression, suicide, manipulation, murder and aggressive control are also many themes scattered throughout the character’s stories.

What do you think? Do you agree with the list, despite how some of these game franchises purposely market to children for business reasons? If not, why? Are there any other child-looking, mature adult games? Please share with me!

[dreamkidddream]

I really enjoyed your writing on the ADA members with a younger sibling like partner <33 I was wondering if you could write the same scenario but with Chuuya and Fyodor? Except the younger partner in question has a rough past and cheery/joking personality similar to Dazai(?) I'm super excited to see more of your writing!! c:

Hi anon! Thank you for the compliment and for reading (here’s the scenario for those that want to read it)! The only difference is that instead of this reader being pure, they’re going to be like a mini Dazai (or at least similar to him). One change that I did make was that Reader isn’t as suicidal as Dazai (ie. constantly trying to find a way to end their life), but Reader is ready to go whenever and wherever, whether it’s on their terms or not. Reader is gender neutral and hope you enjoy!

Also ayyyeeee my first time writing for Fyodor! Hope I did him justice cause his part took a while lol

TW: Mentions of suicide, dark moments (Reader is a bit sadistic, but nothing graphic is mentioned) small spoilers for Dark Era arc and Season 3

Acting as a Younger Sibling with a Rough Past and Personality Similar to Dazai with: Chuuya and Fyodor

Chuuya

Well he was extremely disturbed to say the least. Okay extremely may be over exaggerating, but the way you acted got underneath his skin bad

You reminded him too much of Dazai, minus the suicide attempts and the animosity towards him. Although that didn’t stop the morbid jokes from happening

“Hey Chu-Chu, what did the librarian say to the guy that wanted to check out a book on how to commit suicide?”

“How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that!-“

“Go away, you’re not going to bring it back. HA! A knee slapper, am I right?”

He wondered if Dazai got to you first like he did Akutagawa, and if he did, that was just another reason to strangle him

You were his partner, and you were young. So seeing the way you interacted with everyone and everything with such a pessimistic attitude while still being cheery was alarming

Not to mention how easy it is for you to just readily accept death at every turn. You’re the literal embodiment of “guess I’ll die” and it drives Chuuya up the wall every time

He remembers the one time an enemy held you hostage how you were so cheerful to finally be rid of this joke you called a life, and that you told the guy who was holding a gun to your head to “put it between the eyes, it looks 10x better that way.” And “don’t be afraid to blow my brains out either! But you do you, but I think it’s a rather stylistic choice if I do say so myself.”

The man thought you were trying to distract him at first, but when he figured out that you were serious he honestly got so nervous he was ready to just let you go and suggest therapy lmao

After he handled the situation, he took you directly under his wing. Sure, you were already his partner, but he was really going to look out for you including outside of work. If it meant that he had to “babysit” you, then oh well

Plus he didn’t want to face Mori if he just let you die while under his care

You realized what he was trying to do when you two would go off to “collect information” and would be doing the complete opposite. “Hey, I’m kinda hungry, let’s take a break and grab a bite to eat.”

“I thought we had to get this info back to Mori ASAP. Not that I care if he’s mad, he’s been holding out on me and this is the perfect way to take revenge.”

“Holding out how?”

“I told him that since he’s a doctor he would be the perfect teacher to show me some new techniques.”

“...on?”

“Torturing, duh! My methods are getting kinda stale, and I do want to perfect my craft after all. I want to be good at something before I kick the bucket, Chu.”

Poor man is honestly in so much distress because of you please help him

And the way you interacted with the other members was both entertaining and horrifying to watch at times. Majority of the time, you were this happy go lucky kid with a dark sense of humor (you still made people smile, although sometimes it was tense or apprehensive, but whatever a smile is still a smile). But when you were having a bad day or a mission was going wrong, everyone knew to steer clear of you.

A new recruit tried to cheer you up one day, telling you that “it could always be worse”. You then got pulled into the office with a very angry Chuuya and a mildly disappointed Mori.

Chuuya finally had enough after months of this occurred. It was like a never ending cycle: except your behavior was getting increasingly more reckless and dangerous. It was driving him crazy trying to figure out why you were this way and if it was any way to snap you out of it

He wasn’t a stranger to death, he’s seen it with his own two eyes, end even killed people with his bare hands. But the huge difference between you two is that he didn’t particularly enjoy killing, if it had to be done then he had no problems doing so; it comes with the job y’know? But with you, you took actual pleasure in killing. It filled you with a sick sense of glee, and it even made his stomach turn

The bond between you two grew from just a typical work relationship (as far as working in the mafia goes). He knew that from underneath your rather concerning persona, you were just troubled. Someone or something made you this way, and while he had his own troubles growing up, he was able to deal with it and overcome his issues. It just seemed like you just...gave in to yours. And it made him feel pity for you.

You didn’t mind Chuuya at all. You actually liked being his partner! He was pretty much the only person that you didn’t feel a need to harm or kill. And he was fun to be around, when he wasn’t being such a party pooper (I mean what’s the point of being in the mafia when you can’t purposely spill some blood every now and then for fun?). The only thing you didn’t like was how he would try and get you to talk about your past. You honestly didn’t see a point in it, it’s called the past for a reason, why didn’t he understand that?!

But no matter how many times you would shut down or try to change the subject, he would always try again, and again, and again. It was very annoying. And you didn’t like to talk about it. Why didn’t Chuuya understand that?!

Eventually, his pestering worked. One day after a rough mission when he had to patch you up, you opened up to him. You didn’t immediately tell him everything, but you gave him small insights to what happened, to what lead you to be this way

You could tell that he was grateful that he was finally getting somewhere with you. And you yourself was surprised that your dynamic didn’t change. He didn’t look at you with sympathy in his eyes, he didn’t baby you, he wasn’t disgusted by you, everything was normal. The only difference is that Chuuya told you that it was okay to talk to him, and that you shouldn’t be scared to approach him (psh you scared, yeah okay)

Chuuya felt like a weight lifted off his shoulders once you opened up. You were still a bit sadistic (but you did tone it back after the recruit incident, and after you saw how repulsed he looked, so you just did everything behind closed doors now) and had your cheery persona on, but it felt a little bit more real now. It felt genuine. It gave him a good feeling to see some spark in your eyes instead of the full he felt himself getting used to. And he would never say it to you, but it also gave him a warm feeling with him being your role model (you knew but didn’t want to burst his bubble yet)

Your change wasn’t very noticeable at first, but that’s okay. No one needed to know, it was fine with just you and Chuuya. You still felt the desire to just be done with life, but it wasn’t your focus whenever you were with him. You hadn’t made peace with your past yet, but you felt you could one day with him by your side. He was someone that you didn’t knew you needed (or wanted to admit to), but it worked out in the end. You had doubts that you could or would ever change, but if you did, growing to be someone like Chuuya would’nt be the worst possible outcome

Plus, whenever he did run into Dazai with his new sidekick, he is 10000% bragging about how much better and cooler you are, with him being the superior between them both. He can’t WAIT till you guys can whoop their ass

Fyodor

Well weren’t you such an interesting character

To see someone as young as you ready to just leave this world in an abrupt way was intriguing, and he realized that he could use this to his advantage. Maybe even give you something to gain in exchange

He found you hiding inside a disgusting abandoned building (a fitting place for a rat if he would say so himself), drenched in blood. Fyodor didn’t necessarily care why, but he was curious about one thing: why were you smiling? Your eyes were so lifeless, yet here you were smiling so bright, as if you weren’t covered in someone’s blood

Fyodor found himself smiling down at you. Did you think he was prey, that he was going to be your next target? He wanted you to try, he wanted to see what you were really capable of

“Tell me, what is going to be your next move? Do you wish to attack me?”

“If you do something that I don’t like, then yes, that’s the plan. Why are you here Mister? You wanna have some fun too?”, your smile turned into a smirk, twirling your very sharp knife in your hand. “You’re not even from here, so why are you trying to bother such an innocent kid like me?”

He matched your smirk, “You are from innocent, child, even a blind man can see that. To see just how full of sin you are. This wasn’t your first atrocity that you committed nor would it be your last. Which is a shame, it might be too late for me to cleanse you of your filth.”

Oh, he was going to be very amusing to mess with. But you weren’t stupid. Something wasn’t right with this man. No one would walk up to someone with copious amounts of blood on them, holding a weapon that caused said blood, while berating them about being “full of sin”. What was his ability? Did he have people with him? Was the building surrounded or booby trapped? These questions swirled around your head, all while he just kept smirking at you. He was pissing you off, who the hell did he think he was?

But you kept your anger at bay, plastering a cheerful smile on your face. “Sin? Cleanse me of my filth? I guess I do kinda stink but who exactly do you think you are, some type of God?”

“That’s exactly what I am. I’m here to free this world from this wretched curse that has been brought upon.”

...huh? Did-did he escape from the asylum or something? Did he seriously believe himself to be a God (not even a prophet but an actual God)? Seeing your confusion, he continued on, “The curse of ability users. They plague this Earth, and they need to be eliminated.”

“Why is that? What’s wrong with having abilities? Hellooooo, some people’s abilities are actually pretty cool! If you just have a terrible ability, it’s your problem, not the world-“

“Why not let me show you why it’s indeed a curse?”

“And how would you do that? You must be crazy if you think I’m going anywhere with you. I may be dangerous but I’m not dumb!”

“You poor, misguided soul.”, he tutted at you. “Look at where you have ended up at. These people with these so called “cool abilities” have failed you, have they not? Yet you still idolize them, not believing that they are the reason for your misfortunes. If they were truly your idols, they wouldn’t have left you to fend for yourself, to live among the rats. They left you to rot, do you not see that?”

He was hitting too close to home, he was getting too personal, too close. He didn’t know you at all, you’re a complete stranger to him, but why did his words hold some truth to them?

“Come with me, and I will prove to you first hand why this has to be done.”, he was now physically close to you, staring you deep into your eyes. “It would be such a waste for you to die without knowing the truth, wouldn’t you agree?”

You didn’t have much, he wasn’t wrong. But if he could take you somewhere with real food and not scraps you had to fight to find, and to have real shelter, then fine. You agreed. And if you felt that something was up, you’ll just kill him, run away, or both

After he took you away, he kept to his word. It seemed like he was really was telling the truth, you getting first-hand experience like he promised. It was scary that he was right, but you were also indebted to him. He not only allowed you to live in luxury (at least it was luxury to you considering what you had before), but he opened your eyes to what the true problem is. He gave your life a new purpose. If you two were able to successfully complete his goal, then your problems would be gone forever right? You would finally be able to feel a sense of peace, and you can’t wait till that could happen

You and Fyodor, after he opened your eyes, bonded easier than in the beginning. You were smart enough to not fully trust him after leaving with him, but after just a couple of pulled strings to cause certain things to happen, you slowly melted and molded into the way that he planned. You would be an excellent pawn in his grand plan, and you would do well in keeping him entertained at the same time

You were a joyful child, even when carrying out his dirty work, you did so gleefully. After joining the Rats in the House of the Dead, you tried to spread that joy among the other members. They didn’t find it very amusing, but you didn’t care and neither did Fyodor. You were far too important to let go of now

You were always by him, it seemed. Always in the same space, whether he was planning his next move, and playing the cello, you were always there with this look of awe directed at him. Every time he would catch you staring, he would simply chuckle and softly reprimand you about, “how rude it is to stare, but you simply can’t help it.”

He even taught you how to play the cello!

You sounded terrible but practice makes perfect

As time went on and the end goal seeming to be closing in, he came to see you as more than just an expendable tool. He found out about your past, but simply proved to you once again why you two had to make sure the curse was ridden as soon as possible. No one wanted a repeat of what happened to you to happen to anyone else, so the mission had to be success. Failure was not an option

Fyodor didn’t see himself as a cruel man towards you. He just didn’t mince his words and he made sure that you were dealing with the truth, and not some lie that was attempted to be twisted as reality. If anything, that was the way that he showed that he held some compassion for you, he wasn’t willing to let you be lead astray from the truth again, not while he was here. You had somehow wiggled your way into his mind, where he had been accepting of your close bond, and he took that into consideration

Once his goal is achieved and he has truly made his place known as a God, he’ll make sure that you gain your rightful place among him as well. You were worthy in Fyodor’s eyes, and as long as nothing came in between your bond and the end goal, then everything will work out. He will make sure of that.

[coffeebeannate]

The Old Guard: Vol 2-Force Multiplied (Summary &Overview)

I’d been meaning to make this post for a while, and kept forgetting. Because I know there are those who are curious about the comics and not sure about reading them, or can’t read them, would rather opt out etc. So I’ve put together a basic summary and breakdown of what happens within the issue. I’ll include some information about the characters, some timelines (as I can, we know what Greg thinks of timelines) and mostly keep it uncommented until my own general thoughts at the end.

The movie mostly follows the first comic almost completely, and bits of the second, so I’ve not created a summary of the first volume.

Under a cut, includes images and information. If you want a TL’DR, skip to ‘Final Thoughts’ at the end. Long post.

Content/Trigger Warnings: Mentions of Human Trafficking, Slavery, Torture (This one I need some clarification on, gonna use the word just in case but..basically that’s what it is)

**SPOILERS**

Credits: The Old Guard Vol 2 Force Multiplied is created by writer Greg Rucka and aritst Leandro Fernandez. Colouring by Daniele Miwa. Letters by Jodi Wynne. Publication Design by Eric Trautmann. Edited by Alejandro Arbonna.  Published by Image Comics. Graphic Novel Published 2020. USA. 

Characters and Settings

Characters are the same from volume one. So we still have Andy, Joe, Nicky, Booker, and Nile. As well as more about Lykon and Noriko (she’s not Quynh in the comics, she’s Noriko). There’s more Copley too.

Additional/new characters are FBI  Agent Mustafa King  (also called Moose) and people who work for Noriko *none are named*.

Setting is California, USA and historical settings for the flashbacks we have for Andy. Summary and Overview (Basically the story overall, broken down, with my own commentary)

We open here, with a flashback of Andy’s earliest life. It’s a tiny bit vague, but provides the general idea.

I believe Andy is mortal here, but I’m not 100% sure. I believe she’s providing the narration to her first death. Which comes as the result of being betrayed in battle.

(Much of the stories focus is on Andy. I’ve noted it before, but Andy is our narrator, and a lot of the story is told via her flashbacks, over narration and POV. The comics really are Andy’s story, with the cast supporting around her.

We cut to modern day, of Andy, Nile. Nicky and Joe doing a job in California, USA. I believe the whole job revolves around taking down human traffickers, and in a couple parts. The job at the beginning has a shoot-out during the day, a car chase and then a stealth take down on a dock and shipping warehouse at night.

I just thought Andy looked cool here. Moving on.

Nile and Andy have a cool sportscar. Joe and Nicky have this very stylish *coughs* but exceptionally practical large van.

After the four of them take care of their day business, we cut to Booker being confronted in Paris by Noriko. Now the scene presented in the comics here is close to what we see at the end of the movie. Except this time it’s at night, and Noriko essentially kidnaps Booker. Since she wants to know where the others are, and Booker won’t tell her.

I’ll cut right to the chase. She uh. She tends to torture him. She’s got him on a heavy chain with a metal collar, and at one point drowns him over and over again to get him to talk. He never does, but she keeps him around anyway. 

Around this time Agent King (Moose) appears, and then manages to come across Nile. Which leads to the infamous ‘stew of romance’ scene. 

However. while Nicky and Joe are amused (and making bets on him asking her out).. (I love them)

Andy is not amused at all and loses her goddamned mind over it. To which she threatens to..spank Nile (????????) and Nicky and Joe basically tell her to calm down. (Andy’s worried that Nile befriending a mortal is going to end badly, and Nicky and Joe remind her that even if it does, they can’t just stop her. And that some things, Nile has to learn and adjust to herself. Nile is smart, and she’ll come to her own conclusions in time. Interfering isn’t right.

(They all look so sad in the bottom there, help me)

After this is the night mission at the warehouse docks.

Another shot I just thought was cool. Nicky’s sniping shots are done really well.

After they finish, Noriko comes out of the actual blue to get them. Or well..attack them. Joe’s the first one to greet her, and all she does is comment about how he (Yusuf) hasn’t changed and shoots him. She shoots Nile and Andy as well. After both of them recover, Andy and Noriko start fighting, and Nicky puts a stop to it by shooting them both.

(It’s after Andy see’s Noriko that we get the first flashback from Andy to the ships, the same storm that ended up throwing Noriko overboard all those centuries ago and causing her time at sea).

After Noriko and Andy revive from Nicky’s snipe shot, they split, leading us into the next day where Copley and Agent King (Moose, our new character) are surveying the damage at the warehouse and trying to decide what went down.

Copley already knows it’s the Guard, and is trying to explain this to Moose. I do kind of like this moment, where Copley comments to himself about Nicky being a good shot.

Hey-credit where credit is due and all.

Shortly after this, Copley falls on Nicky and Joe’s radar. And they quickly accost him at night. Which is far more satisfying than I thought it would be. A lot of the outcome with Copley and them does feel pretty good. 

(Nicky’s scary face aside, I kind of love this shot, and this moment)

They don’t beat around the bush nor give him much leeway. They let him know-without preamble, that they’re pissed and his continued existence is on their good graces unless he explains himself.

I have actually discussed this before (here-also has extra screencaps) so I won’t go too hard in detail on it.  But I do love these scenes a lot. I like that they’re allowed to be as fuming angry as they have every right to be, and that they present Copley with no bullshit. Nicky and Joe are completely on the same page. And Copley is made aware of where he stands very quickly. This is where Copley presents them with the information he’d collected in his little self driven conspiracy adventure about them, and then drops the bomb that he knows Noriko has Booker.

Around this time, Andy has more flashbacks of Lykon and her old life..including participating in slave trading of humans. (Which comes back near the end) she also meets up with Norkio. Noriko’s main belief system at present is that, they are above humans *mortals* and there is no reason to behave otherwise. They have no need to stay on the same level as mortals when they’re not.

Also around this time Nile hooks up with Agent King.

Copley gives the information about how to track Booker and Noriko to a boat that Noriko is keeping him on and Andy and Nile join them up in the nick of time. This is also where Copley informs them about how Noriko has gotten her money-organized crime..and basically whatever she can get her hands on. Which is also how Noriko has her own personal army.

‘Fancy’ Joe please.

And for whatever reason, Copley seems to think ‘undercover/distracting’ means..being as stereotypically British as possible?

Though I’ll be honest, I mostly post this cap for how badass Nicky looks.

So! Everything culminates in the boat battle, and at the end, they get Booker back, and handle Noriko. Everyone goes back to a hotel to celebrate, and things are fine until Nile asks Andy about something Noriko had told her. She’d at one point accosted Nile, and told her to ask Andy about “Law 282″ which Andy reveals is the Code of Hammurabi. Which is how they all find out about Andy’s participation in slave trades. slavery etc. Back in her more..ancient warrior days. Nile, and the others are pretty appalled and Andy has a bit of a mental breakdown and explains that she can’t carry on anymore. She won’t. She can’t keep fighting, she can’t keep doing this. Which is when Nile tells them that they have to go. 

They don’t really want to leave her, and ask her repeatedly to come with them-but she won’t. So they leave, even though Andy says she doesn’t want to be alone, they leave. (This is where I say, unless they physically forced Andy to come I don’t personally see what else they could have done without Andy fighting them, and probably figure that she’ll come around).

Next morning:

I’m not sure what ‘others’ Noriko is referring to here, but I personally think she set a lot of this up. She gave Nile that law to give back on purpose. I do wonder if it was part of a larger scheme on her end to alienate Andy from her team and swoop in, but I have no true proof of this beyond theory.

So that’s the basic summary of what happens. 

Other Points:

Noriko vs Quynh

Noriko is very very much NOT Quynh, and I don’t believe the movie is going to act as such either. I’ve seen some *legitimate* concerns with having Quynh portrayed within the movie as she is in the comics, but given the complete difference between the tone of the movies, and the comics, I think that they’ve already set it up to be different. Personally, I’m not too concerned. I have a lot of faith in Gina Prince-Bythewood, and I can already sense where they’re probably going to make alterations.

Andy/Being Abandoned

Andy’s story has some issues. It’s not..great. It is legitimately hard to reconcile the Andy we know with her past, but I don’t see the ending as the team ‘abandoning’ her to the degree it’s presented. I think they FULLY intended to give her some time to cool off and get their bearings themselves, then come back for her. She keeps telling them she won’t come, but they absolutely do try. And everyone knows that nobody forces Andy to do anything Andy doesn’t want to do.

I mean, Idk, but these just..don’t look to be the faces of people who willingly want to leave her behind.

Just Because: 

Nicky and Joe looking over Copley’s work. It’s sweet. Feat WWII Joe.

Final Thoughts

There are-without a single doubt, issues with the comics. I will never deny that. I do enjoy reading them, and I enjoy the dialogue a lot. (And Miwa’s absolutely incredible colouring). I think that there’s a definite difference in tone to them and that there are places where things could be expanded upon overall.

The comics are, as I’ve said before-Andy’s story. The other characters very much exist in support of her, and do not do a lot separately themselves. The movie is definitely more..family with them? Everyone’s personality in the comics is harsher overall. A little bit more dry and dangerous. There’s definitely less comradery with the team too and way less of a family vibe.

As characters, Nicky and Joe are very very similar to their movie counterparts, and I think they are written quite well. They seem to make decisions about what to do together, always appear on the same page *when we see them* and follow the same wavelength We get the sense that they’re completely in-sync. I also do like *though I did say it before* that they’re allowed to have the appropriate reactions and some resolution of what happened to them in Vol 1.

Nile still doesn’t feel as fleshed-out as she could be, so I’m really glad the movie put way more emphasis on her.

There’s some truly strong points in the dialogue-and I personally think dialogue and writing is one of Rucka’s strong points as a writer. Even if I still want to beg him to hire any type of historian whatsoever..and someone who can do math.

I sympathize with the math bit, this is why a helper would be good.

I’m going to wrap it up here, because holy moley this got LONG. If you’ve made it to the end, hi! Feel free to message me with any questions.

[mophamsa]

Thoughts on The Last Of Us Part II

WRITING (creative process)

the game’s storyline is straight to the point, you can see from the trailer that it’s going to be a timeline about revenge. the whole game happens around joel’s death in the beginning and I guess that’s the whole reason why people are upset. but guess what? neil druckmann’s goal was to make you upset, angry and nostalgic. he accomplished his goal and that’s why you’re feeling the way you are.

you not liking the the way things went down does not mean the game’s writing is awful, it just means you were expecting something and got another. not liking something isn’t a crime and it’s totally ok as long as you respect the creators and don’t use your hate to put others down, it’s a valid opinion and that’s it.

what makes a story good is the writing and the thought put into it to make the player/reader/viewer feel a certain way, and the developers did an incredible job to do that. we feel frustrated, anxious and weird the entire gameplay and that’s exactly what they wanted from us, which means they won. I’ll talk more about my opinion on the storyline far ahead.

the graphic visuals of this game are RIDICULOUS, they’re perfect. every detail is insane to look at, they worked so hard to get it right and it was so worth it. every time I entered a new scenario I would just go into photo mode and appreciate the art because that’s what makes the game unforgettable and groundbreaking. the red lighting scenes were so perfectly made and so badass, the sky when ellie goes outside the farm with JJ is breathtaking just like every other view in the game. by far the most beautiful game I’ve ever had the honor to play.

STORYLINE (joel’s death)

the first game gave us a story about love and hope, making us guide joel into taking ellie to the fireflies looking for a cure based on ellie’s immunity. we spend the whole game thinking we’d get to the fireflies, make a cure and live happily ever after but that never happened in those terms. the gameplay made us slowly fall in love with joel and ellie as characters, joel for his tough personality that would fade under the influence of a little girl and ellie for her nativity and innocence as a young teenager who really wants to help other people by making a cure. that’s the whole situation of it, joel getting attached to ellie while she developed a paternal affection for him but in the end joel ends up doing an unforgivable thing, basically destroying the hope for a cure and ruining all hope for the world to heal from the outbreak, so he decides to lie to ellie blaming the fireflies for everything so he doesn’t lose her trust and love.

I do understand liking and loving joel as a character, myself included, because they made the game thinking about it and they knew the audience would develop a major caring for him and ellie as daughter and father, that’s how it was supposed to go and it worked it.

now let’s talk about joel’s death. I think we were all surprised to watch him die so early in the game but considering the game time and storyline, it would have never happened differently. his death was brutal, violent, merciless and inhuman, abby and her crew tortured him until he couldn’t take it anymore and he obviously suffered with ellie being held to the ground begging them to stop. I agree that it was a horrible death but we can’t just pretend joel was a sweet innocent hero because he wasn’t, the audience portrays him as a hero when he literally stopped the human race from being saved, killing the fireflies and acting out of pure selfishness. joel isn’t the angel some people paint him as, he’s not a good person and if ellie herself could never forgive him for what he did, who are we to do so? she said she would try but she never got the chance to and it took her years to even come to terms with it.

most importantly, it’s obvious that people forget these characters are human beings, not real people but they’re real in that universe and technically speaking, they run and feel the same way we would feel if we were in their shoes. they’re people, every character in the game is a person, with feelings, a background, a past, a personality and thoughts. they’re no different than us except for them living in a post apocalyptic world were morality and ethics aren’t taken into consideration since there is no law or living lifestyle.

for us to understand this storyline, we need to step away from our society’s view of morality and wrong or right, because that does not apply to them, everyone in the game has killed people and/or have done something morally questionable in their life since it’s the apocalypse and there is no wrong or right, there’s only how the characters feel about certain situations and how they act on them, which is basically what guides the entire game to happening the way it did: human feelings.

joel obviously changed after the first game, since he starts living in jackson and having to raise ellie as a daughter in a relatively normal town with other people, he’s not the same person as he was in part I, now he turned into a father and a friend, not a merciless mercenary who doesn’t care about others. we see that when he and tommy decide to help abby, a complete stranger who was about to die in the hands of infected, and maybe that’s what led people into hating abby with their heart. but ending this topic, joel’s death was bound to happen, you can’t just expect someone to destroy the world’s hope for a cure and leave with no people being angry at him and wanting revenge, that cure could’ve saved many people’s loved ones but he chose to save his loved one. if joel is indeed a terrible person or not, that’s up to you to decide, that’s more of an internal turmoil within yourself that is different for everyone depending on their experience from part I and how they view joel in the end. it’s kind of messed up if you think about it, would you let the only person you care about die for a not confirmed chance of a cure in a world that is already doomed? that’s a question for yourself.

joel’s death happened so you could see things from multiple perspectives, which is the whole fucking point of the game. there are multiple sides to every story, it’s the same world we live in except in different circumstances. your actions affect others, people have feelings and if you hurt them they might act a certain way, those characters are no different than us because they were based on genuine human thoughts and actions.

ELLIE (growth and development)

ellie is one of the most well written characters I’ve ever seen in my life. she’s the symbol of badass but fragile woman and that’s so amazing to me. as the game goes by we start seeing many sides of ellie, she slowly starts to turn into a completely different person after joel’s death and her urge for revenge. killing abby becomes her main priority the second she leaves jackson and that’s clear in the way she acts and treats others. I’ll have to play the game again to pay more attention to ellie and abby’s behavior throughout the timeline. ellie is the reflection of how the excessive amount of effort you put into a negative thought, the more it will bring you and your loved ones down. watching ellie during the story is such a nice experience, there are times where you love her to death, others you get annoyed with her or don’t agree with how she acts, and that’s exactly how the creators wanted you to feel. revenge takes ellie’s soul from the inside out, from her not being able to forgive herself for letting joel die to her going after abby for nothing but hate for herself in the end.

ellie’s journey is exciting to play and to witness as her relationship with other people (specially dina) starts to fade away and being consumed by hate and regret. we were manipulated into loving ellie since part I and I don’t think she’s a bad person, she lost everything in the hands of other people and went through a lot, losing joel was a deal breaker for her but she just didn’t realize soon enough that killing abby wasn’t going to make things better. ellie’s gameplay was meant to make you reflect on losing a loved one, grief, mourning and revenge, she’s not the lost kid from part I anymore, she’s a grown woman who just lost her dad and she doesn’t even know exactly why. the funny thing for me, which is what makes the story realistic, is that ellie didn’t fully forgive joel yet she still suffered from losing him and went after abby for revenge, when not even herself could forgive him, that’s pretty realistic in my opinion. it’s the human uncontrollable instinct of still missing someone you’re mad at and not being able to say goodbye.

for me, ellie is the perfect and most detailed reflection of revenge and what it can do to you. the game is much more than “revenge is bad don’t do it”, we all obviously know it’s bad but we still have an urge to fight back against it and make the person who hurt us suffer too because it’s not fair for us and it wasn’t fair for ellie until the very last moment.

ABBY (point of view and perspective)

by far the most controversial character of the game. I’ll star off saying I actually like abby and I think the people who hate her so deeply just didn’t understand how things go. hating abby is no different than hating ellie, they’re in the same situation for almost the entire game. abby lost her father in joel’s hands, she was still a teenager and seeing her own dad die for trying to save humanity isn’t easy, just like ellie watching joel being tortured and killed wasn’t easy. being fully honest ellie would’ve done the same thing abby did if joel was the doctor and we can’t deny that.

on the other hand, I do think the ellie and abby gameplays could’ve been distributed better, maybe switching from ellie to abby and back and forth so it wouldn’t get too tiring or confusing since we don’t know the exact timeline when we first play it. that’s the only slightly negative thing I have to say about the game.

I do think abby is a great character, they built her perfectly to make the audience hate her in the begging, painting her as a sadistic monster only to show her side of the story later on in the game and make you realize that you have been wrong all this time, making you see the bigger picture and understand that ellie isn’t the only person in the world, she isn’t loved by everyone, she’s just a girl in the world and so is abby. they both have fucked up pasts and they both lost a lot, and in terms of personality, they’re actually quite similar. we love ellie because we got to see her grow up and WE know that deep down she’s not a bad person, the first impression we had of abby was of her recklessly killing joel with a golf club when ellie was begging her to stop, since that we tend to think abby is a horrible person and that ellie is an angel, but it’s not like that at all. obviously ellie didn’t do anything wrong up to that moment to justify that happening to her, but ellie isn’t the best person in the world either.

the duality in this game was created on purpose and with a deeper meaning, ellie is ellie, abby is abby and the cycle of revenge goes on until both parts understand that it’s useless to keep going. abby let go before ellie could and let her and dina live because of lev, killing joel didn’t change abby to the better, lev changed her. tommy couldn’t change ellie, jesse couldn’t change ellie and not even dina could do it, ellie had to change and forgive herself alone. the point I’m trying to make is that abby is no better than ellie and ellie is no better than abby, they’re both emotionally drained women who are not wrong or right in the end of things.

DINA (support and reflection)

dina is the only character I will 100% defend because she’s flawless and did absolutely nothing wrong during the whole game. in my head she represents ellie’s good side, dina is the constant reminder that ellie hasn’t lost her humanity and hasn’t completely changed into someone else because of revenge, even when she has her downs (example: calling her a burden when dina says she’s pregnant). dina is the most forgiving and loyal character, she loves ellie more than anything and it shows. the sad part of it is that even with dina’s huge amount of love and affection, that doesn’t stop ellie from going in the wrong direction, which brings us to another life lesson: loving someone is a choice you make everyday and nobody can control your choices when you’re determined to do something.

ellie decided to go after abby, dina followed and supported her the whole way through, then she took that for granted and left dina and JJ behind to go after abby again (after abby let her and dina live) officially breaking dina’s heart. that was a choice, dina obviously cared so much about ellie, loved her so much but she couldn’t change ellie’s mind. but the point here is that dina is a reflection of ellie’s bright side, she keeps ellie sane until the very last moment, saving her life multiple times, going with her in a revenge journey, “you go, I go, end of story”, telling the wolves to fuck off and staying by ellie’s side, constantly putting her life at risk while being pregnant, she has loves ellie for such a long time even before getting with jesse (you can read ellie’s journal where she says cat told her dina is jealous of their relationship) and she probably took ellie back when she came back from santa barbara (a theory that I believe in because it makes sense).

dina is one of the few positive ends in the universe of the last of us, highly optimistic, funny, beautiful and an amazing support system for ellie. if it weren’t for dina, ellie would’ve become a monster.

LGBTQ+ REPRESENTATION (ellie x dina and lev)

it’s 2020 and people are still talking shit about the game just because of queer characters. that’s why I say people who hate the game are people who either didn’t capture the story or just didn’t even try to pay attention because of a closed mindset bigot sandwiches. representation is the best path to general acceptance, making people see different stories and realize that someone’s gender or sexuality does not influence on the quality of art.

ellie is a lesbian, that’s clear in the game when she says she’s “not into jessie’s type” (such a nice dialogue by the way), she talks about her ex girlfriend and clearly has had a crush on dina for the longest time (probably the reason why she broke up with cat).

dina is bisexual, in my opinion she always had a crush on ellie but maybe she lost motivation to to after her when she started to get close to cat and started talking to jessie because of that and it ended up working.

now dina and ellie’s relationship is probably the only thing that keeps us sane throughout the game, when we sit down to think “thank god ellie has dina, that means she’s not alone”, which is basically the whole concept of it, ellie not being alone because dina is there to hold her to the ground and stop her from becoming someone she doesn’t want to be.

lev being trans is something I can‘t have an opinion on, I have seen both sides: people saying it was a good approach and others saying it wasn’t an accurate representation. I’m not trans so my opinion isn’t valid and I can definitely see why many people think it was a bad reach but I also can see the other side, so I won’t comment on that.

the nice thing about representation in this game is that they brought it up as a normal thing, the only moment the focus is sexuality is when seth was being a dick and called dina the d-word, ellie got defensive but dina stopped her from getting into a fight. even then the main focus of that situation was how ellie dealt with joel saying she didn’t need his help. the point was never ellie’s sexuality, never, not even in a single moment, because it was never an issue. in a post apocalyptic society people don’t pay much attention to being homophobes (unless they’re in a fanatic religious cult or just assholes like seth).

the game approached the subject very bluntly but in a normal way, not making it that huge of a deal but it is a big deal for those who seek comfort and/or are dealing with their sexuality in a way. if a character they admire ends up being part of a minority group, they can relate to that and feel more comfortable in their own skin. we’re here, we’re real and we exist even in a fucked up infected world.

ENDING + THOUGHTS (moving on)

the last of us part II is a story about revenge, being completely different than part I which is a story about love and surviving. what happens in the second game are the consequences of the first, the choices joel made reflected upon himself, saving ellie costed everything; the cure, people’s lives and maybe a brighter future. people who are bashing the game for it’s storyline and how things went down need to understand that it’s not because we love joel that his actions didn’t matter to others. joel is a human being, so is abby and those who got harmed by joel’s choice to save ellie. joel killed abby’s dad, abby went after him for revenge, a predictable and reasonable thing to do if you just try to see it from her point of view, keep in mind that ellie would do the same exact thing.

if you can’t get yourself to see things from other people’s point of view, you missed the whole point of the game. the storyline isn’t summed up in “revenge is bad don’t do it kids”, it’s just based on the fact that death can never and will never bring you any sort of relief.

the game is the reflection of the cycle of revenge. abby going after joel for killing her dad, ellie going after abby and killing all of her friends in the process, abby finally breaks the cycle letting ellie and dina live but ellie couldn’t get over the guilt and went after abby again, yet she ended up letting her ago and officially breaking the chain for good.

the whole concept of the game is how seeking someone else’s suffering can lead to full destruction of someone’s character and values.

if ellie had killed abby she would’ve turned into the monster she was fighting against and she would lose literally everything she hadn’t already lost: her humanity. I don’t actually know the exact reason that compelled ellie to let abby go, maybe it was losing her fingers and realizing that she’ll never be able to play guitar again, which was her very last memory of joel and what he taught her. it could also be thinking of lev and how he’s the only thing abby has and vice versa, which is what she had with joel and what was taken from her, therefore she didn’t want to turn into the person who put someone through the same pain she was going through. technically if she killed abby she would have to kill lev to avoid him coming after her and continuing the cycle and doing that would kill ellie even more.

to make this shorter, abby moved on earlier than ellie. mostly because abby actually got her revenge killing joel but you gotta look through things before you put all the blame on her. ellie lost everyone in her life, her parents, riley, tess, sam and then joel, going after abby was a defense mechanism since she couldn’t have done anything to save those she lost before, but losing the one who took care and raised her was something she couldn’t bare, specially when she thought joel was the only person she had even though they weren’t in good terms and she and dina weren’t a thing yet.

ellie needed to revenge joel at all costs because that’s what she thought he would want, but in the end she realizes he would want her to move on and be happy, because that’s what he always tried to give her: the best shot in life that he couldn’t give sarah. ellie thought that by killing abby she would be able to let go, when in reality she would just feel more guilty for leaving lev alone like she was having no emotional relief concerning her PTSD. ellie got to that beach fully aware that killing abby wasn’t going to solve any of her problems, but a single memory of joel made her make the decision that she wasn’t going to let her go without a fight. their final fight was silent, in the middle of nowhere, they had absolutely nothing to say to each other because they were both fighting for nothing but excessive mental emptiness. they both knew that nothing would bring their loved ones back and they were ready to move on.

what the game wants to teach you is that nothing good comes from searching revenge and other’s suffering. ellie gets consumed by her own view of justice and ends up losing herself both inside and outside, when she comes to terms with the fact that killing abby won’t bring joel back from the dead, it’s already too late. she lost jessie, her friendship with tommy, her good memories with joel, her fingers which results in her not being able to play guitar anymore, the love of her life and her son.

in the last of us part one ellie says that her biggest fear is to end up alone, and the saddest part of all is that her actions led her to making that fear come true. the ending is ambiguous, it can mean something different to different people depending on what you choose to interpret things and how you view the characters. for some, ellie could just end up alone looking for a life purpose that doesn’t involve anyone from her past. to others, ellie returned to jackson and proved dina that she loved her and that now she’s ready to fully commit because she let go of her anger and is at peace with herself and her inner struggles. but that’s all up to you to decide what you want to believe in.

at the end of the day, this storyline is beautiful, heartbreaking, breathtaking and emotionally draining. it makes you think and open your mind to new perspectives, which is honestly one of the best things art is able to do, create a new universe for you to deep your thoughts in and take your own conclusions. the last of us didn’t have a bad or good ending, it had a realistic ending. just because they didn’t make this the way you wanted it doesn’t mean the writing is bad, it means you’re probably disappointed and that’s fine, but hating on it isn’t the way to make a point.

I can only thank everyone involved for creating this world and making me so invested in it, connecting me with these amazing characters and emotions that I never experienced playing a game before. there is nothing more to say except: endure and survive.

[dcomicsficrecs]

Got any good longish casefic recs? Got a loooong trip and I need something to keep me occupied. Thank you so much!!

First of all, thank you for sending this ask! I love case-heavy stories and long fics, so that was an opportunity to re-discover some of my favorite stories. I am going to re-read half of the list now, as well!

Here we go - top ten recommendations for long(ish) case fics!

1) detective stories series by prismatical starting with bad signal (38K)

The rescue mission went well. Nightwing is safe. Everything should be alright.

Right?

It’s a really gripping story that will keep you on the edge of your seat till the end. Features all of Batfam with Dick as a focus but other boy Robins play significant part too.

2) For Those Who Can't  by  GoAwayOlivia (8K)

They don’t understand him at all. There is no setting him off, that’s not the way it works. And he doesn’t go on violent sprees. Jason kills when the situation demands. That’s it. Plain and simple. He doesn’t lose his temper and murder any asshole that pisses him off. Every kill is a decision that he makes, and every decision is carefully weighed and measured with a cool head. He only ever kills because the person deserves to die.

Red Hood!Jason conducts investigation into a sting of murders that happened on his territory. I have a lot of feelings about this story and I’m sure you will, too.

3)  Raisin Delight  by  LemonadeGarden (8K)

A year after Jason Todd dies, Tim Drake and Bruce Wayne take on the case when they notice strange occurrences in Gotham city. This has disastrous consequences, but so do most things that Tim gets caught up in, so what's new, really.

It’s not only a case fic but also a time travel fic which is, imo, a double treat! The ending is very powerful even if I expect you’re going to have mixed feelings about it.

4)  Little Wing and Big Bird by Airawyn (16K)

When Bruce attempts to murder Jason in his sleep, the young Robin goes to his predecessor for help. Nightwing and Robin must work together to find out what happened to the real Bruce Wayne.

Fic featuring Robin!Jason teaming up with Nightwing!Dick. The boys save Bruce and Alfred and have a heart-to-heart in the process. Superb.

5) Some fics from More to Being a Father than Having a Kid by Romiress:

We Don't Raise Heroes (70K), Don't Call It Revenge (58K), Legacy's Sway (107K)

While technically not a case fic but include a big mysteries that Batfam investigates so I think it counts. I highly recommend the whole series. First fics are gen!

6) The Bat's Crest by livierambles (200K+)

Tragedy strikes the hero community when Bruce Wayne commits a crime so heinous even the best start asking for blood. However, as the heroes try to recover from the hit and carry out justice for their friends, a random assortment of people start acting oddly, including the current Speedy Tim Drake, a child hostage in Gotham, and a young man from an unremarkable circus amongst others. All of them seem intent on saving Bruce Wayne from the grasp of the Justice League for no apparent reason, going as far as betraying their previous allegiances.

Unknown to the Justice League, these people are equally confused. Clearly they're stuck in another dimension, but how do they get back? How did they even get here? Who else is stuck in this world? And how long will Tim's patience last? Back home, the Bat was a planetary symbol that struck fear in the hearts of criminals. In this new world, it has no meaning, save for the handful of stranded souls.

All Batfam is featured. While this is also technically not a case fic but adventure/dimension travel fic, its plot has a mystery element to it and characters have to investigate a lot as far as I remember. It’s probably the only WIP here on this list but god, is it worth to read and bookmark it. You know what? I’m even going to go ahead and subscribe to the author, too.

7) The Volatile Verse (117K) by BlackFriar, starting with Volatile (47K)

After a transdimensional mishap, Batman and Robin are faced with a murderous Joker rampaging through Gotham and an anti-hero who is determined to remove Robin from the crime-fighting business. Can they strike a balance before it all ends in tragedy and the Joker has the last laugh?

It’s a dimension travel case fic (series of fics, actually!) set in Young Justice with Robin!Dick and main universe!Red Hood!Jason. It’s a great story that doesn’t shy away from darker themes, can and probably will make you cry, but it also has hopeful ending. This Jason is going to be okay with these Bruce and Dick, and at the end of the day, after the case is solved, what else do you need?

8) I saved one of the best till the end, and it’s basically anything by Mikimoo

Fair warning, most of their fics are jaydick. My favorites are:

8.1 Between The Bars (48K)

A number of suspicious deaths at South Haven Penitentiary are being ignored by the authorities, but have attracted the attention of various other parties.

OR:

That one time Dick and Jason accidentally ended up undercover on the same mission and started a riot.

8.2 And If I Recover (33K)

Officer Dick Grayson is captured by a criminal group that makes it's living from torture and extortion. Half the family are forced to watch as events unfold, while the rest franticly try to track down the culprits.

8.3 That Awful Bitter Taste (30K)

Roped in to find out what has happened to Dick on an undercover mission, Jason finds himself faced with situations that challenge his personal identity. Meanwhile, Dick is having to face demons from his past, and Jason is not sure if he is helping or hurting.

But of course, the best time to have this particular existential crisis is while trying not to die in the desert, and being chased by angry men with guns.

8. 4 This Night (33K)

The Red Hood and Officer Grayson are on the same case.  A small misstep has far reaching consequences for them both.

All those fics are tagged as jaydick, and most of them have high rating but it’s for graphic description of violence so read the warnings before reading.

Even if you aren’t a jaydick shipper, those fics are plot-heavy and case-focused. The relationship dynamic and its progress would be natural and heartfelt as well.

Also, if asked to choose only one fic from the author, or only one jaydick, or only one case fic, I probably would have chosen Between The Bars, just so you know.

9. Two Birds on a Wire by  empires, pentapus (20K)

Dick asks Jason for help on a case. Jason should have never agreed.

It’s so popular you probably read it already. Still, just in case, I will include it too because it’s such a great undercover mission fic.

10)  Crimes at Night by empires (16k)

It's summer in Gotham, and the city is experiencing a record breaking heatwave and a rash of violence centered around a strange new drug circulating through the city's youth. Robin is determined to locate the drug's source and put an end to the distribution before things get worse.

Young Justice verse, Robin!Dick and never adopted!Jason, jaydick. It’s a great AU and well-executed case fic and if you’re into Jason/Dick, their relationships are very cute also.

[current-mcr-news]

Behind the Scenes: The Umbrella Academy - Episode 1

BRANDON JENKINS: In 1953, a 25 year old director named Phil Tucker had $16,000 and just four days to make his first sci-fi film. The plot? A creature comes to Earth with a death ray and wipes out all of humanity, except for eight people who are immune to the creature’s weapons. He called the film Robot Monster.

Movie clip: With the swiftness of a deadly cosmic ray, the Earth is inundated by indestructible moon monsters. Their ghastly mission? Death for all humans.

B: The film was so low budget, Tucker couldn’t even afford to get alien costumes, so he had the monster in a gorilla suit with a TV for a head.

Movie clip: What astounding technical developments are being made to protect mankind?

B: The release was a disaster. It was widely panned. Its lasting legacy would’ve been that it was one of the worst movies of all time. But in the early 2000s, a kid from New Jersey with a knack for drawing comics saw a picture of the Robot Monster and it stuck with him.

Gerard Way: I’ve never even actually seen the film, but I saw pictures of this creature over the years, and they’ve got a TV set, kind of circular space looking head, and they have a gorilla body, and I was like, “I want a superhero that’s kind of inspired by this.”

B: The kid’s name was Gerard. He’d been writing comics since he was 15 and was on his way to making it as a professional comic book artist.

WAY: I went to art school and I was an illustration and cartooning major, so comics were kind of like my major, and I was like this perpetual intern. I interned at DC, I pitched a cartoon to Cartoon Network, and then I landed a job as a toy designer at this place called FunHaus in Hoboken. But that’s like right when the band took off.

B: That band, Gerard’s side hustle, would become massive alt-punk sensation, My Chemical Romance. Seemingly overnight, My Chemical Romance and Gerard were making some of the most popular music in the world, getting spins on terrestrial radio, dominating music video countdowns, they were even nominated for a Grammy. But while he traveled across the globe leading a rockstar life, Gerard kept up with his first love - drawing.

WAY: So I really missed comics and we were in Japan and we did a signing at a shop, and one of the fans gave me a little marker set and it was Copic markers. They were like the greatest markers that I’d ever used before, and so I started to create Luther.

B: Luther, a superhero with a gorilla body and space helmet who lives on the moon was the very first character Gerard drew in what would become his hit comic The Umbrella Academy. I’m Branden Jenkins and this is Behind the Scenes: The Umbrella Academy. This season, we’re going backstage and inside the making of season 2. The first season of the show, based on Gerard’s comic of the same name, launched in February of last year and quickly became one of the most beloved series on Netflix. Now it’s back for its second season with bigger effects, bigger characters, and bigger drama. We’re going to catch you up on everything that’s gone down in The Umbrella Academy universe so far, and we’ll spend the next five episodes breaking down how the team shot the multi-million dollar superhero production across two countries, and how in the midst of a global pandemic, they managed to finish it from inside their own homes. But first, we wanted to take a look back and dig into the roots of The Umbrella Academy. So today, I’m catching up with the creators of the comic and the guy tasked with making the TV series. We talk about how the graphic novel was adapted for your screens.

B: Alright, so if you haven’t watched season 1, go back and watch season 1 on Netflix. For those of you who just need a quick recap: At 12pm on October 1, 1989, a supernatural event occurred. Forty-three babies across the planet were born to mothers who were not pregnant just seconds before. The world was confused, intrigued, and one eccentric billionaire wanted to find the babies and adopt them. He ended up with seven. Each baby had a superpower, and what do you do when you’re a billionaire with a group of kids with superpowers? You train them to become a crime fighting family.

Reginald: I give you the inaugural class of The Umbrella Academy!

B: When Gerard Way started creating the members of the Academy, he started with the most fundamental material. 

WAY: I created a list of all the things that interested me. It could be anything from ouija board, fortune teller, spaceman, gorilla body, just a list of stuff.

B: Then he drew from that list and started creating these characters. All in all, he would draw seven. The first, Luther, the half-man half-gorilla, was the team’s defective leader. He was also the child closest with their father. 

Luther: Just at Dad’s favorite spot. Allison: Dad had a favorite spot? Luther: Yeah, you know, under the oak tree. We used to sit out there all the time, none of you ever did that?

B: Next, he created Klaus and Allison, the boy who talks to the dead and the girl who can make people bend to her will with just a few words.

WAY: Klaus, he has some pretty serious addiction and addiction is something that I dealt with in my life. He’s also a little bit spooky and supernatural, and my personality in My Chemical Romance was very similar to that.

Klaus: I can’t just call Dad in the afterlife and be like, “Dad, could you just stop playing tennis with Hitler for a moment and take a quick call?” Luther: Since when? That’s your thing. Klaus: I’m not in the right frame of mind! Allison: You’re high? Klaus: Yeah yeah! I mean, how are you not listening to this nonsense?

WAY: He was kind of my version of Doctor Strange. I find Allison to be the one that is easiest to write and I put the most of myself into Allison.

B: Her superpower is that she can make you do pretty much anything she tells you with a few magic words.

Allison: I heard a rumor you want to be my friend. I heard a rumor that you like Bradley. I heard a rumor that you left me alone. I heard a rumor that you stop crying.

WAY: There’s a bit of a tragic nature that comes with her power.

B: Allison, out of all of her super powered siblings, is the only one grasping for a normal life - career, husband, children. In a way, she’s the most human. The fourth character Gerard created is Diego, a guy with an uncanny ability to throw knives. He’s also stubborn as hell.

WAY: I knew early on he was gonna be the one that was gonna be really difficult with the leader. I figured that.

Diego: You know, you of all people should be on my side here, Number One. Luther: I am warning you. Diego: After everything he did to you, he had to ship you a million miles away. Luther: Diego, stop talking! Diego: That’s how much he couldn’t stand the sight of you!

B: The fifth character, a kid who can travel through time and space, who simply goes by Five. Despite the other character growing up into adults, he has remained a teenager, sort of.

WAY: He was a time traveler who then got stuck in his young body when he traveled back in time because time travel is complicated. 

Klaus: Where are you going? Five: To get a decent cup of coffee. Allison: Do you even know how to drive? Five: I know how to do everything.

WAY: So then came The Horror.

B: The Horror, aka Ben, aka the dead sibling who only Klaus can see.

WAY: I imagined this character that had all these monsters living under his skin that came from another dimension. And he was very tortured to me. It actually kind of hurts him and it’s scary to him.

Ben: Do I really have to do this? Klaus: Come on, Ben. There’s more guys in the vault. Ben: I didn’t sign up for this.

B: And then finally, Number Seven, Vanya, who seemingly has no powers besides playing the violin.

WAY: I was at this cafe in Manhattan when I was living in Brooklyn, and it was called The Sidewalk Cafe I believe, and on the wall they had a white violin just as decoration. And I remember looking at that and thinking to myself, “That would be a cool superhero.” And Vanya was always kind of designed to be a character who wasn’t special, that was going to transform into that.

Vanya: Look, if I was special I would’ve been in The Umbrella Academy. I’m so sorry you got stuck with the ordinary one.

B: These seven adopted siblings forced together by supernatural events formed The Umbrella Academy. Both the original comic and season 1 of the show start at the funeral for the Academy’s patriarch, the eccentric Sir Reginald Hargreeves. We learn that while the siblings ventured away from home as teenagers, after years of fighting and a toxic upbringing, they’ve returned home, back together for the first time in years, and all their dysfunctions and old conflicts come bubbling to the surface.

Diego: He was a bad person and a worse father. The world’s better off without him. Allison: Diego! Diego: My name is Number Two.

B: When he started writing the comic, Gerard was focused on his own strained relationships. He saw his band as his own dysfunctional family at the time.

WAY: When you’re a baby band, you’re in this van and it’s like a submarine but it’s smaller. It’s like a closet that you're all living in and sometimes you’re going on seventeen hour drives, and you have very strong personalities. This dynamic starts to develop between all of the members and you really do kind of become a dysfunctional family. Like, there’s times where I felt like I was the mom.

GABRIEL BA: They know each other’s weaknesses.

B: Turns out, family dynamics was a theme with everyone who joined the Umbrella team, including the illustrator and Umbrella’s co-creator, a Brazilian artist named Gabriel Ba.

BA: And sometimes they say it to hurt the other intentionally and they do that a lot in Umbrella because they’re all angry at each other all the time. And even though I have a great relationship with my brother, I have that. We have a younger sister as well, so she’s very opinionated and she’s strong. I wouldn’t say we fight a lot, but sometimes we- I just know how to hurt her if I want to say something.

B: Family is present in Gabriel’s life more than for most people. He works every day with his twin brother, fellow comic book artist, Fabio Moon. But his work made him an unconventional choice for Umbrella.

BA: In the mid 90s, we moved away from superheroes. We, my brother and I, we figured the type of story that we liked to tell and wanted to tell was more real life, day by day life relationship, this kind of stuff. 

B: Gabriel grew up in Brazil and now lives in Sao Paulo. His brother had been making experimental comics for well over a decade.

BA: But The Umbrella Academy was a superhero book with this day by day life relationship drama, and that was really interesting for me.

B: What excited Gerard about Gabriel was his style. His characters weren’t macho. They didn’t have big ripped muscles. They’re the kind of comics you could imagine being drawn in the margins of a notebook. There's nothing stereotypically super about them.

BA: It was not a straightforward American superhero artstyle. It was a mix of European and more fluid, but also could handle action and crazy stuff. And also, I can’t deny The Umbrella Academy was my first paid job in the U.S.

B: Wow.

BA: For the first ten years of our career, my brother and I were making comics for free. Just for ourselves, just getting [?], if there were any. So when I got the invitation to get involved with The Umbrella Academy it was this whole package of factors.

WAY: Gabriel climbing on board was a huge thing for us because he’s such a fantastic artist. He brought these characters to life. The interesting thing about Gabriel,  he didn’t have to make Umbrella Academy. He was doing really well on his own and making really experimental artistic comics, but he liked the idea so much that he said, “I’m gonna do superheroes.”

BA: The superhero aspect of The Umbrella Academy is really just a layer in the story. I like the development of these characters, their struggles, their relationships, there’s romance, there’s deception.

Vanya: You are unbelievable, you’re trying to dig up dirt on a guy I like? Who does that? Allison: Look, I’ve had my fair share of stalkers and creeps, I don’t trust him! Vanya: You mean you don’t trust me.

BA: And it had the fun explosions and action scenes. So that’s the good mix.

B: The first book of the comic is called Apocalypse Suite. After their father’s death, The Umbrella Academy gets a warning from their time traveling brother that the world is going to end in 10 days. They don’t know how, they just know that it will. And now, back together for the first time, they’ve got to figure out how to save the planet and learn how to look past their differences. Which sounds dope, right? But when it first published back in 2007, it wasn’t immediately clear that people would dig it.

WAY: So one of the things I was dealing with when Umbrella Academy came out was a lot of people in the press before the comic came out saying things like, “Here’s a musician and he’s writing a comic.” They didn’t really know my background, they didn’t know that I’d written at 15, they didn’t know I went to art school. All they knew was that I was the singer in this rock band that a lot of teenagers liked. So, all I really wanted was a fair shake. I didn’t write The Umbrella Academy to become a TV show or a film. I wrote it to be an amazing comic. But we knew that first issue, and we knew it was good, and we knew that if you didn't get it by the first seven pages you just weren’t gonna like it, and I was totally fine with that. But then it came out and then the response started to happen and then reviewers loved it and people loved it.

B: The comic went on to win an Eisner award, which is like the Oscar of comics, and pretty quickly, Gerard gets an offer to turn the comic into a full length movie.

WAY: I got swept up in the Hollywood thing.

B: But it doesn’t pan out.

WAY: That’s actually one of the reasons why there was such a big gap between comics, is because I was really, you know, I was trying- at the end of the day, I was trying to be helpful. If this was gonna be a movie version of what Gabriel and I had made, I wanted it to be great so I put in a lot of time and it kept me away from the comics.

B: But then Netflix hits you up and is interested in making this into a series.

WAY: Right.

B: I guess I'm curious, as someone who just initially wanted to make just a really good comic, what about turning that project into a television show was interesting?

WAY: Straight up, I want to make a great comic and that’s all I’m really interested in. If I can write great comics, you’ll have great material to make TV shows. So let me focus on that.

B: In other words, Gerard wanted to focus on the comics and let someone else adapt it.

WAY: And that’s when Steve came in and he changed things and he ran with it. 

STEVE BLACKMAN: I’m Steve Blackman, I’m the showrunner and I’m executive producer.

B: Steve is a master at adapting books, comics, and film into television. Before The Umbrella Academy, he’d worked on shows like Fargo, Legion, and Altered Carbon, all of which originated from other sources. So he knew coming in that adaptation can be tricky work.

BLACKMAN: At first, I think Gerard and Gabriel, who co-did this with him, were very protective of the work like parents of their baby. And I think I had to prove to them initially that I would love and protect this child that they had worked on for so many years, so here I am, an outsider coming in and they were very nice to me, but I could see there was like, “Is this guy gonna totally screw up our baby here?”

B: Is it something that you can come to the table with Gerard and be like, “Hey, here’s my arsenal of adaptations, this is why it will work.”

BLACKMAN: Yeah, I worked on the show Fargo for three years. Fargo was obviously based on the Joel and Ethan Coen movie from 1996. I don’t think Gerard had ever seen my shows, I don’t think he watches a lot of television, so for him, it didn’t matter what I’d done before. It’s just what I was gonna do in the here and now on this show. I wasn’t intimidated by the challenge but I really did sort of have a sense of I know which direction I’m going.

B: What was your first initial reaction? Were you sort of like, “Oh, maybe I’ve never done anything like this, or this does feel familiar to other work  that I’ve done.” Or, “I can do this, this is right up my alley.”

BLACKMAN: Well, what I liked about it from the beginning was what I saw in the subject matter and I saw a dysfunctional family. But right away, I was very inspired by Wes Anderson’s work. The Royal Tenenbaums is one of those movies that really was always something I truly loved. So, I saw that in this show.

Five: An entire square block, 42 bedrooms, 19 bathrooms, but not a single drop of coffee. Vanya: Dad hated caffeine.  Klaus: Well he hated children too and he had plenty of us.

BLACKMAN: It was a family show, it was a very relatable dysfunctional family show that I wanted to tell.

WAY: Steve’s a great collaborator. Steve Blackman, the showrunner, he had a vision. I respected him and his vision. I realized it was gonna be different from the comic, and I let him run with it because he cared deeply about it.

BLACKMAN: My first conversation with Gerard over the phone, I said to him, I told him one of the words was subversive, we wanted to subvert the expectation of what a superhero show could be because there were many other shows, either on the air or coming down the pipe to be next, and we wanted this to stand out. And that was sort of the first hurdle with me, was to say to Gerard that I could do that and I could definitely make this thing feel special. And right away he said, “Okay, yeah. You get it.”

B: You’ve adapted something like Fargo which is a unique adaptation, right? You’re adapting from a different medium, like a feature film. Does that change the way you understand adaptation?

BLACKMAN: At a story point of view, no, I don’t think they’re that different. I think adapting a story, whether it's a graphic novel or the source material comes from a movie, a book, there’s a lot of care into doing it that the tricky thing is, I need to put my creative spin on it. I had Gerard and Gabriel, who lived with this for ten years, and then I have to come in and say, “Look, I’m going to honor you. At the same time, what is the Steve Blackman part of the show? How can I add my spin to it?”

B: For fans of the comic who’ve seen season 1 of the show, you’ll recognize some of that Steve Blackman spin. For example, the group who governs the laws of time in the comics, the Temps Aeternalis, in the TV show they become the Commission, an entire bureaucratic system running and adjusting linear time. Steve made some other changes too. 

WAY: One of the things that I thought was an ingenious idea was making Ben a ghost that Klaus could communicate with. I was most impressed by that change.

Ben: You know what the worst part of being dead is? You’re stuck. Nowhere to go, nowhere to change, that’s the real torture if you gotta know. Watching your brother take for granted everything you lost, and pissing it all away.

B: Perhaps the biggest change from the comic to the show is the diversity of the characters. Diverse in race, diverse in region, diverse in sexual orientation, these characters on screen look a lot more like what the world actually looks like.

WAY: It’s built into it. They’re all from different places, they’re all from different countries, so I think that’s really the biggest improvement on the source material, is how diverse it is.

B: Steve felt the pressure of both fan expectations, and Gerard and Gabriel’s trust in him.

BLACKMAN: There’s nothing worse than having pre-existing source material and having the fans dislike it. You want to make the fans feel honored and respected, at the same time I felt it was incredibly important that Gerard and Gabriel walked out of this thinking, “He did a good job.” If they hated it, I would’ve been crushed. If the fans hated it, I think I’d also be crushed. I knew I couldn’t make everybody happy, but I wasn’t doing a page for page translation. My adaptation wasn’t gonna be that.

B: The adaption worked. Season 1 was a massive success. In the finale of the first season, the Academy thinks they’ve managed to stop the end of the world from happening, but unintentionally, they’ve actually just initiated it. The moon has been destroyed and its remnants are now heading directly for Earth.

Five: We might as well accept our fate because in less than a minute we’re gonna be vaporized.  Diego: What’s your idea then? Five: We use my ability to time travel, but this time I’ll take you with me. Luther: You can do that?

B: The family, latching onto their time traveling brother Five, manage to escape the chaos. But we’re left to wonder where and when they’ll turn up, and that’s where season 2 begins.

Five: We brought the end of the world back here with us. Klaus: Oh my god, again?

BLACKMAN: It’s a pretty crazy journey this year and I think people will be hooked. I hope they binge the hell out of it and love every second of it.

B: Coming up in this season of Behind the Scenes, we’ll be taking you on that crazy journey with the people who make it happen.

“We hired meteorologists, we knew that snow was gonna come, but we had planned it. We went away for a day, we came back, and there was four feet of snow on the ground.”

“It’s 60s Dallas. Okay, so that’s a very different story for Allison. We have to talk about this somehow. Her experience is just different from her siblings.”

EMMY LAMPMAN: And a lot of people would come up to me and apologize for doing their job and I was like, “Please stop apologizing.”

“That was a wishlist fight scene that Steve had always wanted to do.”

“So we actually had our guys throwing plates up in the air and taking photos of them to try to get these UFO imageries.”

“You know, we have a new point in our resume: Can produce and deliver a show during a pandemic.”

B: Behind the Scenes of The Umbrella Academy is a Netflix and Pineapple Street Studios Production. I’m your host, Brandon Jenkins. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. It really does help other people find it. Thank you all for listening. 

[self-loving-vampire]

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (1988)

Summary

Ultima 5 is what you could call Ultima 4′s edgier but “cooler” sibling. The gameplay has gained in complexity, dialogue has been greatly expanded, and the ground-breaking system of virtues and morality from the previous game has been twisted by the tyrannical Lord Blackthorn following the disappearance of Lord British.

Ultima 5 also introduces more of a day/night cycle to the proceedings with the introduction of NPC schedules, enabling a level of world simulation that was very new at the time of release. It goes on to make good use of this system by casting the player in the role of an outlaw fighting against the new government, meeting with members of the resistance in the shadows, and going around the martial law that has been imposed.

Freedom

Just like in Ultima 4, you are dropped into an open world right from the beginning, and your tools to explore the world have been expanded. 

The inclusion of more complex systems also enhance the feeling of being able to interact with the world with less barriers, as there is now furniture you can use, barrels you can search, etc.

Like with Ultima 4, there is only one way to win and a list of absolutely required steps that must be taken to reach that victory, but the order in which these steps can be taken is rather flexible, allowing players to create more of a personal narrative as they follow clues they picked up on wherever their instincts or whims took them first.

It is worth noting that there are actually some optional quests dungeons this time around, which is always nice.

Character Creation/Customization

While it is very nice that you can import your character from Ultima 4 into this game, I would say that this aspect of the game has taken a step back in a sense even as it has made progress in other ways.

The eight classes of the previous games have been reduced to four: The standard Fighter/Mage/Rogue Bard trio plus the Avatar class the main character belongs to, which is an all-rounder. As before, there is not really any customization beyond equipment either.

However, the positive of this is that equipment has been greatly expanded from the previous game. While in Ultima 4 you were limited to merely choosing your character’s weapon and armor set from a very short list, Ultima 5 not only enlarges the list but also allows for equipping multiple armor parts (such as a helm or amulet) while also providing a secondary hand slot.

What this means is that two-handed weapons now also give you a trade-off between their big damage and the option to use a shield in your other hand, or even dual-wield.

This greater variety of equipment allows a greater degree of specialization for your party members, though by modern standards this still isn’t much. The supremacy of ranged weapons also continues here, as magic axes are undoubtedly what you should be equipping everyone with later in the game, and now that class does not restrict equipment every single one of your party members will end up in plate with a magic axe.

Story/Setting

This is, in my opinions, one of the most interesting things about the game. Ultima 5 takes all of the virtues from the former game and turns a corrupted form of them into the law.

The game is pretty explicit about this too. Early in the game, in the town closest to the shack you start in, you can find a man in the stocks together with his son. The man is being punished for failing to donate enough of his income to charity as the Law of Sacrifice demands, while his son (who is barely breathing at this point) is being tortured for not reporting his father to the authorities.

Throughout your travels, you meet many kinds of people. From victims, to resistance fighters, to supporters of the regime and everything in between. Throughout your interactions with these groups you will have to discern who can be trusted (generally easier than it should be since the bad guys tend to be meaner or even cartoonishly evil at times) and learn how to fight Lord Blackthorn and the Shadowlords who corrupted him.

The Shadowlords are, incidentally, the part of the story that I don’t quite enjoy. Fantasy is full of one-dimensional ancient evils and dark overlords. By making the events of the game the result of an unambiguously malevolent supernatural force rather than human failings of the type that are not uncommon in real life, the game makes those events feel more distant and less complex.

This very series already has had plenty of “Defeat this one evil force and everything will be fine” plots. They are generally devoid of the moral complexity that the series is now aiming to explore and I want to know what this game would have looked like without the Shadowlords.

Fortunately, however, this effect is not too pronounced. Blackthorn remains a misguided man with good intentions. He admires you a lot, actually, and seeks avatarhood himself. He has such a positive view of the virtues that he sought to enforce them by law.

(Then again, his actual plans for the shrines make this apparent idolization feel dishonest, or at least inconsistent.)

And there is a real type of authoritarianism that functions a lot like this. Even on this site there are many who would be in favor of things like surveillance, police brutality, and harsher punishments. Even on this site there’s a whole lot of people who seek to punish others over stupid things like shipping the wrong fictional characters.

The people I grew up with even went as far as yearning for a dictator who would unleash death squads to execute all the “bad” people. This is a wish that I still see in many people, even those who grew up outside of the circumstances of my country of birth.

This is not an error that humans need supernatural corruption to fall into.

Other than that, I find the dark twist on the existing setting from the previous game to make for a spicier world to explore. 

This is also the section where I should point out that Ultima 5 introduces a rather large and dangerous “Underworld” map that is easy to get lost in. While it is mostly barren, you do have to visit various parts of it as part of the main quest, and I just find the concept of a massive dark world beneath the earth to be a super interesting one (I mean, I have even run D&D campaigns based primarily in the Underdark).

I kinda wish there was more to it other than some items and a companion to collect. Something like a town would have been interesting.

Immersion

This is one area where the jump from Ultima 4 to Ultima 5 was massive thanks to the day/night cycles, NPC schedules, expanded dialogue, and even the addition of words of power to the magic system.

But the best thing I can say about it is really that it calls on you to actually roleplay and engage in the world as if you were actually there, at least to a degree, and it does so through a combination of atmosphere and gameplay.

You will not only want to be careful with your words when talking to certain people to avoid being reported to the regime, but you can also learn the resistance password and use it to get help and information from other members.

While these systems are all still pretty rough here, they still come together well enough to make this a lot more immersive than the average JRPG.

One thing that does feel really off is that the guards are not only superhumanly tough but you also lose karma for attacking them. They also behave strangely in that even though you are a wanted outlaw they don’t actually hunt you on sight, only trying to arrest or kill you if you refuse to pay tribute (as if they didn’t recognize you or your companions at all). This despite wanted posters.

So there’s definitely some rough aspects to the crime system in this game.

Gameplay

Massive improvements have been made in this area, and I don’t just mean the above-mentioned expansion of items and the addition of NPC schedules.

For one, enemies now drop things other than gold, such as food and armor pieces. The magic system has also been improved so that you can now mix multiples of a spell at once instead of having to do it manually every single time.

Additionally, spells are now cast using a consistent language of magic composed of several words of power, which you can chain together to produce effects.

But I would say that the single most significant improvement in the gameplay is the simple fact that most NPCs now have significantly more keywords that they react to in dialogue, including many that do not come up through normal conversation with them. The system is still not perfect, but you can have more of a conversation with characters now and switch from topic to topic relatively easily.

In terms of combat, you can attack diagonally now (only monsters could do that in Ultima 4) and random overworld encounters are much easier to avoid now, cutting down on what eventually starts to feel kind of like padding in the previous game (but see below).

Despite the fact that the material rewards from combat have been increased and items are much cheaper now, Ultima 5 is actually significantly more difficult than Ultima 4. Not only do you have less health, enemies also seem to do more damage.

Dragons and daemons in particular are a nightmare, as they can summon more daemons (who can posses party members) and are extremely durable. A single dragon is a very tough challenge for an unprepared mid-level party, and even after giving most characters magic axes they still prove tough to take down while also being extremely damaging. Trying to fight multiple ones at once without blowing powerful spells or glass swords is costly at best and foolish at worst. Dragons are best thought of as boss-level enemies probably.

I am pleased to report that the dungeon crawling is better in many significant ways. Not only are the graphics more pleasant and immersive but also fully cleared rooms no longer respawn endlessly the moment you step out of them (in fact, they may not respawn at all).

It is not all positive however. The descend and ascend spells seem to be nearly useless this time around and the spell to instantly exit a dungeon is gone entirely. This can make getting out of the underworld such a pain at times that you might even prefer to literally kill yourself in-game and lose some XP instead of doing that. Fortunately you can now dig up and bury moon stones, so you can create moongates down there to quickly escape that way.

There is one problem in terms of balance though. While obtaining gear is significantly less of a problem now due to many enemies dropping tons of torches, gems, and keys, your experience will lag far behind your itemization and your quest progress. This means that to actually reach the 8th level and unlock all of the ultimate spells you will need to either explore all the dungeons thoroughly while focusing XP on one character, or otherwise just grind a lot.

Enemies just don’t give enough XP for a smooth progression otherwise. This would have been solved entirely by making significant main quest events (such as finding the artifacts of Lord British or destroying the Shadowlords) grant experience, but no such luck.

This makes for a strange endgame where you’ll have so much money that you run out of worthwhile things to spend it on while at the same time still feeling forced to grind out enemies, even if you imported your Ultima 4 character for an XP boost.

You do want to have access to these 8th-level spells too, as the final dungeon can be brutal without them or items that replicate their effects.

Adding to the experience issue is the fact that you can’t level up at will in this game. You have to camp and hope that an apparition of Lord British will appear and level you up (if you have enough experience). He does not always show up, and as far as I can tell he does not appear at all if you sleep on a bed or camp inside a dungeon. It has to be out in the wild in the overworld (and possibly also in the underworld).

I wish leveling up was just not tied to him at all.

Aesthetics

As is often the case for this series, the game looks and sounds really good for its age. The jump from Ultima 4 is particularly notable, as the level of detail is on a whole other level, particularly within the dungeons.

As with the previous game, the aesthetic core of the Ultima series (after the first trilogy) lies in the virtues. While there is still a karma system involved, it is much simpler than having to maximize eight different virtues. The karma system determines how much XP you lose on death and how much shops charge you, encouraging players to behave (or at least atone for their misbehavior).

But the biggest impact on the feel of the game is the above-mentioned corruption and tyranny affecting the land. Some of my favorite moments were early on, when I was just starting to get involved with the resistance and investigating what was happening around the overworld.

That said, I think that if the guards did actually recognize you on sight and hounded you more aggressively after spotting you the atmosphere could be even better (assuming they were balanced a bit better).

I think some of the music some versions of the game have is quite good too.

Accessibility

This game manages to up the complexity from Ultima 4 while not being any harder to play. Chances are that if you’re importing your Ultima 4 character you will need only a little bit of adaptation to do fine in Ultima 5.

As before, you will need to take many notes throughout the game. More so than in Ultima 4 due to the greater size and density of content. However, if you played Ultima 4 and took notes for it, this is somewhat alleviated. The mantras for the shrines remain the same, and the world’s geography should be mostly familiar (though there have been changes there as well).

You will also still need to consult the manuals and map frequently, at least early on.

The difficulty has also increased dramatically. You will likely end the game with about 200-ish HP rather than 800 and every enemy is much more deadly. Both the early game and the final dungeon will challenge the improvident.

For these reasons, the game is not that easy for newcomers to pick up but I would not call it obscure or complex.

Conclusion

I would say that the positives definitely outweigh the negatives on this one. The story and setting are interesting even if I don’t agree with all of the decisions made in crafting it, and the rest of the game is usually tolerable at worst. Nothing nearly as annoying as Ultima 4′s Reaper and Balron sleep spam (in fact, a plot-relevant item you can find renders Reapers pretty much helpless).

My primary complaint about the game is that the balance is poor. You will end the game loaded with all the items you could ever want while struggling to reach level 8 with even a single character even after doing nearly everything you need to do before the final dungeon.

I know there is a remake of this game made using Dungeon Siege, which I have not played. I think this is a good thing and I’d hope that it fixes some of these issues, but even apart from that I wish there were games that set out to achieve the core concept of this game.

What I am talking about is an open world RPG in which you play an outlaw who must hide from the state and meet other rebels in the darkness, but with complex and mechanically-competent systems to enable all the interesting possibilities this should enable.

I do not assign numerical ratings to games with these reviews, but I can definitely say that I liked Ultima 5 better than Ultima 4. I think it is worth trying even today despite the late game grind.

[finished-ink]

The Last of Us Part II RANT

I’m normally a “moblie user only” person myself, but Part II took the fattest, nastiest shit on me I’ve ever had the displeasure and feeling through game, that I had to hop on my computer and type this. But before I get in to all the bad, let me start off with the little good in the game.

PROS: The Sound Design, the Animation and Graphics, and the Voice Work

Sound Design: The songs and music in this game were extremely well done. It had me moved to tears to sitting on the edge of my seat anxious about what was going to happen next.

Animation and Graphics: The animation truly seemed like a TON of time, energy, and love went into designing the characters and their surroundings.The graphics were just as awesome and truly made you feel immersed in the world of tlou.

Voice Work: Great work done my all voice actors involved. They, along with the graphics, made the characters really come to life.

OK, now done with the good, time for the fucking bullshit. I am mostly going to focus an the story and the characters. Because holy fuck, I know GOT season 8 was like a milestone in bad storytelling, but the goal wasn’t to do worse than that shitty ass season.

The Shitty Story:  I think the first thing that set this story up to be the fuck up that it is, was this lesson of “Violence isn’t the answer”. I think if the lesson was, “Your actions and choices have consequences” would have been a better theme to go along with this story. So, lets begin with Joel’s death.

I was honestly not surprised at all when I got to Abby at the beginning and someone was there to kill Joel. To think he would be able to evade the effects of what he did to the Fireflies would have been a bit ridiculous. I was even semi-fine with the torture of Joel, because I could see how that decision would force the player to really want to get back at Abby. Was it needed? Absolutely not because just killing Joel would of accomplished this. But if the torture of Joel was something Naught Dog really wanted to include then OK fine. We then come to the next extremely shitty part in the story, killing members of WLF and the game making the player feel guilty for it.

Now I know this is kinda a game play issue, but the issue being solved with a simple change in the game play would effect the story. And that is allowing the players to choose what the fuck they want to do. Do you want to just going in and slaughter everybody while their friends scream about their friends dying. That’s completely your choice. Do you want to quietly and tactically knock them out and leave them to live? Let that also be a choice. The could of even done it to where the more people you kill the more ammo and weapons you could collect, but it’ll be harder to travel because WLF will be sending out more brutes and harder enemies in an attempt to stop you. On the flip side, the more people you knock out, the less ammo and weapons you have, but the less WLFs there are to try and hunt you down because you’re not a bigger threat than the Scars. Then they could use dialogue said by the npcs to give the player an idea of how much of a threat they are to WLF. In a game where its trying to teach this lesson of “Violence isn’t the answer”, it sure forces you to resort to violence at every opportunity. You can even keep the intended message because in the game, violence isn’t always truly the answer. Bouncing off of this is my next change to the story, having the players make the choice about whether or not they want to kill Nora, Mel, and Owen.

Let’s get one thing straight, Ellie beating the shit out of Nora was not needed. An alternative to getting the info about where Abby was staying at could of been done through a series of little puzzle quests to give Ellie clues on where Abby was. This would be longer, but would not of had the same effect on Ellie’s mental state as beating the fuck out of Nora did. However, they could of kept the original scene as it played out. You get the info fast and you don’t lose out on anything major. Maybe some ammo and some pills but not enough to where it feels like you’ve lost out. But the choice now falls on the players to decide what they should do. The same applies with Mel and Owen. When you arrive at the aquarium, the player can decide to shot Owen to get Mel to talk, kill Mel to get Owen to talk, or grab Mel to threaten Owen to talk. The two kill options would be semi-bad because what played out originally with Abby would happen. But if the player decided to threaten Mel, Owen would talk, Ellie would release Mel but still holding them at gun point, and leave. However this would happen after another choice I think should of been implemented in the game. The choice to travel with Jesse to go and find Tommy.

When this happened even I wanted Ellie to just go with Jesse. It seemed like a great point to give the players a chance to decide what they wanted Ellie to do. Here’s how I would of wanted it to go: The player can either make Ellie continue to the aquarium, and the story would follow along as normal, or the player makes Ellie go with Jesse to find Tommy and leave. They leave and find Tommy after his encounter with Abby. You could even make another choice here where Tommy wants to try and go back to hunt down Abby, or go back to Dina with Jesse after he argues that they need to leave. If you go back with Jesse, Tommy follows with you, upset she gets to live, but moves on. From this they return to the theater, grab Dina and travel back to Jackson. This can then branch off to the future we see with Ellie and Dina, but there’s a scene where they travel to Jackson with J.J to see Jesse and his family. While there, Tommy approaches Ellie and says that he found Abby, and the player can decide what to do here as well. Go after Abby or stay. If the player goes after Abby, Ellie does find her and kills her, but it leaves Ellie feeling a bit conflicted because she doesn’t feel the fulfillment she thought she would feel. Cut to her traveling back to Jackson, visiting Joel’s grave and cue heart wrenching scene of her playing the guitar at his grave.

Now circling back, if the player decided to travel with Tommy to hunt Abby down in Seattle, Jesse reluctantly agrees, but tells them if they don’t find her by tomorrow afternoon, they all leave. This would then lead to the player finding Abby and Lev (because in my head Lev does run off but the boat he takes in the aquarium isn’t there and heard talk about the other boats the WLF’s use and takes off there, but Abby catches him in time to stop him from traveling to the island. This would happen after her encounter with Tommy) and Abby would tell Lev to run back to the aquarium with Yara. So its Ellie, Jesse, and Tommy holding Abby at gun point. Knowing a 3v1 isn’t winnable, she lays down her weapons and thus, another decision is allowed for the player. Kill Abby or let her live. Killing Abby has an effect on Ellie’s mental state and that can effect the game at the end. Not too bad that it ruins the ending, but bad enough that maybe there’s a cut scene of her having nightmares about killing her. If the player decides to not kill her, Ellie lets her go, she runs off, Tommy and her argue and Jesse tells them to drop it and get back to the theater. They do and cue to the ending I talked about earlier with everyone going back to Jackson. Now this leads me to my leads final story issue I would change about the game, Abby’s portion would be significantly cut down.

While the player would still play as Abby, the only flash back that would be included is the one about her and her father. Narratively, I don’t hate it. It allows for the player to understand why Abby wanted to kill Joel and drive home the new theme of “Your choices and actions have consequences”. However playing as Abby for, what, 12 hours of the game wasn’t needed. If the excuse was to pad for time, everything I said above would not have only extended the time, but would of allowed for players to want to replay the game. The player would still play as Abby with Lev and Yara so it can set up the players for how all the characters got to where they are by the time the player is given the choice to Kill or Let Abby Go. I’m on the fence about if the player would still be Abby and the theater scene would play as normal if you kill Mel or Owen. Kinda up in the air but what can you do. Anyways, while this would humanize the character to extent, it wouldn’t try to wash down her deeds like Naught Dogs tried to do. In my creation of this story, what happened in Santa Barbara would not take place at all.

All in all, there was some much they could of done with this story that could of made it worth playing. I have no more words for this grotesque torture p*rn game Neil and Naught Dogs decided to create. I wish I could fucking wipe my brain and get back to two days I wasted on this game. Fuck them and I hope Naughty Dogs fucking falls apart. I will finish my little essay with asking y’all to please not harass or go after the voice actors and the people who tried to make this game. Go after Neil , because ultimately this falls on him.

[inevitably-johnlocked]

do u have a fic list of BAMF john getting kidnapped?

Hey Nonny!

Ahh, I’ve quite a few Kidnapping fics!

Kidnapping, Hostage, & Stalking

Kidnapping, Hostage & Stalking Pt. 2

KIDNAPPING, HOSTAGE & STALKING Pt. 3

Booted by Sexxica (E, 1,175 w., 1 Ch. || Trapped, Kidnapping, Handcuffs, Biting Kink, Blow Jobs, Coming in Pants, Tight Spaces, Humour, Smut, 69 Sex Position, BJ’s Through Pants) – John and Sherlock have been kidnapped, handcuffed, and stuffed together in a car boot. How come they can never take these situations seriously? Part 3 of the Tumblr Ficlets Gone Wild

Imminent by LoyalPaddler (K+, 1,187 w., 1 Ch. || Kidnapping, Open Ending) – What did it say about a person if he recognized the feeling of waking up concussed, blindfolded, and handcuffed to a chair? Probably not good, that.

Coming Full Circle by KCS (K+, 2,358 w., 1 Ch. || Alternate TGG, Friendship, Drama, Violence/Death References, Drugging/Poisoning, Kidnapping, BAMF John, Moriarty POV, Introspection) – Moriarty had John for almost six hours between his abduction and the showdown at the pool - more than enough time to implement a Plan B for his escape should Sherlock call his bluff with the fake bomb vest.

The Hours Before Midnight by Lady Sam Mallory (T, 7,773 w., 1 Ch. || TGG Fic, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Torture / John Whump, Kidnapping, Drugging, Alternating POV, Worried / Protective Sherlock) – Moriarty doesn't play fair. John must deal with hours of torment from Moriarty before going to meet Sherlock at the Pool at the end of the Great Game and Sherlock must deal with the consequences of his boredom.

Victim, Bait, Hero, Friend by KimberlyTheOwl (T, 7,887 w., 1 Ch. || Post-TGG Epilogue, Angst, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Past Kidnapping / Torture / Implied Rape, Panic Attacks, Worried / Possessive Sherlock, Lestrade is a Good Friend) – Some insights into why John was perfectly willing to throw everything away for a chance to kill Moriarty at the pool. Trauma, ugliness, and finally healing. Some nice supporting work by Lestrade as well.

The Five Stages of Mourning, Plus One by SunnyRea (T, 10,557 w., 1 Ch. || MCD, Pining / Grieving Sherlock, URT, Heavy Angst, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Drug Use, Graphic Death, Depression, Unhappy Ending) – Sherlock did not want this, did not want another stalemate with John in the middle, a gun in Jim's hand. This cannot have happened without a sign. There has to be something he missed anything which said today is the day I kill for real.

The Palmyra Atoll by elwinglyre (E, 16,609 w., 3 Ch. || TSo3 Divergence / Episode Fix-It, Stockholm Syndrome, Kidnapped John Watson, John Whump, Evil Mary, Angst, Cuddling & Snuggling, Toplock, Limited 3rd John POV) – As John's preparing for the wedding, Sherlock is preparing to have his heart broken, and Mary is prepared to do the unthinkable. Intervention required. Enter Sherlock. Set before Sign of Three with a far different outcome. John is drugged, kidnapped, and left on an island, but not just any old island.

Between Friends by SilentAuror (E, 18,036 w., 1 Ch. || Post S3, Alternating POV, Friends to Lovers, John in Denial, Abduction, Awkward Situations / Miscommunications, Porn With Feels, Blowjobs, Pining, Unrequited, Angst With Happy Ending) – Sherlock gets abducted. As John discovers him tied up naked in an empty storage facility and comes to rescue him, Sherlock's body has an unfortunate reaction which triggers a series of events. John is convinced that everything will be fine as long as they never discuss it. Sherlock isn't as sure...

Hellfire by testosterone_tea (E, 28,596 w., 9 Ch. || Fantasy / Magic / Mages / Elementals AU || Mage Sherlock, Elemental John, Developing Relationship, Torture, Powerful / BAMF John, POV Alternating, Dark / Blood Magic, UST, First Kiss) – Sherlock is a Mage that gets involved with a case involving Dark Summoning rituals, leading him to John Watson, a man with Berserker blood. The only thing is, Berserkers have been extinct for centuries. And of course, nothing involving Mycroft and his interfering ways is ever simple. This time, even Sherlock may have bitten off more than he can chew.

Inscrutable to the Last by DiscordantWords (M, 48,842 w., 6 Ch. || Post-TRF, Alternate S3, John’s Blog/S3 is a Story By John, Divorce, Marital Difficulties, John is a Mess, Emotional Reunion, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Grief / Mourning, Pining John, First Kiss, Adorably Clueless Sherlock, Nostalgia, Love Confessions, Eventual Happy Ending) – He wasn't Sherlock, he couldn't work miracles. All he'd ever been able to do was write about them.

The Thing Is by TSylvestris (E, 56,743 w., 21 Ch. || Case Fic, Dev. Rel., Anal/Oral, Blow Jobs, Meddling Mycroft, Drama, Romance, Humour, Casual Encounters, Pining Idiots, Possessive Sherlock, Orgasm Delay, Rough / Alley Sex, Public Sex, John Whump, Drugged John, Emotional Love Making, Awkward Relationship, Marriage of Convenience, Switchlock) – The problem with living with Sherlock, John thought, was that you never, never, ever knew the significance of anything. Like your flatmate's nose buried in your hair. Whilst you're in bed. Part 1 of Nitroglycerine

Hell Sent, Heaven Bound by ConsultingHound (M, 64,381 w, 16 Ch. || Angels / Demons AU ||  Fallen Angel Sherlock / Angel Cop John, Alternate First Meeting, Slow Burn, Case Fic, John & Lestrade are Friends Before Sherlock, BAMF John, Mind Palace John, Friends to Lovers, John in Denial, Sherlock Picks Out John’s Clothing, Clubbing / Dancing, Mildly Jealous John, Awkwardness, Kidnapping, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Sacrifice, Worried / Anxious Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, Immortal to Mortal) – Ex-War healer and current angelic guard John Watson is not having the best day. He overslept, he’s underpaid, and now there’s someone tagging the Council’s building walls. However things may be about to get interesting: there’s an unusual stranger hanging around (the definition of tall, dark, and handsome), a literal underground cult is brewing, and rumblings are coming from hell. Can he keep his neighbourhood safe, how and why is he being connected to all this, and who the hell is Sherlock Holmes?

Being John Watson-ish by elwinglyre (E, 69,902 w., 17 Ch. || Bodysnatcher AU || Author John, Cranky Sherlock, Angst, Sexual Tension, First Kiss / Time, Falling in Love, BAMF John, Past Soldier John, Feelings, Inside Someone’s Brain, Shy Sherlock, Sherlock Loves John, POV Sherlock, Switchlock, Slow Burn, Internal Dialogue, Mental Turmoil) – When consulting detective Sherlock Holmes steps on one toe too many at a crime scene, he's consigned to a desk job in an archaic office on the seventh-and-a-half floor of the New Scotland Yard. It’s in this bleak office that Sherlock discovers a portal into the mind of renowned author John Watson. Grander than his mind palace, this new wonderland affords Sherlock new vistas of experimentation. To learn more about the mystery behind the portal, Sherlock seeks out and befriends Watson. But then it all goes wrong when others find the secret portal door—including the man whose brain he visits.

Not Broken, Just Bent by Schmiezi (E, 87,585 w., 43 Ch. || Pining, Love Confessions, Rape/Sexual Assault, Torture, Hurt/Comfort, Heavy Angst, Villain!Mary, Suicidal Ideations, Main Character Death, Sherlock First Person POV, Parentlock, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Grief/Mourning, Emotional Love Making, Possessiveness, Depression, PTSD, Kidnapping, Virgin Sherlock, Eventual Happy Ending) – "For a second, I allow myself to remember teaching John how to waltz. There is a special room in my mind palace for it. A big one, with a proper parquet dance floor. For a second, I go there. I remember holding him, closer than the World Dance Council asks for, excusing it with the fact that we are training for a wedding, not for a competition. For a second, I feel his hand on mine again, smell his sweat, hear the song we used. For a second, I allow myself to love him deeply. For a second, only a second, that love reflects on my face." Fix-it for S3, starting at the end of TSoT. Evil Mary.

The Cost of a Wish by slashscribe (E, 102,493 w., 12 Ch. || xxxHolic Fusion || Spirits / Ghosts and Magic, Love Confessions, Slow Burn, Soul Mates / Fated Lovers, Adventure, Immortal Sherlock, Powerful John, POV John, Frottage, Wish Granting, Angst with Happy Ending, Nightmares) – John has been plagued by a secret his entire life that has made him feel hopeless until he meets a mysterious, seemingly omniscient man named Sherlock Holmes who owns a wish-granting shop. Their meeting sets off a series of inevitable events that will change the course of both of their lives forever.

Two Two One Bravo Baker by abundantlyqueer (E, 114,574 w., 27 Ch. || Military AU || Afghanistan, War Story, Thriller, Switchlock, Rimming, Emotional Lovemaking, Lots of Sex, HJ/BJ’s) – Captain John Watson of 40 Commando, the Royal Marines, is assigned to protect and assist Sherlock Holmes as he investigates what appears to be a simple war atrocity in Afghanistan. An intense attraction ignites between the two men as they uncover a conspiracy that threatens everything they’ve ever known, but Sherlock is as much hunted as hunter, and everyone close to him is in deadly danger. Can he solve the case in time to save himself and John? Part 1 of Two Two One Bravo Baker Universe

A Further Sea by i_ship_an_armada & ShinySherlock (E, 125,492 w., 23 Ch.|| Historical Pirates AU || Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Doctor John / Pirate Captain Sherlock, Sailing, UST / RST, Masturbation, Action / Adventure, Mild Angst & Peril, Romance, Shaving, Molly/Janine, Bottomlock, Past Drug Use, Slow Burn, Mild Violence, Happy Ending) – Here be a tale of adventure for both body and soul, but beware if ye be not of stout heart, for this be piratelock, ya savvy? Luckless ship's surgeon John Watson takes a chance, and finds himself eye to eye with The Ghost, the scourge of the seven seas and a definite thorn in the side of the blaggard, James Moriarty. But when John finds there's more to this most cunning pirate than be meetin' the eye, he has to choose... is it a pirate's life for him?

Free Falling by twistedthicket1 (M, 203,574 w., 38 Ch. || Guardian Angels AU || Guardian Angel John, Fluff and Angst, Humour, Kidlock / Teenlock, Light Mystrade, Passage of Time, Possessive John, Drug Use / Overdose, Victor Trevor, Graphic Bullying, Big Brother Mycroft, Hard Drug Use, Depression, Possessive Sherlock, Possessive John, Panic Attacks, Nightmares/PTSD, Pining, Healing Abilities, Kidnapping, Violence, Torture, Blow Jobs, Virgin John, Emotional Development / Attachment, Mortality, Happy Ending) – All Guardian angels are born with a Chosen human. When this child is born, the angel comes into being to protect and care for them during their life on Earth. For John Watson, all he cares about in the world revolves around his Chosen, Sherlock Holmes. Watching him grow up though, the angel soon learns that God must have had a sense of humour the day he decided to make Sherlock, as trouble seems to follow him like a magnet wherever he goes. John can't decide what's worse, the idea of losing his Chosen one, or the fact that he may be breaking the most taboo law of heaven as he disguises himself as a human to better protect and befriend the beloved detective he's always watched from afar. He was meant to care for him. But what happens when caring evolves into something more? What happens when an emotion an angel is supposed to be incapable of possessing comes to life suddenly and viciously inside John's chest?

[fencesandfrogs]

an abridged history/explanation of warrior cats if you didn’t read them as a kid and have questions (a primer)

welcome. i’m going to keep things to the point, this is not a plot summary, just, well, its a pandemic and people are seeking items of childhood comfort and its come to my attention that a lot of people didn’t read these books as kids and then they come up in conversation and they act shocked so! i felt compelled to write this.

[2.5k words, 10min read. section headers, no pictures. not a ton of helpful formatting. i don’t want to say don’t read this because obviously i wrote it and think it’s worth reading, but i’ll be honest, this is a lot.]

section one: about me

i was an avid reader as a child, most of which fits solidly into “stories for another time,” and some of which would necessitate me adding tags onto this post that are, well, not necessary. so i will skip over that backstory but for those aware of lexile scores, i had one that was too high for literally any book that was appropriate to give me. so reading in school was torture and reading for fun was excellent.

now because i was a first-ish grader and my mom was trying to keep the fifth harry potter out of my hands, she looked desperately for something else to pass to me. her friend, who had a daughter a year or two older than me, was into these cat books, and my mom was like “here honey you like cats” without thinking too much about it.

which is good, because as i’ll get into, it was a really good fit for me. but like a dozen books later she asked me about the plot and well. i think at that moment she realized that it might have been better to just let me read harry potter.

but yeah i continued to read them long past the recommended reading ages and still as a Young Adult will return to them for nostalgia, and also as i will get into, some really good books. (see a list of books for “morbidly curious but i don’t want to spend 56 to 168 hours reading this”)

i’m not fully caught up on the series but this is not a plot summary so that should not impact my ability to discuss this

section two: content warnings

these books (not this post) includes the following:

discussion of castration (1.1 series 1, book 1, i’m not including this on every item/discussion because this is a complicated series but i want to demo how up front some of this is)

teenage romance/sex/pregnancy (1.1ish-1.3 or 4, continues throughout the series quite a lot, comes up again in 3.4/5, 4.4-5, and a bit in 5)

death from childbirth (1.can’t remember which book, many others)

unwanted pregnancy (se super edition, or a longer one off novel, discussed in 4&5)

sex/implied, discussed, and very very very heavily hinted but never directly said/shown (1.1-3ish, se, other)

murder (constantly, 1.1, 1.4, literally every book, 3.5, i’m just listing the ones i remember off the top of my head that were particularly graphic)

disability/illness, esp. the debilitating and/or deadly nature of it (1.3-5ish, 3.1, but all of 3, 3.4ish)

dementia (1.3-5, i’ve heard in some of the later series?)

abuse (7/8 this is reported i haven’t read these books but based on what i know it’s def there)

child abandonment (1.4-5, 3.4/5, it’s also all over the place but i think those are the only major character incidents of it)

treason (1.3-5, all over the place)

the horror/tragedy of war (background, but pretty constant)

disagreeing with an integral religion/tradition (3, based on the series title, 8, and generally scattered)

the corrupting influence of power (1.4/5, possibly 7/8, others)

racism (1, 3-5, possibly others)

sexism (se, background)

patriarchal societies (se, seems to be somewhat softened based on what i’ve heard but i’m not entirely sure about this)

and more! but it starts to get stranger and this is enough to prove my point

basically everything that could go wrong does

oh yeah! child abuse also child abuse that’s a very major theme in the first series as well as during other points. and elder abuse in the first series.

okay i’ve made my point.

section three: the appeal

look. so. i think we’re kind of pastel-ify children’s literature based on movies. see, parents have to watch children’s movies with their kids, so they can’t be gritty and intense because a lot of parents will say “not for my nine year old! they can’t deal with treason!” and that seems to be bleeding into children’s literature.

but warriors is not that. it’s intense, it borders on “too gruesome for children,” and it’s from a time where kids books got to be serious and heavy and dark because they were about animals. which was great because i couldn’t find books at my reading level that weren’t too thematically difficult, so i got to read something below my reading level, but thematically too hard, so it kind of balanced out.

and then well. so. the series grows with the audience, but the books don’t grow in terms of like difficulty so new readers start deep into it and it’s a complicated thing, the fandom history is complex, but.

the appeal is that parents don’t usually read the books their kids read and so they see a book about cats and assume it’s fluff, and kids who are starved of complex content get to read hamlet-for-kids.

section four: worldbuilding/lore

oh yeah also there’s some really deep lore to explore. so there’s two bits of appeal.

i’m not doing a full world/plot summary, but i’ll explain some common elements here.

thunder/shadow/wind/riverclan: harry potter houses for cats (gryffindor, slytherin, hufflepuff, ravenclaw, except this doesn’t work for the last two but that’s fine because no one cares about them despite riverclan being pretty important in most of the books)

-kit/-paw/-star: naming conventions. everyone has a two part name. (we’ll use cinder as an example because i like the two cinders we know, even tho neither of them get to be cinderstar.) babies are -kit (cinderkit), then when they’re apprentices, which is like being a student, you know, elementary through high school, you’re paw, so cinderpaw. then you get an Official Name from ur clan leader (cinderheart). if you become clan leader, you get to be -star (cinderstar). i know i haven’t explained clan leaders bear with me. this is kind of important because i have the names burned into my memory so i cannot simply always call firestar firestar if he was firepaw at the time of the events i’m describing. it won’t be ambiguous, cinderheart/cinderpelt are a special case. if this is tricky for you it’s fine just only read the first part of the name.

clan (leader, deputy, medicine cat, elder): roles with in the clan. leaders literally have nine lives. deputies are next in line and chosen by the leader. leaders usually go through several deputies, because deputies don’t have nine lives. medicine cats are doctors. they also have an apprentice. those are all one per clan. elders are just retired cats. they’re not a special category per say, but i wanted to mention them.

warrior: adult.

warrior code: laws.

star clan: dead cats. this ties into the religion which is pretty important to the books but for the most part if you understand that dead cats get to give guidance and send their approval, you have the gist of it.

section five: so um, what the fuck

so we start with a cat named rusty who runs into the woods to join thunderclan and then his name is firepaw and we all forget that he’s named rusty except for like that one time it comes up again. bluestar is a great leader with some corrupt deputies but fireheart eventually takes care of it and becomes clan leader which is a big deal.

then a bunch of other shit happens and suddenly ashfur is possessing brackenstar and being (more) abusive to squirrelflight (who is on the outs with brackenstar anyway for lying about their kits jayfeather, hollyleaf, and lionheart because they’re actually the children of firestar’s other daughter leafpool who had them with crowfeather after she fell in love with him but he’s from windclan and she’s a medicine cat so that’s double illegal and apparently hollyleaf is alive even though she yeeted herself into a pit and died because she killed ashfur when he threatened to reveal this but couldn’t live with being the product of an illegal meeting and then it was all pointless because leafpool stopped being a medicine cat out of guilt anyway and jayfeather is just an ornery bitch about everything but especially all of this)

i’m not explaining any of that.

section six: i repeat: so um, what the fuck

so the thing about these books is they’re soap operas and dramas about cats and that means they get just as strange and chaotic as anything else in the genre. i think a lot of people like me, who read them as children, regard the series we knew as a child (usually either the first three or the first five, plus super editions) as something good and warm and comforting (despite being dark and gruesome) because they made us feel good.

they were also a breeding ground for young fandom because of all the the drama that exists and the nature of the books providing that.

section seven: super editions

the simple answer to what a super edition is has already been given (it’s a novel length one-off about a single character, and its usually either a side character - bluestar, crowfeather - or a event/perspective we don’t get to see - firestar, skyclan, greystripe - and they’re generally more mature)

my favorite super edition is bluestar’s prophecy. i read it at like 16, slinking into the children’s library with a stack of other ya fiction and a “children’s book” which dealt with unwanted pregnancy, grief, forbidden love, and more. still not sure why that’s in the children’s section.

section eight: about the drama

so there’s been a lot of fandom drama about these books. i can’t tell you about the nuances, because i am an old fan, so i watched but didn’t partake. the highlights reel that i can recall goes as follows (please note i will refer to characters by name without explanation. it’s fine. the point of this section is to convey the pettiness of this drama):

tigerstar: did he do anything wrong? (the answer is holy shit yes, this isn’t discourse, it’s okay to like a villain)

scourge: did he do anything wrong, also what color is his collar? (also yes, doesn’t matter)

was the new prophecy (2)/omen of the stars (3)/etc good? (yes, eh, no, yes, no comment, no comment)

should jaypaw or hollypaw be medicine cat apprentice (neither of them, but jaypaw’s employment opportunities are limited because he’s blind, so its gotta b him)

uhh a massive tangle around this parentage drama between squirrelflight, leafpool, brackenfur, and crowfeather, which i used as the crux of humor for how batshit the plots can get, so i’m not even going to pretend i can make it funny, but just know that it’s batshit and the correct opinion is as follows: no one is right, but squirrelflight has done the least wrong, brackenfur is an asshole to her where it’s unwarrented, and hollyleaf is an idiot

and the current drama centers around brackenstar and ashfur and is tied directly to the point above, which is why i’ve kind of given up trying to make jokes about this because this is the culmination of like 35 novels.

section nine: i feel like i need to have some conclusive point to justify writing all of this

but i don’t have one, because this was really an excuse to ramble about an old passion for like half an hour. i mean i guess i can say, like, i think younger fans are sort of embroiled in this drama they don’t really have context for, because i’m not kidding, the current drama centers around the grandchildren of our original cast.

it’s kind of hard to know why, say, mistystar matters if you don’t know that she’s the child of bluefur and oakheart and if you don’t remember the drama that surrounded that when bluestar was dying and tigerstar and leopardstar were ruling a combined shadow/riverclan.

(i really hope that’s intelligible i tried to lay the groundwork for it. basically, there’s a biracial kid in a very segregated society who becomes the leader of one of the clans. which is obviously drama, especially considering that that clan was part of a weird supremacy movement a while back.)

& you know? i really hope one of the new series gets to be like, a soft reboot. just. end the current drama and pick up again with the latest generation. a) we’re starting to run out of names, and b) i think that it’s kind of tipped over the edge of sane.

the series also used to be very low fantasy. the cat societies are reasonably close to feral cat colonies (the biggest detail is that toms don’t all have their own territory, but there’s honestly in-universe discussion of this and it’s basically a culture thing), and while star clan/religion is a real and legitimate thing, there’s also a discussion of its abuse and most of the early books don’t really use star clan/related ideas as a physical force so much as a plot device, barring, like, when a new leader gets their nine lives.

honestly, i’ll always adore these books for serving the role they did, and a lot of the series is fantastically well written. but the fandom surrounding it can be, uh, not great because 9-14 year olds don’t really have good brains to understand this.

also, i’m very sad that i can’t find the flash game that was for the great prophecy. it was not very fun, but i enjoyed playing it, so if anyone knows the url so i can search the internet archive for it, please let me know.

section ten: i’m morbidly curious but there are 56 hours of books to read, assuming a very fast reading pace, so is there something i can start with to experience this without dedicating 4 days to it?

yes, there is.

it’s called bluestar’s prophecy. it’s standalone, and i should have given you enough of a background on the lore that you don’t need to know anything else. i’ve already given away the twist in series 1 that it would spoil, so you’re all good on that front.

if you want more, or want the original experience, the first series is self contained and quite good. i’ve given the broad outlines of the plot, but trust me, there’s a lot of surprises and all sorts of things i skipped over because while i like it, it’s not exactly fandom primer material

i also enjoy firestar’s quest and skyclan’s destiny for super editions, but you’ll need to read the first series to understand FQ and FQ to understand SD, so it’s not exactly a starting point. also, SD especially deals with a very different set of themes as the other books.

also, if you were to, say, search “readwarriorcats” (no spaces) on duckduckgo, and then click on one of the first links, you know, not the official site, the one hosted on one of those free website things, you know, not wix, not wordpress, the other one, you would only find lists of the books with hyperlinks.

;3

[officialthiamlibrary]

2019 THIAM REVERSE BIG BANG MASTERLIST

Below is  the masterlist of all of the creations by the amazing artists and writers for the Thiam Reverse Big Bang… four months of fantastic work, preparation, organization and collaboration between the creators are in this list, and we’ll never stop shouting about how thankful we are to everyone who participated this year for the work that you’ve put in to these!! 

Some of those participating were even creating for other events (including our Halloween event) in between this one… and they still have these fantastic works ready to show everyone... so PLEASE show them some love for their hard work by commenting, reblogging, and giving likes/kudos/comments where you can! <3 

All fics are arranged by the date each collaboration was scheduled for posting, titles for both each artwork and fic will take you to each individual creators post.

Special Thanks to @manonisamelon for creating this event’s roundup banner!

16 December 2019

The Price of Freedom + Artwork 1,  2

Author: @volsungar-the-mighty   Artist: @moondrunkmonster56

[41k Words | Rated: M | No Warnings]

When the McCall pack find out that Mason is the Beast of Gevaudan, the Dread Doctors plans go awry, and Theo is left in the firing line. He goes on the run, only to be captured and paralyzed by them before he gets too far.

Liam, a Fallen Angel turned demon, is convinced to leave hell for the first time since his Fall. When he comes across Theo, paralysed, wounded, and about to be tortured and punished by the Dread Doctors, he offer's the Chimera a deal.

Theo's freedom, in exchange for his soul. But something goes wrong when Liam makes the deal a reality, and he becomes stuck on Earth with Theo.

And thats when the fun begins.

Archive Tags: Thiam Big Bang | Thiam Reverse Bang | Thiam | demon au! | Demon Liam! | Bargains | Selling of Souls | Violence | Action | Kinda Romance | Slow Burn

~~~

Making The Pieces Fit + Fic Aesthetic , Thiam’s Story Aesthetic , Aesthetic for Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, 

Author: @bookwyrm07   Artist: @manonisamelon

[7.5k Words | Rated: Teen and Up | No Warnings]

When Theo was hired to rob a bank he knew he could do it, but now that two of his crew have taken themselves out his only option left is to get help from his ex.

Archive Tags: Alternate Universe - Criminals | Past Liam Dunbar/Hayden Romero | Past Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken | Getting Back Together | Bank Robbery | Light Angst | Idiots in Love | Mild Sexual Content | Thiamrbb19

~~~~~

17 December 2019

Eyes Unclouded + Artwork 1,  2

Author: @wolfenboyb   Artist: @marauders-mess

[6.5k Words | Rated: General Audiences | No Warnings]

Inspired by Princess Mononoke... Theo leaves his remove village after it is attacked by a mysterious dark god. Cursed, he ventures out into the world to discover the source of unbalance in the land. He discovers a wolf prince at war with an encroaching town of humans making iron out of sand and destroying the sacred forest. As tensions rise, Theo must find a way to end the conflict and protect the one he loves

Archive Tags: AU | Inspired by Princess Mononoke 

~~

Those Who Wait + Artwork 1, Aesthetic 1,  2 ,  3 

Author: @lovelylittlegrim   Artist: @tabbytabbytabby

[6.5k Words | Rated: Explicit | No Warnings]

Theo finally gets what he's always wanted. 

Archive Tags: Dark | Manipulation | Murder | Smut | Claiming | Biting | Alpha Theo | Top Theo | runaways- freeform | Theo’s been so very patient | Established Relationship

~~

Like The Trembling Heart Of A Captive Bird + Artwork 1,  2 , 3

Author: @impalachick   Artist: @osirismind

[9.5k Words | Rated: Explicit | Warnings: Underage]

Liam is head boy for the Juniors at Beacon Hills Preparatory Academy, and Senior Theo Raeken gets in trouble a lot. They don't exactly get along.

Everything changes when Gerard Argent shows up. Liam finds out that the supernatural seniors are to be drafted and sent to Vietnam on Gerard’s orders. Liam is determined to keep the pack safe and is surprised when Theo agrees to help. When they work together, Liam realizes there is much more to Theo Raeken then the bad boy stereotype implies.

*The underage tag is checked because in this story, Liam is 17 (and Theo is 18). There is discussion about the Vietnam War Draft Lottery and the drafting process, and the pack seniors face the stress of possibly getting drafted.

Archive Tags: Alternate Universe - 1970s | 1970s | Alternate Universe - Boarding School | Enemies to Lovers | School Dances | First Time Blow Jobs | Vietnam War | Evil Gerard Argent | Banter| Explicit Sexual Content | Cigarettes | Clothed Sex | Suit Porn | Suit Kink | Formalwear | Getting Together | Getting to Know Each Other | Werewolf Senses | Christmas | Christmas Party | Angst with a Happy Ending | Teamwork | Pack Dynamics | Head Boy Liam | bad boy Theo

~~~~~

18 December 2019

All The Broken Pieces (you chose to love) + Artwork 1,  2

Author: @flyde  Artist: @marauders-mess

[22k Words | Rated: Mature | No Warnings]

Life fell to pieces, not suddenly, not violently, but slowly. Softly, the broken parts were caught. Safely, they were held. Lovingly, they were protected, although they could never be put back together.

Or: a childhood friends to tragic lovers AU

Archive Tags: Emotional Hurt | Emotional Hurt/Comfort | Angst | Minor Character Death | Depression | Sadness | Childhood Friends | Friendship/Love | I'd tag this happy ending but I don't want to promise too much

~~

The Strangeness In You Is The Strangeness In Me + Artwork 1, Artwork 2, Artwork 3

Author: @eneiryu   Artist: @18-sweet-poisoned-heart

[28k Words | Rated: Teen and Up | No Warnings]

Theo’s life is never boring, considering where he works, but he’d have to say that his job doesn’t truly get exciting until the day that their entire station gets taken hostage by the Fae King of Northern California, pissed off that Theo arrested his murderous little protégé prince.

Archive Tags: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism | Alternate Universe - Fae | Supernatural Cop!Theo | Fae Prince!Liam | Life is Full of Misunderstandings | Thiam RBB 2019

~~

(Not) Dying For Brew + Artwork

Author: @nabawrites   Artist: @snaeken

[7k Words | Rated: Teen and Up | No Warnings]

Liam graduated from college, and now he’s back in Beacon Hills. He didn’t expect to run into Theo again, especially not in a coffee shop. It stirs up some old feelings he hadn’t ever really forgotten about…

Archive Tags: Miscommunication | Angst | Fluff | Banter | cute nicknames | Getting Together | First Kiss | coffee shop AU | Future Fic | Anchors | puns | Friends to Lovers | sort of slow burn?

~~~~~

19 December 2019

When the Day Met Night  + Artwork

Author: @imjustafangirl-nobodylovesme    Artist: @lightfiretomypaperwings​

[8.2k Words | Rated: Teen | No Warnings]

The day finally arrives where Theo is told he's officially joining the family business. He's not happy to hear the news. Life under his father's thumb is a nightmare come true.

On his last day of freedom, he meets Liam Dunbar, a human ray of sunshine that changes everything.

Archive Tags: Original Genderfluid Character | Organized Crime | Mob Boss's son Theo | Photographer Liam | Theo and Tara hate their lives

~~

Saw the shadow of the valley but the shadow was mine + Artwork

Author: @eneiryu   Artist: @colder-bones

[17.3k Words | Rating: Mature | No Warnings]

No one ever trusts Theo, but then again: they’re not supposed to. It’s Liam they never see coming.

Archive Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence | Dread Doctor Spy!Liam 

~~

Caput Mortuum + Artwork

Author: @imjustafangirl-nobodylovesme   Artist: @moondrunkmonster56

[16.3k Words | Rating: Teen | No Warnings]

Liam had pretty much resigned himself to never leaving his home, but then HE moved in. Or

The one where Liam is a ghost (but not really) and Theo buys the house he haunts (but not really).

Archive Tags: Alternate Universe - Human | Haunted Houses | Home Renovation | cursed liam dunbar | theo is handy with tools | that's not relevant to their relationship | i just thought you'd like to know | For reasons

~~~~~

20 December 2019

Melting The Ice + Artwork

Author: @extrasteps​  Artist: @snaeken

[30k Words | Rated: Mature | No Warnings]

Liam's entire world is shaken up when Scott McCall, the captain of the Los Angeles Rams and Liam's mentor at the club, unexpectedly asks to be traded to the Dallas Stars. As Liam struggles to deal with this in both his personal and professional life, his teammate and friend, Theo Raeken, is there to help him in any way he can.

Archive Tags: Ice Hockey AU | Liam doesn't handle his ied very well | Scott is a prick (sorry) | First Kiss

~~

The Memory + Artwork 1,  2

Author: @tabbytabbytabby   Artist: @lovelylittlegrim 

[5k Words | Rated: Teen and Up | No Warnings]

When Theo's away and can't reach Liam he gets worried. Especially when neither Liam's parents nor Mason will give him answers. When he gets back to Beacon Hills he's able to quickly find Liam. The only problem is, Liam has no idea who he is.

Archive Tags: Memory Loss | Established Relationship | Light Angst | Post-Canon | Future Fic | Curses | Good Theo Raeken

~~

Be Free With Me + Video

Author: @ethereal--jeonghan  Artist: @underthegallowws

[20k Words | Rated: Mature | Graphic Depictions Of Violence]

After being recaptured and dragged back to Eichen House, the place he's been running from for years, Theo vows to do whatever he can to escape instead he finds himself being drawn towards Liam, someone who was deemed as a 'high-level threat' within Eichen.

Archive Tags: Alternate Universe | powers | Angst | Sadness | Everyone Needs A Hug | Angst and Hurt/Comfort | Self-Hatred | Nightmares | Comfort | Emotional Healing | enemies to friends to something else | Enemies to Friends to Lovers | Sort Of | Happy Ending | Slow Burn

~~~~~

21 December 2019

You Just Need To See The Signs (Quite Literally) + Artwork

Author: @marauders-mess  Artist: @wolfenboyb 

[9.5k Words | Rated: Teen and Up | No Warnings]

Liam is used to not notice most things.

Like when Mason gets a new shirt or his mom gets a new haircut.

The usual, y'know.

But not noticing he got a boyfriend is kind of a new level, even for him.

Archive Tags: Alternate Universe - Human | Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés | Oblivious Liam Dunbar | Deaf Theo Raeken | Deaf Character | Crush at First Sight | Strangers to Lovers | Getting to Know Each Other | Getting Together | Getting Back Together | Awkward Romance | Fluff and Humor | Attempt at Humor | The Author Regrets Everything

~~

Blue + Artwork

Author:  @flyde​    Artist: @li0nh34rt​

[10k Words | Rated: Teen and Up | No Warnings]

Every werewolf has a soulmate.

Every werewolf has a soulmate, and this is how it happens: On every day you spend on earth, the stars move a little closer together above your head until they form a line - the curve of a closed eye that will one day open to look upon you. From that day on, you will have someone to watch over you in life and death, and you will never feel complete without the soul that the eye belongs to.

But what if your soulmate's eye opens to reveal something you didn't expect?

Archive Tags: Alternate Universe - Soulmates | some angst and some fluff | Sharing a Bed | Sharing Clothes | Holding Hands | First Kiss | Happy Ending

~~

You've Got Nothing Left To Lose (I Have Even Less Than You) + Artwork

Author: @snaeken​     Artist: @theraeken​

[3.5k Words | Rated: Mature | Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death]

After everything that’s happened in Beacon Hills, Theo really shouldn’t be surprised soulmates exist. He just never thought he would have one of his own. 

(Still to be completed, word count below is as of 1st chapter)

Archive Tags: Soulmates | Time Loop | Temporary Character Death

~~~~~

22 December 2019

Darkened Skies + Poster, Aesthetic for the fic, Theo aesthetic, Liam aesthetic, Liam with his dragon tattoo, Theo with his dragon tattoo, Theo and his dragon

Author: @lightfiretomypaperwings​   Artist: @manonisamelon

[3k Words | Rated: Teen and Up | No Warnings]

In a world where black dragons are a sign of evil, Theo Raeken was automatically an outcast. Coupled with a tragedy from his childhood that he was responsible for, it was easy to understand why everyone was afraid of him. But not Liam Dunbar, the friend from childhood that Theo hasn’t seen since the fire that claimed his family.

Archive Tags: Dragons | alternative universe

~~

I don’t suffer from my sanity, I enjoy every minute of it + Artwork

Author: @lightfiretomypaperwings​​    Artist: @moondrunkmonster56​

[8.4k | Rated: Teen | No Warnings]

When Theo Raeken became the new therapist at Eichen House, he didn’t expect a collection of secrets. His high priority patient, Liam Dunbar, won’t speak a word to him during their sessions. But when Theo uncovers a stash of notes from a previous doctor, he finds more questions than answers.

Archive Tags: Eichen | Echo House | insane asylum | Secrets | Alternate Universe

~~

Your heart or mine (we’re running out of time) + Artwork

Author: @lightfiretomypaperwings​​    Artist: @snaeken​

[3.8k | Rated Teen | No Warnings]

Theo Raeken knows it’s a long shot. Finding the heart of immortality feels like an impossible task, but it’s an adventure he has to pursue if he wants to survive. He doesn’t expect to meet Liam Dunbar along the way, a man with a record of violence that wants the heart just as badly. When circumstances force them to work together, Theo discovers there’s a whole lot more to Liam than his mercenary past. Can these two manage to get along on their quest or will they tear each other apart?

Archive Tags: Treasure Hunt | some steampunk vibes | Enemies to Friends to Lovers | Angst | Alternate Universe

And that’s it! Thanks again for a great event and we will see you all at the next one ;P

OTL Team

[eeveedel]

Commissions are back open

(beautiful graphic by @louisdaffodil​) 

Hi all! It’s a new year, and I wanted to open my commissions back up this semester as I deal with the joys of being a jobless, soon-to-be college graduate. 

What are commissions? Well, I’ll write you any fic you want for a small payment. I’ve had a lot of fun writing them in the past and I’d love to write more fics in the future!

Here’s a refresher on how it works. All the rules/info are on this post, and also on my new official commissions page.

Prices:

I charge $10 for every 1,000 words. After 5k words, my fee goes down to $5 for every additional 1k (so, a 5k fic is $50, a 6k fic is $55, 7k is $60, and so on…)

This number is based off of the fact that it takes me about an hour to write and edit 1k on a good day. In the state where I live, minimum wage is $8.55 an hour. The additional $1.45 is because the hours I will take to write fic will be taken out of my free time, which is limited.

What I will and won’t write:

For examples of my work, please refer to my ao3 page or my tumblr drabbles.

I mainly write One Direction fic, and am most familiar with those pairings, particularly Harry/Louis, but I am open to most pairings. However, I am willing to write about most media that has appeared on this blog, such as Marvel, Dunkirk, The Hunger Games, etc. If you’re not sure if I’d be open to writing something, just ask!

I most enjoy writing ABO, mpreg, scifi or fantasy, angst and historical fics. While these are my main interests, I am a pretty open book in terms of tropes I am open to writing.

What I will NOT write, however, is:

Smut with underage characters (ie: high school fluff and the like is fine, just no smut)

Underage/over age age gaps

Self harm and suicide (I am open to mentions of mental illness, but please talk to me about it ahead of time)

Non con, dub con, rape, or anything of the like

Torture

Heavy violence

Watersports or scat play

Bestiality

Cheating  

Incest

Teacher/student dynamics (not roleplay)

Major character death

**Please note I reserve the right to turn down any commission request I receive, even if the content is not included on this list.

You cannot pay for a preview of a fic I am in the process of writing, and you cannot pay me to include a requested scene in my upcoming fic. You can, however, ask for a fic set in the universe of one of my past or current fics, or in an upcoming fic project.

I am open to writing smut commissions. If you would like to commission a smut work, you must prove to me you are 18 or older.  

How to request a commission and pay:

DM me on Tumblr or Twitter (don’t send me an ask or an anon message, please!). Please have an idea of what kind of fic you would like, including pairings, tropes, and triggers/things you don’t want included, when you message me.

It would also helpful to me if you have an idea of the word count you would like/are willing to pay for when you message me. You can leave that word count up to me, but when the fic is finished, you will have to pay for however many words I ended up writing. (In other words, if you have $20 to pay for a fic commission, tell me that up front so I don’t write 6k and then expect $55)

I will also need your email and PayPal name. I will send your commission via email.

Payments are ONLY through PayPal or Venmo. I do not accept gifts/trades, online gift cards, wire payments, etc.

You will pay me a down payment of $10 up front (unless you are paying for a 1k commission, in which case your down payment will be $5). After your fic is complete I will send you a message, and will send you the completed fic when you have paid me in full.

After requesting a commission:

You may request two drafts of the fic so you can check for potential changes you would like made before it is completed.

Please reply to my messages in a timely manner. Give me your communication you will check most often, whether that is Tumblr, Twitter, WhatsApp, email, etc. Please do not harass me for updates. I promise I will keep you updated in a timely manner.

If you cancel a commission before it is complete, or if I am unable to finish it, you will be refunded your down payment. You cannot receive a refund after I have sent you the fic – remember, you had options to review drafts to check if there was something you didn’t like.

I aim to finish commissions in a timely manner. However, keep in mind that I am a full time student and that my time is limited. I will let you know what my schedule is and how many requests are ahead of you when you commission me. It is up to you to keep those limits in mind.

Artistic Rights/Copyright:

I reserve the rights of all work created by me, as well as right to upload or distribute these works to my public Archive of Our Own page or Tumblr, unedited or with edits, which acknowledgement the piece was originally a paid commission.

You may not repost my work and claim it as yours on any website, including but not limited to AO3, Tumblr, or Wattpad. You also may not submit my work for academic or professional distribution, or for your own profit. I am sending you my writing on the understanding you will read it for your own pleasure and nothing more

These rules may also change as I gain more experience with taking commissions. Please be patient and flexible!

Well, that’s everything! I look forward to this new endeavor.

Is anything here unclear? Feel free to message me for clarification before commissioning me!

All the information about prices and rules can be found here! Feel free to reach out with any questions

[kcaruth]

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Review

Before the dark times, before the mouse empire, LucasArts published several fun, memorable Star Wars video games, from Star Wars: Bounty Hunter to The Force Unleashed series. After Disney’s acquisition of LucasArts in 2012, the Mouse House stopped all internal developments at LucasArts and laid off most of its staff in 2013. Signaling its turn to the dark side, Disney awarded EA (voted worst company in America multiple times) a multi-year license to create Star Wars video games.

EA rebooted the Star Wars Battlefront series (2005′s Star Wars: Battlefront II has to be one of my most played video games) and released the new Star Wars Battlefront in November 2015. Critics acknowledged the game’s great graphics and visuals, but it quickly became apparent that the game lacked content. The hero and villain rosters were very limited, and the game only included content from the original trilogy, not the prequels.

Then came EA’s disastrous Star Wars Battlefront II, the repercussions of which shook the gaming world. Released in November 2017, Battlefront II had some promise. It was the first game since the Disney takeover to feature a single-player story mode that was canon to the film series. The game also contained content from the prequel, original, and sequel trilogies. Additionally, EA greatly expanded the hero and villain rosters. However, EA showed it true colors with the game’s loot boxes, which could award players significant gameplay advantages if they purchased them with real money. Essentially, the game turned into a pay to win system, thereby making players who did not purchase loot boxes feel so disadvantaged that Battlefront II virtually became pay to play.

Although Visceral Games, the studio behind the Dead Space series, was developing a single-player Star Wars game, even getting to the point in the development process where they could tease everyone with in-game footage, EA canceled the game and shut down the studio. Not counting the Lego Star Wars games and mobile games, EA’s Battlefront games were the only new Stars Wars video games on the market, an astonishing reality compared to the rate at which LucasArts used to produce games for the franchise.

Eventually, EA finally came to its senses and assigned a single-player action-adventure Star Wars game to Respawn Entertainment, the studio behind the Titanfall series. Former Santa Monica Studio employee Stig Asmussen served as game director, and heavy-hitting talent like writer Chris Avellone, perhaps best known for his work on Fallout: New Vegas, joined the project. Finally, Respawn released Jedi: Fallen Order in November 2019 to much critical acclaim.

Now, with that long-winded background introduction establishing the recent state of Star Wars video gaming out of the way, let’s get into the real reason why everyone is here. What did I think of Jedi: Fallen Order? I am usually well behind on newer video game releases, but our current state of affairs with the global pandemic has afforded me a bit more time to dust off my controller. Having just beaten Fallen Order earlier this week, I have plenty to say about the game. (I even made a pros and cons list! Can you tell I have also been spending my time watching the misadventures of Leslie Knope and company in Parks and Rec?)

At its core, Star Wars is about family, friendship, and good versus evil, so let’s start by talking about this game’s characters and plot. (Don’t worry; I won’t spoil anything from the story.) Fallen Order nails the spirit of Star Wars. Set five years after Revenge of the Sith, players control Cal Kestis, a Padawan forced to keep a low profile after the Jedi Purge. Cal lives on the planet Bracca, where he works as a scrapper salvaging ships from the Clone Wars. Kudos to the game here. I stopped a couple of times just to admire the visuals of Bracca. It was definitely a “wow moment” seeing TIE fighters shriek by overhead and watching a Separatist ship descend from the atmosphere. One day, Cal taps into the Force for the first time since Emperor Palpatine’s Order 66 to save a friend from certain death from a workplace accident. Unfortunately, an Imperial probe droid records the incident, alerting the Empire of a Jedi fugitive. Two Inquisitors quickly arrive on the scene to track down the Jedi. Introduced in the animated series Star Wars Rebels, the menacing Inquisitors are an evil organization of Force-sensitive beings, some of them former Jedi, who have been tortured and turned to the dark side by Darth Vader and the Empire or otherwise willingly joined the organization out of hunger for power. They are tasked with hunting down surviving Jedi in hiding and others exhibiting Force potential. Somehow, Cal has survived this long even though he still carries around his lightsaber with him everywhere! When the Inquisitors corner him, he literally just pulls it out of his pocket! How has no one ever noticed it before? Did none of the Imperial probe droids floating around the planet ever take a snapshot of the weapon? Plot holes aside, two new characters, Greez and Cere, rescue Cal from certain doom at the hands of the Second and Ninth Sisters and ferry him off world.

Cere is a former Jedi who held the role of Seeker in the Order. A Seeker located infants with Force abilities who could be taken to Coruscant and trained in the Jedi arts (think the good version of the Inquisitors). Greez is a starship pilot with a bad gambling habit, a green thumb, and an insatiable appetite. Cal finds a small droid named BD-1, who reveals a message from Jedi Master Eno Cordova, detailing the existence of a hidden Jedi Holocron containing a list of Force-sensitive children across the galaxy. In the wrong hands, this list could lead to the children’s demise. Cal and Cere want to use the list to rebuild the Jedi Order. Thus begins the race between the Empire and our crew of ragtag misfits to secure the Holocron.

Overall, the story is good, great even for recent Star Wars standards. It fits the Star Wars cannon very well, and I loved the nods to the Clone Wars, mentions of obscure characters, and the foreshadowing of future events. Some moments elicit chuckles from the appropriate Star Wars humor, while others go to some truly dark places. The way the game tackles Order 66 earns it extremely high marks from me. The developers need to be applauded for bringing in new and relatively unknown planets that we have not really had the chance to explore before. There is no Hoth, Jakuu, or the like to be seen here, thankfully. Star Wars is a big galaxy; it is about time we saw different parts of it. We have spent more than enough time on Tatooine. The planets we do visit feel alive. Each one has a different color palette, climate, weather pattern (although the developers may have been a little heavy-handed on the fog in a few of the locations), and, of course, flora and fauna.

Cal fights everything from annoying rat creatures to ram-like slugs, from giant venus fly traps to trampoline spring-plants. Players can even collect plant specimens on different planets and plant them in Greez’s terrarium, which was a nice little way to take a piece of each planet with you on your journey. Oh, and the spiders. Cal has to kill tons and tons of spiders. Again, this is Star Wars! There is a whole galaxy at your disposal full of creatures that look like whatever your imagination can dream up, and the best we get is different species of spiders? That is probably nitpicking, but it felt like it was worth pointing out.

When it comes to the Empire, however, the variety is fantastic. Of course, the run-of-the-mill standard stormtroopers are here, but there are also variations like shock baton-wielding scout troopers, flame troopers, and the dangerous Purge troopers, essentially the special forces of the Inquisitors. The chatter between the troopers is great. Before they spot him, Cal can overhear them talking about their notorious accuracy, the planet’s hostile wildlife, or even mundane topics like food rations. Once Cal starts fighting them, they often taunt him, full of confidence in their abilities, but then they come to the realization that they are facing off against a Jedi. The confidence in their voices gradually turns to panicked fear as Cal slices through their numbers. By the time Cal gets to the last trooper standing, that trooper will regularly plead for his life or confess how scared he is. Every once in a while, the Empire will even throw AT-ST walkers at Cal, which are a fun enough challenge, though the strategy to defeat them becomes clear within a minute or two, and players are never forced to change up their tactics. I do love that after Cal destroys the walker, the trooper will crawl out of the wreckage and start shooting at him. Nice touch!

With all that said, the story is not perfect. In fact, once or twice it just feels dumb. For example, Cal goes on this grand mission seeking out an important leader in hiding, and when he finally encounters him, they exchange maybe one full sentence before the leader gifts Cal a rebreather so that he can swim underwater. You are telling me I conquered various obstacles and enemies, traversing across multiple planets all to get...a rebreather? This whole section could have been cut out and streamlined so that the storyline goes directly to the main setpiece of this planet I am talking about. Have one of Cal’s crewmates give him a rebreather and send him on his way instead. Regardless, at least the back and forth traversal gives players another chance to board the ship, ascend from the planet, and blast off into hyperspace. Seeing that never got old.

Respawn and its writers did a great job with these characters, including one of the Inquisitors (the other one is just kind of...meh). I enjoyed getting to know my crew, but I wish they had a little more to do in the game. In reality, they just stay on the ship 95 percent of the time while you are out running around on your mission (not that I entirely blame them...it is a cool ship). The conversations between these characters were usually good, but sometimes Cal would not mention huge, seemingly significant events or people he ran into to his crew! For a cinematic franchise like Star Wars, this game could have used a couple more cutscenes. The game often feeds the plot or a character’s mindset to players by making them idly stand near a crewmate and tapping R3 a handful of times to get them to cough up a couple of lines of dialogue.

As is to be expected from a Star Wars product, the game’s music is terrific. Gordy Haab and Stephen Barton composed the score and recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Bach Choir of London. Mongolian folk metal band The Hu also wrote and recorded a song that is featured during a couple of prominent portions of the game. The song lyrics were written in Mongolian and then translated into a fictional Star Wars alien language. The music compliments and elevates the game’s setpieces, with one standout part reminding me of Thor: Ragnarok. A couple of times, the game goes full John Williams to really make some moments hit home, and boy does it work! Hats off to Respawn for putting in this much effort in regards to the music for the game.

Getting into the gameplay, Fallen Order is an amalgamation of several other games. Dark Souls, Zelda, Uncharted, Metroid, Castlevania, Sekiro, heck even Sonic...they are all here in some form or fashion. Unfortunately for Fallen Order, it does not elevate the features it borrows from those games. The biggest reason? The bugs. Oh my goodness the bugs. How can a blockbuster release like this have so many bugs? Maybe it had something to do with EA or Disney wanting to push the final product out before the release of The Rise of Skywalker the next month, but the amount of bugs in this game are simply unacceptable. While none of them led to a complete game crash, I definitely caught myself grumbling, “I hate this game,” with my frustration levels constantly reaching the scorching temperature of Mustafarian lava, especially considering Fallen Order’s inexcusably long load times. Seriously, the load times after dying are so long that I had enough time to run to the bathroom, heat something up in the microwave, or make a cup of tea (to help relax me from this rage-inducing game) before the game finished loading. How can I lift off from a planet and travel through hyperspace faster than the game can respawn me after dying? It is not just dying, by the way. The game developers think they cleverly hid load times behind elevator rides, but that did not work either! At least throw in some elevator music or comm chatter if you are going to make me stand there for so long!

One time, I fell through the level to my death while walking on what was 100 percent solid ground. Speaking of solid ground, or should I say the lack thereof, enemies continued to fight me while clearly hovering in thin air when they should obviously be plummeting to their death. Woe is me if I tried to reach them, though, because my Jedi character must not have that ability, leading to, that is right, more death falls for me as the enemy looked on from his invisible sliver of ground above. If I was lucky enough to have an enemy remain in my relative vicinity and not stand off a ledge, that enemy had a chance of pinning and glitching Cal against a wall, leaving me trapped until I died from the beating. The enemy who kills Cal glows gold until players shave off a piece of that enemies health, which is great, but that means players cannot see that enemy flash red when he uses an unblockable attack. How could Respawn not notice this error when it is such an important component of the combat? For all the aggressive enemies with magical glitching powers, there were also those that would have a change of heart mid-combat and go pacifistic on me. I found this especially common in the later game and on one planet in particular with ranged enemies. They would fire at me, I would block their shot back at them and injure them, and then they would just stand there staring at me. It was really bizarre and made me uneasy turning my back on them to explore the area. I also experienced my health and Force bars completely disappearing from the screen. The first couple of times it happened, I thought it was intentional and meant that Cal could not die for that sequence of the game. Wrong! So much for thinking I was momentarily invincible with unlimited Force powers. This bug was especially crippling during big boss fights, as you can imagine. Respawn throws in some quick time events once in a while where players have to press the correct button in a very short amount of time. For the most part, I did not mind these, but one exception got my blood boiling. Cal is fighting a giant creature and ends up free falling. The game requires Cal to land in a very, very precise spot and pull of a quick time event. I cannot count the number of times I fell to my death during this part because of how finicky the game was being. Cal conveniently stumbles across every single icy or muddy slide in the galaxy during his travels, a way for the game developers to disguise a way to get players from point A to point B quickly, but these slides are also quite particular with when players jump and where they land. Another good portion of my deaths came from Cal not making a jump on one of these slides when he clearly had the distance or him seemingly landing and making the jump only for him to glitch and then fall backwards into a never-ending dark chasm. The game developers may have thought players would enjoy these slides, but I came to dread them.

The worst game bugs by far, however, dealt with frame rates and level textures. Not contained to one section or even one planet, unfortunately, garbage frame rates wreak more havoc across the galaxy than the treacherous Empire. I am telling you the frame rate is absolutely abysmal in this game. I can forgive a drop in frame rate if it happens a couple of times, but it is like it is a built-in gameplay feature of Fallen Order. It was maddening! How can Respawn expect me to properly block or dodge if the game cannot even keep up with my movements or camera adjustments? Texture pop ins and clipping were also recurring issues. One time, I noticed a soldier’s helmet load in late. Another time, a Wookie’s fur took a while to fill up the character model. (By the way, the Wookies in this game look horrendous.) Sometimes, it would get so bad that the game would just pause completely so that it could load in the content of the area. I honestly thought the game had crashed and was about to reboot the console before everything stuttered back into place and Cal got moving again.

I have done a lot of ranting about the game’s flaws the last few paragraphs, so let me get back to some things I did like. The combat works well. I cannot begin to tell you how satisfying and occasionally outright hilarious it is to Force push a trooper off a ledge, especially when he is standing there trying to intimidate you. I had so much fun simply blocking stormtroopers’ laser bolts right back at them. Best of all, I started taking every opportunity I had to pull enemies toward me, especially ones perched up on higher vantage points, and stab them straight through with my lightsaber. The lightsaber boss fights were a highlight of the game. Players feel the weight of every strike and every struggle when the blades cross.

In addition to Cal’s lightsaber, he also has his Force powers at his disposal. He starts out with Force slow and gradually adds other abilities, such as push and pull, as the game progresses. Players may question how Cal, a Jedi, can struggle with a squadron of stormtroopers or the local wildlife, or they may ask why he does not start with all of his Force abilities, but it all makes sense when you consider that Cal has to rebuild his connection to the Force. He has not used it since he was a child, after all. It makes sense that this amateur padawan who did not complete his training runs into a tough time in combat. When Cal does unlock new Force abilities, the game cleverly flashes back to show Cal’s master teaching him that ability during his training before Order 66.

Players can further bolster their Force, survival, and lightsaber abilities through a skill tree. Skill points accumulated from defeating enemies grant players access to increased health, stronger stim potency, increased lightsaber damage, and mass push, to name a few skills. Even later on in the game when most of your Force abilities have been unlocked and Cal has found a couple of fun new gadgets, the game still feels balanced. Cal never feels overpowered like Starkiller in The Force Unleashed games. Even when they are maxed out, his Force push and pull do not appear to have much of an effect on bosses. At most, they will briefly stagger them, whereas when they do it to Cal, he will comically tumble over like Palpatine when Yoda Force pushed him across his desk in Revenge of the Sith.

I will argue that a couple of Force abilities become outdated later in the game. At one point, I forgot I even had Force slow because I had not used it in a while. I only remembered it while I was trying to solve a small puzzle to escape from an area and had exhausted all other options. Can you blame me for always wanting to Force push enemies off a cliff instead of slowing them down?

I appreciate that the game developers allow players to adjust the difficulty at any time. I started out at a higher difficulty and found myself dying before I even left the first world, Bracca. However, I persisted. That is, until I faced off against Oggdo Bogdo and his trash hitboxes. Players can stumble upon Oggdo Bogdo very early in the game. Oggdo Bogdo, a carnivorous amphibian creature, is a boss variation of the more common lookalikes of him. There is a similar optional alpha creature boss encounter on most planets Cal visits. No matter how hard I tried or how many different strategies I employed, Oggdo Bogdo proved to be too tough for me, and after waiting through countless death loads and having to run back over to Oggdo Bogdo’s location time and time again, I decided to lower the game’s difficulty, allowing me to finally slay this ugly creature.

Like Sekiro’s sculptor’s idols or the bonfires in Dark Souls, Fallen Order relies on meditation circles as its save points. Cal can rest to full health and restore his Force meter as well as restock health stims. Meditation circles also allow players to access the skill tree and spend skill points. These meditation circles implement a good risk versus reward system. If players choose to rest at a meditation circles, all of the enemies he or she has defeated since the last rest will respawn. I regularly found myself weighing the pros and cons of my situation, questioning if I should heal and get more stims or push on so that I did not put more enemies in my path.

While I am on the subject of these meditation circle save points, I have to point out that Fallen Order does not have fast travel. Instead, it encourages players to backtrack and explore previously inaccessible areas that they can now open with their newly unlocked abilities. This was fine for a while, but I quickly grew tired of it when I noticed how much of the backtracking had me slowly climbing, traversing across narrow walkways that Cal has to carefully balance on, or shimmying over narrow cliff edges. This is padding by exploration. While the vine and rope swinging was fun, especially with Force pull, I stopped enjoying climbing up a conveniently placed arrangement of vines and the like by the halfway point of the game, if not earlier. I will admit that I believe Fallen Order contains just the right amount of playtime, but this stuff had it teetering on the too long side. This is compounded by one important world that players have to visit multiple times that feels too big. The developers’ creativity and excitement got a little out of hand here. Just pull up the map of that world to see how unwieldy it is. When I completed the story on a planet like this, I felt exhausted rather than triumphant. Why can’t I hail my crew to come pick me up in the ship where I am rather than having to run across the entire planet again to get back to the landing pad, fighting the same enemies I already cleared out a couple of hours ago? The game developers do provide a few shortcuts that players can open, but the amount of time they end up saving is negligible in some cases.

I was disappointed that there is no real endgame content. Sure, players can continue to explore or fight enemies for the heck of it, but the developers could have done so much more. After players unlock every ability in the skill tree, the skill points they collect after that become meaningless. I will confess that I chose to rush past enemies to get to my next destination rather than waste time or energy fighting them for the 50th time after I had filled out my skill tree. Why not unlock fast travel after players beat the story? How about adding in a fighting arena where players can test their maxed out skill set against waves of enemies? Heck, let the players unlock dark side Force abilites like Force lightning or Force choke after they complete the story so that whatever they do then is not canon. I would have continued to gather skill points for that!

Now I mentioned Cal’s droid companion BD-1 earlier, but BD-1 deserves a special shout-out. BD-1 is spunky and lovable. Not only does BD-1 shoot Cal stims to heal him, the droid also provides hints for puzzles, scans enemies to suggest tactics to take them down, plays recordings that push the story along, and helps Cal navigate the worlds by hacking locked doors or carrying him across zip lines. Additionally, BD-1 projects the holomap of each planet, which is vital to keeping track of where Cal is in relation to the ship or his destination. The holomap itself is decent. Color coding helps players see what is inaccessible and what is unlockable, but for the bigger worlds with multiple levels it can be quite a burden to scroll across. Not to knock BD-1, but I grew impatient waiting for the droid’s animation that it goes through every single time Cal finds a hidden chest. Cal opens up the chest, BD-1 jumps in and rumbles around, and then jumps back out with whatever was inside it, all while Cal repeats the same lines of dialogue, like “Woah, buddy!” or “Careful now.” or “What did you find in there?” There are 107 chests in the game. Let that sink in.

These chests are one of the rewards for exploration. They contain items that players can use to customize Cal, his lightsaber, BD-1, or the ship. While this is motivation enough at the beginning of the game, this customization serves no purpose beyond cosmetics. It comes down to which poncho or paint job players find more aesthetically pleasing. I love that the game developers let players change lightsaber colors, but I wish these different ponchos and lightsaber parts had some sort of effect on the gameplay, such as restoring more of Cal’s Force meter or refilling a small amount of health after defeating an enemy.

Force echoes serve as another reward for exploring. Cal uncovers lore from past events by reaching out through these Force echoes. They rounded out the worlds nicely and added to the feeling that they were lived in, real places in the galaxy. The final element of exploration is BD-1′s scans. While you are running around, BD-1 will occasionally crawl down off Cal’s back and scramble over to something the droid wants to scan. These unlock data entries on the planet, its flora and fauna, the Empire, or other characters. This is all fine and dandy, but the level of exploration the game developers expect players to do with all of the backtracking involved needs to reward me with more than just basic lore, especially when some of the entries feel like the writers did not even try when they wrote them. Is an entry on a storage crate telling me that the Empire stored materials in it really worth stopping to scan? I think not. Instead, the game developers could have really motivated me to explore more by throwing in a few interesting side quests or fun Easter eggs. Maybe players could stumble upon active Imperial transmissions and overhear characters like Tarkin or Thrawn. Maybe players could find an abandoned Imperial camp and watch Imperial or Rebel propaganda over a holofeed that was left on. They could have even hidden a squadron of battle droids that were forgotten from the Clone Wars. So many possibilities!

Jedi: Fallen Order is far from a perfect game and has so much unrealized potential, but I would not trade away my time with it. For every flaw, I can point to a positive, and vice versa. At the end of the day, I got to be a Jedi, and that is good enough for me.

[destieltropecollection]

Destiel Trope Collection 2019 Day 10: Creature AU

Operation Little Red Riding Cas | @dean-cas-in-the-impala Rating: Explicit Word Count: 17434 Main Tags and Warnings: Criminal, Action, Drama, Humor, Creature fic Summary: Castiel Novak is a bothersome reporter from a local newspaper, who has compromising evidence against a mob boss named Crowley, known as The King of Hell. Dean Winchester, who works for Crowley is commanded to get rid of Novak. His plan to charm and lure the victim into a trap fails, when the sneaky reporter vanishes from the bar where they meet. But the thing Castiel does not know is that Dean is a werewolf and he remembers his scent, enabling him to find the gorgeous but impudent reporter, no matter where he goes.

Walpurgis Moon | @jemariel Rating: Mature Word Count: 5486 Main Tags and Warnings: Dean/Cas, Fae Castiel, Fae & Fairies, Case fic, fairy wings Summary: Written for the SPN Holiday Reverse Mini-Bang! Art by Pimentogirl. Dean bends low and plucks a sprig of tiny blue flowers. They’re pretty, he supposes. If you like that sort of thing. He plucks a few more stems until he has a small bundle. Behind him he hears a tinkle, like chimes in the wind. But when he turns - nothing. Only dark tree trunks. A brush of wind, like a feather or a leaf brushing his cheek, and he whips around, ready with a cold iron crowbar in his fist, but again, nothing. Except - is that movement? Between the trees? No. Just a trick of the moonlight. Probably. Dean meets a stranger. Be he friend or foe?

sunflares | @reallyelegantsharkfish Rating: Teen & Up Word Count: 2684 Main Tags and Warnings: Incubus Castiel, Demons Are Known, Human Dean Winchester, Demon Castiel, Asexual Castiel, Asexual Character, Wings, Horns, Cuddling & Snuggling, Naked Cuddling, Kissing, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic Summary: Dean’s hand reaches to guide Cas’s chin into another kiss. This feels like the fore-warning to satiation, the promise of a rich meal to come, and Cas’s wings curve forward to hold Dean closer to him.

Interspecies | @destielshipper2017 + @callmemisshorizon Rating: Mature Word Count: 60551 Main Tags and Warnings: Creature Dean, Creature Sam, Shifters, Monsters, hurt Sam, Protective Sam, Protective Dean, Kaiju, Transgenics, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, antagonistic Ketch Summary: After being free for over 2 years, Sam and Dean were recaptured again by a secret government society that has been testing transgenic species for many years, in attempt to control them and use them for war purposes.

An Accidental Incubus | @jupiterjames Rating: Explicit Word Count: 40380 Main Tags and Warnings: incubus Dean, Angel Castiel, creature Dean, soul bonds, FOD Summary: On a hunt gone wrong, Dean finds himself cursed to be an incubus. While Sam and Charlie rush to find a cure before the change is permanent, Castiel decides to become Dean's "offering" when the hunter begins to deteriorate under the effects of the change.

The Quest for the Demon King's Heart | @cr-noble-writes Rating: Explicit Word Count: 12500 Main Tags and Warnings: Angst with a Happy Ending, Major Injury, Angry Sex, Rough Sex, Fantasy AU, Major Character Injury, Demon King!Dean, Wood Elf!Castiel Summary: In a fantasy land, Dean, the Demon King, goes to a distant guild to take a break from evil, where he meets a young adventurer, Castiel, on a quest to slay the Demon King. For fun, Dean helps and protects the adventurer, and affection grows between them. Then, they arrive at the gates of his castle.

Rescue Mission for Two | @pherryt Rating: Mature Word Count: 48478 Main Tags and Warnings: Fantasy AU, Soulmates, Creature Fic, First Kiss, Dragon!Cas, stubborn!Cas, border skirmishes, Captured, brief non graphic torture scenes, Magic, self sacrificing characters, Secrets, bed sharing, Telepathy, nakedness (but no smut), Dragons, Fairies, sick!Cas, Comfort/Angst, Angst, hurt!Dean, drugged!cas, brief section of Cas being drugged against his will Summary: Castiel thinks he's the last of his kind and doomed to live a life alone. He's hiding in plain sight, as a human soldier in Angels Outfit, fighting alongside other companies - including Lord Winchesters renowned cavalry, the Silver Hooves - when his soul mark unbelievably flares to life. Either he's not the only Dragon to survive the war, or he's bonded with a human. Before he can figure out which of his fellow soldiers it could be, he's sent across into enemy territory on a rescue mission. Lord Winchester's eldest has been captured and last rumored to be in Alastair's hands. Castiel can't say no, but the clock is ticking and if he doesn't find his soul mate, he will die.

Little Blue Dragon | @saltnhalo Rating: Explicit Word Count: 23820 Main Tags and Warnings: Dragon Castiel, blacksmith Dean, magic, soulmates, pining Summary: Dean Winchester may have a reputation for being a skilled craftsman and blacksmith, but his life is just like anyone else’s. He’s over-worked and under-slept, and it’s all because of the niggling feeling in the back of his mind that tells him he’s… forgetting something. Still, he can’t let his weird dreams or errant thoughts get in the way of his work and his love for his craft. The strange feeling goes ignored. That is, until he meets a man with jewel-blue eyes and an aura of intrigue. Castiel slots into his life in a way that Dean had never thought possible, and Dean grows accustomed to the mysterious man’s visits and brilliant smiles and tales of far-away places. He’d never known he was missing a piece of himself until he met Castiel, and he thinks that Cas might feel the same way. Until Castiel disappears from Dean’s life completely.

Ensnared | @saltnhalo

Rating: Mature Word Count: 10359 Main Tags and Warnings: Siren Cas, sailor Dean, shipwrecked, desert island Summary: As the current pulls him a little closer to the island, the singing grows stronger. It’s deep and lyrical and the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard and he’s suddenly overcome by the desperate, searing need to be closer, to hear it in all its intended glory. And as he passes a single spur of rock that juts out a little further into the ocean than the others, Dean sees him.

The Captain's Fishy Admirer | @sheinthatfandom Rating: General Word Count: 1958 Main Tags and Warnings: alternative universe-pirate, pirate dean, merman castiel, pirate ship impala, based on fan art, Summary: Dean Winchester is the Captain of the Pirate ship Impala, feared on the seas and is a wanted criminal. He's someone to be feared and respected, so why can't he get this cute merman to leave him alone?

The Crane In White | @drawlight Rating: Explicit Word Count: 9994 Main Tags and Warnings: Creature Castiel, Romance, Pining, Fairytale, AU - Modern Setting Summary: Once upon a time, there was a little crane who fell in love with a human. He prayed every night to be made human to be with his love. Once upon a time, Dean Winchester finds a white crane.

Forget Me Not | @thebloggerbloggerfun Rating: General Word Count: 3638 Main Tags and Warnings: Ghost!Castiel, MCD (because he's a ghost), flowershop owner!Dean Summary: Dean gets a little more than he bargains for when he accidentally buys a haunted flower shop.

In the company of greatness | @angelneedshunter Rating: General Word Count: 4815 Main Tags and Warnings: Alternate universe, Dragon!Cas, Knight!Dean, High Fantasy, Established Relationship, Praise kink, bonding, Summary: All Dean wants is to spend the holiday in peace with Cas. He spots trouble though as a girl approaches the mountain where he and the dragon Castiel resides in. That is the problem when you are dating a dragon. All the sacrifices interrupting your snuggle time.

secret of the sea | @saltnhalo Rating: Teen & Up Word Count: 2465 Main Tags and Warnings: Creature Castiel (Supernatural), Selkie Castiel (Supernatural), Kid Dean Winchester, Kid Castiel (Supernatural), First Meetings Summary: It feels like neither of them are breathing as Dean wades another half-step closer, the waves tugging at his waist now, his clothes soaked. How am I going to explain this? he thinks, this surreal moment that is happening even as he should be making his way back to the safety, the normalcy, of home. But instead he’s standing in the ocean as the sun disappears beneath the horizon and the stars begin to come out above, ignoring the bitter cold of the water to free a seal that watches him warily but almost seems to know that Dean is its only chance at survival right now.

As the World Falls Down (WIP) | @thursdays-fallen-angel Rating: Mature Word Count: 28251 Main Tags and Warnings: Fae!Cas, Half-Fae!Dean, King!Cas Summary: After his mom died, Dean swore off anything and everything relating to her heritage, going so far as to ignore the Fae blood in his own veins. The only magic he uses is to keep his inhuman qualities hidden, and as far as he’s concerned, that’s all he needs. However, when a Fae assassin suddenly appears and tries to kill Sam, everything is forced to change. With nowhere else to turn for help saving his brother’s life, Dean makes a desperate move and takes them both to the Fae Realm. Once they’re there, though, Dean quickly realizes that the Fae Realm isn’t nearly as idyllic as his mother wanted him to believe. Someone there wants Dean and Sam dead, everyone keeps secrets, and the king— The king may just be the most confusing part of it all.

The Offering | @deans-jiggly-pudding Rating: Explicit Word Count: 167703 Main Tags and Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, rape/non-con, incubus Cas, high school AU, religious homophobia, John Winchester’s A+ parenting, trans female character, porn with plot, smut, comfortably bisexual Dean Winchester, minor character death, conversion therapy, angst with a happy ending Summary: As a pastor's son, Dean Winchester is expected to be all the things he's not: the church poster child, compliant with every plan his father has for him, and of course, straight. Fighting the confines of his father's faith and the control it has over his life, Dean is caught in the middle of a teen lock-in activity that will change his life. The boys accidentally summon an incubus named Cas, and his demands are clear. Dean discovers Cas to be everything he expected... Yet, even the darkest of creatures has secrets of his own. Can they be together, despite who they are, and despite everything designed to keep them apart?

No Man's Waters (WIP) | @envydean Rating: Teen & Up Word Count: 16326  Main Tags and Warnings: merman!cas, merman!Dean, merfolk, Angst, Fluff, Happy Ending, Minor Character Death, War, Treason, Touch-Starved!Cas Summary: When Castiel is cast out of his territory for disobeying orders for war, he’s left to perish in No Man’s Waters, the treacherous depth between the Garrison Territory and the Huntsman’s Territory. Nothing survives there, and Castiel is barely holding on to life when one of the Huntsmen Merfolk comes to his aid.

Never Give All the Heart | @castielrisingabove Rating: Teen & Up Word Count: 82096 Main Tags and Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Fae Castiel, Hunter Dean, Slow Burn Summary: Dean knows that fae are dangerous, but he's never crossed paths with one until he stumbled into the realm of the mysterious Castiel. Meanwhile, Castiel has spent centuries having no interest in humans...until Dean appears in his life, strange and demanding and intriguing. They can't really be falling for each other, right?

Inked Feathers, Wounded Skin | @lunastories Rating: Teen & Up Word Count: 59237 Main Tags and Warnings: Fantasy Au, hurt/comfort, Harpy!Cas, Angst with a happy ending Summary: Retired hunters Dean and Sam live in a cabin in the woods, only occasionally taking cases from nearby villagers and those who need their help. Castiel is the very protective harpy that has been awkwardly following (stalking) Dean for years. After Castiel injures a wing, he is taken in by the Winchesters. As Dean tends to him, they form a relationship, and Dean slowly falls for the harpy. But the unique peach cream color of Castiel’s wings hides a secret; one he isn’t sure Dean could accept.

Dean and Castiel's Lagoon of Love | @almaasi Rating: Explicit Word Count: 12519 Main Tags and Warnings: Smut, Fluff, Romance, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Tentacle Porn, Explicit Consent, Dean's Tentacle Fetish, Sexual Roleplay, Octopus Castiel, Human Castiel, Cursed Castiel, Top Castiel, Bottom Dean, Witch Curses Summary: Castiel is presently an octopus from the waist down. But the curse is only going to last a few more hours, and there's only so long Dean can delay before asking Cas to act out the erotic anime closest to his heart: "Sweet Princess Asuka Meets the Tentacles of Pleasure". Cas is the tentacle monster. And Dean is the heartbroken princess, seeking renewal in the monster's lagoon of love. The storyline may not be complicated, but when their half-innocent roleplay becomes more sensual than they planned, their feelings grow complex. Dean can leave the paddling pool in the bunker garage behind, but once Cas has his legs back, he can follow. There are still feelings to resolve. Their story isn't over yet.

Lucid Nightmare | @almaasi Rating: Teen & Up Word Count: 10202 Main Tags and Warnings: Alternate Universe, Emotional Intimacy or Die, Spooky Fluff, Darkfic, Romance, Adventure, Siren Castiel, Winged Castiel, Prisoner Castiel, Supernatural Elements, Doubting Reality, Lucid Dreaming, Dreams and Nightmares, Running Away, Road Trips, Consent, Dreamwalking, Sharing a Bed, Unconventional Format, Rhyming, Poetry, Unsettling Summary: there's fire in this city // sirens, ghosts, and earthquakes // one night, you protect me // and we run until dawn breaks // Or: A spooky, fluffy, mind-warping existential-themed half-fic half-poem, in which Dean saves siren!Cas from a real-life waking nightmare and drives him to Bobby's house for safety. But as Cas reveals more about himself and his past, Dean comes to realise he has to let his new winged friend enter his mind and dreamwalk, or else Cas will die.

The Tailor of Fairy Ridge | @almaasi Rating: Teen & Up Word Count: 17957 Main Tags and Warnings: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Historical, Fantasy, Friendship, Pre-Slash, Fluff, Adventure, Tailor Castiel, Fairy Dean, Mute Dean, Dean Loves Pie, Dean Loves Clothes, Fairy Sam, Fairy Mary, Witch Charlie, Magic, Spring, Festivals, Kidnapping, Mind Control, Profound Bond Summary: A lonely, struggling tailor named Castiel discovers he has a fairy living in his shop, supplying him with clever new ideas for clothes every night. Dean is a glutton for all things sugary, and he doesn't speak a word. Of course, Castiel can't help but adore his company.

A Severe Case Of Fairy | @sternchencas Rating: Explicit Word Count: 38464 Main Tags and Warnings: fairy tale AU, fairy!Cas, angst and fluff and smut Summary: When Dean gets thrown into another world during a hunt, it seems like a fever dream that he wishes to escape, but it could also become the best thing that has ever happened to him.